While predicting the human appearance in the year 3000 might seem like familiar speculation, scientists are exploring radically different possibilities for human evolution. They believe humanity faces a crucial turning point: either we adapt to our environment and evolve as a species, or we decline and potentially develop physical abnormalities.
People’s complexion is not under inspection and though the model is not particularly dark, the human body’s future may be in more ways than one.
Mork and Mindy
From 1978 to 1982, an American situation comedy, Mork and Mindy, brought down to Colorado a creature that was only partially human. More was played by the late great comedian Robin Williams and Mindy by Pam Dawber, who was one hundred percent human.
Ironically, a 3D model has been created of “Mindy”. Mindy is the successor to Emma, the sickly work colleague of the future, who was created in 2019 to illuminate the challenge of good workplace conditions.
Emma was manufactured by researchers after interviews with more than three thousand employees about their health problems and anxieties.
If Emma was a product of fears of workplace conditions, Mindy is a product of the terms of labor in the post-COVID-19 era in which so many more now work from home. The Mindy model is a product of a simulation based on reflections of how the human body will mutate over the next eight decades.
Unlike Mork, humans are not yet predicted to naturally sit on their heads. Neither are they thought to have special powers emerging from the index finger. It is debatable whether “Mindy” or future humanity is predicted to evolve or devolve.
Humans in the year 3000: An agenda for the future
Scientific research is supposed to be pursued objectively when pursuing the look of humans in the year 3000. Still, if all research is sponsored by someone with an agenda, in this case, the model of “Mindy” is a product. It is an offshoot of those concerned with more than future looks. Rather, its focus is how smartphone technologies are impacting the human body.
Since the usage of computer and smartphone technology is nearly universal, scholarship about it can be used to anticipate how the body will change as a result of its use. It appears that is at least one motivation for these studies, framing the research as the outcome of a dystopian destiny.
The human body, broadly speaking, adapts to the environmental circumstances surrounding it. This long-term slow mutation happens in response to tasks humans pursue and especially the tools people wield. If this is so, future human hands and necks will be shaped differently.
Humanity may evolve to have claws instead of the shape of our present hands for holding a smartphone. The human neck may be bent to more conveniently look down at our personal computers. Humans may even become hunch-backs, as they were sometimes in the past. Their progress as humans was only charted when they learned to walk and stand upright.
Constantly sitting at a desk for workplaces the torso out in front of your hips. It causes your upper body to not be properly aligned. Your body should be stacked straight. The human neck should not be constantly leaning over your chest. This might strain neck muscles now. However, in the future, this simply might be what humans will look like.
Texting may mold human arms differently, as the positioning of elbows is slowly and naturally transforming. In scrolling through smartphones or holding them up to ears, the body evolves.
Thicker skulls and smaller brains
The human body may evolve to have thicker skulls in response to radio-frequency radiation emitted from smartphones. This is why some scientists and researchers believe that the low-energy level end of an electromagnetic field issued from items such as cell phones or microwaves could be potentially harmful.
Yet if we continue to use computers and smartphones at the same rate over the next eighty years, something might have to give. Many people sleep with their smartphones under their pillows. for example, which not only may lead to get new forms of cancer on a mass scale, but also the development of thicker skulls or just maybe end up with smaller brains.
In 2011, the World Health Organization argued smartphone radiation is potentially carcinogenic. This means some people can get cancer from it. A 2018 study by the Swiss Tropical Health Institute found that mobile phone usage can lead to memory loss.
In the same year, Dr. Jennifer Cross of Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City commented on a National Institutes of Health (NIH) study that found children who have more than two hours of screen time scored lower on language and thinking tests.
According to the study, children with more than seven hours of usage per day had shrinking brain cortexes. The cortex is the area that relates to critical thinking and reasoning.
Mindy’s evolution, as the model shows, may include humans’ development of a second eyelid. If research into computer screens causing headaches, eye strain, and blindness is well-established, our bodies may evolve to limit the amount of light to which our eyes are exposed.
Mindy’s sideways blink, coming from another inner eyelid that protects from excessive exposure to light from tech devices, plausibly may be the final evolutionary change to our futuristic, tech-effected human.
A second set of eyelids for humans in the year 3000
The Mindy model, likely organized to think about the future of legal liability and work burdens impacting the human body in relation to smartphones and computer usage, at least as it has been popularized, appears to have neglected an important matter.
The human body does not evolve uniformly. Feasibly in the human future, if the body evolves a second eyelid to combat radiation and excessive light, everyone will not have this second eyelid. With a second eyelid, however, another way of seeing may evolve. How we think about the human image in relation to the body’s appearance as it pursues sight may also change.
In the past, projections for what humans would look like in the future suggested a darker or mixed racial uniformity unfamiliar to us today. Under the racial gaze, the visibly “mixed” person is often characterized as a minority.
A dystopian future
The intention here was to move beyond the old assumptions of what humans would look like in the year 3000. The future of humanity is supposed to be “darker” with fewer blue eyes. It is not that such projections are improbable, nor undesirable. Rather, it can be exciting to see a new take on the look of humanity in the cards.
While the “Mindy” study is focused on smartphone usage and how our bodies may evolve or devolve as a result in a dystopian future, those with second eyelids may be deemed inferior or superior. And since everyone will surely not simultaneously be born with this extra pair of eyelids, the prospects of interracial marriage may be newly imagined.
This is not to suggest that this is a desirable future or there is actuality a plurality of races in the world. We actually can never tell what evolution may bring. However, there may be great suffering or injustice in the name of a futuristic vision that will help people. Doubtfully, those concerned with legal liabilities for smartphones or charging fees for healthcare in the future can be little worried about that.
