Tallness, A Crime Against Humanity?

            Tallness, let’s talk about it. Height seems to be a very admirable trait in modern society and I have no idea why. I can see no real benefits and a number is disadvantages to being tall. I should probably say that I am 5’ 9” (that’s 69”... ladies), so I am coming at this from the perspective of an average height person.

            I’ll start with the pros of being tall. Um, you can reach higher things without getting a chair or something. You have an advantage when playing basketball. You can see slightly father due to a higher vantage, once again neglecting the ability to stand on a chair, or like a rock or anything. That’s all I can think of. There is also the whole thing were tall people are perceived as more attractive, but I am about to crush that misconception.

            My first con is that there really isn’t anything tall people can do that short people can’t, but the inverse is true. Anyone can wear platform shoes or stilts to gain height, but you can’t do anything to lose it temporarily. Now the only shortness exclusive activity I can think of is fitting into small spaces, but that could be a pretty big deal in the right situation. What if you are getting chased by an angry bear and the only escape is a tight gap in the cave wall or something; I sure hope those extra 6” were worth it. Now you may say that the tall person could reach a high branch and swing into a tree, but bears can climb trees so that argument is invalid.

This is pretty much all you need to cancel out a couple feet of extra height

            Con number two is the loss of body efficiency as height increases. Bone and muscle strength increase proportional to their cross sectional area, not their volume. Since area increase according to the square of the height ratio, and volume increase according to the cube; if you double your height you will quadruple you strength, but octuple your weight. This means that if you take someone who can lift their own weight and then proportionally half their size, they can then lift twice their weight. This is why people brag about ants being able to lift the equivalent of cars to their own weight, but it’s not true because if you scaled the ants up they probably wouldn’t be about to lift anything, because they would be too busy being crushed by their own weight (exoskeletons are only feasible at small sizes).

Don't worry mam, gravity will soon collapse his entire body

            My final and largest problem with tallness is the consumption of resources. Larger people eat more food, need more material for clothing and housing, and basically everything needs to be built on a larger scale to accommodate them. I don’t think food consumption will scale 1:1 with weight, but if we shrink every human on earth by half we could reduce food consumption roughly eightfold. All of our houses and cars could be built at half size, and you would save immensely on all structural components because the masses would decrease so much. It would be like reducing the human population by a factor of eight, and who’s to say that we would have to stop at only half size. At one quarter height, weight is decrease by a factor of 64!

THANKS FOR RUINING THE PLANET

            The only problem I can see with shrinking humanity is a reduction in brain size might reduce intelligence. A correlation between brain size and intelligence hasn’t been proven though, and a reduction in body size should decrease the number of nerves and what not, reducing the amount of brain power that is needed to run the body. We could also just keep most of our head size with tricks like more premature births or exclusively cesarean sections. Anyway, tallness sucks, Cob out.