Creating the Super Human

[Dicebat]

Look I'm not a science boffin but I do have a great imagination!

If I had to fund scientists to create armies of super humans, how possible do you think it is for scientists to create them?

By super human I mean, a human that possesses qualities and senses of animals (or extremophiles) that can survive in the hostile environments where humans can't. A super human that can survive disasters where the average human being will perish.

What would it take to create the super human?

Quoted from a Live Science article titled: 34,000-Year-Old Organisms Found Buried Alive!

It's a tale that has all the trappings of a cult 1960s sci-fi movie: Scientists bring back ancient salt crystals, dug up from deep below Death Valley for climate research. The sparkling crystals are carefully packed away until, years later, a young, unknown researcher takes a second look at the 34,000-year-old crystals and discovers, trapped inside, something strange. Something … alive....

"...They're alive, but they're not using any energy to swim around, they're not reproducing," Schubert told OurAmazingPlanet. "They're not doing anything at all except maintaining themselves."...

The next step for researchers is to figure out how the microbes, suspended in a starvation-survival mode for so many thousands of years, managed to stay viable.

"We're not sure what's going on," Lowenstein said. "They need to be able to repair DNA, because DNA degrades with time."

Schubert said the microbes took about two-and-a-half months to "wake up" out of their survival state before they started to reproduce, behavior that has been previously documented in bacteria, and a strategy that certainly makes sense.

"It's 34,000 years old and it has a kid," Schubert said. And ironically, once that happens, the new bacteria are, of course, entirely modern.

Source

Imagine we could stop our DNA from degrading and we're able to enter a suspended-survival-starvation state?

Wild Things: The most extreme creatures

Extremophilic microbes are a wild bunch. They can be found thriving in some of the most hostile environments imaginable - swimming in near-boiling water, eating rocks, lounging in sub-zero temperatures, and hanging out where radiation levels rival nuclear reactors.

They're tougher than duct tape, boldly going where humans dare not and cannot.

Extremophiles are also a multimillion dollar-a-year business - some of them are employed to eat oil and help clean up spills. Others have important applications in medical research. But for many scientists, these hardy microbes are interesting because they suggest the potential for life on other planets.

Source

Okay forget life on other planets. If we can somehow get the human body's composition to also consist out of extremophiles, don't you think we'd be the ones sending intelligent earthlings to other planets?

Any further ideas, suggestions or thoughts on this?

 

[porchrat]

If you gave a human being the organs and physiology required to perform the sort of feats you desire they would no longer be human... they wouldn't look human either.

It would be pretty freaking cool though

 

[SoulTax]

If you gave a human being the organs and physiology required to perform the sort of feats you desire they would no longer be human... they wouldn't look human either.

It would be pretty freaking cool though

Hell yeah to that.

 

[porchrat]

You'd have to do it in the embryonic stage like we do with cloning. Insert the organism as a single cell or capsule containing the genome into an emptied out ovum of a genetically close organism and grow it from there.

Modifying an existing organism would be very complicated and for sure your creation would need to take immune suppressants for the rest of it's life and live in a room devoid of any bacteria or virus. Not exactly what I would call "super".

Either that or gene therapy but the effects of gene therapy wear off over time.

 

[Dicebat]

You'd have to do it in the embryonic stage like we do with cloning. Insert the organism as a single cell or capsule containing the genome into an emptied out ovum of a genetically close organism and grow it from there.

Modifying an existing organism would be very complicated and for sure your creation would need to take immune suppressants for the rest of it's life and live in a room devoid of any bacteria or virus. Not exactly what I would call "super".

Either that or gene therapy but the effects of gene therapy wear off over time.

It still doesn't sound impossible to pull off though. I mean, yeah there will be a lot of complications but look at how science has progressed over the past few decades... If they start with this now we'll have super humans within a century!

 

[porchrat]

It still doesn't sound impossible to pull off though. I mean, yeah there will be a lot of complications but look at how science has progressed over the past few decades... If they start with this now we'll have super humans within a century!

Oh definitely not impossible. It could be possible in less than a century I imagine but it depends on what you want to add and how you want to do it.

If you just want stronger muscles for example use gene therapy to influence myostatin formation and you'd probably end up with a dude that looks like a dragonballZ character. The gene therapy injections would need to continue on a regular basis for the rest of your life though to keep up the effect. However gene therapy doesn't overwrite the base genome so it isn't nearly as much of a problem. In fact we're messing with gene therapy already. One study I recall was trying to make fruit produce vaccines so that when they were consumed they conferred immunity onto humans.

To create things like enhanced sense of smell you're going to need to do more than just mess with gene therapy though. You'd have to alter physiology. Humans just aren't equipped to smell well. Obviously you can do that through genetic engineering but we would need a far greater understanding of the human genome and the genome of the animal we're pulling the genes from before we could even attempt it. That knowledge is growing fast though.

There are ethical concerns though. I mean cloning a human being is technically the same procedure as we used to make that cloned sheep all those years ago. The reasons we haven't tried it are mainly ethical.

 

[Dicebat]

There are ethical concerns though. I mean cloning a human being is technically the same procedure as we used to make that cloned sheep all those years ago. The reasons we haven't tried it are mainly ethical.

lol well, this is a forum discussion and we don't need to worry about ethical reasons for now... this is getting interesting.

So now from this discussion we're well on our way towards the design of a super human. We have a human that can suspend deterioration of his own DNA and enter suspended animation states where he can survive without having to eat. With his body's tissue made up of extremophiles, he can withstand extreme radiation, heat and cold in the most hostile environments.
He will have enhanced smell and vision and will look even less human with a possible snout of a silver tip grizzly bear which enables him to smell even fear and eyes that looks like an eagle's.... He'll be as muscular as a 'dragon ball z' character and will probably be able to snap human bones like toothpicks. So it'll just look like a monstrous creature in the end with discolored skin patches... but with the mind of a human nonetheless... we have to keep it human somehow, right?

What about:
Having an internal GPS like birds? - Now this is just instinct, I suppose.
Limbs in proportion to your body mass that enables you to jump distances like flea?
270 degree head movement like an owl?

We have the science here on earth for this and I believe that if a living organism has something special, humans can have it too (or we can re-create that somehow).

Now here's the biggest challenge too... weapons. A super human doesn't have to have weapons right? So what will stop a bullet from piercing its body? Essentially super-humans would probably be used in war situations. An exoskeleton, but that could restrict movement?

 

[porchrat]

lol well, this is a forum discussion and we don't need to worry about ethical reasons for now... this is getting interesting.

LOL I must admit I too am far less concerned about the ethics when it comes to things like cloning. Sure we have a whole lot of failed embryos but to me that is less of a concern.

So now from this discussion we're well on our way towards the design of a super human. We have a human that can suspend deterioration of his own DNA and enter suspended animation states where he can survive without having to eat.

What creature is capable of performing this feat?

With his body's tissue made up of extremophiles, he can withstand extreme radiation, heat and cold in the most hostile environments.

Well his body wouldn't be "made up" of extemophiles. You would just need to be able to express the proteins necessary to give protection. We don't need to mimic all the structures of the extremophile... in fact if we tried we would lose our own tissue specialisation. Extremophiles are usually pretty simple unicellular organisms and they lack the more complex intercellular communication mechanisms and tissue specialisations that we have.

He will have enhanced smell and vision and will look even less human with a possible snout of a silver tip grizzly bear which enables him to smell even fear and eyes that looks like an eagle's....

The human eye is actually rather pathetic. A very poor example of eyes. The eagle eye if I recall correctly isn't really that great for what we need as humans. The eagle can't turn the zoom on and off. They have an area of their eye that is permanently zoomed. Something we as humans could use is an eye structured more like the eyes of cephalopods (squid, octopus etc.). With the human eye where our optic nerve joins the back of the eye the nerves sit above our photoreceptors thus blocking them. As a result we have a blind spot right where the nerve joins the eye. We don't notice it because our brains "gloss over" this blind spot by predicting what would fall within it using colour and shape information from the surrounding areas of the picture. However if a person or something were within that blindspot we would miss them. The blindspot is also right near the centre of our vision... which is needless to say really annoying. With caphalopoda the nerve cells are beneath the photoreceptors meaning they have no blind spot. A far superior system to our own human eye.

He'll be as muscular as a 'dragon ball z' character and will probably be able to snap human bones like toothpicks. So it'll just look like a monstrous creature in the end with discolored skin patches... but with the mind of a human nonetheless... we have to keep it human somehow, right?

Weirdly enough myostatin conditions are natural as well. Some human beings are actually born like that. They live pretty normal lives but end up far shorter than they otherwise would have been because the skeleton has to try to grow against the force of all that muscle.

What about:
Having an internal GPS like birds? - Now this is just instinct, I suppose.

If I recall correctly it is not instinct. It seems to work off of electromagnetic fields. They have a sense organ for it at the top of the beak in pigeons.

Limbs in proportion to your body mass that enables you to jump distances like flea?

The problem is that muscle strength doesn't increase in proportion with mass. The bigger the animal gets the harder this sort of feat becomes. Kind of like the bigger the animal gets the harder it is to keep cool.

270 degree head movement like an owl?

I have no idea how that works. Maybe.

We have the science here on earth for this and I believe that if a living organism has something special, humans can have it too (or we can re-create that somehow).

That is what genetic engineering is all about. Taking the traits of one species and incorporating them into another.

Now here's the biggest challenge too... weapons. A super human doesn't have to have weapons right? So what will stop a bullet from piercing its body? Essentially super-humans would probably be used in war situations. An exoskeleton, but that could restrict movement?

Remember though that an exoskeleton is just that... a skeleton. It is actually what gives the animal structure. We have an endoskeleton. Chitin (the material insects use for their exoskeletons) is strong for it's weight but it isn't strong enough. Insects are the size they are because if they grew a whole lot bigger they would crumple under their own weight... their exoskeletons would be too weak to hold up their massive bodies. I don't know of a naturally occurring material that could stop a bullet... especially something designed to pierce armour like metal jacket rounds or depleted uranium. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist... just that I don't know about it.

 

[Picard]

Like this guy?

 

[Ronjay]

LOL, all I want is to fly, However I doubt that would be possible. If we tried to alter humans to fly all we'd end up with are birds. That's the problem right there, to gain attributes of animals, we'd have to alter human physiology to the point of no longer being human. For military purposes (I can see no other reasons why countries would invest billions in research of this nature) it makes more sense to increase human abilities rather then alter them completely. Increased strength, agility and speed even if it's only a small increase, would be very handy to infantry. But more important would be stamina, a soldier with the ability to cross long distances to a battlefield and then be able to actually fight he battle while being completely "fresh", is a real advantage. Also the ability to withstand higher G's in pilots would be desirable.

Giving humans things like eyes like squids, bullet proof exoskeletons, and all that kind of stuff I feel is impractical, if only that such a creature would still have to function as a soldier.

 

[HavocXphere]

Right now we don't know enough to do more than a few tweaks.

The prog on BBC knowledge the other day was pretty cool. By replacing the eye's lens a dude was able to see UV light (The lens normally blocks it). Pity that the retina won't last long w/ UV exposure like that.

 

[Ronjay]

Like this guy?

Damn. That's ugly. Photo manipulation fail.

 

[porchrat]

Like this guy?

On a serious note this is what happens when your body doesn't produce functional myostatin.

Most of these people go on to live normal lives. They just look like dragonballZ characters. If you wanted to make a human being stronger then that is where I would start. It already occurs in nature anyway. The only down side being that their lungs and hearts don't enlarge to match the muscle so there is the potential for heart failure or some hypoxia.

One of the children in this article (his story was actually the first time I heard of this condition) could stand supporting his own body weight a mere 2 days after birth. They have massively enhanced speed and strength.

 

[DCBloodHound]

Super humans could be possible but i would rather focus on something like the crysis suit then on human gene modification/manipulation since it's more practical (i think).

lol,humans on steroids for life.

 

[Givebest]

Did you watch movie Robot, if not you should then you will say if not human being atleast scientists should create robots who will be much stronger then human being and take care of our country too.

 

[Dicebat]

On a serious note this is what happens when your body doesn't produce functional myostatin.

Most of these people go on to live normal lives. They just look like dragonballZ characters. If you wanted to make a human being stronger then that is where I would start. It already occurs in nature anyway. The only down side being that their lungs and hearts don't enlarge to match the muscle so there is the potential for heart failure or some hypoxia.

One of the children in this article (his story was actually the first time I heard of this condition) could stand supporting his own body weight a mere 2 days after birth. They have massively enhanced speed and strength.

Now that was pretty fascinating. Never knew that even existed.

 

[SoulTax]

Now that was pretty fascinating. Never knew that even existed.

Ye a baby able to fully support his weight at 2 days old. Can you believe it. I thought I was quite cool taking my first steps at like 9 months. That kid woulda taken my playing blocks and I wouldn't have been able to do anything about it.

 

[porchrat]

Did you watch movie Robot, if not you should then you will say if not human being atleast scientists should create robots who will be much stronger then human being and take care of our country too.

I disagree with this in that building a humanoid combat robot is stupid. Human beings are not fast, not strong, not durable, we move inefficiently and we're upright and vulnerable to gunfire. If you're going to build a robot build it to task like we do currently. The reason the robots on car production lines don't look like humans is because humans are less efficient. So the same logic needs to be applied to machines of war.

Now that was pretty fascinating. Never knew that even existed.

Yea they're pretty close to superhuman already. They have on average 40% more muscle mass than a human being of the same size and skeletal build. They're far stronger and faster than us mere mortals . With humans the heart and lungs don't seem to be a big issue as a lot of these people go on to become athletes without any serious problems. The real problem comes in with the whippet I would imagine because it's rib cage is already quite small so there isn't much room for enlarged organs unlike humans.