Will future humans look different?

I was on vacation, but you guys actually decided to wait for me and let me talk about about human appearances changing over time, and it's so exciting to be well, we knew we were going to have to talk about what humans would look like in the future, and Jonathan, I think you are what humans are going to look like in the future. So sorry for all of humanity.

We couldn't really do it without you. I appreciate that. No, I mean the more I've read into your notes and read the references and everything you guys had had really put together, I was really excited to hear this because this is pretty fascinating stuff. Oh yeah, and this is kind of part of our series. This originated as part of our series on what we don't see enough of in science fiction, right, though you do see some of this.

But yeah, if you project forward a little bit in science fiction, look a few thousand years into the future. Part of the problem is you've got aliens who look alien and then unless it's Star Trek, in which case they look human, right or yeah, yeah, there's some sort of ridge somewhere on their face. And you've got humans who look exactly like humans look whenever the movie was made.

Although you know, Patrick Stewart is captain Jean Loup Picard, you know what, you might be onto something about they look the future looks like me. He needs a goateee but yeah, yeah, and he needs to put on a few pounds. But other than that, yeah, no, we wanted to I'm okay with it now, we we we we really wanted to take a look at what will I mean, what what's the prevailing thought about what human appearance is going to be? And as it turns out, it's a

very tricky thing to talk about for multiple reasons. Well, of course you can't really predict, right, I mean, it's one of those things where there's not a a clear projection that will be controlled by human behavior. Right, It's like kind of a it's kind of willy nilly, and it's kind of random. Right, there's not like a a simulation we can pull up where we just have a slider and we said, all right, let's just slide it

forward fifty years. Oh, that's what we're gonna look like arms. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. So we wanted to kind of talk about some of the scholarship behind this and the thoughts behind this, and really kind of dive into this topic and talk about some of the possibilities. Right. So, just last year, there was actually a funny news story and then a lot of back and forth between people in the media and the scientific community about this one particular article that Forbes published, Right,

it went pretty viral. They published this this tech blog and or article and or content piece. I'm not sure exactly what, right um, it was called how the human Face Might look in a hundred thousand years. So this was June of last year. This was junect and h in it, Forbes staffer Parmi Olsen reported on work that had been done by by this digital artist named Nicola Lamb in collaboration with a computational genomist named Dr Alan Quan. I didn't even know computational genomist was a was a

thing me neither. Pretty awesome, congratulations to that guy. And so in their work they speculated on what the face might look like in twenty thousand, sixty and a hundred thousand years. Okay, So so what did they come up with. Well, you guys might have seen a picture of this somewhere. It basically the furthest view out was the sort of anime character looking thing, right, okay, gigantic eyes, gigantic eyes, kind of weird big forehead. Uh and you're not so

far sunny like me. Now, My eyes are not gigantic. I do have the weird big forehead though, That's okay. So their predictions fall into into a few broad categories. Okay. They suggested that the forehead will get longer and wider to accommodate a larger brain. We'll talk more about this way at the end of the podcast. Um that the eyes will get larger approaching and I quote unnerving lye large. This is what we call Disney princess large. As as we adapt to dimmer off earth environments and as we

become more innocent, right. Um that our nostrils will get larger and our hair denser to help with breathing and heat retention off world. That way, I hope the timeline on this is really accelerated because that hair density thing is very very pertinent to me. Um. That our skin will get darker to help combat UV radiation outside of Earth's ozone, That we'll ditch wearable tech for subtle implants um.

And that perhaps most importantly, genetic manipulation will render natural evolution moot um, likely resulting in increasingly normal human features with an emphasis on on symmetry and the golden ratio and that kind of ideal of human and normal normal and ideal there being in quotation really heavy quotation marks in case you can't tell my sarcasm voice, which I

am told sometimes sounds a lot like my normal. Well yeah, now the exactly because normal, I mean, who defines what normal is in this case and this they're specifically looking at these these uh ideals which have been held up as ideals only by certain types certain cultures. Um. So yeah, you gotta take that with a grain of salt. Yeah.

Another thing to note is that they're not suggesting that this is how humans will grow to look because of say, natural selection, they're saying that this is how we will basically decide will engineer, We will choose features and you know, so Gattica ask everyone will end up looking like Jude Law. Well I'm okay with that too actually, but the uh

pretty man. But anyway, the the what I was going to go into here is that, uh, if some of this kind of makes sense from sort of a top level approach, right, the idea that if we are to go colonize other planets, there will likely be uh situations there that will be different enough from what we have here at Earth that we would need some form of

adaptation to be able to thrive on said planet. And so while it might not be uh efficacious for us to wait for evolution to take hold so that whichever humans survive that initial colonization end up producing generation upon generation upon generation. Uh you know, multiply that out ten thousand times. Do you get to a group of human beings or what used to be human beings who are ideally suited for that planet. It may it's more sense that we would be taking an approach where we're making

those choices consciously. Well, I mean, these days, in the ideal scenario, we do all we can to prevent natural selection from happening to humans frequently. Yeah, I had a joke, but I'm going to leave it on this case. You cat, you can thank me later, all right. So an observation I had about their predictions is that if you just take them as like, these are some kind of fun, interesting guesses, I think they are interesting total to go with. But there's sort of the question of, like, at what

level are these being pitched. Are they just saying, here are some interesting suggestions, or are they saying we've got a pretty good idea what humans are going to look like? And I think that exact distinction was embodied in a lot of the responses. Oh yeah, because there is this whole flurry of response on the internet. Do you, guys, do you believe that the Internet took something way more seriously than they perhaps should have and blew it out

of proportion. Um. I'm sorry, that's my sarcasm voice is strong today. UM. And I do want to point out here that that Nicolae Lamb is the guy who created that average Barbie doll that also went viral in um. If you remember the side by side photos of a of a of a store bought Barbie with a barbie who is shaped more or less like a human person. Um uh, yeah, he's that guy. He also is behind the Lammily doll line, which he kicks started in two

to work towards producing realistic shaped dolls for kids. Because Okay, a thing to keep in mind about Lamb's work is that he's really savvy about producing stuff that will capture

the public's imagination and click throughs. So, in other words, like this could be something where uh he imagines a scenario and then and then frames it in such a way that it's compelling enough for people to look at, participate in discussion about, but doesn't necessarily indicate any kind of expertise necessarily that or or scholarship that went into the the ultimate design or or or guess I think very much that Um that you know that that he and the other fellow Quan were trying to make an

interesting thing, perhaps more so than an extraordinarily accurate future prediction. Well, and and one other thing I would point out, and some of the other discussions we're going to to chat about will sort of fall into this as well, is that while we could go the engineering route to try and take tackle some of these these issues. Another thing we could try, besides, you know, altering ourselves, is altering the environment we're going into, and therefore you wouldn't have

the environmental requirement to adapt. We could adapt the environment, which is pretty much what humans have been doing for the last couple hundred years. Yeah. Typically we don't biologically adapt to our environments anymore. We adapt the environments, or we technologically adapt, right, right, right, You don't need crazy anime eyes if you have lamp, right right, that's a good point a Pitch Dark couldn't have, or is it

pitch black? Pitch Black? That Pitch Black couldn't happen because because you know, that's a that's actually a good Vin Diesel movie, and you're gonna destroy the few good I'm not going to take Pitch Black away from us, all right. I think the thinking is that huge anime eyes would help protect the environment because you wouldn't need to use as much energy on lamps or in situations where energy

is scarce. I'm pretty sure that our energy problem, I don't know, I'm pretty sure, and I know you're you're you're making a joke, but I have to be the jerk who who who comments on this. I'm pretty sure by the time we're colonizing other world's we've kind of nailed the energy problem because that would necessitate us being able to get to said other world. But off world is always like the like the crazy wild West. Yeah,

we always have to fusion reactors. Okay, Lauren, you mentioned a couple of the people who responded to the original article in the illustrations that these people did. What what were some of the responses? They were interesting, and we're talking a lot about this particular this particular prediction because the conversation that it generated really was fascinating, even if it was blown out of proportion. So George Dvorsky for I OH nine thought that Lamb and Quain's ideas actually

didn't go far enough. He suggested that they should have taken into deeper account the possibility of technological additions and innovations to human biology, including the idea that we might be totally cyborgs, or have uploaded our consciousness, or be controlling robotic avatars from a distance. He he didn't really comment on the idea that humans might want to stay human looking, which is that's something I want to talk about in a bit here, but we can save that. Yeah,

I got I've got some stuff. I think Joe and I are going to throw down in that in that part of the conversation, I hope. So all right, just keep the fight on that side of the table. There was actually another writer for Forbes responded, though, uh yeah. Matthew Herper wrote a fairly snippy response entitled and I quote no, this is not how the human face face

might look in a hundred thousand years um. In it, he he suggests that the genetic engineering that quantum Lamb hypothesized about is going to be taking place much sooner um, and also points out that a hundred thousand years is only about half the time that Homo sapiens have existed. As such, you know that that this is right, right right, This is basically minus you know, grooming and a little bit of skull size difference. This is how we've looked

for that long. So so you know, a, it's unlikely that major facial changes will happen in so short and evolutionary period of time, and and be that it's impossible to say what tastes and trends will be like in the future. So therefore, Guessing what features we as as geneticists and or consumers are going to select in the future is just pure sci fi speculation, right. I mean, for one thing, we cannot anticipate what a generation that's five years removed from our own is going to perceive

as being desirable or attractive. I mean, a fallout has taught us many things. But no, but but seriously, we don't. We can't predict what people are going to find attractive about the human form in one way or another. And that's part of what will really go into our discussion little bit later too. But so so yeah, it's really difficult to suggest that. Also as far as this this

genetic engineering thing about how it's going to happen much sooner. Uh, that one I'm really curious about because I I foresee there's gonna be a lot of resistance on that front for a long time, for for for various reasons, including ethics. So you're saying it's not just that we might not have the technological expertise to do it, but that there might be reasons not to do There will be cultural and social taboos against genetic engineering, at least in certain

parts of the world. For are a good long time, is my guess. That's a guess because we don't have enough right now to really say one way or the other. But just based upon the reactions we've seen to basic foundation research that would lead maybe one day to genetic engineering, we've already seen examples of people really kind of putting

up barriers. Oh sure. Also, I think, and I think that a few of these nice people brought this up, um that if we're going to do genetic engineering, we're probably not going to be peddling around with eye color. We're going to be say, like wiping out really terrible diseases and stuff like that first and then maybe after that, Like, you know, my nose is a little bit big, I'd like to give my daughter a smaller nose. Is that possible?

Stuff like that. Yeah, I've got more to say about that in the next setting too, just because just because human history is filled with people altering themselves. So my hair is blue right now, so so I totally get that, But I want to be born with blue hair. I'm

not sure anyway. So uh. There was a response actually to Herper's response, and a response to the response, Yes, Kwan actually wrote him this really sick burn email that was the computation who worked on the original hypothesis here, and in which Kwan said, and I think this sums up his I mean, it was a really long email, so I'm just going to quote part of it, but I think it sums up his overall argument really well. Okay,

so here we go. The operative word might, as in this is what the human face might look like in a hundred thousand years, makes the statement an existential statement, which means that there is a non zero possibility that a given event may occur. Given that we agree that no one can make an absolute statement about the future, by the same token, you cannot claim to know the negation of an existential statement. This is not how a

face might look like or it's equivalent. There is no chance that the human face will look like this, all right, But I see this other thing in our notes here. This is kind of interesting to me. Uh, the question about whether or not we will be taller. Yeah, this is something that I think has often sort of been imagined. It might be that we will get taller in the future, or that we are currently very tall compared to our ancestors, which I mean, if you've ever been in an old house, yeah, yeah,

or a castle. I just I just walked around a few castles and there were times where I had to duck my head and I am not a tall person. Well it depends on which ancestors, it turns out, and that's going to come into something. But um so, yeah, there's this question have we grown taller than we used to be as a species and will we continue to grow taller as time goes on? So I want to

start with one fact. A March paper in the Oxford Economic Journals found that from the mid eighteen hundreds to nineteen eighty, the average height of European adult males grew eleven centimeters. That's about four point three is significant. Wait that was in the Oxford Economic Journals. Was it based upon how expensive it is to build higher doorways? No, it turns out actually studying human height uh factors into

economic papers a lot interest. It may reflect certain economic conditions, like a little bit of a spoiler, but for how this discussion is going to turn out. But there was also this other thing I found online that was funny. It was quote a living bar graph, So it was a comparison of height distribution among students at Connecticut State Agricultural College comparing photos taken in nineteen fourteen and then

nineteen seven. So they had different bars basically with like a you know, five ft two, five ft three, and then they'd have the students who measured those heights line up behind each bar, so you'd get a bar graph made out of actual humans in the phototch and you can see over time that the distribution of males students goes up. So the average height of the male students was sixty seven point three inches in nineteen fourteen, and that increased to seventy point one inches in nine seven.

That's a difference of two point eight inches or seven point one centimeters in just eighty three years. Now. Of course, there may be some self selection in this, because the Connecticut State at Agricultural College started offering scholarship packages to taller students in the nineteen fifties. That's yeah, that was just tough. I mean, you know, if you if you were below average height, you got the short end of the stick on that one. Okay, that was totally a joke.

They did not offer scholarship packages to taller students. No, the students actually wasn't a joke, because to be a joke, you have to be funny first. Okay, so they add the student. The male students actually did get taller on average. Um, so there are more comparisons of average male height over time than average female height. For example, the ving barographed from Connecticut. There are no women in the nineteen fourteen photo. The women in the nine photo average sixty four point

eight inches. But don't worry, in another eighty three years will be able to compare both men and women. I'm sure. So can we get a can we get a more general estimate? Like? Does this apply to women too? Yeah, it seems like it. So. In a nineteen guest article for Scientific American, the biologist Michael J. Doherty claimed that the average height of humans in industrialized countries had grown by about ten centimeters or four inches over the past century and a half. Okay, well, let me ask you

this joke. Does this mean that we as a species are evolving rapidly to become like the next generation of NBA players? Is that what this is all about? Sadly no, So what scientists have discovered is that they think we are not evolving to grow taller and There are a bunch of reasons for thinking this. Number one is that it has been a steady progression of much shorter people long ago, too much taller people now. Instead, if we

study history, it seems to be inconsistent. People get taller and then they get shorter, and then they get taller again. Are there any correlating effects that seem to go along with this taller shorter, taller thing, which perhaps we may

have alluded to spoiling this part of the podcast. So Yeah, we observe around the world and in recent history that generations of children who suffer poor nutrition in early development remain shorter as adults, and when economic conditions improve in the next generation receives better food, those children tend to grow up to be taller adults. Is what we seem to observe. There's this study called anthropometric history, and that's

the study of historical trends in human height. In the past couple of decades, people in this field have largely used the historical distribution and human height to study environmental and economic conditions, not population genetics. Yeah, makes sense. Uh. And finally that as far as we can tell, we

sort of seem to have leveled off. So while these increases in average height can be charted over the past century and a half, were a lot taller on average than we were a hundred and fifty years ago, people in industrialized nations aren't really getting much taller anymore. We we seem to have kind of hit the max. Oh okay, well, you know that's all right. I wasn't expecting to grow any taller than I already have figured that my growth spurts were behind me every day. To be a little taller,

a taller. Well, you know we should. We should put a little mark on the wall and just have it being Lauren's height, and we just have our stand under it. Every day we take another picture. Just the power of wishing. That's a scientific experiment. It sounds like testing the power of how tall the heels I can wear? Okay, okay,

how about brains? Huge, huge brains. Part of that that facial features guestimation was was the four head will grow because our brains will get bigger, right, so therefore we'll need more space in our our heads to hold those those big old brains of ours. Have you ever seen a movie called This Islander? Yes? I have. You're talking about the aliens with the enormous brains to two different kinds, two different kinds, Lauren, let me parce it for it. First,

you had the regular human looking aliens. They just have human looking is being general. They have hilariously huge foreheads, like you just had to cram an extra brain in there, so they made the skull bigger, which is yes, almost. It's why the MST three K version of it has one of the characters one of the robots. Just every time the the alien leader has a line to the humans and he's posing as a human. Is you just hear one of the robots say, but I'm not an alien.

But then later in the movie you get an alien this brain mutant. So it's just got a huge, bulging brain and that's basically its head and expose giant brain with goggles. Is that what we're going to be because obviously we want our we want our brains to get more powerful. If we're thinking that we're going to continue to upgrade our intelligence, if we can genetically engineer ourselves to be smarter, that's gott I mean, we're going to

have gigantoid brains. Right. Well, first of all, let's let's let's look back at history, right, we need to look back at our our ancestors and the and the and the predecessors to the humans. Sure, and it's certainly true that that human brains are a hominid brains at the very least have gotten much bigger over the past, say two to three million years. Yeah, that's right, So our brains have more than doubled in size since more than more than two two and a half million years ago.

But does that necessarily mean that size is directly correlated with intelligence. There are some correlations, but it's not a totally direct correlation, right, It's not one to one certainly. Well, yeah, I mean there there are some studies that show that that brain size and intelligence are not so closely correlated that you know, you would say, oh, this persent has a larger brain, therefore they are automatically smarter than this

other person. Right, So, one example I'd like to give is that on average, men have slightly bigger brains than women. But don't take this and run with it, you woman hating jerks. That does not mean men are smarter than women. In fact, men are not measurably smarter than women. It seems that For example, one one thing explaining part of this is that women have more densely crowded neurons in some parts of the brain, the cerebral cortex. Uh. Women may have up to twelve percent more neurons in the

cortex than men. And then there is the fact that it's actually the brain to body mass ratio that is a little bit more predictive of intelligence. But even then you have some variation with that. Sure. Well, like like an elephant's brain can wait four times is that of a humans? Um? And they, as far as I know, don't do many of the complex things that we do. If they do, they're really good at hiding it. Um. No, they need those those big brains to control their huge

muscle blocks. Well that makes sense. Um, there's there's also okay, so within the human species itself, the largest Homo sapiens brains on record belong to the chro Magnets, which were a subset of early modern humans who lived some forty thousand years ago. And and some people theorize that they needed those bigger skulls, uh, not to you know, do computational science, but but rather to chew their less refined food or you know, simply having a thick skull to

like survive infancy. That's really useful. They might have been calculating how long it would take them to chew that food. It's don't I don't know. I've never asked one. I want to throw an even bigger wrench into this and say, okay, so we've established that it's not necessarily just a brain size issue. Brain size is correlated to intelligence, but it's not a one to one thing. But this is the craziest thing. Our brains may not even right now be

the biggest they've ever been. Modern humans we should probably say are the most intellectually advanced SPECIs as far as we know. I mean, but the most intellectually advanced ones that we've encountered at any rate, and not including dolphins and and certainly for smarter overall than Cora magnets. Probably, yeah, most likely. But what if our brains had been bigger than they are now? Yeah? There is evidence that they

have been shrinking recently. According to paleo anthropologist John Hawks in this really great Discover magazine article, um over the past twenty years, the average volume of the human male brain has decreased from about one five cubic centimeters to about one thousand, three hundred and fifty um and that's okay. Conversions are awkward. From metric to imperial that's like six and the third cups of brain to about five and two third cups of brain are like three point two

points to two point eight five points. It's a chunk about the size of a tennis ball. Um and and and and women's brains, for the record, have have shrunk proportionally as well. So wait a minute, how are they explaining this? Are we getting dumber than we used to be? Um? Well, okay, so so they've tread carefully. Different paleontologists and anthropologists have different theories about why and how and the exact effect

that this is having on on humans as a society. Um. The first is that, yeah, we're getting dumber, um uh. And and and Magnans were not less intelligent. I either do to something like have you guys seen idiocracy? Um yeah, just just the lowest common denominator becoming the greatest denominator? Um uh. And or that as a society, you know, being a society means that we don't have to be

so smart to stay alive individually. There is not as much of an imperative for intelligence because collectively we're able to handle so much, right. Um. Another theory put forth is that our brains are getting more efficient, um, both more agile and also more energy efficient, allowing us to concentrate less on food and more on playing really awesome

guitar riffs well sure, um. Or perhaps that we've domesticated ourselves. Um. A marker of tame animals after many generations is a smaller brain size, which again kind of goes back into that idea of they don't need as large a brain because they don't have They don't have to rely so much on survival skills because I got a big old dumb human taking care of them, right right um. Or finally, that are changing diet means that our food is so much easier to eat that our skulls don't need to

be as big for us to chew it. And also, I mean, I I don't think that we mentioned this before, but a definite uh impediment to you know, ludicrously large unnervingly large brains is that the human birth canal is not getting proportionately larger anytime soon. I don't think, I mean like like it would require the birth canal to get larger, or or human hips to get larger. Well, by that time, we'll all be born in artificial wombs. Oh okay, yeah, like the matrix will just be in

little pods. Okay. I think by that time, we're actually gotten to the point where our brains are just in jars, and so then you'll be bragging to everyone else about how big your jar is. Okay, yeah, I want to switch to a different topic. Okay, please do. Are we gonna become the borg? Because this is what everybody imagines, right,

So we were heading towards the singularity. We're gonna start incorporating more technology into our brains, into our bodies to supplement all the things we can't do with these weak, puny little muscles and the gray matter up here. Why not just cram computers into our skin so we'll have little wires and circuit boards popping out everywhere. I feel like this sort of ties into divorce. These comment on the first the first article we were talking about. Yeah,

I mean, he seemed to think we weren't going far enough. Yeah, I mean, I mean, if I could replace one eye with little blinking LEDs that say something clever and morse code I probably would today. Okay, there you go. Alright, well, Joe, I want to hear I want to hear your your point of view on this because then I want to, uh to engage in a discussion about this, because I have I have some thoughts on my own. Yeah, Okay,

Well I kind of doubt that. I mean, I don't know, maybe because of course human culture and what we find attractive is it's adaptable. We know to some extent, we don't know to what extent. And I would guess, based on my affinity for something called the biophilia hypothesis, that we probably aren't going to want ourselves to look to computer y and machine e so that that hypothesis is the EO. Wilson one. Right, Yeah, So this is put

forth by EO. Wilson. There have been a lot of people who have written about it, and the biophilia hypothesis is what it sounds like. It's the idea that living organisms like humans have an inherent, deeply instinctual affinity for other living organisms and living systems, so that we are always going to prefer organic life to artifactual synthetic types of objects, and that humans, you'd always prefer a forest to room with concrete walls, and that that and that

that goes deep. It's not just sort of a cultural institution like, uh, yeah, you know forests are nice because I learned that when I was a kid. It's it's part of the animal that we are to prefer those things. That that's sort of I mean, it's still a hypothesis. Of course, that's not something that's proven to be true,

but that it seems to ring true to me. Interesting, so uh and of course sorry, to complete the thought, sure, how this would apply to humans would be to say that no, maybe our our cultural appreciation for what humans should look like it can change, but it doesn't go that far. It doesn't go to the point where we want humans to stop looking organic. Sure, Like, you know, taking it back to the board kind of reference, there's probably a reason that the board were these horrifying villains

and not really the good guys. Until we got a sexy lady borg. It was okay to be one of the good guys because we had taken most of that weird computer stuff off. Well, and there's some things and we've we've referenced some of this earlier there's some things that if you were to change them about the human face, they do for most people, uh, illicit a sense of

unease or even horror. We've seen that used to great effect in horror movies where you often have um villainous human characters or quasi human in the case of some of these, because they have appeared to have some sort of supernatural et right, but they often have faces that are asymmetrical, or you will end up creating a sense of horror by taking a person's face and then suddenly

distorting it in some way. There's the scene in In the Ring where it's a very quick flash of a person whose face has been distorted so like their nose has been this place, their eyes get a little out of alignment, and it does created a really shocking sense of unease among a very wide audience. I mean, it's just one of those kind of reactions. Uh and and

quick quick sidetrack on that one. I think that that's what uh lamb and quon we're talking about with the golden rule and end symmetry, because you mean the golden ratio, the gold under you ive by that rule, Yes, the golden ratio. Thank you, Joe that yes, and because um, one of the markers of beauty, and and I mean, of course beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all of that kind of stuff. But no, it's it's also scientific, um that that a symmetrical face is

considered beautiful. Well, a couple of things I wanted to say. One of them is actually in the notes, which is that, uh, they any sort of technological enhancements do not necessarily mean we are going to have great cosmetic changes in a person's appearance. Right. That's one thing I predicted is that, well, it seems pretty obvious that if we can give you, if we can upgrade your brain with computers, we can probably do it in a way that's not going to

be too visually obtrusive. Right. There might be some that people choose to have, Like you were talking about an LED light that blinks out Morse code in place of an eye lareen. But that was just a Patrick Stewart Bard reference. But even so, even though that's that's a joking reference, I could easily see technological enhancements or body modification being something that gets embraced by perhaps at first a yeah subculture, but then get embraced by a larger culture.

And the reason why I feel pretty confident about that is that human history is filled with examples of people undergoing various types of body modification in pursuit of some sort of perceived beauty that was supported by that culture. There were a lot of different reasons for something to be seen as beautiful depending upon the culture. For example, there's the foot binding in Chinese culture, which was in part seen as a a you know, the ideal of female beauty was to have that lotus foot. It was

also in part as a means of subjugating women. So it's all, you know, culturally tied up. It's not just like this is what we considered to be beautiful. It's very complex exactly. But the fact that we've seen things like piercings and tattoos become more more accepted in a Western culture over the last I mean even in my lifetime, I've seen that the fact that I have a shaved head and that is considered to be culturally fine in

in America, that has changed. When I first started doing it, it was before you saw it pretty frequently, and so I don't know if guys just were holding onto their hair more back then, but I frequently encountered people who had not really talked to anyone who had ever shaved their head. It was it was really an unusual experience for them. So I had a lot of people asking

if they could touch my head. Thankfully, that part of my life is behind me, I guess, because now we've hit a kind of u uh, you know, saturation point of bald guys, particularly the bald guys would goatee Heisenberg appearance. So at any rate, we've seen changes like changes and ideas of beauty and modification happened over the past. So I don't think that we will necessarily see a future where this sort of thing isn't embraced, and perhaps at first it'll be a very niche cultural kind of thing.

But I don't necessarily think that we're going to have uh people avoiding it forever either. It may be that humans sixty thousand years into the future look extremely different because they have modified themselves in numerous ways. I mean, I can imagine being able to give yourself like electrically glittery skin or that kind of thing. You know, it's it's it's definitely in that realm of science fiction, you know, kind of anime style in a way. But I don't

think it's necessarily beyond believability. I think the prime time to introduce glittery skin body mods would have been, you know, five or six years ago, whenever it was Twilight Big. Really it would have been in the mid nineteen seventies with David Bowie glam Rock. Okay, either are going to be really necessary. Way, Well, I want to offer another, uh concession to what you say, is that we may adapt to it. I thought also that getting all borged out could in the future become an example of a

kind of performative consumption. Right, so if it if it costs money to get cybernetic implants and things like, it's a status symbol exactly. It could be the future's equivalent of wearing expense of jewelry and driving flashy sports cars. You you advertise your financial value by gluing computer parts to your face and all this. You might even have people faking it, like they don't actually have cybernetic implants,

they're just sticking stuff on their bodies. So this would be an intermediary step from the brains and the jars in my jar is bigger than your jar. Yeah, you're saying it could be and bigger than. If this were the case, it's sort of be a question of competition between the need to show your value and this desire to fill the natural biophelia. If that, in fact is is true. You know, I think again, I can totally

understand people saying that this hypothesis rings true, this biophelia hypothesis. Uh, certainly, there are plenty of examples if we just look at our fiction of that being true, where you either have the perfect hero and the disfigured villain, or you have the disfigured hero who whom everyone treats as a villain unfairly do simply because of their their appearance. But then it's revealed that the this person is actually beautiful on the inside and it becomes you know, an object lesson

for for the reader. Yeah, exactly, so, there there's plenty of examples just in human experience that support this hypothesis. Obviously, that's not, you know enough, from a scientific perspective. It's merely anecdotal, But it's anecdotal supported by at least in Western culture, hundreds of years of literature and and uh, and in theater and that sort of thing. Well, and

there are actual scientists debating this. Toime, it's not just speculations right right now, I'm just saying that, you know, we can't we don't have the scientific uh you know, uh consensus on this yet, but there seems to be quite a bit of support from other parts of the

human experience or you know. The other thing we could say is that even if it is a deeply rooted, deeply instinctual genetic predisposition, we have to prefer things that look living versus things that look ARTIFICI shoal today, maybe we'll evolve that could be a thing that we change about ourselves. So at any rate, this has really been a very interesting discussion. I mean, it's it is something that's interesting to think about, like what are people going

to look like in the future? Will we And we've got plenty of examples in science fiction of the idea of cosmetic surgery gone run amuck, where people have have taken the what we consider to be uh, either the ideal or examples of outliers of cosmic surgery today and then they just multiply that by a hundred so that we get these truly at least to us outrageous examples of of modification that who knows, perhaps in uh in in several thousand years, these things that seemed completely extreme

and ludicrous to us might not seem that way in the future. It may very well be that these things that we think are absurd now are just the norm. Yeah. So, ultimately, when it comes down to what are humans gonna look like in the future, we have to say we do

not know. There is there is no mean, there's no way of predicting it because so many different factors are come into play when it comes to human appearance, and human preference is one of those, and that changes from generation to generations or a minute a minute, Yeah, it just takes me back to college. So anyway, guys, Uh, I think this was a fun topic. It was not something that we would normally tackle, right, It was a

little bit outside of it. And but I love that it's also in that kind of things that are not always addressed in science fiction realm, and I love that we're doing these sort of topics. So you guys, if you enjoy these topics, make sure you get in touch with us. Let's know what you like. Uh, let's know if there are any topics specifically that you think we

have to tackle. You know, why is it in science fiction films you never see X and um, I'm sure we're gonna get some interesting examples and I can't wait to read them. So let's know. On Twitter, on Facebook, or Google Plus. You can find us with the handle f W Thinking and we will talk to you again really soon. For more on this topic and the future of technology, visit Forward Thinking dot Com Problem brought to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places,