Pretty much the title. I keep hearing that we’ll have to change the climate deliberately and beneficially as in geoengineering or change ourselves to deal with climate change. When I hear the latter I can’t help thinking that sounds like a transhumanist project, but then the conversations shift to changing how we build our homes and cities. Well, I want to know how we can alter our bodies to deal with the new climate. It’s beyond anything currently offered on DT and beyond anything reallly in the works, but I don’t think it’s too early to think about this -if anything it’s a bit late. So let’s hear any crazy ideas anyone’s got.
The bigger issue is going to be, how can we make sure climate change doesn’t cause famine
That’s very true, but I feel like all of our efforts regarding climate change are either just a show or too little and too late. So I want to know what we who are willing to alter our bodies can do.
Unless it’s regarding food… there’s not a whole lot that will effect your body without causing a breakdown of the entire system
Being permanently sunblocked or having sunglasses in your eyes won’t help if you cant grow crops
5 degrees globally won’t cause a huge issue for your biology… but drought, rising ocean level, contamination of water from toxic algae blooms etc… will destroy the system around you
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Modify our bodies to run more efficiently on consumed calories. Low cal diets push our bodies into this mode by default but if we could keep this mode going with slightly higher calorie intake, it might extend our calorie efficiency.
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modify our bodies to accept only small amounts of calories at once to prevent wasted energy and prevent excessive storage (fat)
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That what I meant by
There’s also allowing our bodies to pull calories from things our bodies currently can’t digest properly
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Styrofoam… we might be able to do this with the addition of symbiotic microbiome flora in the gut that does the initial breakdown.
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I was thinking more along the lines of grass/hay/grains etc
One of the reasons cattle serve a large purpose in our food chain is a lot of farmland isn’t able to sustain things WE can eat, but cows and other grazing animals CAN, and then we turn them into calories at some point
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We might need a couple extra stomachs for that … physical maceration is key for that kind of stuff.
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I would like to photosynthesize
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I explored putting chloroplasts into skin cells one time. It was interesting… but there isn’t nearly enough surface area on your skin to do much beside feed your skin. That’s why leaves are big and thin as fuck… maximize surface area able to receive photons, and minimize feeding support structure. We’re more like bags of salt water. It wouldn’t do much but turn us green and maybe let us hold our breath for at least a few more seconds than normal.
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I’ve also encountered the “we must change ourselves, mostly from a social perspective to fight climate change” argument. And that one is almost always about pushing certain political views while ignoring climate change… But that’s another can of worms entirely.
With that aside, developing better and more efficient farming technologies can help a lot. Humanity is already pretty good at this, we’ve been getting better at farming from the day on which the agricultural revolution started and we should keep going.
Fritz Haber, a Nazi war criminal who invented a great industrialized way to get nitrogen fertilizer also invented and produced Zyklon B poison gas which murdered millions… but his fertilizer invention saved and made possible billions of lives… 
Just a bit of odd trivia that rattled to the surface there when thinking about farming and ag innovation.
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This kind of stuff is interesting because once we find a cheap source of energy like fusion, we can afford to boost agricultural production with innovations like this. Right now it’s not economically feasible to do this because of the cost of producing these types of lights and powering them.
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I kept hearing that fusion is making some actual progress and near to producing more energy than it takes… but I worry it’s the usual 20 years of clickbait
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It just blows my fuckin mind that not so long ago we were so hobbled by pot ash and bird shit being the only serious source of nitrogen fertilizer possible. My grandparents were raised on food grown that way. Like wtf.
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Maybe a good way to alter our bodys would be… sterilization? Like, if humanity keeps growing like that (with equally growing needs and greeds), we will inevitably reach the end of what this planet can stand.
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That reminds me of the German plumber who invented an implantable testicle switch and apparently managed to get it released as a product.
Ok, I’m starting to wonder how many of you will end up getting these installed just for the sake of implanting stuff that adds new functionality…
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Where these ever released? I remember reading about them as a potential alternative to a vasectomy.