It just seems like it would be a really cool thing to have gills and be able to populate the oceans in the same way we populate the land. We could have houses and shops and vehicles, andgo on walks/swims and just kind of live underwater.
Start a whole new second species of human here on earth maybe, Who knows?
Crisper isn’t changing an organism’s genes to that extent. When you’re designing an immune response with rna injection or other changes brought about with cytophages you can only get crispier. It’s sort of like how you can’t double fry fried chicken. It’s already crispy once, it just gets burned and dries out.
While it’s definitely not possible with current tech, I don’t see why it wouldn’t theoretically be possible. It would be an insanely complex, multi stage process, though.
There’s not enough oxygen in water to support our metabolisms, even if we had gills.
Fish are adapted to conserve and use less oxygen, from slower metabolic rates to more options for anaerobic respiration that doesn’t poison oneself from within.
I don’t believe this. Sailfish, barracuda, tuna, huge mass, highly active… I’m sure they use a HELL of a lot more oxygen than I do on a good day. Gills extract MORE oxygen than lungs do, they’re more efficient.
My unscientific opinion tho.
This article estimates at a 40kg sailfish uses about 2.7 megajoules per day of energy when hunting. That’s about 650 kcal.
An 80kg human weighs about twice as much and needs about 3 times the energy, without even exertion.
Warm blooded animals spend a lot of energy just maintaining body temperature. Plus water doesn’t have very much oxygen in it, compared to the atmosphere.
Oh sure, if you’re going to use facts and science we may as well not even talk.
Seriously though, thanks for the insight.
Did Jeff Goldblum teach us nothing?
would
Have you been watching a fairly terrible late1990/early2000s tv series starring jessica alba? I’m pretty sure they had some fish-mutants.
I don’t think you can radically change a human’s environment that much faster than nature, especially not a system so critical as breathing. The whole organism (including the internal microbiome) needs to co-evolve with itself and the ecosystem it is to survive in - to function effectively as an independent organism. I don’t know how long it took cetaceans to evolve, but even they still breathe air at the surface - they’re really just big flappy hippos.
I’m sure it’s not impossible but I think you’d need, many, maybe thousands of generations for it to become something viable that can effectively provide enough oxygen to the other systems - or more likely adapt all the other systems to less oxygen. So it might have to live basically in a lab / sea-world for centuries. You might need scientists with unusual ethical standards to get to human - but an underwater rat? I’m sure you’d find a few Dr Mephestos out there eager to drown a few thousand of those.
Source: 100% ignorant opinion.
I was just thinking there’s plenty of creatures bigger than us with much more active lifestyles. And gills are kind of self-contained. Just slap them on there and away you go!
Hypothetically. 100% ignorant opinion as well.
