My wife wondered if we are reaching the limit of human ability in athletics; I think we’re only reaching the limit of people who actually take part in those sports.
My wife wondered if we are reaching the limit of human ability in athletics; I think we’re only reaching the limit of people who actually take part in those sports.
Kinda but also maybe not
Records are continually broken and we do not know the limits when there is so much undiscovered talent and bodies combined w future technique and technology improvements
It’s kinda pointless to talk about but there are many genetic outliers who could dramatically push these limits but we will never know about them or get them in a position to train and try
We do know what human bodies are physically capable of. You can literally calculate that. With genetic outliers you can push this slightly, but not by a huge margin. There is a reason why so many records are still standing after 30-40 years. For a marathon, 2 hours is about the limit of human bodies. We reached that in 2023. Maybe someone can eke out a minute or two more, but without genetic manipulation or doping that’s it. The world records for long jump were set in 1988 for women and 1991 for men. The record for high jump was set in 1993. For these sports we have reached what human bodies are capable of. If they are ever broken, it will be by a few centimeters. No human will suddenly jump 10 meters.
Well there is always the Bannister effect, where when somebody breaks some arbitary record previously tought as unbeatable, multiple people start to beat soon.
Also i want to point out that before the 1991 long jump record was made in 1968. So it took 23 years for the record break that time and for those 23 years people also said we have found the human limit. Until the now standing record destroyed the previous one with 5cm. A huge increment.
Some records may only be capable of marginal improvement but those are still significant to break
I’m really not sure what point you’re trying to make
These are world records so the people involved absolutely care about small breakthroughs and that literally proves the human body was capable of more than we thought, even if just by a little
Who cares if it’s just by a little? We are operating at the absolute limit of performance where a small gain is actually huge
Humans are not set in stone, we’re constantly evolving. An ostrich can run 70km/h on 2 legs. Who’s to say we won’t one day have humans running that fast?
I don’t think you understand how evolution works. There is no evolutional pressure on humans to run long distances, jump far or high. And even if there suddenly were, it would take generations for noticeable changes. It’s much more likely that some parents let their kids be CRISPRd to create more red blood cells which would grant them an endurance boost or other such changes. That will probably happen in our lifetime.
Besides, your ostrich example is not helpful. A snow albatross is as tall as a small human and also has two. Maybe we will grow wings and fly!
I didn’t say anything about natural selection, I said evolution. Humans evolve by more means than natural selection. We also evolve through culture, through technology. And of course we still do evolve by natural selection, it’s just hard to see because the pace of technology is so rapid.
Take birth control as an example. It’s very recent technology. A blink of an eye in natural selection terms. You might think it would wipe us out by causing population crashes. But culture is evolving to counteract it. Cultural norms have already begun to shift heavily against birth control. I think it’s fairly easy to anticipate a future where birth control is not used very much.
Kinesiologists and mechanical engineers are the who. Ostriches have a radically different body plan than humans, one that’s mechanically much more suited to running fast. Add long, lightweight legs which bend the other way and hence have advantageous leverage and a stride length of 3 to 5 meters. (Usain Bolt has a stride length of less than 2.5 meters, and he’s an outlier among humans.) Even if we genetically engineered a hyper-fast-twitch muscle fiber and springy tendons, those would just tear apart our joints when paired with the body mechanics and locomotion style we’re working with.
That’s a lack of imagination. Why couldn’t we give a human legs like an ostrich? Maybe not achievable right now, but would you bet against it being achieved within 1000 years?
Or would you say that person with ostrich legs is no longer human? That gets to the deeper questions we inevitably get to with sports: what is fair? What does it mean to be human?
I really hate that Oscar Pistorious decided to become a murderer. His inspiring achievements with prosthetic legs actually were raising the above questions. I don’t think anyone questioned the fact that he’s human, but they definitely talked a lot about what fairness really means in sports.
Would that be a human with ostrich legs, or an ostrich with a human body? Indeed, there are a lot of philosophical questions, but if we’re allowing technological augmentation, then Todd Reichert is indisputably human and managed 144 kph.
Right, Todd Reichert raises another question: do we consider removable devices to be part of our body or not?
I think the ostrich question you raised has a bit of a simpler answer: does it have the mind of a human or the mind of an ostrich? That’s only a temporary reprieve though. Once we get into brain augmentation we have a whole other set of issues.
But even if we disallowed any augmentation whatsoever, there’d still be the issue of reproduction, selective breeding, and genetic engineering. Maybe you disallow gene editing and CRISPR, but how do you disallow selective breeding? It’s as basic as having the freedom to decide who to form a relationship with.