[tsimionescu]

A thought I've sometimes had is that if we had evolved to be as tiny as something like these spiders, but still at our current level of intelligence and society, chimps or elephants or whales would still be almost insurmountable threats to us even with today's level of technology.

It'd take entire nations years of effort to build a gun or rocket that could even hurt something that much bigger than us.

[huppeldepup]

Which is why animals at that scale develop techniques of very rapid flight instead of brute fight. That and poison. We would probably pour the resources into genetic engineering and biological warfare.

[sph]

I wonder if anyone has calculated a range of body sizes which maximise intelligence and the ability to exploit resources of their planet.

Could a spider-sized human intelligence build a rocket to go to the moon? Would it have been easier to develop our civilization if we had been as large as a whale?

Maybe the universe is teeming with life a little too large or too small to build an ultra-technologic culture, or space travel. Imagine how long it would have taken us just to explore the Earth if we had been spider-sized, with spider legs and spider eyes.

[tsimionescu]

> I wonder if anyone has calculated a range of body sizes which maximise intelligence and the ability to exploit resources of their planet.

I don't think we understand intelligence well enough even on Earth to do something like that. For example, these spiders seem to have certain cognitive capacities beyond what a hippopotamus can do, even though the hippopotamus is obviously much larger. Even in a single genera, the intelligence of mammals or even just apes doesn't seem to scale with size or brain size.

There did seem to be some correlation between intelligence and the ratio of brain size to body size, but even that is not well established, and it is not clearly evident why it would matter. And, as others are pointing out, many studies of animal intelligence are actually deeply flawed, so perhaps we have just been measuring very wrongly.

[KineticLensman]

> Could a spider-sized human intelligence build a rocket to go to the moon?

I suspect without doing the maths that their rockets would still be similar in size to ours, because of the fuel required to achieve escape velocity, and the good old rocket equation. But they would certainly be able to fit a lot more spidernauts in.

[gaiagraphia]

They also could provide insurmountable opportunity. You'd have a huge advantage against enemies if you could develop some kind of mutualism with the beasts of nature.

Imagine living on top of an elephant. I guess you would attend to its skin and health, in exchange for a great defensive position, free transport, the potential to live off dying cells and moisture, etc.

Fast forward a very long time, and you might have humans controlling all the animals of the wild, which would have developed their own ways of survival, territory and rivalries. Animals which lack this 'army' of humans tending to them would die out. Wouldn't be so different to now...

[dartos]

I’d play that game.

[psd1]

"You have your orders, colonel. Launch the nukes."

"Sir. I will follow any legal order, but I will not countenance the destruction of the entire shrub."

[Kinrany]

Not clear, we might have ended up building industrial machines of roughly the same size. Elephants are soft compared to metal no matter how tiny the driver.

[tsimionescu]

Sure, but the tinier the worker, the more effort you need to build a machine of a certain size. Even today, most construction of any kind has significant manual work components. We are pretty good at building things hundreds of times bigger than ourselves, but I'm not sure we would be great at building something a million times bigger than a human. Of course this is not directly comparable, since we are often limited by materials science before raw manpower if attempting something like this; a 2km tall skyscraper is fundamentally harder to build than a 20m one regardless of the size of your workforce.