Will the world of the future be filled with cyborgs, half machine implants capable of growing limbs, and with video cameras instead of eyes, as science fiction writers promise us? Will people become fatter or slimmer, will they change the color of their skin or eyes?
It is difficult to look into the future, but, we can try to predict where evolution will lead in a million years, looking a million years ago, when the species Homo sapiens did not exist.
At the dawn of mankind, the earth was inhabited by several types of people. Heidelberg man already bore similarities with Homo erectus and modern man, but possessed a more primitive anatomy than the next Neanderthal.
The last 10 thousand years have been marked by the successful development of agriculture and abundant nutrition, which has led to unhealthy obesity and related diseases, for the fight against which mankind is developing medical science. People have grown fat, and in some countries have increased in height.
If evolution made us smaller, our bodies would require less energy, which would be reasonable in an overcrowded planet, says Thomas Meilund, associate professor of bioinformatics at Aarhus University in Denmark.
Another problem of overcrowding is the need to adapt to the many daily interactions with others. In the old days of gatherers and hunters, daily human contact was kept to a minimum. Maleund suggests that evolution will develop in man the qualities necessary for communication. For example, memorizing the names of people as well as their faces will become an important ability.
Here scientific technologies can help a person. “A computer implanted in the brain would improve memory,” says Thomas. “Today, genes responsible for memory are already known. We could change the memorization process. Yes, it looks like science fiction. But the technology already allows such implantations, although it is not yet known how to connect the implant to the brain to make it functional. This is at the experimental stage.
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Will our descendants be cyborgs?
It's just a matter of technology development. Today people use implants to repair damaged organs, such as pacemakers. Perhaps in the future, implants will be used to improve human abilities. In addition to the aforementioned brain implants, an artificial eye with a video camera may appear that will be able to recognize inaccessible spectral regions and visual effects.
The technology of constructing children already exists. Scientists are able to change the genes of the embryo, although it is not yet known what this could lead to. But, according to Maylund, when this technology matures enough, it will simply become unethical not to change certain genes. The child can be designed at the request of the parents.
“Forecasting a million years ahead is an idle exercise, but it is possible to predict the nearest future with a relatively insignificant margin of error. Using the accumulated knowledge of bioinformatics and genetics, demographic change can be modeled,”writes Dr. Jason A. Hodgson in his article Fundamental Issues of Ecosystems and the Environment.
Today, when an extensive bank of genetic data of people around the world has been collected, geneticists have information about the combinations of genes and their distribution in human populations. On this basis, bioinformatics scientists hypothesize about demographic trends.
According to Hodgson's forecasts, the city will increasingly be separated from the village. “We are observing the process of migration from rural areas to cities, therefore, genetic diversity in cities will grow, in contrast to rural areas,” the scientist writes.
This process will take place in different ways in different parts of the world, for example, in the UK, where the rural population is more homogeneous and has remained practically unchanged for hundreds of years, compared to cities, where a significant proportion of migrants.
Different peoples differ in different rates of demographic growth. The population of Africa is growing at a faster rate than the light-skinned population. Therefore, according to Hodgson's forecasts, the skin color of the person of the future will be darker.
What about space? Humans appear to eventually colonize Mars. But how will this affect evolution? How will low gravity affect body composition? Limb lengthening is possible. Could the Red Planet's cold climate lead to hair growth, making people look like Neanderthals?
We do not know this, but certainly genetic diversity will increase. Hodgson claims that two new mutations appear every year in the world for every 3.5 billion pairs of chromosomes in the human genome. It would be strange to expect that in a million years people will look like they do now.