Tuesday 24 November 2009

Slightly alternative anatomy

Two parts of one odd conversation at work: if humans had teeth like sharks, or had tails like dogs, life would be pretty different. For one thing, if your teeth are always growing back, why bother protecting them with a mouthguard? Furthermore, some people would get their teeth engraved to show pictures, their initials or other things before they fell out and were replaced. If humans had tails, then chairs, pants, toilets and a lot of other things would be subtly different too. I imagine the options for toilets would come down to repositioning the cistern or having squat toilets everywhere. Chairs would probably all come with holes or splits in the back, and pants would tend to be worn much lower around the hips.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Personally, I've wondered what it would be like to have two thumbs and three fingers on each hand.
PPS - I expect it would make for a pretty strong handshake.

3 comments:

Erin Marie said...

That's creepy - the two thumbs and three fingers though.

I can see a science fiction story based around this - where aliens come to visit, and they are exactly like us except for this difference. They prove their superiority by opening jars with little effort and being able to thump out amazing bass lines on the piano.

John said...

And then we ask "So now what do we do, our new masters?"

And they respond "I don't know. I'm not smarter than you, I just have extra thumbs. Go back to work, I guess."

So we do, and the world looks a lot like it did before, except for piano recitals and jar-opening.

Erin Marie said...

And we start to mate with our alien overlords, and eventually natural selection has it that we all have extra thumbs.

The end.

What a great movie.