Fellow author @Thremos has recently published an article about the human body and how many things it does are regulated by itself --pretty much without us having to think about it or having any control over it. His article (link below) inspired me to write this article.
Let's get started with one of his examples
Take for instance breathing. You do it automatically. And if you are perusing a strenuous task, you automatically breath harder.
The same is true for our heart beat. It speeds up if we do strenuous tasks. But sometimes, it also speeds up in situations where it is not necessary. Or not even helpful at all. Sometimes, it is even a hurdle: Imagine you want to give a presentation and your heart starts racing... Your body does it by itself, but your body isn't helping you with that...
The body's self-regulation doesn't end there
It's really amazing how many processes our body regulates by itself. Fortunately and unfortunately, I might add. It's great that we don't have to constantly remember to breath and to remind our heart to beat. But there are also downsides to our body's autonomy.
Just think about trying to build muscles as an example. How do we do that? We spend a lot of time and effort in the gym lifting weights or doing bodyweight exercises just to stimulate our body to grow its muscles. If you had full control over your body and could decide to grow muscles just like that, all this effort would be unnecessary. After all, all we do with the exercises is to tell our body "you're not strong enough, build more muscles" or "your endurance is not sufficient, improve it". Our workout is more or less just a crude way to communicate with the automatic regulation of our body. The muscles don't grow during the workout, they grow afterwards in the time you take to recover from your workout. And basically, all our body needs to grow muscles is the proper food. And the signal to do so. 💪
Another example is aging
If I could, I would have stopped my aging process a couple of years ago already. I constantly feed my body with fresh food. All the building blocks it needs to rebuild itself. And what does it do? It slows down its own rebuilding. 😐 I wish I could speed it back up. That would probably make me look much younger again. And injuries would heal a lot quicker. My body used to know how to do that when I was younger. And now it either seems to have forgotten how to do it. Or it is unwilling to do so. 🙄
What if we could take full control over our own bodies?
If we had great control over some or all of the the processes governing our bodies, there might be unintended consequences. If we sped our cell division back up, that would probably increase our chances to develop cancer as well... If we could grow muscles without putting in any effort, we would build a great physique, but not build the character and obtain the virtues that go along with it.
Would our world become a utopia or dystopia?
I believe that so far, most inventions and discoveries had their side effects and their downsides. That said, mankind has always found a way to make the benefits outweigh the downsides. Maybe not right from the start, but at least after the side effects became apparent.
My conclusion
Generally speaking, I believe that any invention or discovery can and will eventually be used for the improvement of our world.
The only exception is an invention that either directly eliminates us or that has the potential for a run-away-effect. I will explain what I mean by that in a future article about AI - Artificial Intelligence. Stay tuned!
The comments
What would you like to change about your body? Would you want to live forever?
Let me know on the comments!
This is the article by fellow author @Thremos which inspired me to write this article. If you liked this article, you will most likely also enjoy his.
hmm, I think I don't have anything in mind to change some parts of my body. I had fun reading this one especially on the Aging paragraph, it is because the more we age our body is also aging our organs will work slowly unlike before when we are you. If we can able to heal our wounds faster and stop aging we will be tagged as “monsters” and we will be immortal. Immortality is sad, we will see our loved ones died while we wont and probably be left alone and lonely in this world 😆