OK - so say your job up was to design the human body - you get a decent salary and have some nice benefits, but your final design is due next week.
What upgrades or changes would you have made in the design of humans?
(Not just your body - but the bodies of all humans.)
A zoom lens.
Joints that don’t wear out.
A breathing tube that isn’t shared with the food intake tube.
No male pattern baldness.
We need a third arm, especially for soldering.
How about not putting the sewage system right next to the playground?
I came into say this, but I would make it detatchable so it doesn’t get in the way when you don’t need it.
Just tuck it neatly into your marsupial pouch.
A prehensile tail would be nice, and make it nice and long and strong too, so that you can use it to grip things.
I would completely rework the way the eye perceives color, so that we had maybe 7 different cones that had very little overlap for what wavelengths of light stimulated them.
I would also either get rid of body hair completely, or make it so that we were all completely covered in hair from head to toe, like the wolf-boys. The in-between phase we are in is just wacky.
One thing that came right to me I would add ‘regeneration’ The ability for the body to replace repair missing deformed damaged and worn parts continuously.
This. Right in the middle of the chest. It wouldn’t have to be very strong.
Assuming the result has to look roughly humanoid, a few ideas:
Regeneration as said, along with the elimination of aging.
Convert the pinky into a second thumb, so we have one on each side of the hand.
Make the knees and elbows into universal joints.
A second set of arms and a prehensile tail. The tail should have 3-4 digits at the end for grasping.
Move the brain into the torso, roughly where the heart is now; divide the heart into 2 or more separate pumps.
Replace most bone with something less brittle, more springy; more like wood.
Integrate a three dimensional weave of something like the strongest spider silk throughout the body to make flesh harder to tear, and a solid layer right under the skin to provide resistance to bullets and other high velocity impacts.
The ability to sense electromagnetic fields like some animals - probably quite useful in a society that makes heavy use of electrical devices like ours.
Better color vision; more varieties of cones, extending into the ultraviolet. The ability to perceive light polarization as well. Larger, more sensitive eyes; not having the brain in the head makes it possible to have larger eyes.
A much better olfactory sense; plenty of room for that with the brain moved.
A pair of curved (sort of like a ram’s) convoluted horns; the convolutions are in part to shape sound as they are ultrasound sonar organs like bats; the convolutions serve the same purpose as the funny shape of bat’s faces. Their other function is to serve as cooling organs and protection for a set of infrared spectrum eyes tucked in the inward curve of the horns.
Skin that can change color like an octopus (better than a chameleon).
A partially dampable pain sense with a hard cap on how bad pain can be.
A hard limit on how bad suffering of any kind can be; there’s simply no practical point in suffering that incapacitates someone.
Make everyone a hermaphrodite. Testicles are internal; some mammals have them that way so we know it’s possible.
Reproduction requires an active effort of will, and automatically shuts down if the person feels coerced (as in rape).
If impregnated, the person has the conscious choice of bringing the offspring to term or having the early-stage embryo fragment into stem cells that are scattered across the body and allowed to grow in place as new, young tissue. This allows for immortality and evolution at the same time.
I want wifi 
I can tell that most of the contributions to this thread thus far have been written by men.
No more menstruation. Uteri simply and seamlessly absorb endometrium. This way, not only are there no more pesky periods, but women are not especially vulnerable to anemia.
The female reproductive system belies any notion of an intelligent designer.
Design it more like a car in some ways.
Have certain parts take the brunt of wear and tear and that are easily replaceable. I think that is how cars work at least. You replace fluid and filter X every Y miles, replace part A every Y miles, etc. And if you do that it works pretty well. But the body kindof works that way too.
Have some kind of output system that tells you what is going wrong and where the same way cars have diagnostic codes and readers to read them.
Aside from that, change our emotions so we are relatively happy and content most of the time. Make our communication skills better. The ability to easily recover from emotional trauma. Some kind of self protection mechanism that isn’t designed to be unbearable the way pain is. There are probably ways to discourage us from engaging in damaging behavior w/o it having to feel like pain. Maybe the more damaging our behavior is the more lethargic and exhausted we get until we can barely move.
Make it easy to upgrade the software and hardware (easily upgraded parts, DNA and brains that can be altered and upgraded).
A marsupial pouch! Awesome idea. Young are born very tiny and easily, and can be popped into either a male or female pouch. infants pretty much stay in there for 6 months or so, and then as they get older they make longer and longer forays into the world.
Being 38 weeks pregnant, I would definitely move the bladder or the uterus. A 6lb baby sitting on the bladder for weeks (and kicking it!) is no fun.
The spine certainly needs a redesign.
Having the head out on a long floppy stalk just invites injury, and having almost all of the body’s weight bear through a single point (I’m looking at you, L5-S1) isn’t too brilliant either.
Most of the ideas so far are either silly, which is fine, or seem unrealistic in terms of the energy expended. Regeneration wuld be great but there’s a tradeoff in terms of the simplicity of the organism. There is a reason most animals can’t do it.
For the most part our bodies work awfully well. The foot and lower leg is a marvel of engineering. If you could redesign them I’d suggest one area of improvement would be strengthening the back/spine/neck, which is wonderfully elaborate but prone to injury.
As Gallagher once said in one of his stand-up routines from… oh, early 80’s ish, “If God was a woman our dicks would be on our chins.”
I was a pre-teen when I heard that. I was an adult before I figured out what it meant. :smack:
And afterwards, you’ll always have a handy place to put your wallet when you go to the beach!
This, definitely. I’ve just had to take two days off of work because my neck is so bad I can’t hold my head up for more than a few minutes at a time. Now my back is going out from holding my neck all weird! :mad: