Man of the Year Million
The above 1893 newspaper drawing forecasts what humans may look like in the "year million." It accompanied an article on our possible evolutionary direction that appeared in The World on December 3, 1893. "The Man of the Year Million" was a notion that HG Wells also explored. (Loren Coleman reposted the 1893 article over at Cryptomundo because the drawing bears an uncanny resemblance to a 1977 sketch of a cryptid called the Dover Demon.) From the 1893 article in The World:
In some of the most highly developed crustaceans, the whole alimentary canal has solidified into a useless cord, because the animal is nourished by the food in which it swims. The man of the year million will not be bothered with servants handing him things on plates which he will chew, and swallow and digest. He will bathe in amber liquid which will be pure food, no waste matter assimilated through the pores of the skin. The mouth will shrink to a rosebud thing; the teeth will disappear; the nose will disappear-it is not nearly as big now as it was in savage days-the ears will go away. They are already folded up from what they were, and only a little tip fast vanishing remains to show that ages ago they were long-pointed things which bent forward and backward to catch the sound of approaching enemies."1893 'Dover Demon' and the Man of the Year Million" (via Robert Schneck)
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There is a certain nerdy obsession with efficiency which informs this -- when you live in your mind, bodily obligations seem onerous. See: Vonnegut's "Unready to Wear" etc.
I should know, as a primary victim.
- GimpWii
Darwin said the primary factor in contemporary human evolution is sexual selection.
Kurt Vonnegut also explores the man of a million in his novel Galápagos, with the help a few catastrophic events.
When that day comes around, will he be able to yell:
"Tonight we're going to party like it's Nine-hundred-ninety-nine-thousand-nine-hundred-ninety-nine!"
So in 1893 the readership of a mass publication had no problem conceiving of Evolution in action.
We keep messing up our planet and eating GM foods, ya.. we could end up looking like this.
I just got through reading "Galapagos" & that's a spitting image of Vonnegutt's description of the human a million years into the future. I wonder if he came across this image during his research for the book.
@OP: Here's Wells' prediction, including an illustration from Punch, both available at Project Gutenberg.
@3: Creationism is a relative recent construction (1960s, IIRC). Although more people believed in gods in 1893 than do now, back then they were trying to fit all these new scientific notions into their faiths. Nowadays, believers can better afford their cognitive dissonances.
There needn't be any direct connection between this and similar depictions. A lot of attempted extrapolations of the course of human evolution pretty much just take the differences between us and our closest relatives (other primates), and exaggerate them. Or just remove anything the author associates with "the wild" or even manual labor, and exaggerate anything else for the "hyper-civilized man," whether it's depicted as sickly and corrupt or as the embodiment of pure, higher intellect. Of course, evolution doesn't especially work that way, but it's still a common trope.
Compare and contrast with typical descriptions of "grey" aliens.
Fun to speculate, but this kind of stuff perpetuates the misconception that evolution is continually driving us toward one form or another.
I blame that classic illustration showing the ancestry of man as a series of apes gradually walking more and more upright. A better way of understanding evolution would be a diagram showing the various branches of the hominid family tree.
Evolution is about species change to cope with environmental changes. Some species have stayed pretty much the same for millions of years because their evolutionary niche remained relatively static (insects for example). Since we humans have gotten pretty good at manipulating our environment to suit ourselves (maybe too good), there hasn't been meaningful evolutionary change in our species for thousands of years. Assuming we don't wipe ourselves out or otherwise do some fancy tinkering with our genome, the humans of One Million AD may still look pretty much the way we do now.
It does not too distantly resemble the "greys" aka "Roswell Aliens", which is kinda interesting. Or perhaps it was the other way around.
Ah, time... you never know which direction it moves.
Does this mean we won't be able to do oral sex anymore? I don't want to live anymore!
It looks a lot more like a third stage Guild navigator from the Dune universe, if you ask me. Down to the description of floating in amber fluid and having a rosebud of a mouth.
if sea levels keep rising and there is more viable food/environment under water, then maybe man in year million will be more like dolphins or whales than post-embryonic land crabs as illustrated.
who really needs technology if all of life's real needs are met? maybe the great whales of year two thousand are already more evolved than man?
maybe that stinker of a movie Waterworld might be too far fetched. get rid of the silly "smokers" and hammy acting, so the sub-mariner adaptation over a million years is not unreasonable. The big question is why would there only be one? I mean besides it being Kevin Costner and his ego not leaving enough room in the sea, that is.
"Since we humans have gotten pretty good at manipulating our environment to suit ourselves (maybe too good), there hasn't been meaningful evolutionary change in our species for thousands of years." - 11
Then after a long period of living in that well-suited environment we may evolve to no longer have an immune system. But I don't see evolution, itself, going away.
"Since we humans have gotten pretty good at manipulating our environment to suit ourselves (maybe too good), there hasn't been meaningful evolutionary change in our species for thousands of years." - 11
Actually, as an example of recent meaningful evolution if you like dairy products and can eat them without any unpleasant side effects you can thank a rather recent (since people started domesticating animals) genetic mutation that causes some human populations to continue producing the enzyme lactase after the weaning period and on into adulthood. It's also the reason why peoples of non-european or east african (as the mutation arose twice indpendently) have higher incidences of lactose intolerance.
Really, with 6+ billion people in the world the human species probably is evolving faster than at any other point in history as we have a higher chance of getting those one-in-a-billion helpful mutations with each new kid.
That said, if that were my kid up there I'd at least make them wear pants.
@10--yes it also illustrates the Lamarkian misconception that traits people acquire through frequent use will be passed down to future generations.
@2 I think this is a fascinating comment, and it's obviously true: released from natural selection, the future evolution of people will be dominated by sexual preference. And without natural selection to hold back e.g. breast size those features would be comically emphasized. In a million years everyone might look like Angelina Jolie.
But it seems pretty clear that we'll have figured out how to manipulate our evolution well before then. How about in a million years we've specialized our classes like an ant society?
@17 with 6+ billion people we're evolving more SLOWLY than at any other point in history...intense evolution requires population bottlenecks.
"the nose will disappear-it is not nearly as big now as it was in savage days.." Thank God evolution will prevent my descendants from having this cumbersome, barbarous thing called a nose. What will their archeologists make of our air fresheners?
Its good to know mankind will still be break dancing in the year 1 million.
@16 & @17
In fact most mutations are silent, hence the availability of 'the molecular clock'. Furthermore, evolution is mostly only dependent of the rate of mutagenesis, r, because:
a) Population effects cancels out since the number of mutations scales with population size: mut ~ N,
b) The propability of spreading to the whole population decreases with population size: P ~ 1/N (mostly for neutral mutations).
So the number of new mutations is:
r * mut * P = r
- in which r in turn is dependent on solar UV, smoking, asbestos, alcohol, cosmic and terrestrial radiation, free radicals etc.
Therefore, our modern lifestyle will probably accelerate mutation, but sexual reproduction will at least select the ones that look good. Then again, if everybody decides the Elephant Man was sexy that will be the end of humanity.