system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: I watched "Honey I Shrunk The Kids" last night and wondered: could a human being function if they were suddenly shrunken down to the size of an ant? Why or why not?

- Would their smaller size create an atmospheric difference in which their lungs could or could not function in?
- When the kids were eating the oatmeal cookie (which looked pretty tasty), would their bodies be able to digest it? I figured that since they're smaller, the molecules might be significantly bigger than what their body was made to absorb and they wouldn't be able to process food.

- Being that small, would the noises everything made have a lower pitch (such as when Wayne and Diane called out for their kids and their voices seemed deeper and lower to the shrunken kids)?

- Anything else involving the five senses, such as how we would see everything differently if shrunken to that size, how things would smell, how textures would feel, could we taste, etc.
gpt
It depends on the proposed method of shrinking. If the space between the atoms in someone's body was condensed (because atoms have a pretty large amount of empty space) then the person would still weigh the same as they did before and therefore be extremely dense. Furthermore, because the surface area of their lungs would have dramatically decreased, but they'd still have the same number of cells requiring the same amount of oxygen, they'd rapidly suffocate to death.

If they were shrunk by removing a certain fraction of the atoms that contained them, equally, from their entire body, then there wouldn't be enough atoms left in their brains to maintain proper brain function and so on, so they'd be pretty screwed then too.

Other problems they'd encounter would be due to how different things don't scale equally with size. For example, when you're very large, water is easy to splash through, but at small scales, it would appear to have a tough rind on it due to water tension. Equally, human bones are the right size and density to support our weight as we are, but if, say, an elephant had bones of similar proportional size and density, it'd collapse under its own weight. It's the same logic behind why a model bridge made of balsa wood can stand up just fine, but an actual bridge, with the exact same proportions, would fall apart.