Small Internet / The right size (zaibatsu), 04/03/2019
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You've hopefully read about spring's Small Internet[1], in 
the original post, and in the various responses speckled 
across gopherspace. It's an important and interesting 
subject.

I came across the following old paper today, and it made me 
think of the Small Internet. It's especially interesting, I 
think, in light of thoughts and ideas on making gopher 
better[2][3]. It may very well be that Haldane's ideas on 
scalability don't apply to gopher & http, I don't know. 
Something tells me there are some ideas to be had in here.

Full text follows:


On Being the Right Size
J. B. S. Haldane
March 1926

The most obvious differences between different animals are 
differences of size, but for some reason the zoologists have 
paid singularly little attentionto them. In a large textbook 
of zoology before me I find no indication that the eagle is 
larger than the sparrow, or the hippopotamus bigger than the 
hare, though some grudging admissions are made in the case 
of the mouse and the whale. But yet it is easy to show that 
a hare could not be as large as a hippopotamus or a whale as 
small as a herring. For every type of animal there is a most 
convenient size, and a large change in size inevitably 
carrieswith it a change of form.

Let us take the most obvious of possible cases, and consider 
a giant mansixty feet high - about the height of Giant Pope 
and Giant Pagan in the illustrated Pilgrim’s Progress of my 
childhood. These monsters were notonly ten times as high as 
Christian, but ten times as wide and ten times asthick, so 
that their total weight was a thousand times his, or about 
eighty to ninety tons. Unfortunately the cross sections of 
their bones were only a hundred times those of Christian, so 
that every square inch of giant bone had to support ten 
times the weight borne by a square inch of human bone. As 
the human thigh-bone breaks under about ten times the human 
weight, Pope and Pagan would have broken their thighs every 
time they took a step. This was doubtless why they were 
sitting down in the picture I remember. But it lessens ones 
respect for Christian and Jack the Giant Killer.

To turn to zoology, suppose that a gazelle, a graceful 
little creature with long thin legs, is to become large, it 
will break its bones unless it does one of two things. It 
may make its legs short and thick, like the rhinoceros, so 
that every pound of weight has still about the same area of 
bone to support it. Or it can compress its body and stretch 
out its legs obliquely to gain stability, like the giraffe. 
I mention these two beasts because they happen to belong
to the same order as the gazelle, and both are quite 
successful mechanically, being remarkably fast runners.

Gravity, a mere nuisance to Christian, was a terror to Pope, 
Pagan, and Despair. To the mouse and any smaller animal it 
presents practically no dangers. You can drop a mouse down 
a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom 
it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the 
ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a 
horse splashes. For the resistance presented to movement by 
the air is proportional to the surface of the moving object. 
Divide an animal’s length, breadth, and heighteach by ten; 
its weight is reduced to a thousandth, but its surface only 
a hundredth. So the resistance to falling in the case of 
the small animal is relatively ten times greater than the 
driving force. 

An insect, therefore, is not afraid of gravity; it can fall 
without danger,and can cling to the ceiling with remarkably 
little trouble. It can go in for elegant and fantastic forms 
of support like that of the daddy-longlegs.But there is a 
force which is as formidable to an insect as gravitation to 
amammal. This is surface tension. A man coming out of a bath 
carries with him a film of water about one-fiftieth of an 
inch in thickness. This weighsroughly a pound. A wet mouse 
has to carry about its own weight of water.A wet fly has to 
lift many times its own weight and, as everyone knows, a 
fly once wetted by water or any other liquid is in a very 
serious position indeed.An insect going for a drink is in a 
great danger as man leaning out over aprecipice in search of 
food. If it once falls into the grip of the surface 
tension of the water -that is to say, gets wet - it is 
likely to remain so until it downs.A few insects, such as 
water-beetles, contrive to be unwettable; the majoritykeep 
well away from their drink by means of a long proboscis.

Of course tall land animals have other difficulties. They 
have to pump their blood to greater heights than a man, and, 
therefore, require a larger blood pressure and tougher 
blood-vessels. A great many men die from burst arteries, 
greater for an elephant or a giraffe. But animals of all 
kinds find difficulties in size for the following reason. A 
typical small animal, say a microscopic worm of rotifer, 
has a smooth skin through which all the oxygenit requires 
can soak in, a straight gut with sufficient surface 
to absorb its food, and a single kidney. Increase its 
dimensions tenfold in every direction, and its weight is 
increased a thousand times, so that if it to use its 
muscles as efficiently as its miniature counterpart, it will 
need a thousand times asmuch food and oxygen per day and 
will excrete a thousand times as much ofwaste products.

Now if its shape is unaltered its surface will be 
increased only a hun-dredfold, and ten times as much 
oxygen must enter per minute through eachsquare millimeter 
of skin, ten time as much food through each square 
mil-limeter of intestine. When a limit is reached to their 
absorptive powers theirsurface has to be increased by some 
special device. For example, a part of theskin may be drawn 
out into tufts to make gills or pushed in to make lungs,thus 
increasing the oxygen-absorbing surface in proportion to the 
animal’sbulk. A man, for example, has a hundred square 
yards of lung. Similarly,the gut, instead of being smooth 
and straight, becomes coiled and developsa velvety 
surface, and other organs increase in complication.  
The higher animals are not larger than the lower because 
they are more complicated.They are more complicated because 
they are larger. Just the same is true of plants. The 
simplest plants, such as the green algae growing in 
stagnantwater or on the bark of trees, are mere round cells. 
The higher plants in-crease their surface by putting out 
leaves and roots. Comparative anatomyis largely the story of 
the struggle to example, while vertebrates carry the oxygen 
from the gills or lungs all over the body in the blood, 
insects takeair directly to every part of their body by tiny 
blind tubes called tracheaewhich open to the surface at many 
different points.  Now, although their breathing movements 
they can renew the air in the outer part of the 
trachealsystem, the oxygen has to penetrate the 
finer branches by means of diffusion.Gases can diffuse 
easily through very small distances, not many times 
largerthan the average length traveled by a gas molecule 
between collisions withother molecules. But when such vast 
journeys-from the point of view of amolecule-as a quarter of 
an inch have to be made, the process becomes slow.So the 
portions of an insect’s body more than a quarter of an inch 
from theair would always be short of oxygen. In consequence 
hardly any insects aremuch more than half an inch thick. 
Land crabs are built on the same generalplan as insects, but 
are much clumsier. Yet like ourselves they carry 
oxygenaround in their blood, and are therefore able 
to grow far larger than anyinsects. If the insects had 
hit on a plan for driving air through their tissuesinstead 
of letting it soak in, they might well have become as large 
as lobsters,though other considerations would have prevented 
them from becoming aslarge as man.

Exactly the same difficulties attach to flying. It is an 
elementary principleof aeronautics that the minimum 
speed needed to keep an aeroplane of agiven shape 
in the air varies as the square root of its 
length.  If its lineardimensions are increased four 
times, it must fly twice as fast. Now the power3
needed for the minimum speed increases more rapidly than the 
weight of themachine.  So the larger aeroplane, which 
weighs sixty-four times as muchas the smaller, needs one 
hundred and twenty-eight times its horsepower tokeep up. 
Applying the same principle to the birds, we find that the 
limit totheir size is soon reached. An angel whose muscles 
developed no more powerweight for weight than those of an 
eagle or a pigeon would require a breastprojecting for about 
four feet to house the muscles engaged in working itswings, 
while to economize in weight, its legs would have 
to be reduced tomere stilts. Actually a large bird such 
as an eagle or kite does not keep inthe air mainly by moving 
its wings. It is generally to be seen soaring, that isto 
say balanced on a rising column of air. And even soaring 
becomes moreand more difficult with increasing size. Were 
this not the case eagles mightbe as large as tigers and as 
formidable to man as hostile aeroplanes.

But it is time that we pass to some of the advantages of 
size. One of themost obvious is that it enables one to keep 
warm. All warm-blooded animalsat rest lose the same 
amount of heat from a unit area of skin, for 
whichpurpose they need a food-supply proportional to 
their surface and not totheir weight. Five thousand 
mice weigh as much as a man. Their combinedsurface and food 
or oxygen consumption are about seventeen times a man’s.In 
fact a mouse eats about one quarter its own weight 
of food every day,which is mainly used in keeping it 
warm. For the same reason small animalscannot live in cold 
countries. In the arctic regions there are no reptiles 
oramphibians, and no small mammals. The smallest mammal in 
Spitzbergen isthe fox. The small birds fly away in winter, 
while the insects die, though theireggs can survive six 
months or more of frost. The most successful mammalsare 
bears, seals, and walruses.

Similarly, the eye is a rather inefficient organ until it 
reaches a large size.The back of the human eye on which an 
image of the outside world is thrown,and which corresponds 
to the film of a camera, is composed of a mosaic of“rods and 
cones” whose diameter is little more than a length of an 
averagelight wave. Each eye has about a half a million, and 
for two objects to bedistinguishable their images must fall 
on separate rods or cones. It is obviousthat with fewer but 
larger rods and cones we should see less distinctly. If 
theywere twice as broad two points would have to be twice as 
far apart before wecould distinguish them at a given 
distance. But if their size were diminishedand their number 
increased we should see no better. For it is impossible 
toform a definite image smaller than a wave-length of light. 
Hence a mouse’seye is not a small-scale model of a human 
eye. Its rods and cones are not4
much smaller than ours, and therefore there are far fewer of 
them. A mousecould not distinguish one human face from 
another six feet away. In orderthat they should be of any 
use at all the eyes of small animals have to bemuch larger 
in proportion to their bodies than our own. Large animals 
onthe other hand only require relatively small eyes, and 
those of the whale andelephant are little larger than our 
own. For rather more recondite reasonsthe same general 
principle holds true of the brain. If we compare the 
brain-weights of a set of very similar animals such as the 
cat, cheetah, leopard, andtiger, we find that as we 
quadruple the body-weight the brain-weight is onlydoubled. 
The larger animal with proportionately larger bones can 
economizeon brain, eyes, and certain other organs.

Such are a very few of the considerations which show that 
for every typeof animal there is an optimum size. Yet 
although Galileo demonstrated thecontrary more than three 
hundred years ago, people still believe that if 
aflea were as large as a man it could jump a thousand feet 
into the air. Asa matter of fact the height to which 
an animal can jump is more nearlyindependent of its 
size than proportional to it. A flea can jump about 
twofeet, a man about five. To jump a given height, if we 
neglect the resistanceof air, requires an expenditure of 
energy proportional to the jumper’s weight.But if the 
jumping muscles form a constant fraction of the animal’s 
body, theenergy developed per ounce of muscle is independent 
of the size, provided itcan be developed quickly enough in 
the small animal. As a matter of factan insect’s muscles, 
although they can contract more quickly than our own,appear 
to be less efficient; as otherwise a flea or grasshopper 
could rise sixfeet into the air.

And just as there is a best size for every animal, so the 
same is true forevery human institution.  In the Greek 
type of democracy all the citizenscould listen to a 
series of orators and vote directly on questions of 
legisla-tion. Hence their philosophers held that a small 
city was the largest possibledemocratic state. The English 
invention of representative government madea democratic 
nation possible, and the possibility was first 
realized in theUnited States, and later elsewhere. With 
the development of broadcastingit has once more become 
possible for every citizen to listen to the politicalviews 
of representative orators, and the future may perhaps see 
the returnof the national state to the Greek form of 
democracy. Even the referendumhas been made possible only 
by the institution of daily newspapers.

To the biologist the problem of socialism appears largely as 
a problem ofsize. The extreme socialists desire to run 
every nation as a single business5
concern.  I do not suppose that Henry Ford would 
find much difficulty inrunning Andorra or Luxembourg on a 
socialistic basis. He has already moremen on his pay-roll 
than their population. It is conceivable that a syndicateof 
Fords, if we could find them, would make Belgium Ltd or 
Denmark Inc.pay their way. But while nationalization of 
certain industries is an obviouspossibility in the largest 
of states, I find it no easier to picture a 
completelysocialized British Empire or United States than an 
elephant turning somer-saults or a hippopotamus jumping a 
hedge.

[1] gopher://republic.circumlunar.space:70/0/~spring/phlog/2019-01-16__The_Small_Internet.txt
[2] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/pondering-whats-inbetween-gopher-and-the-web.txt
[3] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/why-gopher-needs-crypto.txt