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What If Our Bodies Kept Evolving?
WHAT IF
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7/26/2023
From chimpanzees to us to...
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00:00
What will humans look like in 10,000 years?
00:04
What about in 1 million years?
00:07
Will we look like this guy?
00:09
Probably not, but
00:11
we'll definitely look different than we do now.
00:14
What parts of our body would evolve?
00:18
How long would evolving our bodies take?
00:22
And who would win the survival of the fittest?
00:26
This is WHAT IF,
00:28
and here's what would happen if our bodies kept evolving.
00:33
It took roughly 6 million years
00:36
for humans to become what we are today.
00:38
And modern humans have only been around
00:41
for about 12,000 of those years.
00:44
Even in that short period of time,
00:46
humans have evolved slightly.
00:49
We've become about 10 cm (1 in) taller,
00:51
and now we can eat dairy foods after childhood.
00:55
So if those things can happen in 12,000 years,
00:59
where might we be hundreds of thousands of years into the future?
01:04
First, we should probably figure out exactly what evolution is.
01:09
Evolution is all about changes in the genetic makeup
01:13
that happen to a species over time.
01:16
Species with more advantageous traits
01:18
will tend to have more offspring,
01:20
so those genetic traits will tend to carry on to later generations.
01:25
For example, giraffes with longer necks who can reach more food
01:29
will be able to survive better than giraffes with short necks.
01:33
And they'll be able to have more babies,
01:35
who will likely have longer necks just like their parents.
01:38
And as time goes on,
01:40
the short-necked giraffes will die out,
01:42
and the long-necked giraffes are the only ones left.
01:46
That's why all our giraffes today have long necks.
01:50
So how does this apply to humans exactly?
01:53
Well, evolution in this sense is actually very hard to predict.
01:58
In the world we live in,
01:59
we don't need to worry about survival of the fittest.
02:02
Technology has effectively cancelled a lot of that.
02:06
You no longer need to worry about being the fastest or the strongest.
02:10
This isn't 100,000 years ago when you had to fight for your food.
02:15
Things like houses to live in and clean running water make surviving so much easier.
02:21
You never think to yourself, "How am I going to survive today?"
02:24
But that's something our ancestors had to worry about constantly.
02:29
It's not guaranteed that one million years from now,
02:32
humans will be stronger, faster, and bigger than ever before.
02:36
After all, having children today is generally decided by culture and personal choice,
02:42
rather than the need for our species to survive.
02:46
Our future will be decided by the traits of people who have children,
02:50
and how many children they have.
02:53
If people who are naturally overweight and have health problems
02:56
are the only ones having kids over the next million years,
02:59
then that's how the human race will end up.
03:03
But we might not need to worry about any of these natural occurrences.
03:08
Instead, we could become completely fused with technology before any of this happens.
03:14
Cybernetic arms, brain chips, and laser eyes could all become possibilities.
03:20
Not only that, but we also might be able to alter a baby's genes before they're born,
03:26
completely getting rid of evolution altogether.
03:30
This would allow us to get rid of diseases and any other genetic traits that might harm us.
03:37
But if we didn't have this luxury, and we had to evolve the old-fashioned way,
03:43
there's a few things that might happen.
03:45
We just need to look at how modern humans have evolved in the past 12,000 years.
03:51
We know we've been getting taller, most likely due to nutrition,
03:55
and that our brains have been getting smaller.
03:57
But don't worry, we haven't been getting dumber.
04:00
Our brains are actually becoming more efficient.
04:03
So in a million years, we might be incredibly tall humans with tiny heads.
04:09
Does that remind you of anything?
04:11
At the end of the day, human evolution is incredibly difficult to predict.
04:17
That's because evolution is primarily based on our environment.
04:22
And who knows what might happen to the Earth in the next million years?
04:26
We might need to evolve to survive fires,
04:29
as the planet will become so incredibly hot.
04:32
I so hope I'm not around for that.
04:35
Or in the next million years, we might live on other planets, like Mars.
04:41
Humans would evolve to look completely different there,
04:44
as they'd be living in entirely different conditions than here on Earth.
04:48
Wondering what living on the Red Planet would be like?
04:52
Well, that's a story for another WHAT IF.
04:56
(upbeat music)
04:58
[MUSIC PLAYING]
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