Is This What Humans Look Like In 1000 Years?

According to a totally bogus “future human” prediction published by The Sun in 2012, this is what humans could supposedly look like in the year 3000. Basically, people are gonna look totally and completely gnar-gnar.

The story was passed around online like some kind of scientific crystal ball, but it wasn’t a formal study. It was a speculative newspaper feature built around predictions from several experts in anatomy, medicine, anthropology and psychology. In other words: interesting thought experiment, absolutely not a guaranteed preview of your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandkids.

What The Sun Predicted for the Year 3000

The future-human checklist was a lot. According to the feature, improved nutrition and medicine could make people taller, with the average person eventually reaching somewhere around 6 to 7 feet.

It also imagined shorter intestines that would absorb less fat and sugar, smaller testicles if male fertility continued to decline, and longer arms and fingers as humans became increasingly dependent on handheld technology. Apparently all that tapping and swiping was going to reshape us into long-fingered phone goblins.

Then came the head stuff. The article suggested that humans might develop smaller brains because computers would take over more of our memorizing and thinking. Paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer, then quoted from the Natural History Museum, noted that bigger brains are not automatically better brains.

The same prediction pile included larger eyes, smaller mouths, fewer teeth and receded jaws. Dentist Philip Stemmer even floated the idea that softer foods, liquids or pills could reduce how much chewing future humans need.

And because apparently the year 3000 needed one final insult, the feature predicted “quadruple chins.” It also imagined less body hair thanks to warm clothing and climate-controlled buildings, more wrinkles from staring at electronic devices and less variation in nose shape as people became less directly exposed to different climates.

Are We Actually Going to Look Like This?

Probably not in any neat, one-size-fits-all way. Human evolution is still happening, but it does not march toward a predetermined final design. Changes depend on inherited variation, reproduction, environment, migration and plenty of other pressures that are impossible to map cleanly a thousand years in advance.

That is what makes this old prediction so entertaining. Some of the individual ideas were attached to real observations about human biology and changing lifestyles, but stacking them together into one freaky future person turns the whole thing into speculative futurism.

Finally! A human uglier than I am.

When they find my DIY time capsule buried in the backyard and see my seventh-grade yearbook photo, they’re gonna think I was an angel. An angel with longer INTESTINES, smaller EYES, way more TEETH, yet somehow the same amount of CHINS.

Someone have me cryogenically frozen for a thousand years. These freaks are gonna make me their queen!