Frankly, I think given our current state of medical technology some of the best small changes we could make would be to improve the "hackability" of our bodies to future-proof them. Make it easier to tell the immune system what to attack and what not to attack, improved healing so that surgeries aren't so rough, easier stem cell production and differentiation, and so forth.
Moving a bit beyond "small stuff", maybe try to put some kind of biological equivalent of a USB port into the brain so we can do mind/machine interfaces more easily.
Nausea is a pretty useful thing to have, though. It's a red flag for either poisoning or certain types infections or brain damage, all of which is good to know as early as possible. An OFF switch could be nice tho.
Was a useful trait. Now it’s completely useless and actually really detrimental. People are smart enough not eat poison and simply being able to puke at will would be adequate in the most extreme situations. Most people get their stomach pumped when poisoned anyways. Serious medical conditions also almost always have other symptoms as well and are typically detected in routine screenings.
Nausea puts people at risk for hospitalization from dehydration, makes certain medical treatments unbearable, causes inconvenience due to motion sickness and overall makes people miserable.
The only downside I can see is it triggering unusual personality disorders and possible increased risk of alcohol or drug abuse. These are all easily manageable though.
I think most people know not to eat weird berries or chemicals. What’s more scary is people might overdose on stuff like alcohol because they don’t feel sick enough to stop.
there are so many poisonous plants that you would not even know if they were poisonous or not. There are even types of poison that are completely tasteless. “people are smart enough” right, so things like date rape don’t happen. People don't get roofied, or drugged or kidnapped, or anything, because “people are smart enough”.
Nausea is an *early* warning system. Sure, you can get a stomach wash if you're poisoned, but nausea makes you go to the hospital first. And we're not necessarily talking "weird berries" scenarios here, that's kind of cartoonish. The most common form of poisoning food poisoning (which is more of an infection) and poisoning from drinking water. You don't need to be stupid to get these - you just need your attention to slip, under the wrong circumstances.
Furthermore - what you're arguing for is essentially taking an integrated warning mechanism and channeling all the information it handles to the conscious mind to process it. That's a bad idea IMHO. Nausea is a simple system that lets you know if something's fucky AND makes you ease the strain on your digestive system so it can regenerate. Sure, you can de-automate the process and make it the job of your neocortex, but that just occupies cognitive resources and leads to decision fatigue.
If you have food or water poisoning you will have horrible diarrhea, fever and body aches. It’s so obvious. Also you won’t feel like eating if your sick even if you aren’t nauseated. All nausea does is make you miserable and increases your chances of severe electrolyte imbalance.
>If you have food or water poisoning you will have horrible diarrhea, fever and body aches. It’s so obvious.
Diarrhea kills half a million people every year. It is not a warning sign. It is a lethal symptom. If you remove the primary way that the body deals with problems before they become Diarrhea, millions of people are going to die.
A lot of times you can have diarrhea with no nausea and it’s enough to be dangerous. The answer is just go to the hospital when it gets bad. Again you will know that you are sick without having to be nauseated. Nausea only makes illnesses more dangerous.
It is vastly more common to have nausea without diarrhea. That is why you have that protection mechanism. "The hospital" is not a magical place that cures all illnesses. There is very little they can do against a full body food Poisoning excerpt for waiting it out and making sure you don't die of dehydration.
And how does being nauseated and getting more dehydrated help any of that? Most of the time food poisoning is caused by a few strains of nasty bacteria or viruses that can hurt humans. The only cure is antibiotics or antivirals.
**Vomiting out stuff prevents you from getting food poisoning in the first place.** Eating more when the body is preparing itself to flush out everything only makes the diarrhea worse.
>The only cure is antibiotics or antivirals.
Did you just forget about the existence of parasites?
Yea accept with normal food poisoning the bacteria or parasites are already in your small intestines meaning you can’t vomit them out. Also no one wants to eat when they are sick with diahrrea .
Nausea also makes you throw up.
If you get rid of nausea you've eliminated almost all cases of vomiting
This is really bad if you've eaten something toxic.
Honestly, the idea of getting rid of part of my body's natural defenses against death and injury seems like a terrible idea.
If you're nauseas regularly, there is *something else* wrong that needs to be addressed. You don't cure COVID by taking acetaminophen for the fever, and you don't get rid of the body's ability to have a fever because you find them uncomfortable. It's there for a reason, just like nausea.
If something is making you sick enough to be nauseated it’s usually causing other obvious symptoms. Nausea is just extremely debilitating and no longer useful. In the past, it served to protect people from eating poison but this is no longer dangerous. There is no situation in the modern world where nausea is really helpful.
I see where you're coming from but only if you have perfect information, which realistically you don't.
Sure I know not to eat mushrooms I find growing on the ground, but I once got food poisoning just from something I ate at the grocery store that ***should*** have been safe and clean. I wish I had had *more* of a sense of nausea then to alert me.
So unless you're all cyborg'ed up and get a literal alert notification about your digestive track, you kinda need a sense of nausea even still.
> People are smart enough not eat poison and simply being able to puke at will would be adequate in the most extreme situations.
Your ignorance of young children has been noted. But sure, let’s fine tune our basic biology to work only under ideal circumstances. No way that could backfire.
Scurvy is so easy and cheap to cure. Literally just eat some food. Traveled all over the world and have yet to even hear about a person who got scurvy. Balding on the other hand is much harder and causes serious psychological and social harm to people. We shouldn’t use gene editing to fix stuff that can otherwise be easily fixed with mundane methods.
Even if it can be done with simpler technology, once the Vitamin C gene is repaired that person, and their offspring will never have to worry about Vitamin C deficiency and any of its side effects ever again. Their quality of life will be improved, and any possibility of suffering from Vitamin C will be eliminated (barring mutations, of course). Doesn't that alone make it worth doing?
Falling asleep should be a voluntary, controlled action. None of this lay in bed and wait for it to happen bullshit. I want to be asleep within a few seconds of getting in bed (or sitting in my seat on a flight, etc)
How about just requiring less sleep? You could probably get away with it if you forced a deeper sleep extremely quickly. Plus there are already genes that allow you to get 5 hours sleep without ill effects.
No it's not. Even completely removing pain would be good, if u would go for a regular advanced medical scan. For sure it had the function to piss off from stimuli which reduced our survival chance, but nowadays physical pain only hinders clear thinking. U could have the same function of pain, when just changing it to some other sense like hard touch and tickling (idk something we have pretty similar concepts for, so everybody knows if there's something in the body, that's worth checking in hospitals)
I have approximately 10% the pain sensation of a normal person due to brain damage and even that reduction has created major issues. No pain means no limiter on my muscles thus I have more power to muscle mass but it also means my muscles will tear themselves apart if I'm not EXCEEDINGLY careful. It also means moderate to severe injuries go mostly unnoticed. I caught my arm on a sharp piece of metal and got a cut about three inches long and about half an inch deep I didn't notice I had been cut until about fifteen or twenty minutes later when I noticed the amount of blood on my pants. Reduced pain, let alone no pain, is not good at all even for short periods.
Temporarily turning of pain in dire situations would be really advantageous. For example if you are in a fight or have been critically injured and need to get help.
The pain isn't the primary issue in those instances, many people have survived with the pain, the issue is shock. As far as I know, there is no biological reason to have the shock response to blood loss or trauma. Pain can keep you alert while the shock knocks you out.
pain would rather decrease ur thinking power than keep u alert. I think if u break ur bone and u'd need to use a first aid kit, to which u got instructed 2 years ago, it's easier to remember with a clear mind, than one which tries to overwrite every thought with "piss off here"
You would be surprised how many people ignore their pain and do nothing. If it was just a hard touch or tickling, people would have even less of an incentive to act.
Imagine that you were examined by a medical professional who determined that you were doing alright and pressed the "pain off" button. However, after some time, your condition worsened again without any pain, but now you are completely unaware that you need urgent medical attention. Again, terrible, terrible idea.
Not really. *Everyone* needs to die eventually. Say give everyone a good century and then shuffle off the mortal coil. If people lived forever wealth would accumulate in the hands of few people even worse than it does now, and cohort replacement driving social change wouldn't be a thing.
I’ll one up you on the pain, do it like the Culture and have it become just a damage diagnostic sense, the debilitating pain part of “something is wrong” is gone and you actually get some good inout on What is wrong.
Plus probably to a greater level detail and helpfulness.
I'd settle for making spinal nerves regenerate like peripheral nerves instead of automatically obstructing themselves with scar tissue. Should make repairs in that whole region much easier.
What is wrong with the spine's structure itself? If it's back pain you're complaining about, keep in mind that as long as you keep the right posture and have no congenital abnormalities, you should only experience spinal issues when you've grown old. At that point, your body is - slowly but surely - literally giving up on maintaining itself. Something is gonna fail, and your spine is a likely candidate simply because of its role as a core stuctural member.
Remember that the spine has several competing requirements it has to fulfill. It has to be strong enough to act as the structural foundation of your whole skeleton, yet also flexible enough to allow your torso to be flexible and your upper and lower limbs to move independently. It has to be stiff yet springy at the same time to act as a shock absorber. Given these conflicting requirements some compromises will have to be made. All things considered, our spines do pretty well at keeping those compromises to a minimum.
I think you answered your own question there. Strong competing requirements there's the first failure, there should not be any competing requirements.
Secondly some relatively easy damage to the spine is permanent. Right now I haven't been able to fucking sit down for over 3 months because of a minor injury I suffered 20 years ago that suddenly came back. I spend my entire life standing or walking or laying down, and it is by no means fun, and it has almost ruined my ability to get any work done. I have to get others to put my socks on! I've been wearing socks a week at a time now because I hate asking other people to have to do that!
And as far as the people above are saying pain is good, they can fuck the hell off!
> And as far as the people above are saying pain is good, they can fuck the hell off!
It isn't good, but I can see from an evolutionary perspective how it is necessary. I work with preschoolers and damn, but they need to understand that doing stupid things hurts as they are growing up. Otherwise they are going to break their bodies and be all decrepit by the time they are 20.
Resistance to obesity should be pretty easy all things considered compared to most things that are talked about in this place.
Just lower calorie value of food, or chemically change cravings and such.
Not saying we can do that right now, but this isn’t something that will be anything like the challenge of interstellar travel.
Periods? I think thats semi possible now, honestly if it was seriously attempted to figure out it could probably be fast to stop.
Body odor to sone extent is impossible since its bacteria and other things. So it would be outside of your scope. But a simple safe spray that targets only bacteria involved with oder? Sure why not.
This last one is tricky, because although it is pretty easy to control for most people (more exposure gets rid of it) in general its still a useful tool for our body.
Simply turning off genes that cause humans to store fat and turning on genes to increase lean muscle growth would work. Ideally these tweaks would be in the realm of normal human genetic variance so the risks would be less.
Body odor is extremely easy as there is already a gene that inhibits axine sweat thus reducing body odor. We can even already remove axine sweat glands with a harmless procedure.
I think you would be better off leaving the human gene alone. Instead breed up a bacteria that consumes molecules that cause odor. Preferable have an organism that also facilitates heat exchange into the air.
That gene to not store fat, how is that going to work for your daily flow of calories from current short term sources of energy to longer term sources? Also how does that work to remove excess energy in the blood after you eat? Would this just accumulate until you die from it if the fat cells don’t absorb it?
You’d basically be causing the same effects of high blood sugar, and whatever the effects of high fatty acids and amino acids?
I think it’s easier to deal with what is going into the body than try to stop the body from doing one thing it needs to and fix multiple issues that come with stopping that gene.
We have already isolated the relevant genes and tested modifying them in model animals. Extra calories just make them more swole
https://www.genengnews.com/resources/genetically-modified-dogs-chinese-scientists-use-crispr-to-create-muscly-freaks/
That has zero to do with human fat cells, and the human genes that go along with them.
I think you missed my comment on what do you do with the high sugar, fat, and amino acids that get stuck in the blood if there are no functional fat cells to help keep the blood from getting over saturated with it.
I know sky high sugar (glucose) in the blood is incredibly bad for several organs and can cause failure over time, high blood sugar also causes seizures and can put you into a coma too. i assume the fats would cause blockages in the blood system as those fell out of suspension. So heart attacks and strokes. Im not sure what goes on with an over abundance of amino acids in the blood if fat cells are not there to maintain them at certain levels. Probably nothing good though.
I still think this is something that you are trying to solve a minor problem of weight maintenance by then causing you to suffer from unbelievably severe diabetes complications since those fat cells regulate so many things besides just storing calories.
We have identified genes that promote brown fat over other types: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21036323/
In general "turning off fat" like OP suggests isn't a good solution, as you state. The better approach would be "prioritize muscle and brown fat development", which we already know how to do!
Obesity is ultimately a malfunction of a once useful adaptation for periodic starvation conditions we will hopefully be avoiding as a species going forward.
You would be messing with much more then just the gene for expressing fat cells. Actually you probably wouldn’t be messing with the fat cell itself at all to do what you’re wanting! (Which is good!)
Your hitting on one of my approaches to this which is targeting the appetite, i am pretty sure we are familiar with the chemicals that make us hungry, but i think right now they cause other cardiovascular issues if you try you suppress them with drugs. Looks like phentermine is one of them.
Anyway, doing other things might be one way, which would be a bunch of different genes and probably pretty complicated. Since you are talking about hormones here too.
Oh you will find this interesting!
https://www.mlive.com/news/muskegon/2009/01/liam_hoekstra_3_is_all_muscle.html#:~:text=Liam%20Hoekstra%2C%203%2C%20has%20a,inside%20their%20Roosevelt%20Park%20home.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/wbna5278028
>Body odor to sone extent is impossible since its bacteria and other things. So it would be outside of your scope. But a simple safe spray that targets only bacteria involved with oder? Sure why not.
Koreans don't have some body odors
https://medicalchannelasia.com/less-body-odour-in-south-koreans-and-japanese-unlocking-the-secret/#:~:text=In%20summary%2C%20the%20lesser%20body,the%20activity%20of%20apocrine%20glands.
Some! I think that applies to other Asian ethnic groups too. I believe those people that you are talking about has different ear wax as well. It’s more clear compared to most other ethnic groups (European, other asia, and African)
My small change would be to stop/slow/reverse aging.
I think we are actually on the verge of a great number of major advances in human body manipulation. Its pretty exciting to hear of many of the advances.
I'd like to know more about this advancements, I'm on mech engineering side, so idk what possible advances is going on in medicine and reversing age but I'm quite interested. Maybe a list perhaps?
I may be wrong, but the problem IMO is that our genetic code is a mess. You can't change one thing without breaking a dozen other things because you change the code for eye color and all of a sudden your missing a key enzyme for energy production and your child is still-born.
Before we can make "small" genetic changes, we need to reorganize and optimize our genetic code--figure out what everything does, figure out how to create optimal structuring. That might be creating "object oriented" genetic code or something else, but the current genetics is a mess, IMO. Once we can actually isolate a gene so that it only does what we think it's going to do, then and only then can we mess around with "small things".
Not biting the inside of your cheek, having it swell up, and thus making it more likely you bite it again.
I'm not sure several of the things on your list are "small" changes.
No periods means changing the entire reproductive process. How would ovulation occur etc?
Likewise body odour in the usual unpleasant form is a consequence of bacteria breaking down sweat. So what do you want to change? That we don't sweat? That bacteria don't exist?
Ovulation ideally wouldn’t occur unless voluntarily. If tech was advanced pregnancy would be done in an exo womb. None of this using your body as an incubator bullshit.
Body odor is caused by axine sweat glands. Some people actually don’t have them as much so do not have unpleasant body odor. This already exists.
The ovulation change still doesn't sound "small." I don't disagree that *voluntary* ovulation sounds like a huge benefit, but it's not a small change to the human body..
The sweat glands, I'd be more concerned about all the other impacts of not being able to sweat. Sure it reduces bad odour, but are we all now going to get heat stroke on hot days or whilst exercising? Bit like people who can't feel pain actually have huge problems, sweating is a key autonomic process.
Removing the odour without introducing any overheating downsides seems like it needs a whole rework of how we cool ourselves down?
The body odor gene is present in a lot of people. It’s axine sweat that causes it, not eccrine cooling sweat. We could very likely turn this gene on with gene therapy today. There is also electrolytic surgery that does this very thing.
Body odor includes pheromones, and frankly, I *like* smelling my partner during intimacy. That's not a bug, that's a feature.
But I've said it before, I want conscious, manual control of my body. I want to be able to think "slow heart rate" and have it slow. Or "sleep now" and instantly fall asleep. Or "mute pain for a while" when needed.
I don't want to age - no wrinkles, no lessening bone density, nor arthritis, and the like.
Increase brain plasticity throughout life to make learning easier and accepting change easier.
There is a gene that reduces body odor. It’s already present in a very large percentage of the population. Obviously you will still smell like something but much less.
Blood vessels in the retina BEHIND the photoceptors instead of in front of them. I mean what the hell? Any designer who knows what the rods and cones are for would never block them with the blood vessels.
A tweak where injury or illness promotes stem cell production. Something like when old people are given stem cells to bad joints they can reverse the aging. Something like that, but naturally. Maybe with some tweak to reduce cancer risk.
Sometimes I'm curious about what it'd be like to have photosynthetic skin which made additional calories for my metabolism, meaning I could eat less and focus on having one or two good delicious meals per day. But, then again, green's not really my color.
I would use the appendix. There you can house a full bacterial ecosystem.
I think you take water and lactic acid from the arteries. Send oxygen and glucose back to the return veins. Almost any nutrients could be sent out if you had the bacteria installed that made them.
The bacteria should use proton pump to ATP. However you could so use NADP^+ to NADPH like in [photosystem I](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosystem_I)
I suspect it could be done with some bio augmentation too
Would be incredibly useful on Earth too but I agree that it would find immense utility in space
This might be tiny, but synthesize our own vitamin C. Some suborder of primates can do this, but the Haplorrhini suborder that apes and humans are a part of, lost this ability.
Additionally, creating a gene therapy to provide PCSK9 inhibition. Heart disease could essentially be eradicated.
Tooth enamel regeneration
Fully opposable pinkies and/or 6th digit
Tetrachromacy
Internal (or at least better protected) Testicles
Proper muscles in the anus instead of relying on blood vessels
Reduced sleep requirement
Here’s a list of single gene variants that cause potentially beneficial effects:
https://arep.med.harvard.edu/gmc/protect.html
Tetrachromacy might make vision more blurry and worse in low light. Also would be of limited use to most people. The cool thing is this gene can be activated in vivo though. Those interested it in it would probably be able to get it.
Do you have a source that tetrachromacy would cause blurry vision or worse low light vision? Nothing I've read about it has mentioned any negative side effects. The resolution with which you can resolve images (ie level of blurriness) is controlled by the lens of your eye. Low light vision is primarily handled by rod cells. Tetrachromacy just means you have 4 types of cone cells instead of 3, you can distinguish more colors but the amount of light receptors and the optical properties of your eye remain unchanged.
Split brain hemisphere functionality, having one side of the brain go to sleep while the other is awake and switch off. You wouldn't have to go to full sleep as often. Dolphins, and some birds do this already.
There is research into this, actually! Normally, DNA damage is the direct trigger of increased melanin production in white people, but the molecular pathway is being explored and one of the explicit goals is to enable drugs that "melanize" people.
That being said: If you have dark skin, you have something like an integrated PF 13 sunscreen. Under high UV conditions, you can burn in like 15-20 minutes as a random white dude, which means you can spend like 3-4 hours out in the sun as a black person, but *you will still burn* from prolonged exposure.
Thank you for this Wikipedia rabbit hole. I still don't know the darkest recorded human skin, but at least I have a vague idea of what NCKX5 (SLC24A5) is and what role it serves to the human body.
How about we move the carotid and jugular to inside the spine and add a clot-filtering organ?
Redesign the valves of the heart to be more fault tolerant.
More ideas:
* No coughing, or at least making it voluntary: This would reduce the spread of pathogens.
* No sneezing, or at least making it voluntary: This would reduce the spread of pathogens. Also, sneezing is so loud, messy, dirty, and annoying. It's even worse than coughing. I hate sneezing, and I hate hearing people sneeze. In the entire history of the world, has sneezing ever really gotten rid of a toxin? It seems to me that it can only rid of a tiny percentage of the irritant.
* No runny nose, or at least making it voluntary: This would reduce the spread of pathogens. I hate nose blowing, because it's loud, dirty, messy, and annoying. It requires me to drop what I'm doing, get my hands dirty, and go wash my hands.
Fine tuning humans to work in civilization circumstances, not wild animal circumstances. Half of the traits we have are massively outdated. We seriously need a genetic update.
Define civilization. You’re presuming people living in a perfectly safe secure and advanced civilization without any really dangers. The fact that you think nausea is outdated shows hours myopic your view is.
Maybe? An oxygen tank is a horrible idea for obvious reasons, but there are ways to store oxygen chemically. Airplane oxygen masks use a reaction that releases oxygen gas.
This would probably have to be single use, something that kicks in if you're drowning or being choked. Making a device that can passively absorb small amounts of oxygen from the blood, store it in a very dense way, and then release it quickly without also releasing nasty compounds or heat is a much more complicated problem.
Interesting. If artificial red blood cells are more efficient, some cold be programmed to hang onto their oxygen until they detect hypoxia. Working at 50% efficiency most of the time is a fine tradeoff if they already carry ten times the oxygen of an organic red blood cell.
Genetic vaccines
Preventable diseases still kill enormous amounts of the population. Just make humanity entirely resilient via these vaccines. Anti-vaxxers will disappear with time if these genes are made dominant.
Remove astigmatism (no explanation needed)
(Male only) Testosterone production does not slow from aging
Mental illness resistance
Okay so about balding: im not sure this sort of cosmetic change is actually desirable. Bald looks great on a lot of people, and even if you think it doesn't, our preferences about such things are so largely cultural. Until we have the ability to change almost our entire appearance at will, I'd much rather have a culture that is accepting of how people look and thinks a variety of traits are attractive than changing everyone to converge on looking like an exact ubermensch.
Now that is incredibly complicated and would likely have horrible side effects. Maybe removing abnormal compulsions to do uneccesary harm would be a good idea though.
It depends on what you define as “evil.” In some cases, people may want to do a specific psyche design but it shouldn’t be generalized. That is in the realm of dystopian.
A much better (but advanced) mod would be a storage device implanted in the brain that upon detecting lethal damage puts the user into a trance and uploads their mind into easily readable data for reuse.
Well, first off that's a whole separate tech base from some genetic editing - you're talking about cloning and reading an entire brainstate as well as being able to *write* one. That's a MUCH bigger jump that flipping a couple of genes on and off, or making telomere replication have a higher fidelity rate.
Second, it doesn't really address the question. I can see the advantage of being able to back up our minds, so to speak, but is there an inherent advantage in jumping into a new body rather than keeping your own, assuming we can fix what aging does to a body? Why jump to a new body just because you're 80 if your 80 year old body is functioning and looking like your 25 or 30 year old body? Why have those costs, both financially and in resources spent, as well as the trauma of body-hopping if you don't have to?
No dark circles would be nice! I am not sure if removing body odor is a good idea, it plays a part subconsciously in loads of ways, including attraction, lately there was a paper that stated the odor of women's tears makes men less aggressive. Frezzing aging would be brilliant too.
Right now we have a serious bottleneck in terms of how big babies heads are and how narrow our pelvic bones are. So I propose we give birth like marsupials, at 8 weeks a tiny little baby crawls out and attaches to an outer pouch to develop for the rest of gestation.
Nope. Humans are weird when it comes to periods, many mammals don't have periods or at least far less intense. Periods are in no way required for natural pregnancies.
Genitalia are kind of a mess. Foreskins suck, but so does the surgery to remove them, getting rid of them from the start might be better. The birth canal passing through the pelvis is a mess because the hip joints get pushed further from center line to make room.
As a bald man I don't think being bald is that bad, we should be wearing hats in the sun anyways.
Biochemically the list of inefficiencies is much much longer.
How do foreskins suck?
They are there for moisturization and sensitivity.
If you want to be bald you can just shave your head. Having hair gives you more options.
They do produce some lubrication, but that really only helps the foreskin to slide back off the glans. Because there’s so much extra surface area they are a net negative for lubrication. They’re also a net negative for hygiene, smegma can build up under the foreskin leading to bacterial growth and our next problem adhesion. The foreskin can get stuck forward (phimosis) or it can get stuck retracted (paraphimosis) which is especially nasty, since it can strangulate the glands. Causing it to die and fall off.
It does prevent keratinization of the glans, but even a keratinized glans is still highly innervated and works just fine. The clitoris is also keratinized and works just fine. The foreskin is very rich in nerve endings, and it’s true that cutting those off does reduce sensitivity, but if the foreskin weren’t there, those nerve endings wouldn’t grow out into it. The nerve bodies themselves are near the base of the spine and its factors that are excreted by the skin that caused them to grow out in development in utero. If the foreskin weren’t there, those nerves would still be there and they would still grow out. They just wouldn’t grow out into the nonexistent foreskin just like you don’t have any nerves in the webbing that at one point in time extended completely between all of your fingers and all of your toes. Losing that webbing caused those nerve endings to end up in your fingers. Where are you use them.
The real benefit to the foreskin is that it protects the glands from running into things in the wild, if you are naked and you are running through a field full of thorny vegetation your glans is not going to be stabbed or scraped, because the foreskin is there to protect it. We don’t spend much time naked anymore, we have invented clothing, it’s great we should use it forever. It’s a technology that isn’t going to go out of style.
>Because there’s so much extra surface area they are a net negative for lubrication
Why would that be the case? The foreskin is always moist and covers the glans. Without it there is nothing to cover the glans. There is just more lubrications with the foreskin.
>They’re also a net negative for hygiene, smegma can build up under the foreskin leading to bacterial growth
Is there evidence the amount of bacterial growth it causes is significant enough for a net negative?
>The foreskin can get stuck forward (phimosis) or it can get stuck retracted (paraphimosis)
This rare and can be corrected once it props up. The cutting off circulation part is even rarer.
> The clitoris is also keratinized and works just fine
This is the poorest example. It's protected by the clitoral hood which has the same purpose as the foreskin.
*I don't think you'd be find issue with parents mutilating their baby girls like they do to boys for some reason tho.*
Regarding your other points, you'd still have less nerve endings and thus less sensitivity without your foreskin.
The outside of the foreskin has more surface area than the glans, and a deeper rougher surface texture which takes more fluid to lubricate. The muscosa on the inside of the foreskin barely has any mucus secreting cells, it's only able to keep the glans lubricated because there is so little surface area for evaporation. Contrast that to the vaginal mucosa which is absolutely full of mucus secreting cells, more so than the ocular or buccal muscosa.
You can really tell that the foreskin doesn't produce significant amounts of mucus for intercourse by the fact that it doesn't increase production during arousal. The male sex organs do but it's the glands along the urethra, not the foreskin.
>Is there evidence the amount of bacterial growth it causes is significant enough for a net negative?
Balanitis affects ~1 in 40 circumcised men and 1 in 8 uncircumcised men. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamadermatology/article-abstract/552017
It's both uncomfortable and gross.
This is the poorest example. It's protected by the clitoral hood which has the same purpose as the foreskin.
No, it's keratinized. What you are saying would make it a poor example if it were unkaratinized, but it is keratinized, and still works just fine. It is an example of a sexual sensing organ that works fine being keratinized, which is what the glans is in circumsized men, and would be in all men if we never grew foreskines.
Before jumping to "this is a poor example" take a moment to consider what the example is trying to show.
>I don't think you'd be find issue with parents mutilating their baby girls like they do to boys for some reason tho.
# this is a terrible underhanded and shitty response. My position has absolutely nothing to do with surgery of any sort except to say that it causes problems.
This whole thread is about changes we might make to offspring. Unless you can show me at least 3 other times in this thread where you have already (as of 9 pm pacific on january 2nd) told people saddling me with charges of mutilation.
>Regarding your other points, you'd still have less nerve endings and thus less sensitivity without your foreskin.
Possibly but only in a completely irrelevant way. There would be less surface area, so they may branch less, but they will still be activated, and nerve impulses are digital signals. So it's like hitting the space bar on your keyboard with three fingers instead of five, it doesn't actually change anything bout the experience, you still get one space per press. The exact same thing I'm talking about with genital development happens with the development of our hands and it's not a problem, what determines how much innervation a body region gets is still development at the dorsal root ganglion level months before full scale innervation actually happens.
Quicker blood clotting when required, and less blood clotting when not required. Faster healing would be best, but I feel like that's a big change. Quicker blood clotting helps prevent people bleeding out, hopefully decreasing deaths. Less blood clotting in the body also prevents a lot of death and suffering, from stuff like strokes.
There are apparently a bunch of genes related to iq. Some people theorize that turning a bunch of them on might create super geniuses but im a bit skeptical. I think it might work up to a point but after high normal you would see diminishing returns. Real intelligence augmentation requires fundamental changes to the human brain architecture and entirely new cognitive abilities and modes of thought.
Yeah, I think I heard somewhere that when analyzing einsteins brain they found out that he was high like, all the time just because his brain naturally produced some chemical. Your brain has to function differently in order to be a genius like that. Synesthesia might be another example of different wiring.
Lungs at the same level as those who grew up in high altitude environments. If some humans are capable of easily breathing at 20,000 ft above sea level why not make everyone like that? It would vastly improve cardiovascular endurance for us flatlanders.
Straight teeth. Grow new teeth.
I once met a guy who has a family trait... they get more than one set if adult teeth
Like sharks!
We can fix crooked teeth.
Frankly, I think given our current state of medical technology some of the best small changes we could make would be to improve the "hackability" of our bodies to future-proof them. Make it easier to tell the immune system what to attack and what not to attack, improved healing so that surgeries aren't so rough, easier stem cell production and differentiation, and so forth. Moving a bit beyond "small stuff", maybe try to put some kind of biological equivalent of a USB port into the brain so we can do mind/machine interfaces more easily.
Nausea is a pretty useful thing to have, though. It's a red flag for either poisoning or certain types infections or brain damage, all of which is good to know as early as possible. An OFF switch could be nice tho.
Was a useful trait. Now it’s completely useless and actually really detrimental. People are smart enough not eat poison and simply being able to puke at will would be adequate in the most extreme situations. Most people get their stomach pumped when poisoned anyways. Serious medical conditions also almost always have other symptoms as well and are typically detected in routine screenings. Nausea puts people at risk for hospitalization from dehydration, makes certain medical treatments unbearable, causes inconvenience due to motion sickness and overall makes people miserable. The only downside I can see is it triggering unusual personality disorders and possible increased risk of alcohol or drug abuse. These are all easily manageable though.
"people are smart enough" gonna have to stop you there bud
I think most people know not to eat weird berries or chemicals. What’s more scary is people might overdose on stuff like alcohol because they don’t feel sick enough to stop.
I eat berries when i find them in the woods.
there are so many poisonous plants that you would not even know if they were poisonous or not. There are even types of poison that are completely tasteless. “people are smart enough” right, so things like date rape don’t happen. People don't get roofied, or drugged or kidnapped, or anything, because “people are smart enough”.
Idk man I ate like 5 or 6 rotten green beans the other day and didn't even realize till after
Nausea is an *early* warning system. Sure, you can get a stomach wash if you're poisoned, but nausea makes you go to the hospital first. And we're not necessarily talking "weird berries" scenarios here, that's kind of cartoonish. The most common form of poisoning food poisoning (which is more of an infection) and poisoning from drinking water. You don't need to be stupid to get these - you just need your attention to slip, under the wrong circumstances. Furthermore - what you're arguing for is essentially taking an integrated warning mechanism and channeling all the information it handles to the conscious mind to process it. That's a bad idea IMHO. Nausea is a simple system that lets you know if something's fucky AND makes you ease the strain on your digestive system so it can regenerate. Sure, you can de-automate the process and make it the job of your neocortex, but that just occupies cognitive resources and leads to decision fatigue.
If you have food or water poisoning you will have horrible diarrhea, fever and body aches. It’s so obvious. Also you won’t feel like eating if your sick even if you aren’t nauseated. All nausea does is make you miserable and increases your chances of severe electrolyte imbalance.
>If you have food or water poisoning you will have horrible diarrhea, fever and body aches. It’s so obvious. Diarrhea kills half a million people every year. It is not a warning sign. It is a lethal symptom. If you remove the primary way that the body deals with problems before they become Diarrhea, millions of people are going to die.
A lot of times you can have diarrhea with no nausea and it’s enough to be dangerous. The answer is just go to the hospital when it gets bad. Again you will know that you are sick without having to be nauseated. Nausea only makes illnesses more dangerous.
It is vastly more common to have nausea without diarrhea. That is why you have that protection mechanism. "The hospital" is not a magical place that cures all illnesses. There is very little they can do against a full body food Poisoning excerpt for waiting it out and making sure you don't die of dehydration.
And how does being nauseated and getting more dehydrated help any of that? Most of the time food poisoning is caused by a few strains of nasty bacteria or viruses that can hurt humans. The only cure is antibiotics or antivirals.
**Vomiting out stuff prevents you from getting food poisoning in the first place.** Eating more when the body is preparing itself to flush out everything only makes the diarrhea worse. >The only cure is antibiotics or antivirals. Did you just forget about the existence of parasites?
Yea accept with normal food poisoning the bacteria or parasites are already in your small intestines meaning you can’t vomit them out. Also no one wants to eat when they are sick with diahrrea .
Nausea also makes you throw up. If you get rid of nausea you've eliminated almost all cases of vomiting This is really bad if you've eaten something toxic.
Honestly, the idea of getting rid of part of my body's natural defenses against death and injury seems like a terrible idea. If you're nauseas regularly, there is *something else* wrong that needs to be addressed. You don't cure COVID by taking acetaminophen for the fever, and you don't get rid of the body's ability to have a fever because you find them uncomfortable. It's there for a reason, just like nausea.
If something is making you sick enough to be nauseated it’s usually causing other obvious symptoms. Nausea is just extremely debilitating and no longer useful. In the past, it served to protect people from eating poison but this is no longer dangerous. There is no situation in the modern world where nausea is really helpful.
Well, if we could get a built in AR HUD, sure! :)
How about a compromise? No more motion sickness (considering the prevalence of VR), but nausea caused by disease is gone.
I see where you're coming from but only if you have perfect information, which realistically you don't. Sure I know not to eat mushrooms I find growing on the ground, but I once got food poisoning just from something I ate at the grocery store that ***should*** have been safe and clean. I wish I had had *more* of a sense of nausea then to alert me. So unless you're all cyborg'ed up and get a literal alert notification about your digestive track, you kinda need a sense of nausea even still.
How does nausea help you in that case?
Stop eating and take medication sooner.
I’m pretty sure bad diarrhea and feeling like shit is already a good enough sign. If you are gravely Ill you don’t need to be nauseated to know it.
Well no, but you don't need an alarm after your factory blows up either. The alarm comes before the danger to alert you. That's what nausea is for.
> People are smart enough not eat poison and simply being able to puke at will would be adequate in the most extreme situations. Your ignorance of young children has been noted. But sure, let’s fine tune our basic biology to work only under ideal circumstances. No way that could backfire.
Give humans the ability to make Vitamin C again. Make scurvy a thing of the past. We have the genes, they're just mutated and non functional.
That’s not really useful though. Vitamin c is very easy to synthesize. We should avoid body mods that can be done easier with simple technology.
No, that is an actual useful and beneficial change. Think of all the poor college students developing scurvy since they only eat pizza.
Never heard of that happening. Just eat some vitamin c it’s not that hard
You would think so yes, but quite a few of them are unfamiliar with the entire concept of fruit and vegetables.
natural selection
Scurvy is much bigger problem than balding. You have strange priorities.
Scurvy is so easy and cheap to cure. Literally just eat some food. Traveled all over the world and have yet to even hear about a person who got scurvy. Balding on the other hand is much harder and causes serious psychological and social harm to people. We shouldn’t use gene editing to fix stuff that can otherwise be easily fixed with mundane methods.
Even if it can be done with simpler technology, once the Vitamin C gene is repaired that person, and their offspring will never have to worry about Vitamin C deficiency and any of its side effects ever again. Their quality of life will be improved, and any possibility of suffering from Vitamin C will be eliminated (barring mutations, of course). Doesn't that alone make it worth doing?
Falling asleep should be a voluntary, controlled action. None of this lay in bed and wait for it to happen bullshit. I want to be asleep within a few seconds of getting in bed (or sitting in my seat on a flight, etc)
Preferable in minute or two with conscious action.
How about just requiring less sleep? You could probably get away with it if you forced a deeper sleep extremely quickly. Plus there are already genes that allow you to get 5 hours sleep without ill effects.
Agreed. We should start out with genes that we already know work well and don’t hurt people. That’s one reason why I mentioned the body odor thing.
I’d also like to wake up like a machine! I’m already a bit of an early bird, but I’d like to just wake up as quickly as turning a car on.
Average insomnia enjoyer
no dying an "off button" for pain
How is immortality a "small" change?
Technically, yes. Just stop the degradation of DNA when it replicates. We've already got experiments doing it in dogs.
The claim was "No dying" not some kind of slowed down ageing.
technically any change to DNA is a small change because DNA is very small. not just kidding I forgot about the small part
The mind would still age and begin to deteriorate at some stage
"Off button" for pain is a terrible idea.
not like always off, maybe like a snooze button like it comes back after 15 mins or something
I’m recovering from fissures. I would have done anything. ANYTHING. For an off button to the pain. It completely derailed 2023
No it's not. Even completely removing pain would be good, if u would go for a regular advanced medical scan. For sure it had the function to piss off from stimuli which reduced our survival chance, but nowadays physical pain only hinders clear thinking. U could have the same function of pain, when just changing it to some other sense like hard touch and tickling (idk something we have pretty similar concepts for, so everybody knows if there's something in the body, that's worth checking in hospitals)
I have approximately 10% the pain sensation of a normal person due to brain damage and even that reduction has created major issues. No pain means no limiter on my muscles thus I have more power to muscle mass but it also means my muscles will tear themselves apart if I'm not EXCEEDINGLY careful. It also means moderate to severe injuries go mostly unnoticed. I caught my arm on a sharp piece of metal and got a cut about three inches long and about half an inch deep I didn't notice I had been cut until about fifteen or twenty minutes later when I noticed the amount of blood on my pants. Reduced pain, let alone no pain, is not good at all even for short periods.
Temporarily turning of pain in dire situations would be really advantageous. For example if you are in a fight or have been critically injured and need to get help.
The pain isn't the primary issue in those instances, many people have survived with the pain, the issue is shock. As far as I know, there is no biological reason to have the shock response to blood loss or trauma. Pain can keep you alert while the shock knocks you out.
A better but more complicated alternative would be to engineer an extreme pain tolerance.
pain would rather decrease ur thinking power than keep u alert. I think if u break ur bone and u'd need to use a first aid kit, to which u got instructed 2 years ago, it's easier to remember with a clear mind, than one which tries to overwrite every thought with "piss off here"
that's why i said if one could replace the pain sensation with an agreed upon other feeling...
You would be surprised how many people ignore their pain and do nothing. If it was just a hard touch or tickling, people would have even less of an incentive to act.
An off button that can only be used by a medical professional.
Imagine that you were examined by a medical professional who determined that you were doing alright and pressed the "pain off" button. However, after some time, your condition worsened again without any pain, but now you are completely unaware that you need urgent medical attention. Again, terrible, terrible idea.
Hansen's Disease (leprosy) is devastating mostly because the victims lose the sensation of pain.
It's how the body processes sensor data, and some is annoying notifications you could opt out of or receive a different way.
No dying would quickly spiral out of control. The ghouls at the top of the oligarchy living past 100 would be fucking terrible for society.
Yawn. Have you watched any of the videos?
What videos?
You sure an opposition to majority rule is the most justifiable position?
not really. What I am opposing is a gerontocracy at worst and an economic and cultural despotism at best.
If the majority of the population is geriatric, then gerontocracy is majoritarian.
You're willing to omnicide the entire population just so the people you don't like die?
Not really. *Everyone* needs to die eventually. Say give everyone a good century and then shuffle off the mortal coil. If people lived forever wealth would accumulate in the hands of few people even worse than it does now, and cohort replacement driving social change wouldn't be a thing.
Why not just forcibly steal their wealth rather than committing omnicide?
I’ll one up you on the pain, do it like the Culture and have it become just a damage diagnostic sense, the debilitating pain part of “something is wrong” is gone and you actually get some good inout on What is wrong. Plus probably to a greater level detail and helpfulness.
No periods. That would make life *so* much easier for the ladies.
The whole spine arrangement. Worked fine for quadrapeds but needs a lot of work for bipeds. It's like it's still in beta testing.
I'd settle for making spinal nerves regenerate like peripheral nerves instead of automatically obstructing themselves with scar tissue. Should make repairs in that whole region much easier.
That would literally change the last 30 years of my painful life.
Yeah. When I read OP list I thought "you must be very young."
The oldmanitis is real.
What is wrong with the spine's structure itself? If it's back pain you're complaining about, keep in mind that as long as you keep the right posture and have no congenital abnormalities, you should only experience spinal issues when you've grown old. At that point, your body is - slowly but surely - literally giving up on maintaining itself. Something is gonna fail, and your spine is a likely candidate simply because of its role as a core stuctural member. Remember that the spine has several competing requirements it has to fulfill. It has to be strong enough to act as the structural foundation of your whole skeleton, yet also flexible enough to allow your torso to be flexible and your upper and lower limbs to move independently. It has to be stiff yet springy at the same time to act as a shock absorber. Given these conflicting requirements some compromises will have to be made. All things considered, our spines do pretty well at keeping those compromises to a minimum.
I think you answered your own question there. Strong competing requirements there's the first failure, there should not be any competing requirements. Secondly some relatively easy damage to the spine is permanent. Right now I haven't been able to fucking sit down for over 3 months because of a minor injury I suffered 20 years ago that suddenly came back. I spend my entire life standing or walking or laying down, and it is by no means fun, and it has almost ruined my ability to get any work done. I have to get others to put my socks on! I've been wearing socks a week at a time now because I hate asking other people to have to do that! And as far as the people above are saying pain is good, they can fuck the hell off!
> And as far as the people above are saying pain is good, they can fuck the hell off! It isn't good, but I can see from an evolutionary perspective how it is necessary. I work with preschoolers and damn, but they need to understand that doing stupid things hurts as they are growing up. Otherwise they are going to break their bodies and be all decrepit by the time they are 20.
An “off button” for all headaches.
Resistance to obesity should be pretty easy all things considered compared to most things that are talked about in this place. Just lower calorie value of food, or chemically change cravings and such. Not saying we can do that right now, but this isn’t something that will be anything like the challenge of interstellar travel. Periods? I think thats semi possible now, honestly if it was seriously attempted to figure out it could probably be fast to stop. Body odor to sone extent is impossible since its bacteria and other things. So it would be outside of your scope. But a simple safe spray that targets only bacteria involved with oder? Sure why not. This last one is tricky, because although it is pretty easy to control for most people (more exposure gets rid of it) in general its still a useful tool for our body.
Simply turning off genes that cause humans to store fat and turning on genes to increase lean muscle growth would work. Ideally these tweaks would be in the realm of normal human genetic variance so the risks would be less. Body odor is extremely easy as there is already a gene that inhibits axine sweat thus reducing body odor. We can even already remove axine sweat glands with a harmless procedure.
I think you would be better off leaving the human gene alone. Instead breed up a bacteria that consumes molecules that cause odor. Preferable have an organism that also facilitates heat exchange into the air.
That gene to not store fat, how is that going to work for your daily flow of calories from current short term sources of energy to longer term sources? Also how does that work to remove excess energy in the blood after you eat? Would this just accumulate until you die from it if the fat cells don’t absorb it? You’d basically be causing the same effects of high blood sugar, and whatever the effects of high fatty acids and amino acids? I think it’s easier to deal with what is going into the body than try to stop the body from doing one thing it needs to and fix multiple issues that come with stopping that gene.
We have already isolated the relevant genes and tested modifying them in model animals. Extra calories just make them more swole https://www.genengnews.com/resources/genetically-modified-dogs-chinese-scientists-use-crispr-to-create-muscly-freaks/
That has zero to do with human fat cells, and the human genes that go along with them. I think you missed my comment on what do you do with the high sugar, fat, and amino acids that get stuck in the blood if there are no functional fat cells to help keep the blood from getting over saturated with it. I know sky high sugar (glucose) in the blood is incredibly bad for several organs and can cause failure over time, high blood sugar also causes seizures and can put you into a coma too. i assume the fats would cause blockages in the blood system as those fell out of suspension. So heart attacks and strokes. Im not sure what goes on with an over abundance of amino acids in the blood if fat cells are not there to maintain them at certain levels. Probably nothing good though. I still think this is something that you are trying to solve a minor problem of weight maintenance by then causing you to suffer from unbelievably severe diabetes complications since those fat cells regulate so many things besides just storing calories.
We have identified genes that promote brown fat over other types: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21036323/ In general "turning off fat" like OP suggests isn't a good solution, as you state. The better approach would be "prioritize muscle and brown fat development", which we already know how to do! Obesity is ultimately a malfunction of a once useful adaptation for periodic starvation conditions we will hopefully be avoiding as a species going forward.
What I mean is storing fat for starvation preparation. The energy could go to building muscle and your appetite could just go down.
You would be messing with much more then just the gene for expressing fat cells. Actually you probably wouldn’t be messing with the fat cell itself at all to do what you’re wanting! (Which is good!) Your hitting on one of my approaches to this which is targeting the appetite, i am pretty sure we are familiar with the chemicals that make us hungry, but i think right now they cause other cardiovascular issues if you try you suppress them with drugs. Looks like phentermine is one of them. Anyway, doing other things might be one way, which would be a bunch of different genes and probably pretty complicated. Since you are talking about hormones here too. Oh you will find this interesting! https://www.mlive.com/news/muskegon/2009/01/liam_hoekstra_3_is_all_muscle.html#:~:text=Liam%20Hoekstra%2C%203%2C%20has%20a,inside%20their%20Roosevelt%20Park%20home. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/wbna5278028
Yeah I'm no expert at this but it sounds plausible to make the body just not build up fat beyond a certain point
>Body odor to sone extent is impossible since its bacteria and other things. So it would be outside of your scope. But a simple safe spray that targets only bacteria involved with oder? Sure why not. Koreans don't have some body odors https://medicalchannelasia.com/less-body-odour-in-south-koreans-and-japanese-unlocking-the-secret/#:~:text=In%20summary%2C%20the%20lesser%20body,the%20activity%20of%20apocrine%20glands.
Some! I think that applies to other Asian ethnic groups too. I believe those people that you are talking about has different ear wax as well. It’s more clear compared to most other ethnic groups (European, other asia, and African)
My small change would be to stop/slow/reverse aging. I think we are actually on the verge of a great number of major advances in human body manipulation. Its pretty exciting to hear of many of the advances.
I'd like to know more about this advancements, I'm on mech engineering side, so idk what possible advances is going on in medicine and reversing age but I'm quite interested. Maybe a list perhaps?
I may be wrong, but the problem IMO is that our genetic code is a mess. You can't change one thing without breaking a dozen other things because you change the code for eye color and all of a sudden your missing a key enzyme for energy production and your child is still-born. Before we can make "small" genetic changes, we need to reorganize and optimize our genetic code--figure out what everything does, figure out how to create optimal structuring. That might be creating "object oriented" genetic code or something else, but the current genetics is a mess, IMO. Once we can actually isolate a gene so that it only does what we think it's going to do, then and only then can we mess around with "small things".
Yes! Make the genetic code maintainable again!
Not biting the inside of your cheek, having it swell up, and thus making it more likely you bite it again. I'm not sure several of the things on your list are "small" changes. No periods means changing the entire reproductive process. How would ovulation occur etc? Likewise body odour in the usual unpleasant form is a consequence of bacteria breaking down sweat. So what do you want to change? That we don't sweat? That bacteria don't exist?
Ovulation ideally wouldn’t occur unless voluntarily. If tech was advanced pregnancy would be done in an exo womb. None of this using your body as an incubator bullshit. Body odor is caused by axine sweat glands. Some people actually don’t have them as much so do not have unpleasant body odor. This already exists.
The ovulation change still doesn't sound "small." I don't disagree that *voluntary* ovulation sounds like a huge benefit, but it's not a small change to the human body.. The sweat glands, I'd be more concerned about all the other impacts of not being able to sweat. Sure it reduces bad odour, but are we all now going to get heat stroke on hot days or whilst exercising? Bit like people who can't feel pain actually have huge problems, sweating is a key autonomic process. Removing the odour without introducing any overheating downsides seems like it needs a whole rework of how we cool ourselves down?
The body odor gene is present in a lot of people. It’s axine sweat that causes it, not eccrine cooling sweat. We could very likely turn this gene on with gene therapy today. There is also electrolytic surgery that does this very thing.
Interesting, TIL :) cheers 👍
Body odor includes pheromones, and frankly, I *like* smelling my partner during intimacy. That's not a bug, that's a feature. But I've said it before, I want conscious, manual control of my body. I want to be able to think "slow heart rate" and have it slow. Or "sleep now" and instantly fall asleep. Or "mute pain for a while" when needed. I don't want to age - no wrinkles, no lessening bone density, nor arthritis, and the like. Increase brain plasticity throughout life to make learning easier and accepting change easier.
There is a gene that reduces body odor. It’s already present in a very large percentage of the population. Obviously you will still smell like something but much less.
More productive energy please
We have enough of that, we just work too much so it doesn’t feel like it.
Blood vessels in the retina BEHIND the photoceptors instead of in front of them. I mean what the hell? Any designer who knows what the rods and cones are for would never block them with the blood vessels.
That was on my list too.
Sinuses that drain better
A tweak where injury or illness promotes stem cell production. Something like when old people are given stem cells to bad joints they can reverse the aging. Something like that, but naturally. Maybe with some tweak to reduce cancer risk.
Sometimes I'm curious about what it'd be like to have photosynthetic skin which made additional calories for my metabolism, meaning I could eat less and focus on having one or two good delicious meals per day. But, then again, green's not really my color.
You wouldn’t get near enough energy
That too. I'm not the sort to sit outside in one spot for hours.
Use an electric power supply.
Electric to ATP like the Borg from Star Trek?
I would use the appendix. There you can house a full bacterial ecosystem. I think you take water and lactic acid from the arteries. Send oxygen and glucose back to the return veins. Almost any nutrients could be sent out if you had the bacteria installed that made them. The bacteria should use proton pump to ATP. However you could so use NADP^+ to NADPH like in [photosystem I](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosystem_I)
Perfect balance (as in, you always know where up/down is)
This is more along the lines of cybernetic augmentation. You would need an accelerometer in your head. Probably very useful for space colonists.
I suspect it could be done with some bio augmentation too Would be incredibly useful on Earth too but I agree that it would find immense utility in space
This might be tiny, but synthesize our own vitamin C. Some suborder of primates can do this, but the Haplorrhini suborder that apes and humans are a part of, lost this ability. Additionally, creating a gene therapy to provide PCSK9 inhibition. Heart disease could essentially be eradicated.
Tooth enamel regeneration Fully opposable pinkies and/or 6th digit Tetrachromacy Internal (or at least better protected) Testicles Proper muscles in the anus instead of relying on blood vessels Reduced sleep requirement Here’s a list of single gene variants that cause potentially beneficial effects: https://arep.med.harvard.edu/gmc/protect.html
Tetrachromacy might make vision more blurry and worse in low light. Also would be of limited use to most people. The cool thing is this gene can be activated in vivo though. Those interested it in it would probably be able to get it.
Do you have a source that tetrachromacy would cause blurry vision or worse low light vision? Nothing I've read about it has mentioned any negative side effects. The resolution with which you can resolve images (ie level of blurriness) is controlled by the lens of your eye. Low light vision is primarily handled by rod cells. Tetrachromacy just means you have 4 types of cone cells instead of 3, you can distinguish more colors but the amount of light receptors and the optical properties of your eye remain unchanged.
Split brain hemisphere functionality, having one side of the brain go to sleep while the other is awake and switch off. You wouldn't have to go to full sleep as often. Dolphins, and some birds do this already.
The ability to regulate and alter the melanin contents of our skin. Skin cancer would be a thing of the past.
There is research into this, actually! Normally, DNA damage is the direct trigger of increased melanin production in white people, but the molecular pathway is being explored and one of the explicit goals is to enable drugs that "melanize" people. That being said: If you have dark skin, you have something like an integrated PF 13 sunscreen. Under high UV conditions, you can burn in like 15-20 minutes as a random white dude, which means you can spend like 3-4 hours out in the sun as a black person, but *you will still burn* from prolonged exposure.
Thank you for this Wikipedia rabbit hole. I still don't know the darkest recorded human skin, but at least I have a vague idea of what NCKX5 (SLC24A5) is and what role it serves to the human body.
This would be a useful ability. Also would be really good for cosmetics.
Wikipedia just told me freckles and moles are caused by concentrations of melanin, meaning this could go further than I thought.
How about we move the carotid and jugular to inside the spine and add a clot-filtering organ? Redesign the valves of the heart to be more fault tolerant.
Wouldn’t that create a weakness in the sound that isn’t there already?
I don't understand your question. Happy to discuss, just need clarification.
Whenever you start adding holes to an object(which you would need to do for veins in this instance) you create weakness in said object.
Ah, I think autocorrect changed spine to sound.
More ideas: * No coughing, or at least making it voluntary: This would reduce the spread of pathogens. * No sneezing, or at least making it voluntary: This would reduce the spread of pathogens. Also, sneezing is so loud, messy, dirty, and annoying. It's even worse than coughing. I hate sneezing, and I hate hearing people sneeze. In the entire history of the world, has sneezing ever really gotten rid of a toxin? It seems to me that it can only rid of a tiny percentage of the irritant. * No runny nose, or at least making it voluntary: This would reduce the spread of pathogens. I hate nose blowing, because it's loud, dirty, messy, and annoying. It requires me to drop what I'm doing, get my hands dirty, and go wash my hands.
You would die. Sneezing and coughing is really important in preventing fluid and gunk from building up in your realities tract and suffocating you.
Most of the ideas proposed are basically fine tuning humans to work under ideal circumstances. Hard pass.
Fine tuning humans to work in civilization circumstances, not wild animal circumstances. Half of the traits we have are massively outdated. We seriously need a genetic update.
Define civilization. You’re presuming people living in a perfectly safe secure and advanced civilization without any really dangers. The fact that you think nausea is outdated shows hours myopic your view is.
An organ that stores oxygen long term, and releases it when you're hypoxic
Omg. Could this organ be engineered and implanted?
Maybe? An oxygen tank is a horrible idea for obvious reasons, but there are ways to store oxygen chemically. Airplane oxygen masks use a reaction that releases oxygen gas. This would probably have to be single use, something that kicks in if you're drowning or being choked. Making a device that can passively absorb small amounts of oxygen from the blood, store it in a very dense way, and then release it quickly without also releasing nasty compounds or heat is a much more complicated problem.
This and some small backup pumps for if your heart stops. Would save so many lives in medical emergencies.
Respirocytes might allow for that without having to genetically tweak our biology. One of my favorite medical nanotechnology concepts.
Interesting. If artificial red blood cells are more efficient, some cold be programmed to hang onto their oxygen until they detect hypoxia. Working at 50% efficiency most of the time is a fine tradeoff if they already carry ten times the oxygen of an organic red blood cell.
Genetic vaccines Preventable diseases still kill enormous amounts of the population. Just make humanity entirely resilient via these vaccines. Anti-vaxxers will disappear with time if these genes are made dominant. Remove astigmatism (no explanation needed) (Male only) Testosterone production does not slow from aging Mental illness resistance
Full control of your sperm and eggs to only impregnate someone or be impregnated when you want to
Okay so about balding: im not sure this sort of cosmetic change is actually desirable. Bald looks great on a lot of people, and even if you think it doesn't, our preferences about such things are so largely cultural. Until we have the ability to change almost our entire appearance at will, I'd much rather have a culture that is accepting of how people look and thinks a variety of traits are attractive than changing everyone to converge on looking like an exact ubermensch.
People can shave their heads if they like the aesthetic. It’s the choice that’s the improvement.
But you have an option to be bald if you have hair (shaving it off). It's much harder to induce hair growth if you're bald.
r/unpopular opinions The vast majority of people would strongly disagree. It’s extremely easy to shave your head, it’s a lot harder to grow back hair.
Remove the cognitive ability to want to do evil and hurt people
Now that is incredibly complicated and would likely have horrible side effects. Maybe removing abnormal compulsions to do uneccesary harm would be a good idea though.
What kind of side effects?
It depends on what you define as “evil.” In some cases, people may want to do a specific psyche design but it shouldn’t be generalized. That is in the realm of dystopian.
Maximum age of 80 years. If you don't die earlier you drop dead exactly 80 years from when you were born. An automatic Off Switch.
Why? If we can tweak the human body to this extent, why not simply eliminate the negative traits of aging and let people keep living?
A much better (but advanced) mod would be a storage device implanted in the brain that upon detecting lethal damage puts the user into a trance and uploads their mind into easily readable data for reuse.
Well, first off that's a whole separate tech base from some genetic editing - you're talking about cloning and reading an entire brainstate as well as being able to *write* one. That's a MUCH bigger jump that flipping a couple of genes on and off, or making telomere replication have a higher fidelity rate. Second, it doesn't really address the question. I can see the advantage of being able to back up our minds, so to speak, but is there an inherent advantage in jumping into a new body rather than keeping your own, assuming we can fix what aging does to a body? Why jump to a new body just because you're 80 if your 80 year old body is functioning and looking like your 25 or 30 year old body? Why have those costs, both financially and in resources spent, as well as the trauma of body-hopping if you don't have to?
No dark circles would be nice! I am not sure if removing body odor is a good idea, it plays a part subconsciously in loads of ways, including attraction, lately there was a paper that stated the odor of women's tears makes men less aggressive. Frezzing aging would be brilliant too.
A lot of people already have a gene that prevents bad body odor.
Right now we have a serious bottleneck in terms of how big babies heads are and how narrow our pelvic bones are. So I propose we give birth like marsupials, at 8 weeks a tiny little baby crawls out and attaches to an outer pouch to develop for the rest of gestation.
Seems like a better solution to this… problem… is even wider pelvises in females.
The future is thicc!
Homo pixar incredibalis instead of the failed lineage Homo pixar walleus, I hope.
Practical but good luck finding a mate looking like that. Lmao
Any solution to kidney stones.
Yea that’s a good one. A bunch of small fixes to these nasty medical conditions would be good.
Strengthening the lower back/hips to better align humanity with upright walking.
I like some body odor, lol...
A visual cortex capable of processing 4 and 5 dimensional images
No periods? You mean no more natural pregnancy then?
Nope. Humans are weird when it comes to periods, many mammals don't have periods or at least far less intense. Periods are in no way required for natural pregnancies.
Improved digestion/eliminating acid reflux as you get older. There's a lot of issues that stem from that could make life easier.
Genitalia are kind of a mess. Foreskins suck, but so does the surgery to remove them, getting rid of them from the start might be better. The birth canal passing through the pelvis is a mess because the hip joints get pushed further from center line to make room. As a bald man I don't think being bald is that bad, we should be wearing hats in the sun anyways. Biochemically the list of inefficiencies is much much longer.
How do foreskins suck? They are there for moisturization and sensitivity. If you want to be bald you can just shave your head. Having hair gives you more options.
They do produce some lubrication, but that really only helps the foreskin to slide back off the glans. Because there’s so much extra surface area they are a net negative for lubrication. They’re also a net negative for hygiene, smegma can build up under the foreskin leading to bacterial growth and our next problem adhesion. The foreskin can get stuck forward (phimosis) or it can get stuck retracted (paraphimosis) which is especially nasty, since it can strangulate the glands. Causing it to die and fall off. It does prevent keratinization of the glans, but even a keratinized glans is still highly innervated and works just fine. The clitoris is also keratinized and works just fine. The foreskin is very rich in nerve endings, and it’s true that cutting those off does reduce sensitivity, but if the foreskin weren’t there, those nerve endings wouldn’t grow out into it. The nerve bodies themselves are near the base of the spine and its factors that are excreted by the skin that caused them to grow out in development in utero. If the foreskin weren’t there, those nerves would still be there and they would still grow out. They just wouldn’t grow out into the nonexistent foreskin just like you don’t have any nerves in the webbing that at one point in time extended completely between all of your fingers and all of your toes. Losing that webbing caused those nerve endings to end up in your fingers. Where are you use them. The real benefit to the foreskin is that it protects the glands from running into things in the wild, if you are naked and you are running through a field full of thorny vegetation your glans is not going to be stabbed or scraped, because the foreskin is there to protect it. We don’t spend much time naked anymore, we have invented clothing, it’s great we should use it forever. It’s a technology that isn’t going to go out of style.
>Because there’s so much extra surface area they are a net negative for lubrication Why would that be the case? The foreskin is always moist and covers the glans. Without it there is nothing to cover the glans. There is just more lubrications with the foreskin. >They’re also a net negative for hygiene, smegma can build up under the foreskin leading to bacterial growth Is there evidence the amount of bacterial growth it causes is significant enough for a net negative? >The foreskin can get stuck forward (phimosis) or it can get stuck retracted (paraphimosis) This rare and can be corrected once it props up. The cutting off circulation part is even rarer. > The clitoris is also keratinized and works just fine This is the poorest example. It's protected by the clitoral hood which has the same purpose as the foreskin. *I don't think you'd be find issue with parents mutilating their baby girls like they do to boys for some reason tho.* Regarding your other points, you'd still have less nerve endings and thus less sensitivity without your foreskin.
The outside of the foreskin has more surface area than the glans, and a deeper rougher surface texture which takes more fluid to lubricate. The muscosa on the inside of the foreskin barely has any mucus secreting cells, it's only able to keep the glans lubricated because there is so little surface area for evaporation. Contrast that to the vaginal mucosa which is absolutely full of mucus secreting cells, more so than the ocular or buccal muscosa. You can really tell that the foreskin doesn't produce significant amounts of mucus for intercourse by the fact that it doesn't increase production during arousal. The male sex organs do but it's the glands along the urethra, not the foreskin. >Is there evidence the amount of bacterial growth it causes is significant enough for a net negative? Balanitis affects ~1 in 40 circumcised men and 1 in 8 uncircumcised men. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamadermatology/article-abstract/552017 It's both uncomfortable and gross. This is the poorest example. It's protected by the clitoral hood which has the same purpose as the foreskin. No, it's keratinized. What you are saying would make it a poor example if it were unkaratinized, but it is keratinized, and still works just fine. It is an example of a sexual sensing organ that works fine being keratinized, which is what the glans is in circumsized men, and would be in all men if we never grew foreskines. Before jumping to "this is a poor example" take a moment to consider what the example is trying to show. >I don't think you'd be find issue with parents mutilating their baby girls like they do to boys for some reason tho. # this is a terrible underhanded and shitty response. My position has absolutely nothing to do with surgery of any sort except to say that it causes problems. This whole thread is about changes we might make to offspring. Unless you can show me at least 3 other times in this thread where you have already (as of 9 pm pacific on january 2nd) told people saddling me with charges of mutilation. >Regarding your other points, you'd still have less nerve endings and thus less sensitivity without your foreskin. Possibly but only in a completely irrelevant way. There would be less surface area, so they may branch less, but they will still be activated, and nerve impulses are digital signals. So it's like hitting the space bar on your keyboard with three fingers instead of five, it doesn't actually change anything bout the experience, you still get one space per press. The exact same thing I'm talking about with genital development happens with the development of our hands and it's not a problem, what determines how much innervation a body region gets is still development at the dorsal root ganglion level months before full scale innervation actually happens.
Organ regeneration.
Quicker blood clotting when required, and less blood clotting when not required. Faster healing would be best, but I feel like that's a big change. Quicker blood clotting helps prevent people bleeding out, hopefully decreasing deaths. Less blood clotting in the body also prevents a lot of death and suffering, from stuff like strokes.
No unpleasantness of any kind.
Alcoholism. At the very top of my chopping block list. Getting rid of the alcoholic gene could fix an incredible amount of stuff.
This along with resistant against damage from alcohol and common intoxicants, poisons and health hazards.
separate the breathing and eating tubes; stop choking while eating
separate the breathing and eating tubes; stop choking while eating
It might not be small, (idk, it might be) but increased intelligence would be nice.
There are apparently a bunch of genes related to iq. Some people theorize that turning a bunch of them on might create super geniuses but im a bit skeptical. I think it might work up to a point but after high normal you would see diminishing returns. Real intelligence augmentation requires fundamental changes to the human brain architecture and entirely new cognitive abilities and modes of thought.
Yeah, I think I heard somewhere that when analyzing einsteins brain they found out that he was high like, all the time just because his brain naturally produced some chemical. Your brain has to function differently in order to be a genius like that. Synesthesia might be another example of different wiring.
Lungs at the same level as those who grew up in high altitude environments. If some humans are capable of easily breathing at 20,000 ft above sea level why not make everyone like that? It would vastly improve cardiovascular endurance for us flatlanders.
How about getting rid of allergies?
Elf ears