Asklemmy

Did Jeff Goldblum teach us nothing?

cd ~/me
npm install gills —save

Yes, but being able to change genetic code does not mean being able to design entire organs and pop 'em in there during fetal development. That would be very challenging.

Gene editing has the most positive potential when it comes to things like curing/eradicating genetic diseases, doing microbiological research, or engineering metabolic products in microorgsnisms.

maybe?, if we accept the mountains of dead human babies the research would inevitably produce.

Changing the color of your eye take so much changes that's impossible todo it, gills is going to need so much changes, and we don't even know what most of our genes do

Have you been watching a fairly terrible late1990/early2000s tv series starring jessica alba? I'm pretty sure they had some fish-mutants.

I don't think you can radically change a human's environment that much faster than nature, especially not a system so critical as breathing. The whole organism (including the internal microbiome) needs to co-evolve with itself and the ecosystem it is to survive in - to function effectively as an independent organism. I don't know how long it took cetaceans to evolve, but even they still breathe air at the surface - they're really just big flappy hippos.

I'm sure it's not impossible but I think you'd need, many, maybe thousands of generations for it to become something viable that can effectively provide enough oxygen to the other systems - or more likely adapt all the other systems to less oxygen. So it might have to live basically in a lab / sea-world for centuries. You might need scientists with unusual ethical standards to get to human - but an underwater rat? I'm sure you'd find a few Dr Mephestos out there eager to drown a few thousand of those.

Source: 100% ignorant opinion.

Pretty sure you can already get those you just need to have sex with enough siblings and cousins

Yes, but not very good ones, probably. We're endotherms (hot blooded), and as a result we burn like 3 times as much oxygen as a similarly-sized shark. You'd need a lot of gills.

The rest of our body is also not very well suited to being underwater long-term. If you're adding gills you might as well change our silhouette, eyes, hair and skin as well, but you might not look very human afterwards. Maybe you could manage something merperson-ish, with an extra-flexible neck for looking towards where you swim and gills all along the tail? Sanitation would also be a bit of a nightmare, because if there's a sewage leak you get to breathe it.

The other option is just to get really good at diving conventionally, maybe enhance ourselves to make that easier, and build dry "indoor" spaces underwater. The technology to do it at a basic level isn't new, but there just hasn't been much interest in living that way yet.

would