r/NoStupidQuestions • u/Kingsley_Holness • 4d ago
If all animals, except humans, grew double their size over night, how much trouble would we be in?
If all animals from flies, to lions, cows and all grew twice the size they currently are, how much trouble would this cause for the human race? And what positives could this cause?
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u/Narrow-Bluebird1472 4d ago
Mosquitoes might be a problem but other than that I think we’re okay
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u/go-for-Banjo 4d ago
It wouldn’t be possible with the conditions of the earth currently. There was a time of giant insects on the planet, but there was also a lot more oxygen in the atmosphere. Insects breathe through holes in their exoskeletons called spiracles. This type of respiration limits their size. If they grew too large they wouldn’t be able to draw enough oxygen to live.
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u/Drumedor 3d ago
A bunch of mosquitoes that can no longer fly wouldn't be a big problem. The doubling in size would probably wipe out all mosquitoes in a matter of weeks.
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u/the_hucumber 4d ago
I think it might make mosquitoes less of a problem. They'd still be small enough to splat with a single hit, but being a bit bigger, they'd be easier to see. You'd also feel them as soon as they landed on you making slapping them right before they bite so much easier
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u/Psigun 4d ago
This was what it was like in the ice age and we killed and ate all the big ones.
Megafauna bbq
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u/Narapoia_the_1st 4d ago
Yeah it's hard to judge exactly what the OP is after with their question. But If they mean how would we handle it, well as you say we killed & ate them all when all we had were clubs and spears with sharpened stone heads. We'll manage just fine now.
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u/MLGesusWasTaken 4d ago
Twice the food 🤤 🤤
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u/Kingsley_Holness 4d ago
Yes, but imagine all the ants.
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u/alex20_202020 4d ago
That depends on what laws got broken to allow that and the status of those laws next "morning".
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u/rock-paper-o 4d ago edited 4d ago
I’d be a little worried about our house cats and small dogs as well as car collisions with deer. Lots of the small animals will still be too small to be of serious concern and the animals that are already huge will still be generally worth keeping a distance from. But in the 20-60 pound range you potentially go from too small to be a major concern to big enough that aggression is dangerous. Fortunately most animals in that range tend to run from humans but medium/small dogs and large cats are often allowed to behave in ways that would be quite dangerous if they were bigger.
And if deer were twice the size and no more road wise, that’s a lot of car collisions with extra damage.
Now that I think of it our agricultural system would have issues too. All of our equitment and strategies for safely managing cows, pigs, horses and the like assume a side range and probably wouldn’t work if we doubled it.
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u/and-its-true 4d ago
If all the microbes in water got twice as big
I imagine it would make all liquids feel thicker and slimier.
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u/UlteriorCulture 4d ago
Doubling the biomass of the zooplankton instantly is probably an extinction level event for us. Immediate collapse of many ocean ecosystems.
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u/Muroid 4d ago
Most things would struggle as physics don’t scale up and down like that, so just mechanically everything’s body plan isn’t necessarily suited for being twice the size that it is. Anything on the lower end of its specific body plan might be able to muddle through. Anything on the upper end is going to suffer significantly, if not just die outright.
Two of the biggest issues you’re going to run into are heat dissipation, because volume increases faster than surface area, so regulating body temperature gets harder the bigger you are.
And strength:mass ratio, as the strength of muscles increases with their cross-section, not volume, so that doesn’t scale up well. The bigger you are, the stronger er you are, but the comparatively weaker you are compared to your size, which is problematic for moving around all your excess mass, which grew faster than your level of strength.
I suspect very large humans and infants are going to come out of this the worst.
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u/genus-corvidae 🟨⬜🟪◼️ 4d ago
Most things would die under their own weight because if you double in height you uhhhh. I think your weight increases by a factor of eight and you usually suffocate to death very quickly.
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u/burlingk 4d ago
We would eat them.
I mean, honestly, that is humanity's answer to most problems in the animal kingdom... including some of the now extinct human species.
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u/Jazzlike_Standard871 3d ago
Square cube law is a bitch, get read for thier weirdest extinction event.
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u/Gideon9900 3d ago
The amount of food and water they consume would also increase. This would cause multiple species to go extinct.
Humans would be fine, survival wise.
Unsure if costs would go up or not, but I'm pretty sure taxes would.
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u/LookOverall 3d ago
Domestic animals which we’ve bred to unnaturally large sizes already would be in big trouble
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u/Youpunyhumans 2d ago
There would be a lot of dead animals, crushed by their now 8x greater body mass, as when you double the dimensions of a creature, you increase its surface area by 4x, and volume, and therefore mass, by 8x.
Square/cube law is a real downer on these kind of questions.
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u/BlackMilk23 4d ago edited 4d ago
They'd be in trouble. There is a reason nature didn't let them get that big in the first place.
Evolution doesn't engineer life to be badass and engineers it to be efficient. So most animals doubling in size would likely struggle as species relative to now.