What Will Humans Look Like In 100,000 Years?

The future is always unknown, but that shouldn’t stop us from making educated guesses. That is what artist and researcher Nickolay Lamm and Dr. Alan Kwan, who has a doctorate in computational genomics from Washington University, did!

Their starting point was the question: “What do you think the human face might look like in 100,000 years and why?”

They reasoned out how humanity with advanced genetic engineering technology might reshape itself over time, taking over the role played by natural selection so far. Lamm then created a series of images of what he thinks the human face might look like 20,000 years, 60,000 years and 100,000 years in the future.

The first image is an unmodified photo of a man and woman from the present. Nothing special.

The 20,000 years image shows some changes, but they are not too major yet. Heads are a bit bigger to accommodate larger brains, and those yellow rings that you see in the models’ eyes are special lenses that act kind of like Google Glass does today, but in a much more powerful way.

In the 60,000 years image, we’re starting to see some major changes. Heads are even larger, but the eyes have grown too. Lamm speculates that this would be a result of human colonization of the solar system. Skin pigmentation would change and our eyelids would become thicker to offer more protection against UV rays.

100,000 years! Here Lamm predicts big changes, the most notable of which is the big Japanese Manga-style eyes that may feature “eye-shine enhance low-light vision to offer extra protection against cosmic rays. These futuristic faces follow the golden ratio proportions and are perfectly symmetrical from left to right, and have larger nostrils to make breathing in off-planet environments easier, as well as denser hair to contain heat loss from their even larger heads. Various implants might allow the man and woman of the future to always be connected, but these would be subtle and almost invisible.