Writing

Human beings still have wisdom teeth. Our spines aren’t very good at standing us up straight. Our recurrent laryngeal nerves make a biologically unnecessary trip down into the thorax before making their way back up our necks. And we’re woefully inefficient food processors, producing far more waste than would be biologically necessary if someone decided to make a human from the ground up.

But… We’re also very, very smart.

Human biological engineering is becoming more and more a science fact, rather than science fiction, and that got me to thinking: What if we could engineer away our own inefficiencies?

Take food, for instance. Imagine you could rework your stomach and intestines to extract far more from what you eat than you currently do, turning your body into a super-efficient calorie-extracting machine. Imagine one meal keeping you sated for a week, after which you would… ahem… excrete whatever tiny amount of matter could not be used as fuel in any way, in the form of one small, hard pellet.

From an environmental and humanitarian standpoint, such a biological change would be of extraordinary benefit. No more starvation, no more squabbling over land resources for growing food… It’s hard to imagine a down side. Overnight, overpopulation concerns are gone, or at least staved off for a day far in the future.

And what about water? Why do we need to urinate at all? If we were more efficient, everything that currently comes out as urine could be included in your weekly excretion. We could stay hydrated on maybe one cup of water every two days. The drain on the world’s waterways could disappear practically over night.

And sleep? What if you could improve your sleep efficiency such that one hour a night was enough? Or even take a pill that negates the need for sleep entirely? Who wouldn’t jump at the chance to spend an extra eight hours a day with their family and friends? Or earn a little extra income with an additional part-time job? Or, to make it more personal, have the time to work on that novel?

I know some people would be horrified at the concept of a human being as thoroughly bioengineered as I’m describing, but why? Is there a downside? If so, what? Sure, I’d miss eating lots, but that’s because I’m biologically wired to crave food. What if I wasn’t?

And how would society change to accommodate a human race that eats once a week, drinks very little water, and hardly ever sleeps? What other changes can you imagine that would make us more efficient?

Have you noticed that we live in The Future yet? I have. I realized it while I was on the biofuel-powered mass conveyance machine this morning. Anyway, I looked up from my portable network terminal (on which I was simultaneously reading about vat-grown organs and receiving wireless audio signals) and found myself genuinely considering, for the first time, the possibility that I might someday become functionally immortal.

After all, scientists have already demonstrated that simply by reducing the speed at which DNA structures called “telomeres” shorten, they can make worms live 20% longer. Studies are already under way on telomerase, and other gene therapies that at least theoretically counteract some or all of the effects of aging.

Of course, there are other paths life-extension technology could take. We don’t even have to wait for the day limb replacements get better than the real thing; that day is already here.

I wanted to share these thoughts with someone. I considered using my portable network terminal to engage in instantaneous verbal communication with someone — that someone could very well be anywhere on the planet — but decided against it. Such conversations are a little rude in close quarters such as the conveyance I was sitting in.

So I kept it to myself. However, the towering heights our collective technological genius has reached left me feeling dizzy all day, from the moment I used a magnetized strip embedded in polyvinyl chloride acetate (a credit card) to purchase breakfast, to the moment I decided to use a large-screen portable network terminal to write this essay and simultaneously share it across half a dozen different virtual network locales (websites).

What would our burgeoning sciences look like to species on other worlds (some of which we can now take actual photographs of)? When I visited NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratories, I met a man whose job description is basically “drives robots on Mars with his phone.” We must appear to be getting fairly high-tech to the little green men now, if they’re out there.

In some ways, this is something of a bittersweet thought. The science fiction I read when I was a child has been outstripped by a reality I couldn’t have imagined back then. And the pace of improvement keeps increasing. Sometimes I’m afraid any story I write will be obsolete by the time it’s published. Writing fantasy has frankly become easier, because no scientific advancement will ever render stories set in magical worlds any less realistic than they already are.

But… We’ve won. And by “we,” I mean science fiction writers. We’ve dreamed of futures filled with spaceships and robots and computers and everything else for so long, those dreams have affected the reality we live in. Scientists and inventors look to science fiction for inspiration, and find ways to turn it into science fact.

We live in The Future, and it’s goddamn awesome.