The cost of lanching a chemical rocket increases with the payload, especially launching humans into space is expensive because they need all kinds of supporting equipment and oxygen and elementary livingspace. Many alternative concepts are studied and tested to cut down the launch costs, but until we have that space-elevator we are still burning hydrazine and buckets full of money.... So, why not have lilliput astronauts ? Their size and space requirements (and therefor the launchcosts)are less and it would give them some kind of superior status, small people are generally literally looked down at, but in space they might outperform us rather clumsy bulky creatures. Maybe they will look down at earth from their mooncolony someday and say: " those poor people are grounded by gravity and religious inbreeding "Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Well, this idea has been floated before, but it is a good one; if you can miniaturise a human type mentality to fit in a small space it is an excellent idea. Kurt Vonnegut imagined the Chineese miniaturising themselves until they became a flu-like virus, but that was mostly satirical; Hans Moravec reckons a human equivalent AI could fit in a centimetre cube or smaller. So give a 1cc human artificial brain an artificial body, and you have a race of animated GI joes or Buzz Lightyears. (tiny people are mentioned in one of my own stories- blink and you'll miss it though)
they'd have to develop new space suits to meet their finger size requirements, also, if they began down that path and developed a scaled down shuttle then taller people would be unable to use the new shuttle, hence the quality of the astronaughts would decrease because the initial population of people that nasa would be required to choose the astronaughts from is a lot smaller than before.
He's talking about little people...wee ones...at the risk of being non-PC, midgets. Not actually shrinking people. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Why not just put robots into space exploration instead of humans? If AI could be made much better and true AI capabilities are reached then AI bots would exceed humans for anything that could be done in space exploration. This also would lessen the costs by billions of dollars and reap many rewards while safely exploring space without the fear of death for humans.
