[ul]those reflective lenses that give cats better night vision
improved olfactory receptors but with same size nose
Denser bones
Double down on muscle fiber count and tendons
Hidden gills[/ul]
Defeat diffusion and electrostatic pressure (+ attracts -, repels +), and you can work on ion pumps.
We could engineer ourselves to have wings and fly, but then it is likely we’d have to make our bones much lighter and more fragile. So your thing might work, we would just need to find a way to bind [del]adamantium[/del] a substance that is light but strong to our bones.
Nictitating membranes: we may have had them, or our ancestors did anyway. Didn’t need them.
Olfactor receptors are weird. They don’t just sense one substance, but the pattern of activation of multiple receptor types affects what we smell. Maybe we could create more folds to cram more receptors in a smaller space, like how our brain is folded.
It would be interesting to look at the olfactory receptors or the hippocampus and transfer their adult neurogenesis to other parts of the nervous system.
Gills would be cool. Hardy ones.
This thread, especially Mikemike2’s post (not the prostate part) makes me think of Space Marines from Warhammer 40,000. They have lots of redundancy and such. And of course, being a Splicer without the insanity would be cool. I could do without bees burrowing into my arm, though.
One idea I’ve run across is adding a pair of joints in the female hipbones. Normally they are locked in place, but during birth they unlock and let the hips spread as wide as necessary.
Universal joints for elbows and knees.
Under-skin armor. Our soft skin is good for touch but not protection. Given that some organic materials like some spider silk have the strength for bulletproof vests, it may be possible to make our nu-humans tough enough to survive moderate gunfire.
Color controllable skin like octopi have.
More types of cone cells for better color vision. Normal humans are trichromats; three kinds of cones let us distinguish about a million colors. A percentage of women may be tetrachromats with four kinds of cone cells, allowing for far more possible colors. And some animals are pentachromats, and cans see an estimated 100 billion colors. So we know our present eyes are nowhere near the limit for color vision.
Turn the pinky finger into an extra thumb; having a opposable digit on both sides of the hand should help dexterity.
Gills won’t work for anything warmblooded; running cool water through something with that much surface area will suck the body heat right out of you. Instant hypothermia.
I’m surprised nobody’s mentioned aging. Just a few modifications to the telomeres of each cell, would remove the hard limit on cell division, which (it seems) causes us to grow old and rickety and eventually die. Some experts believe this type of change would put us at greater risk of cancer, but presumably, a civilization with such mastery over genetic engineering would have doubtlessly destroyed cancer already. 
Also (to avoid a hijack): What would proper bipedal design look like, anyway?
That’s not really an issue. Plenty of fast moving fish such as tuna thrive in water at or barely above freezing, and they function just fine using gills. Plenty of warm blooded animals such as ducks sit with their feet in water *below *freezing for literally months at a time without suffering hypothermia.
The trick is to set up an efficient counter current blood flow, which you need any way to get maximum efficiency out of the gills. Once you’ve achieved that the heat loss to water would be relatively small. More than we lose presently, but probably only about 5% more. IOW a person with gills would die of hypothermia in 1 hour and 25 minutes where a normal person would die in an hour and a half. Considering that without gills you *drown *in less than three minutes that’s not really a consideration.
Of course gills would also dovetail neatly with the other flaw in our respiratory system: tidal breathing. Mammals breath by taking in fresh air, extracting a tiny amount of oxygen and then wasting energy pushing it back out trying to expel waste gases. It’s hideously inefficient. It’s hideously inefficient because each breathing cycle wastes energy. Birds do slightly better by passing air *over *the lungs into blind sacs when they breathe in, then passing the air from the sacs back over the lungs when they breathe out. As a result birds can get about 4 times more oxygen from the air than mammals can.
But the ideal solution would be true laminar flow, where air is breathed in constantly through the mouth, passed over the lungs and then out through an separate opening in the navel. Doing that we could extract 100% of the oxygen from the air we breathe and comfortably function at altitudes of 10km compared to the 3km we can manage now.
Fish are coldblooded, they aren’t trying to keep up their body temperature in the first place. And duck feet don’t begin to have the same kind of exposed surface area that a gill would need.
I really doubt that; water is IIRC something like 200 times as effective at dissipating heat as air, and a gill would require a huge internal surface area to supply something like a human with oxygen.
What if we gave the oropharynx a filter? Or moved the end of the trachea upwards, so that if we want to breathe through our mouths, the air can go up and over?
This would be nice, but there’s the nutrient issue again. Earlier than 28 weeks, and they can’t generally get enough calories in 'em by mouth. Eating is too fatiguing, even if their suckle reflex kicks in. WhyBaby, as strong and healthy as micropreemies ever come, could suck the heck out of her pacifier weeks before she could suck a bottle. Even when she figured out the “suck, swallow, breathe” triad, she just didn’t have enough energy in her little self to get all her nutrients and water requirements by mouth. IV’s and feeding tubes required. Or, of course, we’re back to eggs, which are essentially round IV bags with the patient inside!
Yes, generally speaking, childbirth earlier in pregnancy would be awesome, but there are dozens of hurdles, not just a couple, if we’re disallowing technology assistance.
There are lots of major design flaws could be fixed.
You could totally separate the eating and breathing system. Having to put food down the same tube you breath through is colossally stupid idea, and this design flaw kills people all the time.
The light sensing cells in the eyes could be reversed so the “wires” that come out of them come out of the rear and not in the front. That would leave us with slightly more sensitive vision and no blind spot which currently has to be worked around by fancy processing tricks in the brain.
Fix the urethra prostate system. Running an important tube through an organ which has a tendency to swell up and block it, is seriously stupid design.
Reroute the birth canal so it goes forward not down through the pelvis. That would mean you could give birth to a child with a fully formed brain, instead of a significantly immature one. It would also mean childbirth wouldn’t have to be painful or have as high risk of complications.
Testicles that form outside the body, instead of inside then descend, would eliminate a weak spot and reduce the chance of hernias.
Separate the brain information processing channels for speed and contrast. Currently they overlap, meaning changes in visual contrast can cause a change in speed perception. An example is when fog reduces contrast causing people to think they’re going slower. It contributes to many fatal accidents in poor weather.
Doing some work on the brains innately terrible grasp of probability would be a good thing too.
That’s just what came to me in a couple of minutes. I’m sure there’s a lot more I could come up with.
Well, let’s add a water heating organ then. It’s about as feasible as adding gills.
After all, several of the suggestions so far have been for how the human body could be more energy-efficient or get more energy from the environment. And many of us already have surplus energy (obesity). So it doesn’t matter if it’s energetically wasteful.
And we are not necessarily talking about being underwater for long periods.
Make fertility require a conscious choice, something that has to be “turned on”; besides eliminating unwanted children, it would have the side effect of eliminating the menstrual cycle since women would only ovulate when they needed to.
Add valves in the blood vessels that reflexively shut down the blood flow when a catastrophic loss of blood pressure occurs; in other words, they stop you from bleeding out from serious wounds.
There’s a defective reflex controlling the blood vessels surrounding the lungs that needs fixing. It is normally supposed to operate only once in your life; when you take your first breath, it expands the blood vessels surrounding your lungs. Unfortunately, at high altitudes the low pressure can cause it to activate in reverse and clamp down on those blood vessels, making it even harder to get enough oxygen. The necessary genetic variation to fix this already exists in fact; unlike the rest of humanity, native Tibetans do not have this reflex mis-activate. One of several high altitude adaptations they have.
Make the human body more surgery friendly, for transplants, repairs and cybernetic additions. For example, have blood vessels and nerves grow organic couplings every so often, so instead of being cut they can simply be “unplugged”; and then when the job is done they can be plugged back together. Or if you are putting in a prosthesis, there’s already a ready made interface; just attach the electronic connector to the organic one. Redesign organs with similar couplings to make them easier to remove and replace; make the muscles’ attachments to bones similarly something that can be detached then replaced when you are done. Basically make the body as modular as possible, like a machine.
Make the body more tolerant of organ transplants and implanted machinery.
Replace or augment bones with something that is less brittle. Say, integrate something similar to wood fibers into bones as a composite so they are harder to break, and if broken bend back into the proper alignment on their own like a bent branch snapping back. Self-splinting bones.
Or just have internal testicles; some mammals do so it’s biologically possible.
No, it would do nothing; the energy is lost regardless of where you heat the water; in the gills or elsewhere.
So you either think that fish do not swim in freezing water, you think that they do not maintain a body temperature far above freezing, or you think that they do not breathe with gills.
Which is it?
I don’t think you’ve followed my point. Or I haven’t followed yours.
Let’s say an organ to warm enough water to a suitable temperature would require 200W of power. Well…good; I need to lose a few pounds.
It might not be sustainable indefinitely, but I’m not planning on spending months underwater, and the organ can basically shut down when not immersed.
First problem - the amount of oxygen required for a warm blooded creature is significantly higher than that required by a cold-blooded creature. Thus, what is acceptable gill size for Charley the Tuna won’t begin to work for a human. We have lungs, which can exchnage for the oxygen we need from a mix of about 21% O2. Gills would probably be at least as big as those things taking up half our main body mass. That’s why a cold-blooded animal like a snake also only needs to eat once a month - it’s not wasting food or oxygen creating heat.
As for straight-thru lungs - the problem is, the less oxygen left in the air, the less efficient the exchange is; with the fill-empty cycle, the endpoints of the lungs all have the same advantage. With a tube flow, the front gets all the good air, and the tail end of any tube has to work with depleted O2 air also full of CO2. There is probably no massive advantage to be gain from flow-thru respiration.
IIRC, gas dissolves better at low temperature than high temperature - one reason why life - Krill, whales, etc.- thrive near the poles despite the temperature. So at body temperature, you are less likely to get a lot of oxygen out of the water; at low temperatures, you are significantly cooling the bloodstream… meaning you need to eat a lot more, and breath a lot more to burn that food, meaning even bigger gills. No win. If you add a “heat exchanger” organ in front of the gills, you are adding a dubious huge extra mass for not much gain.
Aquatic mammals have it right. Breathe air, cover yourself in fat to prevent heat loss, touch the cold water as little as possible with your body heat; if you really want an advantage, ask for something like whales have, where you can hold your breath for up to half an hour.
While you’re at it making wishes, add in the ability to hibernate until down to you ideal body weight. We’ll sleep away the winter and come out in the sspring without an obesity problem but able to eat whatever we want of our faourite foods.
I don’t know why gills have received so much scrutiny next to the other ideas in this thread.
If there’s not enough O2 in seawater, then just make our magical organ do electrolysis too. If warmer water can hold less O2, then fine; the O2 that bubbles out as we heat the water can be vented to the lungs.
Yeah, it’s far-fetched; like the other ideas.
There is an article published in March 2012 in The Atlantic that discusses this very subject.
In this article, S. Matthew Liao, professor of philosophy and bioethics at New York University, proposes (among other less radical ideas) that genetic engineering be used to reduce individual human’s carbon footprint by reducing their physical size.
On the surface, this seems like a pretty good idea. Smaller humans mean smaller required caloric intake, if nothing else. This looked like a good article. Let me know what y’all think, please.
You need oxygen to generate energy, in this process the oxygen is converted to water. If you needed first to electrolyze the water to produce oxygen, this would result in a net energy loss.
No, not necessarily. The electrolysis could be powered by anaerobic respiration.
So basically what you are saying is that if you gave a genetic engineer a copy of my DNA and told him, “Modify robert_columbia’s DNA so that if we make a clone out of your modified version, it will be like robert_columbia except his thumbs will be 10% longer and he will have three kidneys.” he could not do it? Could you modify DNA to make the clone a redhead or is that still too complex?