What we may look like in 100,000 years:

http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112870236/human-face-thought-experiment-has-us-looking-wild-061113/


He is talking about humans taking over their own evolution.

Originally posted by sonhouse
http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112870236/human-face-thought-experiment-has-us-looking-wild-061113/


He is talking about humans taking over their own evolution.

I think his predictions will probably be wrong for just one good reason; most people will not want their face to look that way and thus would not ever choose to have anything done to them to look that way in a million years.
I know I for one wouldn't!

Originally posted by sonhouse
http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112870236/human-face-thought-experiment-has-us-looking-wild-061113/


He is talking about humans taking over their own evolution.

Isn't that what Hitler wanted to do?

The Instructor

Originally posted by RJHinds
Isn't that what Hitler wanted to do?

The Instructor

No. Just for starters, Hitler was obsessed with skin color and eye color and race none of which are even mentioned in that link. Also, the link makes a prediction which should not be confused with a proposal nor what the person in the link would necessarily want to happen so the person in that link isn't trying to 'do' anything here. I just happen to think that those predictions are fatally flawed but, that's besides the point here.
But one thing Hitler and other Cristian Nazis certainly did want to do is stamp out atheism:

"We were convinced that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out. "

Adolf Hitler

-this attitude appears to be all too familiar to us in this forum. Guess how so.

Nazism obviously historically came form Christians and not us rational atheists so, if you were trying to make a religious propaganda point of mentioning Hitler here, you have scored an own goal.

But all this is going completely off-topic here as this has nothing to do with the OP.

Originally posted by humy
No. Just for starters, Hitler was obsessed with skin color and eye color and race none of which are even mentioned in that link. Also, the link makes a prediction which should not be confused with a proposal nor what the person in the link would necessarily want to happen so the person in that link isn't trying to 'do' anything here. I just ...[text shortened]...

But all this is going completely off-topic here as this has nothing to do with the OP.

The thing about humans taking over their own evolution is this: If it becomes technologically possible, it will happen somewhere. It might take the form of increased stamina or strength for olympic games or whatever. There would probably be new rules making genetic mods one more no no like taking steroids. It would be hard to prove your genetic code had been modified unless you had pre-mod gene samples to see the before and after.

Once something like that becomes possible, the genie will be out of the bottle and who knows what changes will come about.

Like the author, I don't think it will be 100,000 years in the future, it could happen in the next 300 or 30 years.

Kurzweil thinks we are approaching an era where computers of tomorrow will exceed human intelligence. He thinks it will be in the next 30 or 40 years but I think that is a bit optimistic.

If it happens, humans and the computers might work together to create the next jump in human evolution.

Originally posted by sonhouse
The thing about humans taking over their own evolution is this: If it becomes technologically possible, it will happen somewhere. It might take the form of increased stamina or strength for olympic games or whatever. There would probably be new rules making genetic mods one more no no like taking steroids. It would be hard to prove your genetic code had bee ppens, humans and the computers might work together to create the next jump in human evolution.

I agree with everything you say here -I just think they have got the bit about the human face evolution wildly wrong simply because I guess that most people would always choose not to look weird or that different from the way they look now.

Originally posted by humy
I agree with everything you say here -I just think they have got the bit about the human face evolution wildly wrong simply because I guess that most people would always choose not to look weird or that different from the way they look now.

I think for the most part people are stupid. Some kind of mass media campaign, with slightly larger eyes on ads, milk cartons, etc., and eventually it will be considered the new norm. Obviously, you would not get very far going from our present eyes, what 20 mm across? just a guess, but then going to say 50 mm sized eyes in one go, that would never work. But going from 20 mm to say, 22 mm, then a couple years later, 24 mm, etc, it would probably sell, especially when it would be shown you would have much better night vision and the stars would look like looking through telescopes.

Originally posted by sonhouse
I think for the most part people are stupid. Some kind of mass media campaign, with slightly larger eyes on ads, milk cartons, etc., and eventually it will be considered the new norm. Obviously, you would not get very far going from our present eyes, what 20 mm across? just a guess, but then going to say 50 mm sized eyes in one go, that would never work. Bu ...[text shortened]... ou would have much better night vision and the stars would look like looking through telescopes.

I think you could be right about that. Perhaps we would artificially evolve to slowly have ever bigger eyes so that very 30 years our eyes would grow noticeably bigger and in a thousand years time we would be walking about with football sized eyes and extra thick necks to support the weight of our eye balls.
Perhaps this would become the new norm and anyone with much smaller eyes would looked upon as if they are freaks?
Your eye balls would then also be surely designed to be mainly air-filled rather than fluid filled to reduce their weight.

....OK, I am just kidding. Somehow, for aesthetic reasons, I don't think people would be persuaded to let it go that far -but who knows!?

Originally posted by humy
I think you could be right about that. Perhaps we would artificially evolve to slowly have ever bigger eyes so that very 30 years our eyes would grow noticeably bigger and in a thousand years time we would be walking about with football sized eyes and extra thick necks to support the weight of our eye balls.
Perhaps this would become the new norm and anyone wi ...[text shortened]... sthetic reasons, I don't think people would be persuaded to let it go that far -but who knows!?

I wasn't thinking of quite that size🙂 People right now would really freak out with just double sized eyeballs. I wonder how much more efficient we could design an eye as far as sensitivity and resolution goes though, I bet there would be plenty of room for improvement in both areas in the same size eye we have right now. Eagle eyes are a lot sharper than ours and I think they are quite a bit smaller. One thing we could design away would be that deal where the blood vessels are in front of the rods and cones. That has to be a bad move for sure.

Originally posted by sonhouse
I wasn't thinking of quite that size🙂 People right now would really freak out with just double sized eyeballs. I wonder how much more efficient we could design an eye as far as sensitivity and resolution goes though, I bet there would be plenty of room for improvement in both areas in the same size eye we have right now. Eagle eyes are a lot sharper than o ...[text shortened]... where the blood vessels are in front of the rods and cones. That has to be a bad move for sure.

I wasn't thinking of quite that size 🙂

LOL

I bet there would be plenty of room for improvement in both areas in the same size eye we have right now.

I haven’t worked out the theoretical limit for the resolution of vision but, I have carefully calculated the absolute limit for increasing dim-light vision providing you don't increase the apparent diameter of the human iris, and assuming the eyes are designed to see in colour infrared (which is from 700nm to 900nm wavelength ) but no further into to infrared spectrum (because thermal noise and the 'dark count' would actually decrease dim-light vision if you went further! ), to be about a 30 fold improvement to the amount of sensitivity to dim natural light.
This is assuming that only about 5% of the photons heading towards that pupil fail to reach the retina and be detected by the retina and also you can design the pupil able to expand its diameter to the same diameter as the iris.