It's the future man!
Forget the bush, the desert or the fatal shores, The Sydneysider has adapted to one of the planet's harshest environments: the city itself. In part two of our Future Sydney series, Time Out investigates what we'll look like in the Year 3000. Illustrations George Boorujy
From neanderthal to modern man, the only thing that hasn't improved in modern times is our posture
“Selfish, self-reliant, ready in resource, prone to wander, caring little for home ties – freed from the highest burden of intellectual development (yet) content with nothing short of a turbulent democracy.
“The male will be a tall, square-headed, strong-jawed – a masterful man, with full temples, plenty of beard, a keen eye, a stern yet sensual mouth, a capacious chest, bad teeth, and good lungs excelling in swimming and horsemanship. His wife will be a thin, narrow woman, very fond of dress and idleness, caring little for her children, but without sufficient brain-power to sin with zest.”
So said famous Australian author Marcus Clarke talking of Future Sydneysider back in 1877. Clarke was speculating 100 years into the future – in 500 years, he reckoned, “unless recruited from foreign nations, our breed will be wholly extinct” – but by then the Sydneysider had already evolved a good deal from the desperate men and women who had been shipped here with the First Fleet in 1788.
As electricity lit up the nights, our eyes grew stronger. As we spent less time on our feet, they grew slimmer. As the demands of physical labour lessened, we slimmed down. As medicine developed our susceptability to smallpox, polio and tetanus decreased and with the elimination of rickets, we grew taller. More time inside meant our skins paled. And as we became less dependent on tough, fibrous plants, hard bread and sugary foods our jaws and number of teeth shrank.
The 2008 forecast for the Sydneysider in the Year 3000 is staggering, beyond Clarke’s and all our imaginations.
For starters, we’ll live longer – at least to 120 years of age and perhaps as old as 600, because by then we’ll have overcome genetic-based diseases and laid to rest almost all the mysteries of biology. We’ll all self-medicate and the effects of ageing will be overcome by counterbalancing drugs. We might even grow younger.
Mentally, according to Dr Stephen Juan, an anthropoligist at the University of Sydney, we are currently experiencing the greatest spike in knowledge ever. “There are almost three billion google searches a month and the number of SMS messages sent and recieved every day is several thousand billion and growing – that’s a lot of answers coming back where they didn’t before. No wonder half of what students learn in their first year is outdated by the third and why it’s estimated that by 2049, the capacities of a $1000 US computer will exceed the computational technabilities of all the biological minds on earth.”
Physically, by 3000AD we’ll also be “trans-human” – part biological evolution, but full of artificial engineering, non-organic elements, synthetic substances. “All vital organs – heart, kidneys, bladder – will be replaceable in a hundred years. And although the central nervous system and brain will still be too complex to replicate, by the dawn of the third millennia, we’ll have artificial human robots tand super computers that will go far beyond anything the human mind will be capable of.”
Bold New World or a nightmarish vision of the future? You decide. As Juan says: “It’s vitally important we use future technology to it’s potential... otherwise it will use us!