Where to start a program for right sizing humanity - with flight of course!

How to right-size humanity? How to create a trajectory and momentum towards smaller human body forms with smaller energetic profiles?

Computation is one of the key costs of being human - but the transition from biological computation systems to inorganic is already very well discussed.

In this post I will concentrate on the physical and social aspects.

Firstly - motivation is the key - the offer must be obviously, demonstrably, persuasively better than current existence. This can be achieved negatively via deterioration of the real world environment to a point where lower quality simulations, or even cessation, becomes attractive (e.g. Chinese WoW Gold Farmers, Japanese suicide cults).

However to be optimistic about the future, we must attempt to construct positive pathways to the same goal, using the technology we have now. And I believe that we are very close to this point. Consider this:

The convergence of prosthetics technology and robotics is accelerating rapidly. The need to have biological limbs to function in richer urban societies is fading. In some cases it could even be said that limbs may even no longer be a prerequisite for a pleasurable existence (a good life).

Consider also that humans have always dreamed of flight, and that we naturally understand that weight is a key issue in achieving flight.

What better motivation is there than the dream of flight? If a smaller body is required for a human to be able to fly on a day to day basis as part of normal life, is it a price worth paying? For many people I think the answer is unequivocally "You bet!"

But to make sense, the cost of flight (in energy) must be lower than the cost of traditional human limbs.

Insect muscle is the most active tissue known to man, and therefore a great candidate for a meta-biological flying platform. With organ printing technology, fabrication of a pseudo-muscle may be possible using insect stem cells combined with more traditional substrates (plastics, metals.)

One interesting fact that may be worth bearing in mind is that insect muscle runs on Trehalose, a sugar which is also implicated in the biological mechanism of anhydrobiosis - the ability of plants and animals to withstand prolonged periods of desiccation. This means that artificial, detachable wings/muscle systems could potentially be stored for long periods and shipped cheaply.

These factors make possible a single-use unit approach (rather than a rechargeable unit approach)- and this reduces the complexity of an artificial wing/muscle system design by some orders of magnitude, and reduces time to market. And while single use may seem contradictory to the aim of reducing energetics footprints, the fact that the product can be entirely biodegradable is undoubtedly an important consideration.

So the target needs to be - what is the minimum size that a human body can be revised to, and still be viable, and what is the largest size an artificially created insect muscle/wing system can be constructed?

A Modest Proposal - Right Sizing Humanity for a smaller footprint

It is tautologically uncontroversial that closed systems have limits. It is also relatively well understood that from a practical perspective the biosphere is and will be for the foreseeable future, a closed system.

Self awareness is the phenomenon which has punctured the limits of this closed system - and is now disrupting the system itself with the side effects of non-biological chemical synthesis and energetics.

At the same time the primary agents of that change - humans - remain firmly a part of their greater biological context. They proceed with the same motivation and desire for resources and procreation that is manifested by the less conscious elements of the bioshpere.

In short, they love their children.

How to solve the problem that lies therein? By successfully subverting the biosphere to our own advantages we have willed into being many billions of us - the vast majority of whom wish to will into being their own children to love. But the closed system has limits and those limits are finite.

We are now at the critical point where our own self-awareness tells us that to create children is to not love them. However our biological impulses are incapable of accepting this anti-biological reality, and instinct holds the trump card.

Bearing these 2 points in mind I have a modest proposal;- understanding that humanity is more numerous than is feasible, and understanding that humans will continue to desire to procreate, is not the logical solution to reduce the size of those offspring?

Island or Insular dwarfism is a somewhat uncontroversial theory which explains evolutionary reduction in body size of species in constrained ecological environments.

With our unprecedented capabilities of biological manipulation, and our urgent ecological issues, I believe it is now the time to investigate making humans smaller.

There will be many many issues associated with this proposal - technological, social, ethical, political, and biological (parents want their kids to grow up big and strong after all).

But from a philosophical perspective I can see nothing wrong with the idea. Can you?