While you can create spiracles that repel polar substances like water, you cannot protect them against surfactant like soap. No more showers unless you want to drown.
Let's put a cap on how much excess energy the body can store as fat. Sure, some amount is fine and has a number of uses, but just let me poop some excess calories out. I'd only need more if I were to hibernate.
Thinking on it, I want to hibernate too, please.
While we're at it from animals, how about upping some of our regeneration? Teeth don't regrow? Naw, constant regen please. I get too big of a cut and I get a scar? Let's let everything regrow from being lost if you can survive without it. Also why doesn't the brain heal? Most important part of the body and each crack's there for life. Let me get my serotonin back already, slacker.
Also what's with this getting assigned a gender thing? You don't even get to know what it means before you have one! And then we build society as if this coin flip was the seed to the tree of life. Let people choose and switch naturally, please and thank you.
Omg yes this absolutely. I eat to nourish myself and survive and am punished randomly by self-inflicted mouth wound that lasts for days/weeks => evolutionary failure at its finest.
Insult to injury when the food is actually something healthy like a salad instead of fries.
Like, yo, tummy: I have not failed to feed you in over 30 years. Maybe don't cause me physical pain and nausea? A simple grumble is fine until it gets actually serious, ok?
A simple grumble would be perfect. Sometimes I get really hungry annoyingly quickly, and other times I don't get hungry and go way too long before remembering to eat. It'd be really great if I could just program my body to just give me a lil popup reminder after a certain number of hours.
Sometimes strokes can destroy the area of the brain that controls hunger. They require alarms to consistently eat, sleep, etc. I remember one story about a guy who put all these alarms on his watch. One day, his watch runs out of batteries, so his alarms stop completely. A couple days later, he calls the hospital because he couldn't get out of bed. Turns out he hadn't eaten anything the whole time. In short, you'll probably forget to eat without any signal you have to.
I will tell you, it's not that hard to train your body to treat hunger differently. You just need to fast now and then, most religions have
guidelines for this. It doesn't take much to give you hunger resistance, and it makes a huge difference... You become less affected by low blood sugar and able to ignore hunger when you need to
After your body adjusts, hunger becomes cyclical - you feel hungry, maybe even nauseous, but then it goes away after a couple minutes. If you're doing something, it's so easy to ignore you forget about it
Like if I want to grow my hair out, I need to actively concentrate on it for a year? Or can I grunt out a moustache like a cartoon? Both are problematic.
How about a system which fully harvests nutrients, then compresses waste into smooth, solid, compact, sterile pellets which leave no residue and don't smell bad?
You can not have a cure for cancer, but a cancer. I promise I am not trying to be pedantic here. Cancers are so different from one another, that a single cure for breast cancer might not even work on all breast cancer.
We should not get our adult teeth at 7 then no more ever. We need at least one more set.
I don't think balding is useful, agree that could go.
Fertility should be manageable without using all the devices, hormones, etc. Like it should be a positive choice not a default state we have to harm ourselves to avoid. And I don't think we need menopause either. Just turn on fertility only to get pregnant.
(ETA- I also think sexually transmitted diseases should not exist at all, they seem like religious fundamentalist biological warfare, but not sure what change in a human body could accomplish this and leave the pleasure intact. )
Or just have a built in birth control switch that has zero side effects. Of course, it would have to be entirely controlled by the individual so as not to turn into some dystopian population control mechanism.
Appetite is 100% linked to calories needed. You still enjoy food, but the moment you swallow enough calories for whatever you did since the last time you ate, you have zero appetite and anything put in front of you loses all appeal.
Terrible for survival situations, great for modern life where an abundance of food is a bigger problem than a scarcity.
Being able to tell how much food you need in advance would be better, so that instead of thinking that you're really hungry and piling your plate, you only buy or prepare as much food as you need. That would cut down on food waste too.
Maybe it could be based on the average daily calories used each day over the past month to replenish exactly what's been used plus predict ahead until the next meal time?
My appetite is at least 90% based on calories needed, since I was around 25, I 'm over 50 now. My kids laugh at me when I sometimes say I'm still full 6 hours after eating, but sometimes I am. Or eat, then eat ten minutes later. And usually I stay at the same weight unless intentionally bulking or cutting.
One exception - I lose appetite when stressed, and rarely but but sometimes have anxiety around eating still. But most of the time, my appetite just follows my calorie expenditure. Can't be the only person like that, it seems a normal state?
Nah, that's just with stuff like alli. What your guts absorb goes into your blood stream, you'd piss it out if your liver doesn't process it into fat... For reasons we don't fully understand, our gut microbiome stays in our gut.
If you mess with absorption, that happens... If you mess with the fat creation pathways, you just pee out sugars that would've been turned into fat
I'm not an evolutionary biology expert, but my armchair thought process says that this trait might not survive the evolutionary pressure. The burden of child rearing is quite high (specially these days).
Oh totally. Absolutely would decimate the human population on earth. And that wouldn't be a bad thing if it meant people only had kids they could actually take care of.
This. The list of medical issues that would go away if the immune system were properly tuned is enormous. But since it isn't, it errs on the side of attack to keep us alive... and in the process sometimes kills us or just makes us miserable.
The ability not to pee myself every time I sneeze, run or jump after giving birth vaginally would be pretty nice. Even without doing any physical therapy.
No more accidentally biting my tongue or the inside of my cheek while eating. Sometimes I'm just excited for some good food and it just gets completely ruined :(
On that note, can we make teeth less fragile in general? Mine are all messed up from grinding them at night and from brushing way too hard as a kid. :/
Appendix not coming from the factory is a big one. A slightly better immune system that can get through the blood/brain barrier and kill rabies/amoebas, and other brain infections like TB (without shredding brain tissue) too. If a virus like rabies gets past that barrier, you are 1 0 0 % B O N E D as your immune system is largely locked out.
Wider uterus/vagina too. Human babies have massive heads that don't fit through too well. It's like an orange on a toothpick. Making a smaller baby could be a possibility, but survivability would potentially go down.
For very tall people: a larger and stronger heart organ. A second one acting like a smaller turbo would also help. Heh. Failover cluster hearts. You'd probably have to have stronger veins and tissues as a result though.
I don't care about balding (and I have been since 20s). Just a healthy body reset every decade or two/whenever necessary. Get the metabolic rate up, clean up all the junk from the environment that has polluted the DNA and reduced the telomere lengths (whatever the correlation/causation there). Just a "take the body to the shop" type of repair possible. A chance to live for centuries.
Body hair should have multiple sliders like a video game avatar. Wanna be furry all over like a Persian cat or a poodle? No problem. Want to be smooth as a dolphin? Also no problem.
I'm pretty sure the major things that need to change are in the brain. Predeliction for violence and hate, addiction to controversy and toxins, and whatever makes people stupid enough to support facists.
I think our lack of vitamin C production is a feature and not a bug because we basically can't eat too much of it. But animals that produce it like rats can get cancer from eating too much.
Iirc there are some reptiles with two sets of eyelids on each eye, the inner one being transparent, so they can close just the one while under water or in like dusty/windy conditions, but still be able to see.
Our bodies need some trace metals, problem is it can't differentiate between metals it needs and metals that will kill it. "Hell yeah, delicious zinc" as it noms down on lead instead of pooping it out.
Basically the only joints we got that are good are the hips and shoulders. The rest of the joint are what evolution could do (so far) with the bag of bones from fish flippers.
Boobs just stay full and up, despite aging, breastfeeding, etc.
if we are going to have periods, at least make them painless.
Cells just shut down cancer every single time it starts, making it obsolete.
You wouldn’t get out of breath at the top of a staircase/big hill if there’s anyone nearby.
Easier to just make them a lot smaller. Other primates nurse without the extra fat in the boobs. But I like the idea of much more resilient skin, it should bounce back endlessly. No reason for it to get fragile or lose tone, sagging achieves no purpose. Can we fix acne and rosacea with this patch, too?
The ability to breathe underwater - or if that is too much of an upgrade to ask for, the ability to hold your breath for much longer periods of time so that we could spend significant time underwater.
Especially seeing as the planet's surface is over two thirds water!
Improve the birthing process so you don't have to rotate just to fit on the way out. Either make babies smaller or vaginas bigger (in which case penises would have to compensate I guess)
That one's entirely of our own doing! By having better healthcare, people who wouldn't be able to survive childbirth naturally are spreading their genes which leads to childbirths being harder and harder with every generation.
Baby teeth last longer. What's this bullshit about your first set of teeth lasts 5 to 10 years, then you're supposed to make it 60+ on the only other set you get? I'd make baby teeth last about 20 years.
People used to only live like 35 years most of the time. A tribe usually only had a couple of people who lived to old age, and became elders who were cared for by the younger people.
Change that double helix into a quadruple one for extra redundancy, making it harder for it to gain irreparable damage. Also, make it a loop rather than a straight line so the ends don't get shorter with each replication. And remove that dementia bug that has a greater chance of showing up the longer run time is
If the body couls generate muscle without needing to excersize first that'd be cool. But I guess that's why steroids were invented and those have some side effects
I think they are fairly well-designed. You have to be able to expel solids and liquids somehow, otherwise they'd build up inside you, and you might die if they couldn't be digested or sweated out. I guess they could be combined, like birds. But I don't think that would make it less 'gross' in a non-quantifiable way. Sweating is also a pretty effective way of cooling down. Other methods such as large ears as radiators, thin blood vessels on the forearms that must be licked to aid in heat transfer, and panting all have their downsides.
If you think about it, tailpipes on cars and vapor pipes on AC and heatpumps and furnaces are basically the same thing as our digestive system.
The only thing that could really be redesigned is to have them be much more efficient, like some animals, which can pull a lot more water and nutrients out of byproducts. That, and the ability to extract stuff like heavy metals, microplastics, and forever chemicals, which get stuck and can't always leave.
Waste does not have to leave residue behind and stink. We ought to be able to extract more nutrients from digestion, and we could probably make an implant to carbonize waste, compress it into pellets, and even wrap it in a biodegradable capsule before disposal. I do like your point of dealing with hazardous materials.
Some of them at least. Some diets are improvised out of necessity, but then again, we also have restaurants, which are not a necessity. If one animal is plentiful and does the trick, we shouldn't have to go to a restaurant to eat an exotic animal that isn't plentiful.