Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot Com. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: I'm Julie Douglas and this week co host Robert Lamb
Speaker 1: is off pursuing the lengthening of his tebo mirrors. At
Speaker 1: least that's what I think he's doing. Good luck with that, Robert.
Speaker 1: In this Encore presentation of Wind Beneath My Surgical Wings,
Speaker 1: we continue the dream of flight as a means to
Speaker 1: transcend the limits of our biology. So, without any further ado,
Speaker 1: I hope that you enjoy. Okay, So we've discussed in
Speaker 1: the past about how we have augmented ourselves before. I
Speaker 1: believe there's someone who had an ear grafted onto his
Speaker 1: skin um or rather that the tissue was grown for it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was in our performance art. Yeah, and um, you
Speaker 1: know we've had we've talked about people who have taken
Speaker 1: out ribs before to have like, you know, twelve inch
Speaker 1: waist um. We have certainly manipulated and bottle bodily modified
Speaker 1: ourselves to the extent where it's a little bit shocking.
Speaker 1: But you get two surgical wings or the idea of it,
Speaker 1: and is it that shocking? Yeah, it's it's that is
Speaker 1: the question we're gonna talk about in the second half.
Speaker 1: First of all, I do want to say just a
Speaker 1: quick thing about plastic surgery again. And when I was
Speaker 1: growing up and I would hear the term plastic surgery
Speaker 1: almost exclusively in reference to people who had new noses
Speaker 1: and or new chest augmentations. UM, I kind of had
Speaker 1: in my mind that it was plastic, like it was
Speaker 1: actual literally plastic, Like, oh, they have a plastic nose.
Speaker 1: It's like a humpty hump or something, you know, where
Speaker 1: it's just you know, set that right up there in
Speaker 1: their face, or that obviously breast implants. I was kind
Speaker 1: of like, well, that's kind of like plastic I guess
Speaker 1: you see them. I would see them in like Newsweek
Speaker 1: magazine and my grandparents had, and so I'm like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: that's plastic surgery. It's putting plastic in or on the
Speaker 1: body and making things new. You thought there are water
Speaker 1: balloons in there? Yeah, I thought there were water balloons.
Speaker 1: But but just for a quick primer, plastic and plastic
Speaker 1: surgery means plasticity. So essentially what we're talking about is
Speaker 1: flesh sculpting, and the idea goes back a long time.
Speaker 1: For instance, uh, skin graphs may have taken place as
Speaker 1: early as eight hundred BC, which is crazy to think
Speaker 1: about that, just the the idea that we were we
Speaker 1: were already figuring out ways to sculpt the flesh of
Speaker 1: the human body even in eight hundred BC. We have
Speaker 1: I mean, humans just can't help but tinker with themselves, right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And and certainly if there's a if there's a medical advantage,
Speaker 1: even if you're trying to help somebody, you know, improve
Speaker 1: their quality of life, I mean that and or appeal
Speaker 1: to their vanity, that's all. That's what you need to
Speaker 1: get to learn more about it and to get the
Speaker 1: research done to achieve the the already lofty heights the
Speaker 1: plastic searchery we have today. Yeah, and of course I
Speaker 1: was about to say, you know, the technology is commensurate
Speaker 1: with the procedures. So what you have in place is
Speaker 1: what is going to determine what happens with your body
Speaker 1: or how you decide to manipulate it. So, as we
Speaker 1: were discussing or later, Rosen proposed that, yeah, he thinks
Speaker 1: you could you could give people winks. Now, what would
Speaker 1: this consist of? How would this possibly work? Because when
Speaker 1: we're talking about plastic surgery. We're talking about sculpting the body.
Speaker 1: So it's most interpretations were not talking about making some
Speaker 1: wings and cooking them up in a lab and then
Speaker 1: just stitching them on the body. We have to essentially
Speaker 1: look to nature and see how nature flies. Right, Well,
Speaker 1: we have to look at nature, but we also have
Speaker 1: to look at the mind because this is an important
Speaker 1: part of the process. Right. Um, we've talked about how
Speaker 1: the mind also has its own type of plasticity and
Speaker 1: can certainly conform to whatever is going on with the body.
Speaker 1: And you've used the wonderful analogy of the horse and
Speaker 1: rider before that. It's not, you know, the two things
Speaker 1: aren't necessarily separate when you're talking about the mind and body.
Speaker 1: It's not the mind is the rider and the body
Speaker 1: of the horse, but it's both are one. They were
Speaker 1: essentially a centaur instead. Yeah, so you know you're this
Speaker 1: brain plasticity. Plasticity gives us the ability to make physical
Speaker 1: changes that are then incorporated by the brain. This is
Speaker 1: from the Doctor Dedelius article. Rosen explains that when quote,
Speaker 1: when we lose a limb, the brain absorbs its map
Speaker 1: or rewires it to some other center. Similarly, when we
Speaker 1: gain a limb, the brain almost immediately senses it and
Speaker 1: goes about hooking it up via neural representation. He said,
Speaker 1: if I were to attach a sonographically powered arm to
Speaker 1: your body, your brain would map it. If I were
Speaker 1: to attach a third thumb, your brain would map this
Speaker 1: as well. Our bodies change our brains, and our brains
Speaker 1: are infinitely mouldiple. If I were to give you wings,
Speaker 1: you would develop literally a winged brain. If I were
Speaker 1: to give you an echo location device, you would develop
Speaker 1: in part of that brain. I mean there's some truthless
Speaker 1: right now totally. I mean it's important to to do
Speaker 1: think in terms of brain mapping and and neural adaptation
Speaker 1: to these features. Because you can talk all day about
Speaker 1: sow in bits under your body, but if you if
Speaker 1: you can't, if they are not actually a part of you,
Speaker 1: if they're not part of that centaur uh that is
Speaker 1: the mind body connection, then it's really not a part
Speaker 1: of you or your body. So in a sense, whatever
Speaker 1: you dream up your brain can hang with. But um,
Speaker 1: it comes down to a matter of where really the
Speaker 1: rubber meets the road, and in the actual surgical bits
Speaker 1: that are put onto it, and in order to really
Speaker 1: look at that, you have to look at um a
Speaker 1: professor in plastic and reconstructive surgeon, Samuel Poor, who took
Speaker 1: on the idea of surgical wings. Yeah, from the Division
Speaker 1: of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at the University of Wisconsin.
Speaker 1: And he actually published an article about this idea, about
Speaker 1: the the actual the possible details of transforming uh normal
Speaker 1: humans into winged humans. And he did this after Rosen
Speaker 1: had made lots of ways with his discussion, So it's
Speaker 1: it was a response to Rosen's work where he says, Okay, well,
Speaker 1: that's assuming that this is something we want to do,
Speaker 1: and and and and actually there's someone out there who
Speaker 1: wants it. What would this consist of? How would we
Speaker 1: go about it as a thought experiment and as a
Speaker 1: plastic surgeon? What can I do? What could I do
Speaker 1: to the human body to give that body wings? And
Speaker 1: I love this because he really did respond to it,
Speaker 1: not just in the philosophical sense, but like, really, what
Speaker 1: have the nuts and bolts to make this happen? If
Speaker 1: you're going to take this thought experiment one step further?
Speaker 1: Because Rosen's ideas are amazing and it's great to sort
Speaker 1: of get caught up in them. But a lot of
Speaker 1: times he's kind of spitball in though, or at least
Speaker 1: I mean, maybe not in his own mind, but in
Speaker 1: terms of just how he's commenting to other people. He's
Speaker 1: not necessarily laying out a you know, a five step
Speaker 1: plan to make it happen. Um, but not outside of
Speaker 1: his own mind anyway. Right, Well, he knows all that,
Speaker 1: you know, he's he's pretty well informed about all they
Speaker 1: different fields that would take to make this happen. But
Speaker 1: you're right, he's not going to sit there and say
Speaker 1: it's here step one. Yeah. I pretty much have no
Speaker 1: doubt that he has it in his mind. Absolutely he
Speaker 1: sat down to say, like, how would you actually do this?
Speaker 1: But that's why I think it's so interesting that Samuel
Speaker 1: pour to this on because it does give you a
Speaker 1: sense of what the limitations are and what the possibilities
Speaker 1: are as well. Yeah, so in this article he asked, okay, well,
Speaker 1: all right, if we're gonna have wings, what what are
Speaker 1: the aspects of a bird wing that we would want?
Speaker 1: And in this article he does to deal exclusively with
Speaker 1: bird wings. Um. I don't know why I didn't think
Speaker 1: that much about bat wings. We'll talk about that a
Speaker 1: little more. But he's talking about bird wings, so evidently
Speaker 1: he as far as art goes, he is into the
Speaker 1: idea of of of an angelic figure with the big, lofty,
Speaker 1: feathery wings, which is beautiful, I'm telling, into that art
Speaker 1: change from from X Men. Yeah, like like like that
Speaker 1: character from from X Men or or any of you
Speaker 1: know painting you've seen of an angel. But but then,
Speaker 1: of course, the other side is we have plenty of
Speaker 1: images of fallen angels uh and and their kin creatures
Speaker 1: with bat like wings, which some might find hideous. Uh,
Speaker 1: some might find kind of appealing. Of the pictures I
Speaker 1: had on my wall in high school had anything, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, to do with that. But but but certainly
Speaker 1: he decides to focus just on wings with feathers. Sure,
Speaker 1: and why not, because I mean this is really the
Speaker 1: example from nature that we draw from the most. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so what does a bird wing have? First of all,
Speaker 1: it has those feathers for lift and insulation. It has
Speaker 1: a highly derived shoulder and a distinct thorax. Okay, so
Speaker 1: what else do we have to take into into account here?
Speaker 1: Then we have to we have to look at the
Speaker 1: human body. What do we have? Well, we have these arms, right,
Speaker 1: and when you look at a bird, what does it?
Speaker 1: Does a bird have arms? No, a bird has wings.
Speaker 1: So obviously we're getting getting to the point here. We
Speaker 1: have to realize if you're going to use plastic surgery
Speaker 1: to make what we have into something similar to what
Speaker 1: birds have, it's not going to be a matter of
Speaker 1: straping wings on on the back and turning us into
Speaker 1: six limbed creatures. We're going to remain four limbed creatures,
Speaker 1: but we're going to have to transform our arms into wings,
Speaker 1: which is something you don't see as often in our
Speaker 1: fantastic visions of winged humans. We tend to imagine that
Speaker 1: we still get to keep our arms and that we
Speaker 1: just have wings springing out of our backs. But the
Speaker 1: plastic surgeons of the world are here to say, actually, guys,
Speaker 1: if you really want those wings, you're gonna have to
Speaker 1: part with the arms. Yeah, and then you're not gonna
Speaker 1: be a big, fluffy white feather is just probably gonna
Speaker 1: be more like a turkey vulture. Yes, well, well I
Speaker 1: say that, but Professor Samuel Poor does say that in
Speaker 1: order for us to really get the right structure, we
Speaker 1: can't necessarily look at modern birds as the example, Um,
Speaker 1: we would be better off to look at something called
Speaker 1: the arch o optics and this is a bird that
Speaker 1: existed one and fifty million years ago. Yeah, because the
Speaker 1: archaeopter X has a very primitive wing structure. It's a
Speaker 1: very early model, okay, versus birds. Modern birds would have
Speaker 1: a very highly, very highly evolved, very advanced model of
Speaker 1: the of the wing. So if you're going to using
Speaker 1: the plastic surgery techniques that we have today, if you
Speaker 1: were going to transform our arms into wings, you really
Speaker 1: want to fit with go after something a lot simpler,
Speaker 1: because that's going to be something that we can actually
Speaker 1: achieve potentially arguably as opposed to really advanced structure. It's
Speaker 1: kind of like if you're adding onto your house, right,
Speaker 1: you have to take into account the existing architecture, the
Speaker 1: existing structure, What is going to work structurally as a
Speaker 1: part of the new house, What is going to work
Speaker 1: stylistically as part of the new house. And uh, you
Speaker 1: know it's just not always in the cards to take
Speaker 1: say a medieval castle and then build a highly modern
Speaker 1: structure on top of it. I mean, it's just you
Speaker 1: have to take into account the original form. So our
Speaker 1: arms are great arms but they're really crappy wings, like
Speaker 1: the crappiest wing possible because they don't do anything, you know,
Speaker 1: So to to actually change them into wings, were essentially
Speaker 1: having to backtrack on evolution and go think back to
Speaker 1: how wings really begin to evolve and take form in organisms,
Speaker 1: which makes sense, right, because you do, as you say,
Speaker 1: have to go back to the more primitive version if
Speaker 1: you're trying to make this, you know, from soup to
Speaker 1: nuts on a human being. It's a little bit ironic though,
Speaker 1: that you'd have to go back a hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: million years in order to get some sort of futuristic
Speaker 1: um structure for human wings because the archaeopteryx it had
Speaker 1: it was it was feathered, it was flying, but it
Speaker 1: had a far less complex wrist and shoulder, which is
Speaker 1: key because this is what really places it within surgical
Speaker 1: reach for us. Okay, so in this article, Poor lays
Speaker 1: out some possible steps to transform the arm into a wing.
Speaker 1: He talks about forming a distal row of carpal bones
Speaker 1: and marta carpals in our existing arm in to a
Speaker 1: carpo metacarpuss, which is essentially a buffalo wing. Delicious, yeah, uh,
Speaker 1: And a single fuse bone between the wrist and knuckle.
Speaker 1: So if you look if you look at at a
Speaker 1: picture of a human arm, and you see a picture
Speaker 1: of the of the wing of a of a bird
Speaker 1: or or in this case a flying dinosaur, then you
Speaker 1: see that. All right, we have the humorous the upper
Speaker 1: bone and the arm, both of that. But then when
Speaker 1: you're looking at at the lower portion of the arms,
Speaker 1: the lower bones, that's where you're talking about needing to
Speaker 1: fuse things together. Because do you ever see a bird
Speaker 1: using like a smartphone or typing on a keyboard? No,
Speaker 1: they don't need the digits, right, and the wrist knuckles
Speaker 1: alving one piece makes sense to write because they're not
Speaker 1: sort of waving their hands back and forth. Um. You'd
Speaker 1: also have to fuse the small finger, the ring finger
Speaker 1: in the index finger, although your thumb would remain free. Yes,
Speaker 1: that's good news. Yeah, so some video games are still possible.
Speaker 1: The hand and elbow would have to be fixed to
Speaker 1: prevent a too broad a range of movement. But but
Speaker 1: there's not any need for bone bony fixation in the elbow.
Speaker 1: You need movement. Um, so you make use of existing
Speaker 1: muscle and skin there. You redirect the bicep intendent of insertion.
Speaker 1: You use a tissue expansion techniques to cover all of
Speaker 1: this because you need skin over right, and then for
Speaker 1: non functional cosmetic wings, this is this is a really
Speaker 1: good stopping point, right because this is what you need
Speaker 1: in order just to support them around town. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And we're not even talking about the possibility of of
Speaker 1: sticking feathers in these things. That would be a whole
Speaker 1: separate thing to worry about, because what are you going
Speaker 1: to try and grow feathers? A You're gonna try to
Speaker 1: manipulate the body to produce feathers. Um, that's a whole
Speaker 1: kettle efficient and of itself. But just to transform your
Speaker 1: fleshy arms into fleshy bat wings, you could parade around
Speaker 1: talent in Yeah, this is where you would you would stop.
Speaker 1: And we know we can grow tissue, right, so in
Speaker 1: to actually grow the skin, that's not a problem, right. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, of course we're talking about pretty advanced technologies here,
Speaker 1: so I don't really see you just going into your
Speaker 1: local clinic and getting your your wings all done up.
Speaker 1: But again, in this idea of twenty to fifty years out,
Speaker 1: let's say you can't get these wings, um, constructed for you,
Speaker 1: and you really want to take flight, well, then you
Speaker 1: need to flap them. You need to flap those wings
Speaker 1: in order to even try to fly. And if you
Speaker 1: want to do that, you're gonna need high velocity rotation
Speaker 1: in the shoulder. So you're gonna need some pretty extensive
Speaker 1: shoulder reconstruction to make that possible. And of course you
Speaker 1: are going to need feathers. Now, this is particularly problematic
Speaker 1: because feathers are so specific to this species of subspecies.
Speaker 1: It's um something that has evolved for you know, billions
Speaker 1: of years, and it's not an easy thing to just say, oh, here,
Speaker 1: let's stick some turkey feathers and you'll be fine. Yeah,
Speaker 1: feathers are are very complex and really amazing um adaptation
Speaker 1: of flying organisms. Now, some critics of Poor's article, and
Speaker 1: I don't want to say critics, let's just say people
Speaker 1: having a lively discussion with him about this. They point out,
Speaker 1: we'll bats don't have feathers, so why should we feel
Speaker 1: limited to on on this whole feather argument? Why would
Speaker 1: that be a sticking point? Yeah, and we can talk
Speaker 1: more about bats, but for sure, this would this is
Speaker 1: a good model to go after. I think it's not
Speaker 1: just birds, because I really actually feel like abouts have
Speaker 1: more potential in this arena, and it would be so
Speaker 1: cool to wrap yourself up in bat wings and hang
Speaker 1: outside down. Yeah, all right, we're gonna take a quick
Speaker 1: break and when we come back, more about cervical wings.
Speaker 1: All right, and we're back, so I can I'm kind
Speaker 1: of already imagining, uh, like, super rich individuals in the
Speaker 1: future surrounding themselves with beautiful men and women that they
Speaker 1: have they have had surgically adapted into winged creatures, so
Speaker 1: they're just kind of like they're not flying, but they're
Speaker 1: just walking around their party like, well, they couldn't really
Speaker 1: hold a tray of drinks. I don't know what they're doing.
Speaker 1: I guess they're just walking around looking pretty and bird like.
Speaker 1: We'll see, and why not keep your own arms and
Speaker 1: then just do a separate wing structure too. Yeah, well
Speaker 1: that would just this, That would be even that would
Speaker 1: be higher hanging fruit. All right, Well, let's get back
Speaker 1: to the flight issue, because it's not just the feathers
Speaker 1: and the ability to to actually figure out in your
Speaker 1: dermos how to grow the feathers that you need, or
Speaker 1: to genetically game your body into doing it. Um, it's
Speaker 1: also the wing loading ratio. We would need really really
Speaker 1: large wings to support say a hundred and seventy pound body. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I mean look at the size of of flying
Speaker 1: animals in the size of their wings. Look at the albatross.
Speaker 1: Albatross is a pretty large creature and h and kind
Speaker 1: of a clumsy bird as well. You know it. Flight
Speaker 1: is not the most graceful thing for this this creature.
Speaker 1: So it's win but it wings have to be pretty big.
Speaker 1: And so you know, when you're looking at the at
Speaker 1: the wing ratio in an organism, and you're looking at
Speaker 1: the possibility of creating wings on a human from that
Speaker 1: human's existing flesh, sculpting their existing body into this Because again,
Speaker 1: you have a blump of clay, and you're gonna sculpt
Speaker 1: that lump of clay into a vase. That vase better
Speaker 1: have equivalent mass to that lump of clay. That's just
Speaker 1: the basic limits of of what you're working with. So
Speaker 1: if you're going to try and build wings big enough
Speaker 1: for the human for a human to fly, there's not
Speaker 1: enough material to go around. I don't care how much
Speaker 1: like butt flesh and extra bones have You're not going
Speaker 1: to build proper fliable wings. Now poor did say that
Speaker 1: four hundred sony pound body you would need about twenty
Speaker 1: ft of wingspan, which you know, then becomes sort of impractical,
Speaker 1: especially if you're taking mass transit can imagine trying to
Speaker 1: get on mortar with those I mean, I guess you
Speaker 1: could get like donor flesh, that would be about the
Speaker 1: only way you could really start looking at that. Then
Speaker 1: you're having to like scrap you could get, you know,
Speaker 1: flesh from a corpse, I guess, and and use that
Speaker 1: in the process. I mean, you know, it's not impossible,
Speaker 1: but it's like something to think about you that you
Speaker 1: just you can't completely just reshape the existing form into
Speaker 1: the flying form. There are a lot of other considerations
Speaker 1: to make. The blog Human Enhancement and Biopolitics takes on
Speaker 1: some of these issues, and in that blog they're talking
Speaker 1: about the larger problem, which is muscle, because birds, bats,
Speaker 1: and pterosaurs have really large peck muscles, and they're so
Speaker 1: large that they actually take up about thirty of their
Speaker 1: body mass. So that would mean that humans would then
Speaker 1: have to grow these bionic peck muscles that somehow where
Speaker 1: you know, maybe nano materials were used somehow lighter than
Speaker 1: actual muscles in order to really power yourself. Um. So
Speaker 1: again that's an issue of actually trying to take flight
Speaker 1: because we were pretty undeveloped, underdeveloped in our chest areas
Speaker 1: because obviously we don't fly and we don't need those
Speaker 1: those muscles. Yeah, I mean you get into a situation
Speaker 1: where the classic idea of just sort of the the
Speaker 1: art idea of angels with them and backs, that kind
Speaker 1: of thing. It's it's just more complicated than that. You
Speaker 1: can't just you can't just add something of another species
Speaker 1: to this animal and it to and expected to be
Speaker 1: a steamless transition. There are a lot of complex questions
Speaker 1: to come with that. Well, if you're gonna have those
Speaker 1: wings again, you're gonna need the pex to power of
Speaker 1: where are you gonna put those um because if you're
Speaker 1: if you're doing the model where the wings are on
Speaker 1: the back, then where the muscles in the wings. I
Speaker 1: mean it's it's sort of like in that article that
Speaker 1: we are discussed in the Center episode where you had
Speaker 1: a German surgeon who is looking at the at the
Speaker 1: Center as a mythological creature and saying how would that
Speaker 1: actually work? And when you get down into the the
Speaker 1: theoretic bo theoretical biology of that. They are all these
Speaker 1: different complications you wouldn't even possibly think of. Of course,
Speaker 1: the thing I remember was where do you put the
Speaker 1: penis front of back? I mean, you know, in some
Speaker 1: ways it's the same thing with wings, are there's no penis,
Speaker 1: but you have some of the same engineering problems. Um.
Speaker 1: Of course Poor did say that in microgravity zero gravity, um,
Speaker 1: it could be helpful to have wings, which is which
Speaker 1: brings us back to the where of principle and the
Speaker 1: idea that should can and can we adapt the human
Speaker 1: body to make it better suited to life on say
Speaker 1: a long space flight to somewhere, uh, to life in orbit,
Speaker 1: to life on another world, uh if it. If it
Speaker 1: one ended up making the argument that yes, small wings
Speaker 1: would be highly effective and navigating this environment, then maybe
Speaker 1: that's something we have to consider well. And again go
Speaker 1: back to bats, right, because as we've discussed before in
Speaker 1: our podcasts or episodes about bats, they are governed their
Speaker 1: their wing structure by a rogue finger gene. So if
Speaker 1: you look at the structure of a bat wing, it's
Speaker 1: really just a modified a million arm and it's got
Speaker 1: these Why you should call them fingers. They don't actually
Speaker 1: call them fingers, but if you think about their wings
Speaker 1: as sort of these fingers like the spokes of an umbrella,
Speaker 1: that's how they get the structure. So why not tinker
Speaker 1: with our own genetics to game our you know, jeans
Speaker 1: in the arm bud that begin to produce that this
Speaker 1: sort of hand that we have and have it spread
Speaker 1: out and you can take flight much easier because, as
Speaker 1: we know, with bats, they get their their lift by
Speaker 1: basically free falling from an upside down position and then
Speaker 1: catching the wind with their wings. Yeah. Not every flying creature, obviously,
Speaker 1: is a humming bird capable of just amazing quick spirited flight.
Speaker 1: You know, they can go from zero to a to
Speaker 1: a hundred, can take off vertically without any any problems.
Speaker 1: I mean some of these larger animals they have to
Speaker 1: fall off of something to achieve flight. Yeah. Plus it
Speaker 1: would be kind of cool to take flight that way,
Speaker 1: I think, just free fall upside down. Um. Of course, now,
Speaker 1: Poor in his his paper did say, look, this is
Speaker 1: just sort of not well, he didn't say, hey, look
Speaker 1: this is just an idea, but he did conclude by saying,
Speaker 1: despite advances in surgical techniques that could theoretically lead to
Speaker 1: the ability to construct wings from arms. It is evident
Speaker 1: that humans should remain human, staying on the ground, wandering
Speaker 1: and studying the intricacies of flight, while letting birds be
Speaker 1: birds and angels be angels. He had me to the
Speaker 1: and and let angels be angels. That then he was
Speaker 1: just really crossed. Now, I obviously Rosen would strongly disagree
Speaker 1: with this man's He would probably see Um see Poor
Speaker 1: as as someone with a limited um limited vision for humanity,
Speaker 1: whereas Poor is certainly staying more on the cautious realism
Speaker 1: side of things. Well, Poor also doesn't really address genetic
Speaker 1: tinkering as well. He's just sort of saying, what would
Speaker 1: we do right now with the materials that we have? UM,
Speaker 1: So some of the some of his discussion is limited
Speaker 1: by that. But there is this idea that is in
Speaker 1: the article doctor did alias Um and it is an
Speaker 1: idea put forth by Mary Douglas. She wrote in her
Speaker 1: anthropological study Purity and Danger that human beings have a
Speaker 1: natural aversion to crossing categories and that when we do,
Speaker 1: we transgressor and when we do transgress it we see
Speaker 1: it as deeply dirty. So that there's idea, this idea
Speaker 1: of like, well, if this is not human, it's separate
Speaker 1: from us, there's a danger in it. Yeah, which I
Speaker 1: think it comes back to the wing thing or even
Speaker 1: the center thing. It's one thing to have, like, oh,
Speaker 1: the top is a is a topless lady? In the
Speaker 1: bottom is a fish? Like that? Doesn't this maybe okay,
Speaker 1: at least to a certain extent, because there's this firm line.
Speaker 1: There's a distinction between the part that is animal and
Speaker 1: the part that is human. And when you get into
Speaker 1: you know, we've talked before about monsters. The idea of
Speaker 1: any kind of a monster is that it embodies an idea,
Speaker 1: especially any kind of monster, that there's half human half beast.
Speaker 1: It's ultimately about the competing higher and lower natures of
Speaker 1: our being, the part of us that thinks that we're
Speaker 1: above and being an animal, and the part of us
Speaker 1: that it is inevitably an animal. And we but we
Speaker 1: like seeing that division, even in our monstrous imagined creations.
Speaker 1: But when there is crossover, more crossover than we anticipated,
Speaker 1: that's where they getting that polluted area. When you get
Speaker 1: into models of a center that has a penis in
Speaker 1: the front, uh and or in the back. When you
Speaker 1: get into examples of oh, this person has wings, but
Speaker 1: it also means they have to have grotesque pectoral muscles
Speaker 1: to power it. Then the line become smudged and uh,
Speaker 1: and we begin to go a little a little. I
Speaker 1: was thinking about this in the context of bio gerontology
Speaker 1: and and our bearded friend Aubrey de Gray and in
Speaker 1: his quest to tinker with people at a cellular level
Speaker 1: in order to have them live upwards to five years
Speaker 1: a thousand years old. And I was thinking, well, how
Speaker 1: does that, How does all of this sort of jibe
Speaker 1: with post humanism, because surely that will be the thing
Speaker 1: to do when you reach two hundred years old, Like
Speaker 1: you just get bored and you say, why don't I
Speaker 1: go ahead and get those surgical wings I've always wanted.
Speaker 1: You know what if what does that world look like? Um?
Speaker 1: You know, do we have this possibility of of you know,
Speaker 1: very elderly people zooming around with their new wings with
Speaker 1: sort of angel faces faces to match when you just
Speaker 1: ultimately you're you know, talking about completely just casting aside
Speaker 1: any expectations about what a human is or should be
Speaker 1: in a physical level. And then to draw from Rosen's
Speaker 1: idea of plastic surgery. It also means that there are
Speaker 1: no constraints of the soul who you are. Hey, guys,
Speaker 1: that concludes our musings on trans humanism by way of
Speaker 1: bird and bat wings. If you want more of this
Speaker 1: kind of futurist fair as well as other offerings, you
Speaker 1: can find it on stuff to Blow Your Mind dot
Speaker 1: com and mind stuff Show on YouTube. You can also
Speaker 1: join us around the social media fire on Twitter, Tumbler,
Speaker 1: and Facebook. So here's my question to you, guys. Do
Speaker 1: you have a topic you feel really strongly about, one
Speaker 1: that you like us to cover and uh and to
Speaker 1: really delve into. Let us know at below the mind
Speaker 1: at house to words dot com. For more on this
Speaker 1: and thousands of other topics, visit houstuff works dot com