Do you ever think that
human evolution is a little slow?
What if we cranked up the speed
and had you evolve
1,000 years in one day?
About 10,000 years ago,
your ancestors spread
to every continent on Earth,
except for Antarctica.
They had already started to farm,
herd animals and settle down into villages.
With all the changes in our living conditions since then,
humans have evolved 100 times faster
than at any other time.
In the last 150 years,
we've grown 10 cm (3.9 in)
and started living an average of 20 years longer.
Fast forward another 1,000 years of human evolution,
and could it be possible to live forever?
If you jump-started your evolution
and evolved 1,000 years overnight,
all the changes might feel a little awkward.
For starters, you might become smaller.
Yeah, you would be living on an overcrowded planet
with scarce resources.
Our bodies might conserve more energy.
This would come with a certain amount of growing pains.
Or rather, shrinking pains.
But you would wake up
feeling better than you did the day before.
That’s because tiny nanobots inside your body
would be enhancing your natural abilities.
These nanobots would be small.
About 1/100th of the width of a strand of hair.
And they could monitor every aspect of your body’s health.
If you have diabetes, for example,
these little workers would regulate your glucose and insulin levels.
You could discover that compared to your unevolved friends,
you're suddenly thinking faster.
Your brain would benefit from advanced artificial intelligence
that would be as fast, if not faster, than the human brain.
With such advanced AI,
you could do things that are impossible by today’s standards.
Maybe you could see frequencies outside the visible spectrum
because special cameras would enhance your eyes.
You would be able to recognize faces and names at lightning speed.
Your mind would have its own version of Facebook.
Let’s call it a Brainbook.
You could find that you suddenly have a new grasp of languages.
So you could discover that you now
speak Mandarin or Cantonese.
These could be the standard global language in the future,
considering that 1.39 billion people speak Chinese today.
Now, if you still understand me,
that could mean that English has retained its position as a global language.
It could also be that you now understand and speak all languages.
This would be thanks to advanced translation enhancers in your brain.
You could talk to anyone, anywhere,
without ever needing to learn the language.
But if those enhancers in your brain stopped working,
you would discover that
maybe ou aren’t that much smarter than your peers.
You could take a quick intelligence test
to find out you aren’t even as smart as you used to be.
This could be because your brain
evolved to be dependent on all these new developments in AI.
Without their assistance,
simple tasks you perform at work
could seem complex and challenging.
The most dramatic change of all
is one you wouldn’t notice right away.
But eventually you would discover that
your life expectancy has extended to around 150 years.
That would be thanks in some part to those nanobots monitoring your health.
But it would also be due to genetic modifications
that could be commonplace in the future.
Your genes would be engineered
to remove diseases like cystic fibrosis
or Huntington’s disease.
All these new developments in your body
would feel unique and special if they happened to you overnight.
But with all these changes occurring to humanity
over the next 1,000 years,
you'd find that we would all start to look and act the same.
Like clones of each other.
Maybe by that time,
we would be clones.
But that’s a story
for another WHAT IF.