[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.