Staying within the laws of physics (for things like oxygen exchange, metabolic rates, etc), and assuming we could read and re-write DNA like a blueprint, what are the big “design flaws” that we could correct? How strong and fast could humans be (without losing any other capability)? How tough and resilient? How long-lived? Could we regenerate lost limbs, organs, and tissue? Could we be engineered to breath water as well as air? Could we get nourishment from the sun? What other capabilities could we have?
Also, how far are we, technologically speaking, from doing any of this?
I don’t think we need this. Our problem in developed countries is getting too much nourishment, not too little. Being able to absorb less energy from food would probably be more beneficial in that environment. Though maybe higher efficiency at getting vitamin D from sunlight would be beneficial. But directly absorbing calories from sunlight definitely would not be.
Make the spinal cord less vulnerable, especially in the relatively skinny and unsupported neck area. (waves at umkay) Probably best to move the spinal column further into the center of the torso.
Make the knee joints stronger and less complicated so they’re less vulnerable to injury.
Retractable claws would be a nice bonus, as long as we’re fiddling around.
The regeneration part of the OP is relatively close, using stem cells.
Better eyesight by rerouting the optic nerve, improving wavelength sensitivity, improving lowlight vision with something like say reflective membranes.
We may not need it, but could we do it? And wouldn’t it help the environment (as well as reducing hunger), because we’d need less space/waste for agriculture?
First of all, DNA doesn’t store information in any way like a blueprint. The final form of an organism emerges from complex interactions of thousands of genes that interact in countless ways. E.g. there is no gene that specifies “make a femur that’s x cm long”. Instead, there’s a convoluted logic: when protein A is active, and B is not, express C, which modifies D, E, F, G, leading to increased growth rates wherever H is also expressed. Developmental biology has a decent handle on the earliest and most basic interactions that gives an organism its form. But we’re a very very long way from understanding development well enough to make creatures with any shape we want. Frankly, I would be surprised if we figure it out in my life time.
That said, if we did have that (essentially magical) ability, there’s plenty of stuff to fix. For one thing, we have a skeleton that’s rather lousy for our bipedal stance, since it evolved from four-legged critters long ago. We could fix a lot of the structure in our legs and so they would last longer, be stronger, and cause us less pain.
Missed edit: We couldn’t get enough energy from photosynthesis to benefit much. We burn something like 100 watts at rest. There’s about 100 watts/m^2 of energy available in sunlight, but photosynthesis is only around 1% efficient. So, as a ballpark, if we were lounging in direct sunlight, we wouldn’t get anywhere near enough energy to be useful.
It’s sort of like putting a solar panel on the roof of an electric car – the energy you get is barely enough to run the dashboard lights, let alone move the car.
Well it depends on the scope of the changes we’re talking about.
If we’re talking about humans doing photosynthesis, I think by comparison changing our appetites so that we eat far less, or only desire stuff that can be grown sustainably would be a trivial change.
I know it’s an old joke. But, can we separate our sex organs - a least the fun ends of them - from the excrement organs? Not only would it make oral more fun and accessible, but it’d make UTI’s much less likely.
I’d be more interested in some re-engineering to better accommodate a modern lifestyle in a developed country. Stuff like:
Getting rid of type 2 diabetes.
Getting rid of heart and circulatory diseases.
Making it so that you can spend all day sitting and not get lower back pain or hemorrhoids.
ETA: It might be a good idea to make food absorption try for a specific number of calories each day. If you’re eating less than that, it gets more efficient. If you’re eating more, it gets less efficient. That could help with hunger and obesity.
Right now, I think we could really do with some re-engineering with the process of pregnancy and birth:
Make the placenta better at filtering out harmful stuff, so that things like environmental pollutants, medications, or alcohol can’t damage a fetus.
Get rid of gestational diabetes and pre-eclampsia. Pre-eclampsia affects 6-8% of pregnancies worldwide, and is a major cause of premature birth in the developed world. It kills 76,000 women and 500,000 babies a year.
Make the process of giving birth less difficult, dangerous, and unpleasant.
It would also be nice if we could make the female urethra longer. That would make incontinence a lot less likely in women, plus provide protection against UTIs. If you’ve been pregnant, you know exactly what this has to do with pregnancy.
Lets go back to laying eggs instead of giving live birth. Lay an itty bitty egg, put it in an incubator, wait 9 months for it to hatch, and voila your new baby at no pain.
Added bonus (for the guys out there complaining they have no choice after pregnancy) - either parent could choose to abort by destroying the egg.
Extra credit bonus: Easy collection of stem cells once a month from the unfertilized egg.
Nah, I’d rather just figure out a way to make conception into a conscious, voluntary process.
ETA: that was a response to “Drawback: Too easy to get too many kids?”
Just checking, is the OP talking only about genetic engineering biological enhancements, or are cyborg enhancements allowed, such as replacing joints with higher efficiency mechanical joints.
To where? Acuity is limited by a bottleneck at several points. 2) If you mean improve sensitivity within the range we already have, then that’s very possible. If you mean increase our range: in the blue direction, our UV sensitivity is limited by the lens and cornea. Our having these structures is a good thing, as for one they limit UV damage to our eyes. I’m not sure out IR, but it might also be helpful to non-eye sensors, like in pit vipers. 3) that’s like the tapetum lucidium. It is useful for a lot of animals because it allows a second chance to capture photons. However, I believe it is associated with lower acuity so it might be a tradeoff.
Drawback: you have to watch an even more helpless offspring for another 9 damn months. Babies are fragile, but at least they have places to grab. Imagine bringing a 3 foot egg onto the subway every morning.
I was briefly musing on regenerating limbs. The thing is, it’s a hard problem: how does some random muscle cell in your forearm know it’s time to un-differentiate and go back to growing like an embryo proto-arm cell? And how do all the cells along the cut coordinate to set up the same chemical gradients that are in place in an embryo so that the proto-arm cells know when to stop growing, and when to turn into muscle or bone, and when to die off? We’re nowhere close to even being able to reasonably think about how to engineer these processes, let alone how to encode them in DNA so they only turn on when a limb is amputated. On the other hand, we can already grow replacement skin in a lab and create living bone from a 3-D printed template and we’re closing in on how to grow muscle (blood vessels are the tricky part). So my opinion is that by the time we can even think about genetically engineering limb regrowth, we’ll have had lab-grown replacement limbs for so long, nobody will think it’s worthwhile.
Egg laying would be problematic. An egg can’t get any bigger after it’s laid, so the laid egg would have to be big enough to contain a newborn-sized baby. I fail to see the improvement from giving birth to a newborn to giving birth to a newborn-sized egg.
But eggs don’t take in any new nutrients. So the egg would still be at least as big as the baby, plus the placenta. That would be bigger than the baby alone.
A marsupial plan might work better.
Or just have babies come out of the belly button, since the real problem for human birth is the combination of small pelvis and big head.
An IR eye is a problem, for a couple of reasons. First, IR has a longer wavelength than visible light. You need a bigger detector to get the same resolution in a longer wavelength. That’s why radio telescopes are so much bigger than optical telescopes. You’d need bigger eyes. Second, humans emit infrared radiation. We might not be able to see anything useful over our own emissions. Pit vipers, as cold-blooded animals, don’t have this problem.