How Long Would You Last at the Size of an Ant?

Imagine waking up 3 millimeters tall. Falls can't hurt you anymore, you can lift 70 times your own weight, and a raindrop can't crush you. So how long would you actually last? We put tiny you through four checkpoints: one minute, ten minutes, one hour, one night. Every danger is real science: J.B.S. Haldane's famous essay on falling, Ohio State's ant-neck test, Georgia Tech's high-speed footage of mosquitoes hit by raindrops, frog tongues that strike in seven hundredths of a second, the speed limit on lawnmower blades, the Etruscan shrew's 1,500-beats-a-minute heart, and bats that hear up to 200,000 Hz. The twist: it isn't the ant, the spider or the frog that gets you. Chapters: 0:00 You're 3 millimeters tall 0:28 The game: four checkpoints 0:40 Minute one: the fall 0:59 Why falls can't hurt you 1:30 The scream nobody hears 1:58 Half blind 2:20 Ten minutes: the ant 3:21 The jumping spider 3:47 Rain 4:34 Water is sticky 5:02 The frog 5:23 The lawnmower 6:00 Thirst 6:50 One night under a flowerpot 7:07 Cold and hunger 7:28 The bat 7:55 So how long would you last? Sources: - Haldane, J. B. S. (1926). On Being the Right Size: https://www.physlink.com/education/essay_haldane.cfm - Dickerson, A. K. et al. (2012). Mosquitoes survive raindrop collisions by virtue of their low mass. PNAS: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1205446109 - Ohio State University (2014). Ant neck joints withstand forces up to 5,000 times body weight: https://engineering.osu.edu/news/2014/02/study-ants-remarkable-strength-may-lead-powerful-micro-sized-robots - Noel, A. C. et al. (2017). Frogs use a viscoelastic tongue and non-Newtonian saliva to catch prey. J. R. Soc. Interface: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2016.0764 - OSHA 1910.243(e), power lawnmowers (blade tip speed limit 19,000 ft/min): https://up.codes/s/power-lawnmowers - Insect water balance and the cuticle wax layer. Journal of Experimental Biology (2022): https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/225/7/jeb242358/274935/A-perspective-on-insect-water-balance - Etruscan shrew: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etruscan_shrew - How fast do raindrops fall? (CIMSS, UW–Madison): https://wxguys.ssec.wisc.edu/2018/07/16/raindrop-speed - Bat hearing range: https://hypertextbook.com/facts/1998/JuanCancel.shtml "By our math" numbers (your weight, your scream's pitch, how fast you dry out) are our own estimates for a 1.75 m person shrunk to 3 mm (about 583 times smaller). #animals #science #whatif