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One evening a group of teenagers got arrested for taunting a queen's guard and was brought to a temporary holding cell, all of a sudden a radioactive mosquito seemingly escaped from a nearby lab bites all the detainees and injected them with a special enzyme containing a kind of experimental drug which can shrink any vertebrate into roughly the size of a flea, most of their mass leaks into another dimension so they can't pretend to be superhero ant-man but can leap a coffee mug in a single bound. What is the quickest way for them to draw attention without getting smacked?

elemtilas
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user6760
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2 Answers2

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I would start writing a message on the floor using grains of sand and dirt lying around.

But realistically you would just very quickly end up freezing to death because of the square cube law.

Fred
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    Well, that's a horrifying thought. Freezing to death because of screwed up surface area ratios. – Halfthawed Nov 28 '19 at 04:54
  • I should mention that the drug also control mitochondria level but that's too late for me and to be fair you are absolutely right. – user6760 Nov 28 '19 at 06:57
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It depends on how the shrinking works and if you stay connected to your extradimensional mass.

1) The drug kills all of your cells but a few thousand, so you are flea-sized

As Fred already said, you will almost instantly die from undertemperature (your body mass is divided by roughly 50 million, but your skin surface is only divided by about 500,000 so you lose 100 times more heat than now) If the drug also turns you to to an ectotherm creature, you will still simply have too few neurons in your brain to be able to speak or write or even think about not being killed by a human.

2) The drug affects your atomic structure, so the atoms are packed denser like in a neutron star

You retain your mass but get smaller. This will yield the opposite problem than in version 1. You will die from overtemperature, because your body still produces 100 Watts of heat energy, but your skin surface is too small to get rid of that energy. Luckily, that won't happen instantly. If I calculated right, you need about 1.6 MJ to heat up a 80kg body by 5 Kelvin, so you got about 4 and a half hours before you die. If you do exhausting things like running around or climbing the furniture around you, the time will be significantly shorter. You will feel like having a bad fever before you die, so maybe you won't be able to move a lot. Because you are so heavy and so small, most surfaces will give way under your feet. So you can just write a message on a wooden surface by walking on it. That will be very exhausting, like carving a way through deep powder snow without having skis. You have to be lucky, to have a jailer realize that you seem to have vanished, so he inspects the cell an maybe finds you before you die.

3) You somehow stay connected to your extradimensional mass, so you just get smaller and lighter but don't have any heat problems or unability to think etc.

I think it's a bit unrealistic that you will be strong enough to leap a coffee mug when you're so small. You will most probably be about as powerfull as a flea, but will be much more intelligent. You could for example climb into a radio speaker and make knocking noises. You could climb into a microscope and wave at the person who looks through it. You could climb into the ear of somebody and shout at him (but don't step on hairs, because that might tickle and you might be killed). The problem you still have is, you are in a simple arrest cell where you probably won't find a radio, microscope or other person. You can maybe just walk out of the cell because you're tiny enough, but it will be a long way to a place where you might get someones attention.

Dorian
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