Intelligently Design a Human

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

2. A prehensile tail. Bonus: biioluminescent tip.

Why would we need such a thing? It would likely screw with our hips and our hands are far better at grasping things, and a tail is not likely to just as easily hold a 5-15 kilo monkey than a 50-100 kilo man or woman.
And biolumisient lightning is not preferable: it takes a lot of energy to make for little gain. Modifying the eye to be able to take in more light is a better alternative.

Because two hands are simply not enough, and a tail is probably much simpler to handle than a full extra set of arms, with all the musculature that would be associated with them.

A tail is located in the wrong place, and on the wrong side of the body to be useful for doing hand-tasks. It'd only be useful, perhaps, as something to use to let your baby hang safely from a tree while you forage for food.

[Eulogy]

Put in a natural tendency for science and logic as the basis for human behaviour instead of the witch's brew of instincts we got over the eons. Make being rational come easily, something that doesn't need to be taught. That right there would solve (and prevent!) a lot of problems.

Have two (or more, if feasible) brains, both share memories and experiences but one runs the body at a time. That way, you have redundancy while not increasing energy requirements too much (brains burn tons of energy).

On that note, engineer brain and nerve cells to be able to regenerate and heal, so an unlucky knock on the head doesn't render one invalid for the rest of his life.

In fact, regeneration in general would be very useful, even if it takes a month to regrow eyes and limbs. Better to be blind or crippled for two months then the rest of your days.

Increase processor speed, but have it controllable. We don't need to be thinking all the time, but it sure would be nice to be able to come up with better solutions for problems faster and in less time, when the situation calls for it. Yes, this needs more energy and produces heat but it wouldn't be used most of the time.

Have the power to toggle fertility at a moment's notice. Being able to be sterile or not at a whim would really go a long way towards preventing unwanted pregnancies.

Better control over reproductive organs in general. No erections at the worst times and women wouldn't have to suffer from periods ever again.

Have our lungs be more like the air intake of jet engines. Better efficiency, faster oxygen absorption and less problems with breathing.

Have the urinal tract not run through the prostate gland; swelling of said gland is not a good reason to not be able to piss.

Scratch that, remove the need to piss entirely. Let the bowels move all waste, and save water.

Upgrade the efficiency of the digestive system, so we get more out of what we eat.

Have specialized organs that can store large amounts of oxygen, and release on demand.

After all this talk of gills, why not let the skin extract oxygen from the water? Skin already has large surface area and it is already good at dealing with temperature changes.

Get rid of all hair except, perhaps, for hair on the scalp. It serves no purpose and eats up resources.

There is no reason to keeping shedding so much skin cells. Skin cells should reproduce only if other living ones have died off.

Dental care needs an overhaul. The mouth we have now is utterly pathetic at preventing dental problems; it requires the capacity for self-cleaning.

The mouth should always be capable of producing more enamel and therefore more teeth. Regeneration doesn't stop at limbs, you know.

Why age at all? Remove the mechanism that causes aging; lifespan should not be a limiting factor. Since we are building a better human there is really no need for further evolution. Just put in a natural tendency to control one's own population to compensate.

Undo the mutation that made humans only a tenth as strong as chimpanzees.

Natural weapons may not do much when futuristic technology comes online (ho ho!) but simple ones at least gives us a better edge over other animals and we'll always have it.

For the bonus round, the power to change gender. Extra bonus points if the change is quick and hassle-free.

[Simon_Jester]

I must have missed something because I literally can't believe no one thought of this:

Remove the biological need for sleep.

Seriously, this is probably (I'd think) much easier to implement than immunity to aging or consciously controllable brain processor speed, let alone stuff like aluminum bones. It would greatly decrease the average human's down-time, especially in an environment where your need for physical rest is relatively low.

Curing cancer might give us (at a guess) 20 or 30 extra years of life, but so would eliminating the need for sleep, when you get right down to it.

[Broomstick]

Have the urinal tract not run through the prostate gland; swelling of said gland is not a good reason to not be able to piss.

You realize this is already a design feature for 51% of the human race, yes?

[Simon_Jester]

It's like the "immune to sunburn" thing. To the people who have problems with it, it's annoying enough that they tend to forget that not everyone has the same difficulty.

[Surlethe]

Removed unhelpful posts by raptor3x and LordOskuro.

[Lagmonster]

People positing better natural protection from predators or the elements should consider one thing: If you make your organism TOO well protected, what urge does it have to do anything but lie around naked in the grass?

Think of it this way - this organism is intelligent, but has no knowledge. There is no language, no tools, no precedents to be taught. If you have metal armour on your skin, don't age, don't feel pain, eat sunlight, don't drown, and can survive everything up to dismemberments and violent trauma with ease...when the fuck are you going to bother building a spear, let alone a city? Humanity built a godamned civilization because we *weren't* intelligently designed. We had to achieve intelligence, and use it, as the only way to survive given an absence of indestructible bodies, venoms and horns.

It would seem to me that there is a possibility that immortal supermen wouldn't achieve as much as we have, simply because they have far fewer needs and virtually no fears. Is it even possible that intelligently designed organisms wouldn't develop civilization at all?

[Drooling Iguana]

Signals from the brain to various parts of the body should be sent through a medium that's easy to interface with manufactured technology, and the signals should be easy to decode and reproduce.

[Simplicius]

If one intelligently designs a truly optimal organism - one that is guaranteed to have high survivability, efficient life processes, and a reproductive rate that sustains the population without overrunning the rest of the biosphere (since presumably the design is one that discourages death by predation and disease) - perhaps civilization is not only not inevitable, but not even necessary.

To put it another way - making a 'better human' by creating, at Day 1, some kind of über-organism is not, in fact, creating a human at all. There is little point for a creator to drop human mental patterns and behavior, evolved in response not only to the environment but to the physical limitations of our bodies, into the mind of an organism which may live in the same environment but which has few or none of the physical limitations, and a host of additional capabilities besides.

Since in this thread people seem inclined to create a superior organism deemed human rather than to refine the existing frame of H. sapiens, it is not necessarily a bad thing if it doesn't need as much intelligence, doesn't need much logic or reason and doesn't build cities.

[Starglider]

You realize this is already a design feature for 51% of the human race, yes?

Women have more serious problems. Giving birth through a small hole in the middle of a primary load bearing structure is really bad design. Menstruating every month, whether you are actually trying to have a baby or not, is almost as silly.

I would certainly implement reabsorbtion of the fetus, as in rabbits etc, but on conscious mental command. In fact I wish we could do that in reality, as the screaming and wailing from the anti-abortion people would be priceless.

Think of it this way - this organism is intelligent, but has no knowledge. There is no language, no tools, no precedents to be taught. If you have metal armour on your skin, don't age, don't feel pain, eat sunlight, don't drown, and can survive everything up to dismemberments and violent trauma with ease...when the fuck are you going to bother building a spear, let alone a city?

We can simply wire the organisms pleasure/reward system such that it has an irresistable attraction to tools, scientific explanations and the ability to manipulate the environment in general. If we did that then we could dial down the aggression without worrying about losing the innovative push warfare gave humans. Language you could just put in directly. Everyone sharing the same basic grammar and vocabulary would certainly ease communication between nations.

To put it another way - making a 'better human' by creating, at Day 1, some kind of über-organism is not, in fact, creating a human at all.

Creationists only care about superficials, of course. They would accept something that looks human and acts human as a 'human'; i.e. made in god's image (not that that notion makes any sense at all). A genuine artificial life engineering project needs more specific design goals. Some implementation constraints would be nice too, otherwise I will specify something like this and have galactic conquest well underway within the first year.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Some commentary.

I'm curious as to how the knees would be redesigned for bipedalism,

I recall that the knees are one of the parts of the body that have a higher likelihood of sustaining injury due to exceeding the joint's range-of-motion limits. Except that humans are already sufficiently well-adapted that a human is capable of eventually running down virtually any animal alive, as most human species since about Homo Erectus have become increasingly adapted to being able to run at modest speeds for really, really long distances. So I'll withdraw this.

and how the bird's brain is volumetric instead of surface-based.

Take an African Grey Parrot and a beagle. They've got brains of roughly identical mass. But one has the mental potential of a small human child, and the other is readily outsmarted by small children. The bulk of a dog's thinking goes on entirely in the top layer of its cerebral cortex, which is why mammal brains have all those folds, furrows, and creases. This is to increase the brain's surface area so more cortex can be stuffed in there. It's also part of the reason why brain injuries are so devastating. Minor impact? You drag the processing parts of the brain against the ridges inside the skull. These are also compressed by swelling, and destroyed by subdural hematoma, since the byproducts of free blood breaking down are highly toxic to neurons. The surface of a bird's brain is almost entirely smooth, because all the processing occurs in clusters of so-called nuclei which are distributed through the volume of the brain. Something like fully 75% of the tissue in a bird's brain performs the sort of higher functions that the human cerebral cortex does.

1. Gills, gills, gills. Falling into water should not be a death-threatening hazard.

No. The amount of oxygen that can be extracted from water is a tiny fraction of what can be extracted from the air. If you can't get out of the water before you run out of air, all a set of gills that a human-sized creature could safely carry around would to is make your death a lingering one.

3. A digestive system capable of utilizing cellulose.

Cellulose is a sort of long polymer. It requires a lot of energy just to break down into its constituent glucose molecules, making it a fairly low-energy food. That's why herbivores need to eat a lot of plant material to survive.

4. A cooling mechanism that doesn't waste water.

You're not going to do much better than evaporative cooling. And you're not going to do much better than water as the substance to evaporate. Better to utilize a biochemistry that is slightly more heat-tolerant than ours so that less cooling is required. Of course, this will make our ID humans more susceptible to cold, but they're going to be smart enough to figure out how to kill animals for their fur.

1) Better protected vitals. The brain, particularly, would be located in the deepest part of the body-mass, as opposed to on the other end up a highly vulnerable neck. You want to brain someone? You're going to have to carve through a foot or two of flesh, muscle and bone.

My idea of a smaller brain making much more efficient use of its volume, surrounded by lots of cerebrospinal fluid (in pockets in a substantially reengineered dura mater to prevent the brain from moving with impacts) would already give ID humans the equivalent of a helmet. Brains are kept in the head for a reason. Nerve impulses are fairly slow. You could possibly speed up the nerves' signal conductance to compensate, yes, but then you'd have to engineer a lot of extra protection for the optical, auditory, and olfactory nerves to keep them safe for the foot or two of extra travel.

At the top of my head I would like to add better resistance against deceases and parasites and no deterioration of senses and organs as we get older. This menas swine flu becomes like a small cold to us, no alzheimers, cancer, diabetes and other shit like that. Hm... Evolution would of course come up with new and imroved deceases, but I'm not looking that way now.

Self healing ears that even at old age still could hear into the 30-40Khz range. (AFAIK salmons and chicken got this. No hearing loss from loud sounds or old age and no tinnitus. Well, not for long anyway.)

In other words, age like turtles. Some species of which, near as we can tell, don't. You would have to substantially lower fecundity to compensate, otherwise the species will promptly head off towards Malthusian catastrophe before it's smart enough to pronounce the word "Malthusian."

[Simon_Jester]

A genuine artificial life engineering project needs more specific design goals. Some implementation constraints would be nice too, otherwise I will specify something like this and have galactic conquest well underway within the first year.

I'm a little worried about the fractal hand concept; it raises structural problem because the microscopic fingerlets will tend to break easily.

[Ariphaos]

...that's a bit like worrying about Google's "Servers are expendable whether you like it or not, treat them that way and account for it." concept. The entire point is that they are highly modular. Something breaks, replace it. I imagine by the time we are considering walking around in those things, we will have separated mind and body anyway.

[Starglider]

I'm a little worried about the fractal hand concept; it raises structural problem because the microscopic fingerlets will tend to break easily.

They're much stronger than individual skin cells, yet somehow we manage to heft heavy objects without tearing the skin off our hands. For that matter they're much stronger than individual bacteria, yet bacteria seem to thrive despite being squished by a relatively tiny amount of force. The reason being of course that any macro-scale load is inevitably distributed over a large number of elements. In fact, a fractal design will do this much better than say a human hand, because it can actively arrange its elements to conform to the surface, instead of relying on passive flexibility (it will also have fully controllable contact friction, up to effectively infinite).

Of course while that design is structurally efficient, it does not meet my standards of cute. Thus I would probably design something that looks like a stereotypical furry (anthromorphic mammal) when wandering about, but when it wants to interact with something the 'fur' will peel off to reveal that it is actually a terminator style robot with sheets of fractal manipulators attached to various points.

[Oni Koneko Damien]

This is more in the social/behavioural engineering that physical modification:

1) Install a very strong bias against intra-species violence and harm. Much stronger than we already have and less prone to errors (such as sociopathy and the like).

2) Reproduction: Make the instinctual urge to reproduce highly dependent on surrounding conditions. If there are plenty of people around you, you have no urge to reproduce. Progressively lower population density will correspondingly raise that urge. Likewise, when population reaches a certain density, random individuals will have the strong urge to seek out areas of lower population-density to live in. This will ensure a constantly spreading, but self-regulating population, fulfilling the 'go forth and multiply' dictate.

[Lord of the Abyss]

People positing better natural protection from predators or the elements should consider one thing: If you make your organism TOO well protected, what urge does it have to do anything but lie around naked in the grass?

Think of it this way - this organism is intelligent, but has no knowledge. There is no language, no tools, no precedents to be taught. If you have metal armour on your skin, don't age, don't feel pain, eat sunlight, don't drown, and can survive everything up to dismemberments and violent trauma with ease...when the fuck are you going to bother building a spear, let alone a city? Humanity built a godamned civilization because we *weren't* intelligently designed. We had to achieve intelligence, and use it, as the only way to survive given an absence of indestructible bodies, venoms and horns.

Outside of the previously given point that you could just install a drive for progress from the start, you still have the most important source of competition of all left over: each other. That in fact is postulated by some scientists to have been our actually driving force for developing intelligence. You only need to be so smart before you can take on less intelligent animals ro the weather and survive; at that point they aren't going to drive a species any further up the intelligence ladder. But outwitting your own species is always going to be a Red Queen's Race, because any genes that make you a bit smarter will show up in the next generation as you pass them on. Even if the species in question is non-violent; then the driver for intelligence could be something as simple as "who talks the females into letting them mate with him best?".

[Mayabird]

First things I do, make humans be able to synthesize vitamin C. Fixing one goddamn gene. It's already there, just broken. A few nucleotides switched, and no more scurvy or chance of getting it.

I'd also do other things, like improve the vestibular system so we don't get dizzy from spinning around in a circle (I haven't figured out an ideal system yet, but it is on my mind) and avian lungs instead of stupid mammal lungs, but the vitamin C thing really, really bugs me.

Just as a note, if/when we start doing genetic engineering on ourselves, this had better happen. And it had better happen before stupid shit like "I want my kids to have kaleidescope eyes like in that old song."

[Simon_Jester]

They're much stronger than individual skin cells, yet somehow we manage to heft heavy objects without tearing the skin off our hands.

Unlike skin cells, fractal manipulators are also jointed; I'm not sure it's precisely analogous. But I'm prepared to take your word for the engineering issues.

First things I do, make humans be able to synthesize vitamin C. Fixing one goddamn gene. It's already there, just broken. A few nucleotides switched, and no more scurvy or chance of getting it.

I'd also do other things, like improve the vestibular system so we don't get dizzy from spinning around in a circle (I haven't figured out an ideal system yet, but it is on my mind) and avian lungs instead of stupid mammal lungs, but the vitamin C thing really, really bugs me.

Hell, you ought to be able to do it for all the vitamins and essential amino acids. After all, animals reasonably closely related to us can synthesize those chemicals; biochemical pathways to do it exist. The only reason we don't have them is that they are naturally selected against in an environment where the diet is rich in vitamin C or whatever.

Much easier to engineer than not needing sleep, and infinitely simpler than aluminum bones.

[Zixinus]

About the separating the opening of the air and digestive track: this could be a little more complicated than we thought, because it is this "fault" that allows us to manipulate air so well. We speak with out mouths after all.

Of course, this does not mean that we can't create a nose with enough flexibility to allow the creation of language. However, as we use our nose to get rid of unwanted stuff, as well as being hairy to filter air, this could become complicated.

There is creating a normally tightly-sealed opening into the mouth of the airway but that just leads us back to square one.

[Drooling Iguana]

Who says we have to talk with our mouths? We could simply adopt a setup similar to what parrots use for mimicking sounds.

[Broomstick]

Parrots use their mouths, too, or at least their airways to make sound, and they are quite capable of choking even if not as prone to it as humans.

[Starglider]

Parrots use their mouths, too, or at least their airways to make sound, and they are quite capable of choking even if not as prone to it as humans.

There is no fundamental reason why they couldn't use a dolphin-style blowhole instead. In fact it would be even easier for a land-based animal as aerodynamics are less of a concern.

[Molyneux]

Parrots use their mouths, too, or at least their airways to make sound, and they are quite capable of choking even if not as prone to it as humans.

There is no fundamental reason why they couldn't use a dolphin-style blowhole instead. In fact it would be even easier for a land-based animal as aerodynamics are less of a concern.

I'd favor either that, or multiple airways - it might be a bit tough to handle the airflow, perhaps by use of separate sphincters, but I do think it would be worth it to have a person who can imitate a barbershop quartet all by its lonesome.

[Guardsman Bass]

We already have something that blocks food from going down into our lungs when we swallow. Couldn't you reverse that, and have it so that air can be blown out of our mouths if not drawn in that way? That would allow you to keep vocal chords in the throat.

[TheLostVikings]

We already have something that blocks food from going down into our lungs when we swallow. Couldn't you reverse that, and have it so that air can be blown out of our mouths if not drawn in that way? That would allow you to keep vocal chords in the throat.

Well people have already mentioned avian lungs, so as part of that modification we could make it so that the ID humanoids inhale using their noses, but exhale using their mouths.

Or if leaving it as it is you could do like in some snakes and have the breathing tube extend all the way to the front of the mouth, just behind the front teeth. A much simpler hack that pretty much accomplishes the same thing. Though the avian lung project obviously have a lot more things going for it besides preventing coking.