WHOLE EVOLUTION ALMANAC
HEIRS TO THE HUMAN THRONE MAY ASSUME A VARIETY OF INNOVATIVE FORMS
COSMIC CLOUD
He will be the size of a planet, though the human of today could walk right
through the grain-sized iron particles that make up his Brobdingnagian frame.
This giant
creature, inhabiting the empty reaches of space, would greet friends
with a blast of solar
energy and blow hydrogen gas to whisk cosmic debris away.
More than a decade ago, physicist
Freeman Dyson, building on an idea from
astronomer Fred Hoyle, suggested that the
evolutionary last stand of the human
might be in the form of a giant, intelligent black
cloud. "What I envisage as
the structural unit of such a creature is simply dust grains,"
Dyson said,
"probably made of iron or some convenient stuff, charged and working on each
other with electric and magnetic forces. Such creatures could be just as
complex, if not
more complex, than the creatures we see around us now."
In a recent interview, the
physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton said that the creature's sensory
organs would be collections of solid
particles tuned to respond to radio waves, visible
light, and X rays-a fuller
spectrum than humans can perceive. It would live on sunlight or
perhaps
interstellar gas and radiate long-wave energy-infrared or radio waves-to aid in
the
excretion of waste "It might get rid of things it considers junk," Dyson
says, like
hydrogen by-products, for instance, in an occasional volcanic belch.
Will the cosmic cloud
have feelings? Will it suffer pain, laugh and love, or
pray? "There's no reason why it
shouldn't do all of the above, or none," Dyson
says. "They may not share any of our
concepts, or on the contrary, they may
share a great deal."
The cloud could evolve much more
rapidly than we did, Dyson speculates, and
might prove even more damaging to the earth's
environment than we are. In its
wanton wanderings, the dust cloud might sometimes park
between the earth and the
sun, casting a cold shadow over the remnants of anachronistic
humans, still in
solid organic form.
ANTIGRAVITY GRUNT
She will have to be thickskinned
about wisecracks concerning her weight: almost
nothing, because she'll live in a zero-g
environment. She'll be thickskinned
about everything else as well, because genetic
engineers will build her that
way, with several inches of tough hide surrounding her human
bones, an organic
space suit that will enable her to live forever in orbit.
British science
writer Dougal Dixon, author of Man After Man (St. Martin's
Press), imagines that the
antigravity grunt will be launched with genes from
human parents on pollution-plagued Earth
in 200 years. Then she'll enter
permanent service to work on a starship under construction
in orbit. There will
be no smog in, her workplace. But Dixon says she will worry about
solar
wind-streams of ionized particles hurled past the earth from the sun. When the
solar
wind is high, her alligatorlike skin will close over two sealed lenses
covering her eyes,
the most vulnerable part of her anatomy. Her gray, ovoid
body, about four feet long, will
include a balloonlike base, two arms and two
legs, and long fingers and toes. Her tough
skin will house a compressed human
skeleton and organs, including a few spare lungs, one
containing high-pressure
breathing gases and another for use in venting carbon dioxide.
The fourth lung
will come in handy if she loses her grip on the starship's struts and
floats
free in space. Then she'll be able to blow off some waste gas to push herself
back
to the safety of the spaceship.
Far above the earth, the weightless creature will also find
time for play.
"She'll shoot pool in three dimensions," Dixon suggests, the balls
ricocheting
off the inside walls of a sphere. With rudimentary understanding of human
society,
she'll be able to laugh at visitors' jokes about how lighthearted she
is. But sealed inside
her skin, she'll never hear the jokes well or speak with a
human voice. Instead she'll
communicate through a set of quivering antennas,
like a bee. Starship workers will carry
electronic translators to convert their
speech into vibrations transmitted by direct touch
from plastic antennas to her
artificial sensory organs.
She will learn through this
touch-talk how "unique" she is, says Dixon, a
euphemistic way of telling her that she
wasn't built to breed. She'll never
reproduce. If there is a need for more vacuumorphs, as
Dixon calls them,
engineers will pull out the blueprints and build more.
HO-MUM HOMINID
We have seen the future, and it is us. According to many evolutionary
biologists, it seems
humans are no longer evolving at all. "Indeed, when one
looks at the evolution of brain
size and longevity," says gerontologist Richard
Cutler of the National Institute on Aging,
"it appears that evolution for humans
stopped fifty to a hundred thousand years ago." In
fact, Cutler says, technology
has rewritten survival-of-the-fittest laws. Men with
defective eyesight, who
would have been devoured by tigers in the primeval jungle, wear
contact lenses
today and pass on their biological blueprints for myopic men of the future.
"Not
only are we not improving," says Cutler, we're getting worse."
One evolutionary
biologist who believes that human evolution has slowed to a
halt is Harvard's Stephen Jay
Gould. "Review the incredible things we've done,
how all of civilization has been built in
twenty-five thousand years from
Cro-Magnon to this, with no change in morphology," he says,
"so why should we
predict anything else?"
Gould made his case to Omni writer Delta Willis,
who interviewed paleontologist
Richard Leakey as well. Further evolution, notes Leakey,
would require major
life-style changes-living in a space colony, for example. But Leakey
says that
humanity is not likely to enlist in quests requiring isolation for extended
times.
PLANT PEOPLE
In the future, those who eat spinach may not have to eat much else.
Tomorrow's
vegetarian will learn to incorporate plant cells into the human body without
digesting
them. So, like the plants they eat, humans will draw their energy
from the sun through
photosynthesis-the process by which plants combine
sunlight, water, and oxygen into
carbohydrates, the basic foodstuffs of life.
For these photosynthetic people of tomorrow,
the alteration will bring a side
benefit: They won't have to worry about suntanning because
they'll be green.
Fatima Linda Jackson, an anthropologist at the University of Maryland, is
already at work researching how we might make better use of the components of
plants for
good health. The ultimate goal: protecting the plants we eat from
digestion so they can
continue to live inside our bodies.
One animal has already solved the problem--the lowly
sea slug, a green blob less
than an inch long that lives at the base of grass in saltwater
marshes. Sidney
K. Pierce, Ph.D., professor and associate chair in the department of
zoology at
the University of Maryland, has discovered that the slug sucks nutrients out of
certain hairlike kinds of algae and supports the plant material inside its body.
Under
light, the material produces oxygen and fats that feed the slug. Pierce
says he's kept a
colony of slugs alive with nothing more than ordinary
fluorescent light for months.
Even
before we learn the slug's secret, we could load the cargo bays of
spacecraft with batches
of the animals to supply oxygen. But Pierce says
there's a limit to the blob's
beneficence. Colonies die out after about a year.
Keeping them cool-close to
freezing-adds about six weeks to their lives,
roughly 12 percent, suggesting that future
green men might want to take a cue
from today's florist-shop roses and remain refrigerated
when they're not out
feeding in the sun.
THE CHILD IS FATHER TO THE MAN
*
Scientists call it
neoteny, but you could think of it as the Hollywood
hypothesis. The future human will have
a larger head at birth than our
newborns, and at age forty, his head will be twice the size
of ours, Like Mickey
Mouse, he'll also have comparatively large eyes, suggests
gerontologist Richard
Cutler. It Cutler and other researchers are successful, Homo sapiens
futurus
will be smarter than we are and won't reach middle age until sixty. And like
the
lead in a fairy-tale movie, the creature will live happily almost -ever
after-perhaps 200
years.
*
The neoteny hypothesis holds that the more advanced the species, the more
juvenile
its features. With evolution comes larger crainial domes and smaller
facial masks below
that is, increasing "babyishness"-according to cognitive
psychologist Robert Shaw at the
University of Connecticut at Storrs.
*
Shaw has developed computer simulations of how human
heads grow. Running his
simulation backward, Shaw regressed the face to a hypothetical
time before
birth, generating a picture of the large-headed individual into which the
neoteny
hypothesis suggests we will evolve. The bigger brain, Shaw points out,
would require a
bigger body to supply it with nutrients and to diffuse the
increased production of heat.
*
Cutler adds that the genetic engineering to spawn this creature might be simple,
involving
the fine-tuning of a few hundred genes. But polities might prevent
it. "We don't want a
lot of smart guys around," says Cutler, "We're afraid of
too many chiefs,"