From chimpanzees to us to...
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00:00 What will humans look like in 10,000 years?
00:04 What about in 1 million years?
00:07 Will we look like this guy?
00:09 Probably not, but
00:11 we'll definitely look different than we do now.
00:14 What parts of our body would evolve?
00:18 How long would evolving our bodies take?
00:22 And who would win the survival of the fittest?
00:26 This is WHAT IF,
00:28 and here's what would happen if our bodies kept evolving.
00:33 It took roughly 6 million years
00:36 for humans to become what we are today.
00:38 And modern humans have only been around
00:41 for about 12,000 of those years.
00:44 Even in that short period of time,
00:46 humans have evolved slightly.
00:49 We've become about 10 cm (1 in) taller,
00:51 and now we can eat dairy foods after childhood.
00:55 So if those things can happen in 12,000 years,
00:59 where might we be hundreds of thousands of years into the future?
01:04 First, we should probably figure out exactly what evolution is.
01:09 Evolution is all about changes in the genetic makeup
01:13 that happen to a species over time.
01:16 Species with more advantageous traits
01:18 will tend to have more offspring,
01:20 so those genetic traits will tend to carry on to later generations.
01:25 For example, giraffes with longer necks who can reach more food
01:29 will be able to survive better than giraffes with short necks.
01:33 And they'll be able to have more babies,
01:35 who will likely have longer necks just like their parents.
01:38 And as time goes on,
01:40 the short-necked giraffes will die out,
01:42 and the long-necked giraffes are the only ones left.
01:46 That's why all our giraffes today have long necks.
01:50 So how does this apply to humans exactly?
01:53 Well, evolution in this sense is actually very hard to predict.
01:58 In the world we live in,
01:59 we don't need to worry about survival of the fittest.
02:02 Technology has effectively cancelled a lot of that.
02:06 You no longer need to worry about being the fastest or the strongest.
02:10 This isn't 100,000 years ago when you had to fight for your food.
02:15 Things like houses to live in and clean running water make surviving so much easier.
02:21 You never think to yourself, "How am I going to survive today?"
02:24 But that's something our ancestors had to worry about constantly.
02:29 It's not guaranteed that one million years from now,
02:32 humans will be stronger, faster, and bigger than ever before.
02:36 After all, having children today is generally decided by culture and personal choice,
02:42 rather than the need for our species to survive.
02:46 Our future will be decided by the traits of people who have children,
02:50 and how many children they have.
02:53 If people who are naturally overweight and have health problems
02:56 are the only ones having kids over the next million years,
02:59 then that's how the human race will end up.
03:03 But we might not need to worry about any of these natural occurrences.
03:08 Instead, we could become completely fused with technology before any of this happens.
03:14 Cybernetic arms, brain chips, and laser eyes could all become possibilities.
03:20 Not only that, but we also might be able to alter a baby's genes before they're born,
03:26 completely getting rid of evolution altogether.
03:30 This would allow us to get rid of diseases and any other genetic traits that might harm us.
03:37 But if we didn't have this luxury, and we had to evolve the old-fashioned way,
03:43 there's a few things that might happen.
03:45 We just need to look at how modern humans have evolved in the past 12,000 years.
03:51 We know we've been getting taller, most likely due to nutrition,
03:55 and that our brains have been getting smaller.
03:57 But don't worry, we haven't been getting dumber.
04:00 Our brains are actually becoming more efficient.
04:03 So in a million years, we might be incredibly tall humans with tiny heads.
04:09 Does that remind you of anything?
04:11 At the end of the day, human evolution is incredibly difficult to predict.
04:17 That's because evolution is primarily based on our environment.
04:22 And who knows what might happen to the Earth in the next million years?
04:26 We might need to evolve to survive fires,
04:29 as the planet will become so incredibly hot.
04:32 I so hope I'm not around for that.
04:35 Or in the next million years, we might live on other planets, like Mars.
04:41 Humans would evolve to look completely different there,
04:44 as they'd be living in entirely different conditions than here on Earth.
04:48 Wondering what living on the Red Planet would be like?
04:52 Well, that's a story for another WHAT IF.
04:56 (upbeat music)
04:58 [MUSIC PLAYING]