Between The Microcosmic and The Macrocosmic: We Are All Giants Now

By OOI KEE BENG, Penang Monthly editorial for January 2025

YOU WOULD HAVE seen them. Mobile drone shots of cities, done with the camera pointed straight down to capture the topographical grid of streets and buildings. Whether done in daylight or at night, the effect is a reminder to us of how like those of bees or termites human habitations are.

Indeed, the more we urbanise, the more we have to cram ourselves, and the more we have to stack our living spaces on top of each other. We have to go vertically upwards. High-rise buildings are simply manmade caves balanced on top of each other. We then have stairs and elevators to move us vertically.

And we have pipes to supply water or dispose of used water; we have wirings to bring WiFi coverage and electricity to each apartment (I believe compartment is a better word). We once had telephone wires lining all our roads and penetrating buildings so that we could call each other on our landlines. We’ve got mobile phones now, but in many cities, those overhead wires remain.

Out on the streets, we have all sorts of traffic signals put up to control the movement of vehicles, and to keep pedestrians safe whenever they cross roads.

And then you have the street lamps; and neon lights and so forth. If you have x-ray vision, you will be able to perceive the labyrinths underground too. We go vertically downwards as well. Tunnels join underground stations, allowing for easy movement underneath streets and pavements; more wires and pipings making these dark places inhabitable and accessible.

The Outer Space

If you now fly your drone up as high into the sky as you can, the interconnectedness of urban infrastructure become even more obvious. Small routes lead to larger ones, and larger ones lead to expressways. Here and there, there is a river to cross, a hill to navigate, and a forest to penetrate. And flight paths will also be visible if you take your time to observe them.

As your drone ascends into space, you will realise how humans have been managing their physical environment to utilise more and more space for their own purposes. Upwards, downwards, sidewards—pushing Mother Nature back, leaving waste wherever they can.

It is about the need for Lebensraum—“Living space”, German nationalism’s iconic word. But this need goes for Homo sapiens as a whole. We need space. And we arrogantly consider all of Nature, and all of outer space—the boundless skies—our final frontier.

Seen from space, we do indeed procreate like insects, and our populations need space.

The Inner Space

But what if we look down from where we are, from our individual human size into the world of electronics? Suddenly, we are giants. With the coming of electronic technology, humans now complement their insect-size within the Universe, with the stature of giants with the help of transistors and even-smaller electronic chips.

In taming electricity, and in understanding the semiconducting properties of certain materials, humans can now create tools of such minute sizes that these, in principle, turn us into giants. We have created for ourselves—from where we stand with our natural size—a realm befitting giants, even gods. How we psychological manage or not manage this revolutionary leap in Lebensraum, as individuals and as societies, remains to be seen.

Instead of zooming out with your drone, you can now zero in on the minute, into the wafer, into the chip, into one of the little squares in the chip, passing through layers of varied materials, to study transistors packed in a pattern of microcosmic cities.

This Lilliput world, is very like the city views you saw when your drone flew horizontally above the cityscape and then zoomed out into space. Here, you go the other way, from where we naturally belong into the world of the electron.

And here, we again design things the way our cities are designed. But here, nothing can be left to chance. The level of discipline and precision is as high as is thinkable. And there does not seem to be a limit for how far we theoretically can go. Just like outer space.

There is no imaginable limit. There is no wall to hit, either outwards or inwards. Into the macrocosmos or the microcosmos.

We are all giants now, and insects at the same time.