News Fiction Diary #5

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It is highly unlikely that humans will be any more or less diverse 1000 years from now than they are today. Radiation damage causing mutations will not affect this much.

Our most obvious example of dramatic evolutionary change (outside the lab) is in dog breeds. Humanity managed to breed all varieties of dogs from wolves in 10,000 years.

The key thing to note though, is that dogs reproduce much quicker. A dog is ready to mate in less than a year of its birth, whereas the average generation length for a human is measured as years in double-digits.

If it took 10,000 years to breed variety in dogs through controlled artificial selection, it's going to take far more than 10,000 years and some pretty powerful selective pressures to cause humanity to diversify as widely as dogs have.

TL;DR - Humans may have a little diversity in 1000 years, but nothing like what people think will happen.
 
TL;DR - Humans may have a little diversity in 1000 years, but nothing like what people think will happen.

You might be interested in Mostly Harmless by Kate Russell, which talks about a population that went to great pains to adapt itself to life on a high-gravity world, through both breeding and training. It's an officially licensed piece of Elite: Dangerous fiction, although real life may have the indecency to diverge from canon ;)
 
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