[nkrisc]

Taking it seriously for a moment, that still seems outlandish even in a sci-fi scenario. The amount of changes that would be necessary to the body for a human to achieve autonomous powered flight would be substantial.

Given our overall density, we would need enormous wings and musculature. Consider that the heaviest flying birds alive today weigh maybe 40lbs and have a wingspan of 8ft or so. If we naively extrapolate that linearly then an adult weighing 160lbs would need a 32ft wingspan.

There were flying pterosaurs that weighed much more than the heaviest flying birds today, but they were also the size of small planes and it’s a bit of a debate how well they even flew. They may have struggled to even take flight.

So injecting yourself with some designer DNA isn’t just going to make you grow wings, it would have to completely transform you into a completely different creature, simply due to the physics of flight.

Additionally, you need not only to be able to fly, but your body needs to function well enough to stay in this new state. You would also likely need an enormous caloric intake to support the massive new growth, or it would take a very, very long time.

It wouldn’t be designing wings for a human, it would be designing a be creature based on a human but not human at all, really. Call me shortsighted but I don’t really see how that will ever be possible.

[slfnflctd]

"...are you suggesting coconuts migrate?"

Seriously, lesser-schooled folks don't realize the extent to which evolution took tiny variations over an extremely long time to achieve physical flight. The way it arose differently in pterosaurs, birds and bats is fascinating.

I think younger children are capable of understanding more about genetics than we often suppose. More of these concepts should be taught at younger ages.

[dyauspitr]

I have a bachelors in bioengineering, I’m not a “lesser schooled individual”. Just because evolution took a long time doesn’t mean we have to, you can run millions of simulations virtually, something that nature has to do over millions of years. Are the simulations going to be perfect? Probably not but there’s a lot that can be gleaned through simulations combined with observations in the real world.

[awwaiid]

(a) I like your analysis (b) maybe the wings are just for show so that you flap them out at clubs every now and then right when the music hits the drop or something and everyone is like WHHAAA????!!!!

[JumpCrisscross]

> it would have to completely transform you into a completely different creature, simply due to the physics of flight

In OP's defence, they never mentioned flight. Maybe they just want a peacock train.

[nkrisc]

Ok, fair enough. I hadn’t considered that. In my mind, wings you can’t fly with are worse than no wings.

[galangalalgol]

Tell that to am emu or ostrich, or don't, their claws aren't vestigial.

I would opt for smaller tweaks like an extra rhodopsin folding with longer features so I could see near (like tv remotes) ir. re-enable hibernation. Things some mammals already have would be good starts.

[nkrisc]

I meant as a human.

[hinkley]

A futurist I knew of long ago pointed out that the Moon’s gravity is light enough that the human skeleton could achieve sufficient lift without sustaining damage in the process.

True, you might have to be a junior Olympian to do it, but it’s possible.

On earth your pectorals would tear off of your sternum long before you achieved takeoff.

[BurningFrog]

I thought the same thing.

The lack of Moon atmosphere is a real problem though.

[hinkley]

Don’t bump into the top of the dome. You’ll get charged for disinfecting the equipment.

[abecedarius]

Heinlein, "The Menace from Earth"

[diego_sandoval]

All that energy will be better spent designing jetpacks powered by portable nuclear reactors.

[dyauspitr]

Your point seems to be that massive changes are required to achieve wings. I’m saying that’s not impossible and an acceptable modification to whoever wants to do this to themselves. As long as you can maintain the brain as is, I don’t see there being a problem with radically modifying the rest of the body.

Argentavis magnificens had a wingspan of around 24ft and weighed around 72 kgs or a 160lbs which is close to what an average human weighs.

If you compare growth rates to other mammals like elephants, I doubt a change like that would take much more than 5-10 years.

[nkrisc]

> As long as you can maintain the brain as is,

That’s the question, can a human sized body that can fly additionally support a human sized brain? I suspect you would have to spend nearly every waking minute eating to support both. Or at least a substantial portion of your day. No time for hacking, gotta eat.

You’ll probably have to pay full up front for this, as no one will finance you since you’ll be too busy foraging for sugary fruit or carrying livestock off to your eyrie to work a job to pay it back.

Finally, this raises another question I won’t even attempt to answer: is it even possible for you to still be “you” in another body? How responsible is your body, beyond just your brain, responsible for making you who you are?

[dyauspitr]

If it’s pure caloric intake there are plenty of dense fats that will let you do that without having to eat all day. Or your body could create all the proteins you need like silverbacks. Either ways, I’m saying in a sufficiently advanced society there should be enough ways to thread that needle to maintain what you want while modifying the rest. None of this is physically impossible.

[nkrisc]

No, not physically impossible to have large flying creatures. What I’m suggesting is that by the time you modify a human so they can fly, they’re not really human anymore.

But that may be more of a philosophical debate so I’ll leave it at that.

[nonameiguess]

It's about as close to impossible as you can get. If you tried to do it in the womb, too much deviation from a regular human fetus won't be carried to term. If you try to do it after growth plates have closed, you'd have to destroy every bone in the body first, which would kill you. That gives you some kind of post-birth, pre-puberty window over which some sufficient level of body remodeling can at least happen in principle, but you seem to be underestimating the level of remodeling to do this. You'd need to drastically reduce bone density, which would leave you extremely susceptible to injury. You'd have to undo human adaptations in the spine and pelvis for upright posture, which would be extremely painful. You'd need to effectively swap out the glutes with pecs and undo the adaptations for brachiating arms. Things like your eyes and ears and basic breathing apparatus are not well-adapted for flight. Things like where blood and lymph and other bodily fluids tend to pool in the human body versus where they do in the bodies of flying animals. Just as laying down for too much time will cause it to pool in places your body can't easily clear right now, being horizontal for flight would have the same effect.

It's not just a matter of growing wings. And yeah, the energy demands of making all these changes, as others have pointed out. The only kinds of animals that go through this level of non-fetal metamorphosis are insects with weights measured in the tens of grams, energy needs that kind be sustained by something like a cocoon. How would you meet the energy demands of an adult human going through metamorphosis? You couldn't do it by eating, not only because your gut can't actually digest the amount of food you'd need (you don't have an elephant gut) but also simply because being conscious through the process, unlike insects in a cocoon, would be so absurdly painful that I doubt you'd be able to function and do anything at all, let alone spend all of your time finding and eating food. You'd need to be put into a medical coma and injected with intravenous nutrients to have any shot at all.

Why on earth would we ever try this? In reality, giving yourself genes to grow wings would just kill you.

Look at this picture from Wikipedia showing Argentavis side by side with a human: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentavis#/media/File:62628-A...

What sorts of processes do you imagine are necessary to stretch the human body to the size of the Argentavis body without adding any weight? It'd be like getting flattened by a steam roller, then drawn and quartered. Bodily tissue isn't balloons.