Depiction of What Humans Might Look Like in 100,000 Years Creates Stir [VIDEO]

A new depiction of what the human face might look like in 100,000 years shows a man and woman with larger foreheads and eyes reminiscent of anime.

Developed by artist and researcher Nickolay Lamm and computational geneticist Alan Kwan, the images represent “one set of possible changes” based on several assumptions, including humanity’s relocation to space.

The enlargement of the eyes, for example, has to do with the colonization of places farther from the Sun where light is less available, Lamm writes in a post published on the site MyVoucherCodes.co.uk.

Furthermore, Lamm argues, the humans of the future will all have darker skin so as “to alleviate the damaging impact of much more harmful UV radiation outside of the Earth’s protective ozone.”

Finally, not only will people's eyes be bigger, but the whole human head will increase in average size in order to accommodate a growing brain size “as our understanding of the universe increases,” Lamm explains.

However, at the crux of the duo’s argument is this: all of these changes will be brought about not by natural selection, but genetic engineering. And while Forbes’ Matthew Herper, a reporter regarding science and medicine, agrees in a future of the manipulation of one's genes, he disagrees with Lamm's and Kwan's timeline.

While the researchers portray such technology as millennia away, Herper sites Harvard’s George Church and his book Regenesis as evidence that that the ability to alter DNA is a matter of mere centuries, if not decades.

Furthermore, Herper posted in his article several Twitter interactions with leading geneticists, including Leonid Kruglyak, the William R. Harman ’63 and Mary-Love Harman Professor in Genomics, who responded with an article about how humans’ brains have actually been shrinking.

Michael Eisen, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley also responded via a tweet, which stated that “we can’t really figure out how/why evolution happened, so I don’t put a lot of stock [in] predictions.”

In a response to Herper, Kwan issued a statement of his own, which the Forbes writer also posted.

In it, Kwan argues that neither he nor Lamm ever presented the project as science, but simply one man's idea of what might occur.

“Ultimately,” Kwan wrote, “you took one man’s speculation for a simple thought experiment and ‘exposed’ it for not being ‘real science.’”