Humans may look like Pokemon characters, 100,000 years from now, sporting larger heads, bigger eyes and improved night vision, researchers believe.
Two researchers claim that humans in the future may have larger heads, Google Glass type contact lenses and sideways-blinking oversized Disney eyes that glow green with cat-like night vision. “This is speculation based on reason,” artist Nickolay Lamm told the New York Daily News. “When I designed it I wasn’t thinking of anime, but I can see the resemblance. It’s kind of a coincidence that happened,” he said.
Lamm collaborated with computational geneticist Alan Kwan to envision a future where zygotic genome engineering technology develops to the point where humans will be able to control their own evolution the way we control electrons today. “In this future, humankind has wrested control of the human form from natural evolution and are able to bend human biology to human needs,” Kwan said. This ability, could result in more facial features that humans find intrinsically attractive: strong lines, straight nose, intense eyes and perfect symmetry. But other changes will be driven by function, the researchers suggest. Kwan thinks that the human head might expand to accommodate a larger brain as our knowledge of the universe increases. They also believe that millennia of space colonisation could also produce larger eyes to account for dimmer environments when humans live farther from the sun and darker skin in general to protect against UV radiation beyond the Earth’s ozone.
Thicker eyelids and a more prominent superciliary arch, the bone above the eye socket, could offset the same kind of disorientation that today’s astronauts sometimes feel aboard the International Space Station, they added. Perhaps their most remarkable conjecture is that future humans could start to blink sideways like owls to “protect from cosmic ray effects,” the researchers added. However, Kwan and Lamm insist that their experiment was always intended to be more existential than scientific. “I just tried to do this for fun. This project was more for entertainment purposes,” Lamm said.