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Monday, June 10, 2013

How Humans May Look Like 100,000 Years in the Future

Artist Nikolay Lamm collaborated with computational geneticist Alan Kwan of Washington University to come up with the sketch of what us humans may look like 100,000 years in the future:
As our understanding of the universe increases, I predict that the human head will trend larger to accommodate a larger brain. But instead of some orthogonal evolutionary path that ends up with the 210th century human a la Futurama’s Morbo the anchor-alien, the rule of viable human biology will still apply and so the entire head will trend larger, though with a bias for a greater cranium growth than facial growth; the human 20,000 years from now would look to us like someone today except we would notice the forehead is subtly too large. [...]
While evolution in space is only beginning to be explored today, I would hazard a guess that millennia of human space colonization of Earth-orbit and other solar system space colonies will also select for…
1. Larger eyes in response to the dimmer environment of colonies further from the Sun than Earth.
2. More pigmented skin to alleviate the damaging impact of much more harmful UV radiation outside of the Earth’s protective ozone.
3. Thicker eyelids or a more pronounced superciliary arch to alleviate the effects low or no gravity that disrupt and disorient the eyesight of today’s astronauts on the ISS.
Read the rest over at Lamm's blog: Here.

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