The Incredible Shrinking People

As I mentioned in my previous post, Isaac Asimov wrote the novel Fantastic Journey, based on the script of the science fiction film of the same title; not the other way around, as many people believe. In the film and in the novel, a submarine and its crew are reduced to microscopic size and injected into an artery of a comatose human being, to perform an operation in his brain from within, which would be impossible from the outside.

Will it ever be possible to do something like this in the future? Or are there limits to what technology can achieve?

In an article published in 1969 in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and in 1970 in his collection of articles The Solar System and Back, Asimov tells how he approached the scientific part of the plot, which is not well explained in the film. According to Asimov, three things could have been done to reduce human beings to microscopic size:

a)      Eliminate a substantial part of its atoms; but a brain with most of its atoms removed would not work, so the attempt would be futile. To reduce a human being to the size of a bacterium (approximately one micron), almost all his atoms should be eliminated, until just one every quintillion would be left. Otherwise, the desired small size wouldn’t be achieved.

b)      Press the atoms against each other so that they occupy less space; but then the density of the miniaturized objects would be one quintillion times greater, and consequently nothing could support their weight: they would sink until they reached the center of the Earth. Asimov therefore also had to reject this solution.

c)      Or reduce a million times the diameter of the atoms; at the same time, it would be necessary to reduce one quintillion times their mass, to maintain their density. This was the solution adopted by Asimov. Obviously, if he was to write the novel, he must adopt one.

Isaac Asimov

As a consequence of this, Asimov had to give his novel a different ending, compared to the film. In the latter, the surviving crew members are gouged out of the eye of the patient, where they have arrived from the brain by following the optic nerve. One of them, together with the submarine, remains inside the body of the patient, engulfed by a leukocyte. Asimov reasoned that, in that case, when the atoms returned to their normal size, the patient would explode, pushed from within by a dead man and a crushed submarine that would no longer be microscopic. That is why he insisted on making the leukocyte come as well out of the patient (by making it chase the surviving humans), so that when they returned to their normal size, the debris would be outside the patient's body.

Although he tried to convince the film's producer of his reasons, Asimov was unsuccessful. Therefore, he had to formulate an ultimatum:

Look, I'm going to change the ending. If you don't like it, fine; I won’t do the book.

The threat worked and he could write the novel as he wanted, but I am sure that the producer, who did not understand what Asimov was explaining, didn’t worry. Surely he thought that the change was irrelevant, as the different ending of the novel would be undetectable to virtually all those who both watched the film and read the book.

In any case, I am convinced that Isaac Asimov never believed that his solution would become feasible one day, for the size of atoms and elementary particles is what it is, and no technological advance will make it possible to change it.

In the aforementioned article, Asimov raises additional scientific difficulties caused by the procedure, which he solved as best he could, but which would undoubtedly make the plot of this film even more unrealizable, not just for our current technology, but for the future.

The same post in Spanish

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Manuel Alfonseca