An unnerving look at the future of human evolution
Posted by staff / June 8, 2013 Alan Kwanhuman evolutionhuman physiologyNickolay Lamm
Much has changed in human physiology in the last 100,000 years and even in the last four hundred or so, so naturally, scientists are curious about what the next 20,000, 60,000 and 100,000 will bring.
For the rest of us, we might sleep more soundly at night not considering the possibilities.
Enter artist and researcher Nickolay Lamm who based his intriguing illustrations on the work of Dr. Alan Kwan.
The computational genomics PhD based his calculations on what he believed “living environments” will demand from humans in the future as well as our ability to choose preferred features for our offspring.
Kwan says that 60,000 years from now, our ability to control the human genome will also make the effect of evolution on our facial features moot. As genetic engineering becomes the norm, “the fate of the human face will be increasingly determined by human tastes,” he says in a research document. Eyes will meanwhile get larger, as attempts to colonize Earth’s solar system and beyond see people living in the dimmer environments of colonies further away from the Sun than Earth. Similarly, skin will become more pigmented to lesson the damage from harmful UV radiation outside of the Earth’s protective ozone. Kwan expects people to have thicker eyelids and a more pronounced superciliary arch (the smooth, frontal bone of the skull under the brow), to deal with the effects of low gravity.
The photo above is what Lamm believes humans will look like in 100,000 years, if, of course, we manage to survive that long.
Well, long live the eyeliner industry…
Full story at Yahoo.
Image credit: Nickolay Lamm
…and he didn’t even imagine a smile 🙁
We will look like that without space travel and all that, just from staring at screens about 15 hours per day as we already do. And I suspect it will not take ten thousand years – a few hundred will suffice for sure. I also expect for legs to get shorter and weaker since we already just sit on our bums all day (by then, everyone will have a motorized wheelchair thingy to move around) until we entirely lose the ability to walk. But we may never survive until then – sperm is getting less and less productive so we will not be able to reproduce. It is just nature’s way of slowing down the ever increasing consumption and waste of resources on the planet.
Don’t worry, guys, we will die out before we ever get this ugly. It is already in the works and it is not like we are not all doing our utmost best to help that « evolution » along…
We’ll all look like blue-eyed white people?