What If Humans Were A Different Kind Of Creature? | Unveiled XL

<h4>

What If Humans Were a Different Kind of Creature?</h4>

Have you ever wondered what it might be like to be a different species entirely? To ditch our human lives and soar like a bird, swim like a fish, or just generally live out your days in a fundamentally changed way? There are lots of bizarre and unusual directions you could choose to follow, and in this video we take a journey through all of them!

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; what if humans were a different kind of creature?

Humans can live almost anywhere on the planet. We’re capable of adapting to the harsh conditions of the arctic circle, the high altitudes atop the Andes, and even in the midst of tropical jungles. In fact, few species are spread as far and wide as humankind, with us even aiming to venture to the stars and colonise alien worlds. But could evolution have taken us down a totally different path? 

What if humans were cold-blooded creatures? 

First off, what do we actually mean by “warm” and “cold-blooded”? Neither are the best nor most specific of terms. Biologists would rather speak of “endothermic” and “ectothermic” creatures, referring to animals that either produce their own body heat, or don’t. As well as that, we have “homeothermic” or “poikilothermic” creatures, meaning an animal either maintains its own internal body temperature, or it relies on its environment to regulate it. All told, as humans, we’re endothermic homeotherms, because we produce our own body heat and maintain it ourselves, through our metabolism. Most other mammals and birds also do this, but cold-blooded animals – or “ectothermic poikilotherms” – are incapable of regulating their own temperature. That’s why you see lizards in the desert bathing in the baking sunlight, because they need to warm up their bodies before their muscles and brains can work. 

Interestingly, though, even these aren’t the only options that the natural world can throw up. Palaeontologists now believe that some dinosaurs were actually “mesothermic”, meaning that they survived via a combination of creating and maintaining their own body heat and utilising their environment. But for this video, let’s just focus on the basic, non-dino categories. 

If humans had evolved to be cold-blooded instead of warm-blooded, or even if we all miraculously turned cold-blooded overnight, one of the first big changes we’d all notice is we’d be eating less food. A lot less food. Even the so-called ‘king of reptiles’, the crocodile, can actually go more than twelve months without eating anything at all. They’re painted as ruthless killers of the deep, but typical crocs only average about fifty meals a year – or just one a week. If humans ate so infrequently – rather than tucking into three square meals a day plus snacks – our food bills would definitely be much cheaper, it’d also be much easier to feed everybody around the world, and we’d only need a tiny fraction of the land we use now for agriculture. Theoretically, nobody would ever have to go hungry. 

Of course, you still could eat three meals a day, if you wanted to. But, with the much slower metabolism of a cold-blooded creature, the calories wouldn’t have anywhere to go, and the added food would translate into fat. In lots of warm-blooded animals, fat is pretty important and essential – keeping mammals like seals and whales warm in freezing oceans, for example. But it could prove deadly very quickly were we cold-blooded, causing us to overheat and die. Luckily, as a cold-blooded being, you should never feel hungry enough for this to ever actually happen… but over-indulgence would definitely be off the menu. 

Assuming that you don’t eat too much, though, it’d actually be harder to get sick as a cold-blooded animal. The constant heat of an endothermic homeotherm (as we currently are) provides a perfect incubator for germs, which is why it’s so easy for us to get sick from just being near other sick people. But, if we were cold-blooded, our bodies wouldn’t be able to cultivate these germs as easily, staving off potential infections. There is a deadly caveat, though, because our new-found cold-bloodedness wouldn’t make it impossible to get sick; and if you did fall ill, the consequences could be dire. You may not spread your disease, but if you got just a little too cold – say your heating breaks, or the wind picks up when you’re waiting for a bus – your lowered body temperature could damage your immune system. If an ectotherm is too cold for too long, their body could stop functioning, leaving them wholly unable to fight off disease and infection. 

As warm-blooded creatures, we can live anywhere with relative ease, usually by just adding or removing layers of clothing. We can even survive the likes of Antarctica with the right equipment. But, if we were cold-blooded, the state of our environment becomes a matter of life or death every single day. Where most warm-blooded creatures maintain a body temperature of around 37 degrees Celsius, a cold-blooded creature is exactly the same temperature as its environment. So, if humans were suddenly cold-blooded, we’d be much better off living in jungles and deserts, along the equator and in the tropics, never straying too far north or south. If we did branch out to a colder region we’d need to build complex habitats, designed to maintain a constant, reliable, 24/7 temperature. Going outside for just a couple of minutes could result in death, so human settlements would have to be high-tech places – with our fundamental need for tolerable temperatures at their heart. 

Strangely, though travelling to places like Canada, Russia or Scandinavia would be a lot harder, travelling into space might actually be easier if we were a species of advanced ectotherms. This is because it’d theoretically be easier to go into torpor if we were ectothermic, which is a state of total inactivity some animals can enter by slowing their metabolism to a stop. Putting humans into deep sleep is a staple sci-fi idea, but it’d be all the easier if we could just do this naturally, without the need for complex technologies that we haven’t yet invented. Send some deep space astronauts on a shuttle to Mars and (if they’re cold-blooded) they could nap through the whole journey, meaning they needn’t take as much food and water with them, and they needn’t deal with the loneliness. Though, of course, actually living on Mars would be just as tricky for any ectotherm, since the Red Planet’s average surface temperature is minus-60 degrees Celsius. 

There’s one final thing that’s pretty important, though: brain function. The human brain uses about 20% of our current energy levels, which is 20% of our daily caloric intake. Clearly, if we only ate one meal a week, our human brains wouldn’t receive the same power to reach the same levels… It’s why the world isn’t really run by a race of advanced lizard people. If there actually were lizard people, they’d be evolutionarily obliged to spend most of their days sunbathing just to get their brains and bodies to work – and they’d have to stay stuck on the equator, to even begin to match the potential of a warm-blooded rival. So, even with space travel, the problems would again outweigh the plus points. Yes, we might stand more of a chance of actually getting to other planets, but would a cold-blooded crew be clever enough to work out what to do next? Probably not. 

With this in mind, if humans had always been cold-blooded, evolution wouldn’t have happened in even remotely the same way. We certainly wouldn’t be such a social species, and our hunter/gatherer instincts wouldn’t have developed as they did. Instead, we’d all have sat around waiting for our next meal to arrive, expending all of our limited energy on trying to catch it in one strike – just like real-world reptiles do. It’s why you see crocodiles floating ominously in the water for hours on end, biding their time, for absolute efficiency. Even if we did have some intelligence, we wouldn’t have needed to co-operate to do things like build, farm, and generally invent. The only time we’d ever really need to have met other people would’ve been for procreation. And, even then, reptiles and fish aren’t exactly known for their parental instincts, instead tending to leave their offspring to fend for themselves, or else ditch them before they’ve even hatched. And, as well as all of that, we probably wouldn’t even be bipedal. Instead, we’d crawl around, spreading our bodies to expose as much of our skin to the sun as possible, in order to increase our brain function. 

True, nobody would ever go hungry because of our extremely low metabolisms. But, we also probably wouldn’t care if anybody went hungry in the first place, because an ectothermic race of humans would essentially all be lazy, antisocial lizards. And, that’s what would happen if humans were cold-blooded creatures.

We humans typically perform most of our work during the day, under the light of the sun. But, actually, that’s not all that normal to a great number of other animals. Around 70% of all animals on Earth are most active at night instead; the clear majority. So, what if we were to join them? 

What if humans were nocturnal creatures? 

First, it’s important to note that just because humans aren’t altogether nocturnal, that doesn’t mean we’re naturally or wholly diurnal, either. While it’s true that, in real life, human circadian rhythms do favor sleeping with the lights out, and that there are a great number of benefits to our sleeping at night… primates in general don’t have set sleep cycles. Technically, they could move into a new ecosystem and choose whichever hours worked best for them, for convenience, efficiency, safety, and evolutionary sense. 

That said, it’s clear that we (as we are) descended from mostly diurnal ancestors… and that our typical “sleep at night” patterns have grown to be what’s best for us. Daylight activates chemicals in the human body that make us feel more awake, while darkness naturally lowers our blood pressure and temperature in order to prepare us for sleep. As many who’ve tried switching to night time working might testify, changing the habit of a species lifetime is no easy task. But still, had our ancient, evolutionary path taken even a slightly different direction, there’s a real chance that we may have wound up nocturnal, naturally. So how would that have looked?

In general, animals develop their bodies differently to fit with the hours of the day they spend most of their time awake. Nocturnal bodies are built to counteract the low levels of visible light during the nighttime, for example, resulting in nocturnal creatures often having larger eyes and wider pupils to capture more light. Sticking with just the eye, there’s also the Tapetum lucidum, a reflective layer in the eye of some animals, such as cats, that enables them to amplify the amount of light that enters the retina… and also causes the eye to glow in the darkness. More than just being better, though, our vision would also probably be very different. This is because it’s likely that our eyes would have evolved to have more rods in our retinas than cones, as rods pick up light sources easier while cones focus more on color. So, in just this one part of the body, it follows that if humans were nocturnal then we too would have tapetums, wide pupils, larger eyes, and a sharper (although perhaps less colorful) view of the world, via a kind of biological night vision.

A lack of light also causes some of the other senses to naturally become heightened, as well. The powers of hearing, smell, taste, and even touch can dramatically increase in creatures that have to hunt and survive at night. With vision impaired due to the darkness, some animals develop an increased sense of touch, for example, to better feel vibrations in surrounding water or through the ground; some rely most on heightened hearing to perhaps respond to an attack that they can’t actually see coming; or a better sense of smell can be used to to track predator or prey in the dark. 

So, nocturnal humans would also likely have improved senses across the board. What would this actually be like? Perhaps we’d have much more mobile ears that move around our heads to track sound; or longer snouts like dogs or mice to smell much more subtle scents in the air; or fibrous skin that can feel every tiny change and movement in the wind. We might find ourselves with an incredible sense of hearing like an owl or a moth, thermal vision that allows us to see heat like some snakes can, or even over 175,000 taste buds, like the catfish does. For all of those animals, their improved senses are in some way a reaction to the lack of light they experience - and so humans would surely be no different. 

This is a hypothetical scenario about more than just our physical characteristics, though. A switch to nocturnality would also affect our general behavior and even the way we run our societies. The most immediate and obvious change, were this situation to just happen suddenly, would be that humanity would now do most of its work during the night… and sleep during the day. Interestingly, this would probably result in far less artificial lighting on Earth. As it is, street lamps and the like are made to offer us the opportunity to comfortably extend our waking hours, if we choose to. But in this alternate, naturally nocturnal world, all the potential adaptations previously discussed would mean that we’d no longer need extra lighting. And, in fact, that increased lighting could actually do more harm than good. Similarly, cars probably wouldn’t have headlights anymore, as the strong beams could again be less of a help and more of a hindrance, or even a danger.

If humans were nocturnal, then, we’re imagining a version of life just slightly removed from our own, but one where instead of making the most of the day…  we’d all traverse the darkened streets amid the shadows, because that’s where we’d feel most comfortable. That lowered appreciation for color would have a dramatic effect, too, though… perhaps leading us to preferred living environments that are much less vibrant. Although we wouldn’t know they were less vibrant, because we could never notice it. 

The wider effects on society could be almost limitless. We’d now live most of our lives in naturally cooler, nighttime temperatures… so air conditioning would now be more about bringing down the heat during the lesser-seen day, because our tolerances will’ve swung toward colder climes. Topping up your tan would also be a thing of the past, because the vast majority of us would always be asleep when the sun is at its highest. You could substitute today’s nightlife for daylife, too, with raves and parties happening over the midday hours, and bars opening up just as the sun is rising. Shops would open their doors as the night set in; schools and offices would be full from the early hours of the evening until gone midnight.

The change would be felt by more than just us, though. We know that human society, as it is, has a massive impact on the natural world as a whole… so here the natural world would also need to absorb our living our lives at night. In many cases, this would mean now-nocturnal animals shifting the other way, to become diurnal… mostly just to avoid us. At the roots of natural history, one of the main reasons that many animals are nocturnal is because they’ve had to adapt to avoid daytime predators on the prowl, including humanity. But now, the night is where all the potential trouble would be for them… and so an upheaval of their own body clocks would be necessary. It perhaps wouldn’t be the same for all animals, though. Perhaps dogs would also convert to a nocturnal lifestyle if we did, given how closely they live with us. Traditionally useful “work animals” like horses and cows might soon be awake at night, too, due to our dependence on them… although the agricultural industries where they’re used will’ve also been flipped on their heads without sunlight, so there’s a good chance that nocturnal humans wouldn’t rely on them so much. 

Elsewhere, and finally, there are a wide range of other, less common adaptations that nocturnal animals have developed that could change how we function if we had them as well. Nighttime humans might come to possess echolocation like bats, for example, where we’d effectively be using our own voices to track targets and find our way around. Many nocturnal animals expertly use the night sky to navigate, so nocturnal humans might follow suit… ditching maps and GPS for just a much improved understanding of the sky above. We might even have developed our own version of bioluminescence as a means of communication, or even of attracting a mate - not unlike fireflies, glowworms, some mushrooms, and many deep sea species.

Overall, it’s clear that this is one “what if?” scenario that has massive and wide-reaching repercussions. Physically, nocturnality could totally transform our bodies; socially, it could influence so many aspects of our lives; and generally, with our being the apex predator on Earth, such a shift could have ripple effects throughout almost every other ecosystem in the world. And that’s what would happen if humans were nocturnal creatures. 

Humans are terrestrial animals, living on the land of every major continent, even for short periods of time on the cold and icy plains of Antarctica. But the vast majority of Earth’s surface is actually covered in water, and so many of those waters remain wholly unexplored by us. In an alternate world, that might’ve been very different.

What if humans were underwater creatures?

The aquatic ape hypothesis is an anthropological theory that certain human traits, those which separate us from other primates, are the result of our species having had semi-aquatic lifestyles in the distant past. It was first proposed in the 1960s, and supporters of the theory argue that characteristics like our lung capacity and the fact we walk on two legs are evidence that humans were once a more aquatic creature. It’s said our ancient ancestors needed these specific adaptations so that they could wade into the sea, dive and catch shellfish, which meant they needn’t compete so much for food on land. It’s also put forward as a way to explain some of the potentially useful traits that humans don’t have; like our not having thick hair or fur to keep us warm in the winter, because that fur would’ve been disadvantageous in the water.

Though the aquatic ape hypothesis does have one glowing endorsement from the world-renowned documentarian Sir David Attenborough, it isn’t taken all that seriously by the majority of other scientists. This is because most believe that it just doesn’t hold up to deeper analysis, and that all of the human traits which supposedly support it are actually better explained in other, simpler ways. That our hairlessness, for example, is more likely linked to sexual selection or body temperature. Our apparently increased lung capacity and breath control compared to other primates is believed to be better linked with our ability to speak. And finally, our being bipedal just isn’t that unique… with plenty of other primates capable of walking on two legs if they choose, we’re just the only ones that do so constantly, most likely because it takes less energy to walk on two legs than on four. The other major criticism of the aquatic ape hypothesis is that we’re also not actually that good at swimming or diving - not compared to other aquatic and marine mammals, at least. And our senses - our abilities to see, hear, smell and touch - are also severely impaired while we’re underwater.

Whales and dolphins are intelligent, air-breathing mammals, much like us, but they’re obviously different to us because they’re built and evolutionarily designed to live their entire lives in the water. Humans, as we are, just can’t compare. The world record for the longest time a person has held their breath for is (an admittedly quite staggering) twenty-four minutes, but the average is significantly less. Contrast that with just the average for, say, sperm whales, and they can go around ninety minutes before needing to come up for air. The longest recorded time that any whale (and, indeed, any mammal) has held its breath for is 137 minutes. It’s not only true for whales and dolphins, though; animals like seals and otters also breathe air but can also comfortably hold their breath for ages. And seals and otters have fur, showing that our hairlessness is hardly a sure-fire sign that we’ve ever been a natural fit for water. 

Perhaps the aquatic ape theory would be more widely supported if we had stronger, real-world adaptations to make us more like marine mammals… but we just don’t. It’s not the only way this alternate reality could play out, though. Many non-mammalian creatures get oxygen via gills instead of lungs, for example, and the aquatic humans from various myths and legends often have a similar setup. Merpeople folklore has existed for thousands of years, and the mermaids in the stories aren’t part whale or part seal, they’re part fish… with a fishtail and often gills. Familiar as these storied merpeople are to us, however, they’re a totally different prospect to the contentiously proposed aquatic apes of our own distant past. But, maybe there’s a middle ground. Some have theorized that something like the aquatic ape idea could in fact be part of our future. The diver and oceanographer Jacques Cousteau famously suggested that, one day, humans would take to the water and evolve into a new species; a species he called homo aquaticus. Perhaps we could view Cousteau’s future human as an amalgamation between aquatic ape and merperson… but what would a homo aquaticus society really be like? Would it be recognizably human at all?

Again, we can take our lead from the natural world that does already exist, as there are some sea creatures that already order their societies in similar ways to us. Whales travel in large, familial pods, they take care of their young for a long time, and it’s even been found that some have regional accents and dialects. If humans were underwater creatures, then, we’d still have our families around us, and we’d still have local communities and a hometown (or home bay). We probably wouldn’t have cities but, after a large community of octopuses was discovered off the coast of Australia in 2017 and dubbed “Octlantis”, there’s reason to believe we would still group together. The ocean is wide, but aquatic humans could still be social creatures.

In almost all other ways, though, we’d have to be totally different animals. It’s simply too difficult to accomplish many of the things that humans have on land, underwater. One of our most important tools, for example, fire, doesn’t fare well underwater - which means no cooking or developing complex metals to build with. But even if we had fire, the free physical movement we enjoy on land, the incredible dexterity in our hands which has enabled us to craft all kinds of things, from clothing to skyscrapers, would no longer be there. We’d have lost so much of that mobility because of the weight and density of the water - something which would only get worse the deeper we travelled. Octopuses and whales might be some of the most intelligent, non-primates on the planet, but they still don’t have hands and fingers… because they would never be able to use them. And that’s crucial. If humans lived underwater, we wouldn’t have hands and fingers, either.

Of course, being an underwater creature and living underwater aren’t necessarily the same thing. And humans, as we are, have made various efforts to build suitable, human-specific habitats under the waves. But, again, there have been problems. Building anything underwater has proven a puzzle down the years, but efforts were led by Jacques Cousteau, again, in the 1960s. Cousteau, who is arguably humanity’s greatest ever advocate for underwater living, helmed multiple projects to build human-inhabited villages under the sea[1]. But, the remains of these ultimately abandoned villages, specifically Continental Shelf Station Two or “Conshelf Two”, can now be found definitely uninhabited at the bottom of the Red Sea. Conshelf Two is large, yellow, and bizarre looking - more like a spaceship than a submarine - but, for one whole month in 1963, six people (who were dubbed oceanauts) did live and work inside it. That’s really as far as we’ve got, though, with the few underwater bases that exist today still operating mostly as short-stay research labs rather than long-stay settlements. And, although Cousteau remained a believer that humans were destined for the sea, land-mimicking labs like these aren’t about to trigger in us any kind of evolutionary adaptations to turn us into a new, truly underwater species. 

The reality is that if anything ever happened to force us into the water as we are now, any kind of disaster event, then humans would be in serious, almost certainly un-survivable trouble. If, in an alternate world, humans simply were underwater creatures, though… well, we’d look and behave drastically different to how we do now. If even parts of the aquatic ape hypothesis are true, then perhaps our fairly hair-free bodies wouldn’t change all that much… but we probably wouldn’t have hands, or feet, because we wouldn’t need them, because we wouldn’t be building things all the time. If we retained the need to breathe air, then we’d have had to have developed far superior lungs to what we have now. Or we’d need to have ditched air altogether and grown gills… in which case everything not covered in water - the mountains and valleys and cities - would be our great unknown instead. Where, as we are, the bottom of the sea is a place of infinite mystery, if humans were solely underwater creatures it would be the rocks and trees of dry land that would capture our imaginations most of all.

The ability to fly is common throughout the animal kingdom. The majority of birds and insects can, and there are fish, reptiles, and mammals that can fly, or at least glide, as well. But for a number of reasons, it isn’t a gift which stretches to humans, who have long been firmly grounded on Earth. But that could soon change…

What if humans could fly?

In the early twentieth century, after hundreds of years of trying, humans finally achieved flight when the airplane was invented. But the plane has never truly been able to offer the same level of freedom to humans as wings do to birds. Learning to fly a plane is costly, and actually buying one is even more so… commercial flights are pricey too, and they come with tight rules and regulations, as well as rigid timetables and flightpaths. And, even if you are lucky enough to own your own plane, you’re still limited by how much fuel you can carry and what the weather’s like. As exciting and generally crucial to the modern world as airplanes are, then, in a perfect world there’s surely a better way to fly than this?

One of the earliest stories of human flight comes from the Ancient Greek myth of Icarus and Daedalus, where Daedalus builds artificial wings and uses them to escape King Minos. The myth’s tragic ending wasn’t because the wings didn’t work, but because the wax in them melted when Icarus famously flew too close to the sun. Thousands of years since the story was first told, however, and we still haven’t managed to build real-world artificial wings capable of lifting a human. If, in prehistoric times, enormous dinosaurs like the quetzalcoatlus – which was the size of a giraffe – could get off the ground, then why can’t we? 

The simple answer is because we’re too weak. Far too weak. Birds and insects specifically evolved to fly have incredibly powerful muscles for the task. The humble hummingbird, for example, may be tiny but it can flap its wings as many as eighty times per second in order to hover. You could strap wings to any human being in history, but we’d never, ever match that. Our arms simply aren’t powerful enough for lift off. There’s a little more reason for hope with our legs, though… which is why bicycle-powered flying machines are often seen in science fiction. The Igor I. Sikorsky Human Powered Helicopter Challenge - wherein participants have to build a human-powered machine which can fly for at least sixty seconds - was first launched back in 1980… but it wasn’t until 2013 that the AeroVelo Atlas - a vast, winged, pedal-powered apparatus - finally won the $250,000 Sikorsky Prize. The Atlas’ huge size, however, means that it won’t be mass-produced anytime soon. If humans ever want to fly en masse, then, we’ll need something more than just our standard biology, even when it is aided by ingenious inventions.

So, we’re now talking superheroes. Would we ever be able to invent or develop a means for us to fly like Superman, for example? Well, probably not. A fun fact is that even Superman wasn’t meant to fly, originally. His original power was just leaping - being able to jump really, really far - and it was only changed to flight to make it easier for the artists to draw him. In later versions of the DC canon, the explanation for the Man of Steel’s flight is maybe even stranger… where it’s said that Krypton’s powerful gravity means that Kryptonians have natural anti-gravity abilities everywhere else, which enable them to fly on Earth. So, on Superman logic, one way humans could all fly is if we ever developed working anti-gravity… but we’re currently a million miles away from doing that, unfortunately. 

Still, not all superheroes are off limits for us. Marvel’s Iron Man generally flies using ion thrusters powered by his arc reactor - and there is hope for the future when it comes to this type of technology. While the exact tech as seen on Tony Stark doesn’t exist yet, there have been various attempts to recreate it - some more successful than others - including an effort by Adam Savage from “Mythbusters”, using small jet engines mounted onto a titanium suit.

This approach essentially amounts to a jetpack, with jetpacks long having been symbolic of what the near future might look like - along with hoverboards and flying cars. And we do actually already have working jetpacks… we have done for years, they just come with a whole host of issues. One of the biggest being that they generally work by strapping either a rocket or a jet engine to a person’s body… which both uses a ton of fuel, and comes with all sorts of safety concerns. In a world where jetpacks were common, though, there’d also be the problem of jetpack laws determining who can fly them, where they can fly them, when and how fast. Everyone would need jetpack lessons to obtain a jetpack license, and there would be a dedicated arm of the police force to enforce the rules. And yet, although we’re still a long way away from all of that actually happening, we’re much closer to everyday jetpacks than we are to ever being able to actually fly. 

Which… is a shame. Because if we could just naturally develop wings or introduce them to the human body like some kind of extreme body modification, then we’d sidestep a lot of the problems that jetpacks bring with them. In this world, flying would be no more or less obstructive or dangerous than walking is now. It wouldn’t require fuel, it wouldn’t need a license, it would just be the norm… with people only colliding into each other mid-air whenever they got distracted. If humans were born with wings, then they’d have to learn to fly in much the same way as we have to learn to walk… but, after that, the mishaps should be at a minimum. Travel in general would certainly be a lot easier for the individual… as we’d no longer be limited to just roads, bridges and airports, but could move freely anywhere we like. For the authorities, however, human flight would make monitoring and regulating travel close to impossible and would turn borders obsolete. Not only would we have a birds-eye view of the planet, then, but it would be an open world, too.

More specifically, we’d see flight incorporated into sport, with the fastest flyer being the this-world-equivalent to Usain Bolt. We’d also see it impact the fashion and clothing industries, with products specifically designed for wings. Perhaps we’d even see the advent of treetop businesses - like bars, shops, restaurants and cinemas - now that everyone could access them easily. At the very least, we’d see purpose-built platforms on high-rise buildings, to provide places to rest. And inside those high-rise buildings, we wouldn’t need stairs or elevators anymore! There would, of course, still be some limits to where we could go, with it being impossible to fly too high without struggling to breathe and experiencing airborne altitude sickness. And we’d still need some sort of flight police to make sure that individual fliers never cross-paths with a jumbo jet - if jumbo jets even still exist in this world. It’s a good bet that they would, though… after all, humans can swim but we still need boats to travel any distance of length. 

Finally, though, we might be giving up that ability to swim in this new world. Many biologists believe that humans, as we are, originally evolved from creatures that crawled out of the sea. But it’s long been speculated that there’s a trade-off in the natural world between swimming and flying, one that’s best exemplified by penguins - which can’t fly but use the same muscles and techniques as other birds to be expert swimmers. In a world where the skies were our own, then, would the waters become inaccessible? Would we lack the lung capacity or buoyancy to swim? Or perhaps our wings would simply get in the way? Maybe, in this alternate reality, we’ll have developed a quarter million dollar prize for the first person who could create a human-powered submersible, so we could once again see how the other half lives. And that’s what would happen if humans could fly.

Which of these alternate realities do you find most interesting? Which of all the various skills and abilities discussed in this video do you wish that human beings had for real? The natural world is already a strange, strange place… but it would become even stranger if our own species were ever to adapt and evolve quite so dramatically. Because that’s what would happen if humans were a different kind of creature.