One Big Baby

What if, in some weird fluke, a baby were born that had a genetic mutation that allowed it to grow forever, and never die from its own size? What if the baby converted an unusually small amount of food into growth, so it required massive resources to keep the baby fed; it was continuously needing more and more calories to sustain itself, while all the time growing a little bigger!
At some point, the child would become critically large, and no longer be able to live in a home. Humanitarian groups would build a larger home for it, and scientists would discuss how to arrest the growth of this super-sized child. But because the condition was genetic, there was little that could be done. Plus, the amount of medication it would take to control the growth of a 25,000 lb. 3 year old is restrictively immense. Surgery to remove the pituitary gland or some other growth inhibition method does not work becuase this child's every cell was imbibed with the unstoppable growth.

Eventually, by about the child's 10th birthday, he fills a football field. He lumbers and sways as he plods about, and the thunderous shakes wreck nearby buildings that are poorly constructed. The child requires massive amounts of food each day, and huge financial resources are required to keep him alive. Many start to call upon the parents of the child to stop feeding him, or at least try to starve him back down to mere tennis court size, but the parents love their child; they cannot possibly starve it! Some call upon the government to intercede, but the laws here are clear: the government cannot just kill an innocent child because it is hungry. On the contrary, the liberal leadership of the country insists that we must devote every resource to feeding, clothing, and providing shelter for this poor afflicted child. Funds are specifically allocated to research the child's condition, but no cure is found.

By age 25, the child is now a young man the size of a city.

By age 40, it becomes clear that the Earth no longer has the resources to feed this person. But the man is the size of Rhode Island, he moves about like a colossus, grazing on huge stores of food like the planet is his candy store. And he continues to grow. The government implores him to cease his eating, for the sake of the rest of humanity, and for the continued survival of the Earth. The parents, now aged, look back with intense regret on the reckless eating machine they created and made thrive. The oxygen intake alone of this titanic being is a tangible drain on the earth. Daily he drinks entire reservoirs of freshwater. And the people of earth cannot stop him. His skin has become so thick that armed assaults do not hurt him. Food cannot be hidden from him, his city-sized nose can smell food from states away, and he can wade across oceans if he needs to escape military action against him. Massive, nuclear-powered aircraft carriers are batted out of the way like inconsequential ladybugs. Much of the earth has become a seething cesspool of the huge man's feces and waste. Entire continents have become covered, literally, in his crap. Oceans run an unearthly green from the algae and other bacteria that grow and feed from the bizarre rivers of urine that poured into them.

Eventually, the Earth shutters, and then fails under the titanic weight of this mega-being. The ecosystem fails, and as the humans gasp and die in the tens of millions, they all wonder why they didn't stop this epic human 40 years earlier from ever getting so big. As the atmosphere dissipates around him, the huge man ponders: "when did things get so bad? I never thought I'd really use up all the resources of the planet!" Then, with a cough that blows the moon out of orbit, the gigantic man dies too.

Of course, the ever-growing baby I speak of is no single baby at all. He's the 6.7 billion of them currently leeching every ounce of life out of this planet as quickly as they can.


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