Future Human Evolution: How Genetics and Prosthetics Will Reshape Humanity in 100 Years

Selected 100 classic TED talks, lasting 8-15 minutes, covering innovation, growth, and future trends. Provides MP3 streaming, download, and English transcripts to help improve listening and speaking skills. Ignite your passion for learning through ideas! Here is this episode's 【TED】100 classic speech listening material collection. Consistent accumulation brings your English closer to real life!

Here's the question that matters. Because we're beginning to get all the tools together to evolve ourselves. And we get evolved bacteria, and we can evolve plants, and we can evolve animals. And we're now reaching the point where we really have to ask, really ethical, and do we want to evolve human beings? As you're thinking about that, let me talk about that in the context of prosthetics. Prosthetics past, present, future. So this is the iron hand belonging to one of the German counts, loved to fight, lost his arm in one of these battles. No problem. He just made a suit of armor, put it on, perfect prosthetic. That's where the concept of ruling with an iron fist comes from. And of course, these prosthetics have been getting more and more useful, more and more modern. You can hold soft-boiled eggs. You can have all types of controls. And as you're thinking about that, they're wonderful people like Hugh Herr, who've been building absolutely extraordinary prosthetics. So the wonderful Amy Moines will go out and say, how tall do I want to be tonight? Or he will say what type of cliff do I want to climb? Or does somebody want to run a marathon or does somebody want to ballroom dance? And as you adapt these things, the interesting thing about prosthetics is they've been coming inside the body. So these external prosthetics will now become artificial knees. They've become artificial hips. And then we'll evolve further to become not just nice to have, but essential to have. So when you're talking about a heart pacemaker as a prosthetic, you're talking about something that isn't just 'I'm missing my leg.' It's if I don't have this, I can die. At that point, a prosthetic becomes a symbiotic relationship with the human body.

And for the smartest people that I've ever met, Ed Boyden, Hugh Herr, Joe Judic of some bald lander, are working on a center for extreme biotics. The interesting thing is that these prosthetics now get integrated into the bone, the skin, and the muscle. And one of the other sides of Ed is he's been thinking about how to connect the brain using light or other mechanisms directly to things like these prosthetics. If you can do that, you can begin changing fundamental aspects of humanity. How quickly you react depends on the diameter of a nerve. With prosthetics using light or liquid metal, you could theoretically increase the diameter to the point where, as long as you could see the muscle flesh, you could step out of the way of a bullet. These are the order of magnitude changes we're talking about. This is a fourth level of prosthetics, such as phoenix hearing aids. These cross the threshold from disability aids to enhancements that a 'normal' person might voluntarily want. They not only help you hear but also allow super hearing, 360-degree perception, white noise filtering, and recording—all combined with film functionality for phones. At that point, people might actually want prosthetics voluntarily. Thousands of loosely connected pieces are coming together, leading to the question of how we want to evolve human beings over the next century or two.

And for that, we turn to a great philosopher, a very smart man despite being a Yankee fan. Yogi Berra used to say, it's very tough to make predictions, especially about the future. So instead of predicting, let's take what's happening now with people like Tony Atala, who is redesigning 30-plus organs. Maybe the ultimate prosthetic isn't titanium; it's using your own genetic code to remake your body parts, more effective than any external prosthetic. Craig Venter and Ham Smith's work on reprogramming cells shows we can change organs' cells, making them more radiation-resistant, oxygen-efficient, or better at filtering toxins. Recently, George Church discussed inserting an entire human genome into a cell. Once that is possible, we ask: would you enhance the genome? Enhance the human body? What is ethical? Suddenly, we have a multi-dimensional chessboard where human genetics can be altered via viruses, gene therapy, or epigenetic changes, affecting future generations. All these combined lead to radically different humans.

Many people fear this, and there are risks. But why pursue fundamental human body changes? Lord Rees of Great Britain argues that since the universe is 100% lethal, extinction is inevitable. Biological order survives through small eddies that occasionally fail, leading to extinction events. With extinction likely, diversifying our species becomes a moral imperative, especially for living on Mars. Gravity and radiation require body redesigns for survival off Earth. Life civilizations range from Level 1 (altering appearance) to Level 4 (radical redesigns for interstellar survival), including oxygen modifications, radiation-resistant cells, and other extreme adaptations. Experiments by Floyd Romesberg and others show alternative DNA chemistries and amino acids can create life forms adaptable to different planets.

Another experiment in China involves transplanting hundreds of mouse heads. This tests whether new brains are blank slates or retain memory and consciousness, potentially enabling long-term consciousness in redesigned bodies for space survival.

Finally, why do this? Because this is humanity's ultimate selfie—Earth as seen from six billion miles away. To survive long-term extinction, evolving the human body becomes an ethical necessity, allowing future generations to explore and thrive in places we can't even imagine today. Thank you very much.