My wife wondered if we are reaching the limit of human ability in athletics; I think we’re only reaching the limit of people who actually take part in those sports.
My wife wondered if we are reaching the limit of human ability in athletics; I think we’re only reaching the limit of people who actually take part in those sports.
Kinesiologists and mechanical engineers are the who. Ostriches have a radically different body plan than humans, one that’s mechanically much more suited to running fast. Add long, lightweight legs which bend the other way and hence have advantageous leverage and a stride length of 3 to 5 meters. (Usain Bolt has a stride length of less than 2.5 meters, and he’s an outlier among humans.) Even if we genetically engineered a hyper-fast-twitch muscle fiber and springy tendons, those would just tear apart our joints when paired with the body mechanics and locomotion style we’re working with.
That’s a lack of imagination. Why couldn’t we give a human legs like an ostrich? Maybe not achievable right now, but would you bet against it being achieved within 1000 years?
Or would you say that person with ostrich legs is no longer human? That gets to the deeper questions we inevitably get to with sports: what is fair? What does it mean to be human?
I really hate that Oscar Pistorious decided to become a murderer. His inspiring achievements with prosthetic legs actually were raising the above questions. I don’t think anyone questioned the fact that he’s human, but they definitely talked a lot about what fairness really means in sports.
Would that be a human with ostrich legs, or an ostrich with a human body? Indeed, there are a lot of philosophical questions, but if we’re allowing technological augmentation, then Todd Reichert is indisputably human and managed 144 kph.
Right, Todd Reichert raises another question: do we consider removable devices to be part of our body or not?
I think the ostrich question you raised has a bit of a simpler answer: does it have the mind of a human or the mind of an ostrich? That’s only a temporary reprieve though. Once we get into brain augmentation we have a whole other set of issues.
But even if we disallowed any augmentation whatsoever, there’d still be the issue of reproduction, selective breeding, and genetic engineering. Maybe you disallow gene editing and CRISPR, but how do you disallow selective breeding? It’s as basic as having the freedom to decide who to form a relationship with.