Hi
Nope.
I mean use the existing adaptation.
Not running fast enough? Grow kangaroo legs or invent the bicycle or the automobile. Getting wet in the rain? Modify your hair with more density, a topcoat and undercoat, or invent an umbrella. Unable to breathe underwater? Grow gills or invent a gill pack (ask me about that one, sometime).
What appendage will you grow if you want to go into interstellar space, or into some interesting magma?
Interstellar space is reasonably difficult, but not impossible. The major challenges are getting rid of the heat, surviving the vacuum, and dealing with the lack of oxygen. The advantages are absurdly low gravity forces.
Since the gravity is so low, muscles are a complete weakness. The more you have, the more likely you are to injure yourself, and the more mass you have to support. Reducing the musculature to that of a severely atrophied person, but with the tone necessary for fine motor control would significantly increase manuverability in space.
The skin would have to be replaced by a hardened exoskeleton. That would probably allow us to cut down on the bone mass, especially when you combine it with the lack of muscle, which should give us more than enough room. The eyes would need to go. Replace them with video cameras that plug directly into the optical nerve. Not only would that give you a much wider range of vision than visible light, it would give you significant advantages in dealing with the sun. I'd suggest organics, except for the entire liquid problem.
Oxygen could be supplied through a recycler in the lung. With reduced muscle mass we should need less anyway. Power would be provided by coating the skin in solar cells - the power is abundant out there, and it would allow you to drive many systems.
Heat is the hardest to deal with. We currently deal with heat by flushing it into space. Its possible for long term we could create gigantic unfurable heat fins, to store and radiate the heat when not directly in line of sight of the sun. But honestly the easiest way would be to use the bloodstream to move heat into a central location, and vent very hot matter through an organic refrigeration system.
Food would have to be transported directly into the stomach, through liquid feeding tubes. Waste would be expelled probably similarly to the way it is now, although waste expulsion would serve the very important purpose of expelling waste heat, thus keeping you alive.
Magma presents a much harder problem. I dunno how we'd go about doing that one.
If you can make my jessiccalbanization instantaneous, things may be different.
If I have to grow the various things I want, and the exigencies of my life remain pretty much unchanged, I'll be spending about half, maybe two thirds, my time in the growth tanks.
Uh, why would you want to change your body that often? I mean if you do, more power to you, but you have to assume the average person will get gills, use them for 5-10 years, instead of trying to take weekend trips to the ocean and then spend the next weekend in space.
I'd much rather view myself as a general-use platform with lots of options than end-user specified hardware. I know what end-users do to critical system specifications.
Here's the problem - we can't live in space. Not for more than a week or two. We can't live underwater, period. We can't live on mars. Think about terraforming - absurdly difficult, time consuming, dangerous, expensive, and prone to failure. Now think about human-forming. Much easier, testable before hand, and overall quick. We could settle Mars. Mercury (we'd probably still need some sort of tents, but they could be much less demanding), the ocean. How much of our planet can we really live on? Deserts? Don't make me laugh, we barely survive there as it is. Siberia, Northern Canada, Antarctica? Once again, we desperately try to create the terrain we need. The entire bloody ocean? Nope, once again, hostile turf.
I can make my computer into a stop-light controller with a little work and a few pieces of interface hardware. I can't get the stop-light sequencer to play World of Warcraft without some truly superior time and effort. I can use my computer as a word processor, but the best thing Lanier ever made won't let me on the internet.
So why does anyone buy stop-light controllers? Oh yeah, specialty stuff trumps heavy equipment. Your computer can malfunction for a dozen reasons. The stop light controller just works. Only a malfunction, in the case of living in space, or underwater, means one thing - you die. Very quickly, very messily, and with little hope of rescue. You have to live constantly at war with your own environment, policing your protections to make sure not a single thing can pass them. A leak, a faulty gage, a bad readout, and you die.
By transforming our body, we adapt to the environment. That which was once hostile becomes friendly. Instead of protecting our body with systems designed to keep our fragile flesh safe, our flesh becomes one of our systems, and works in tune with the new environment.
I like my general-use platform, thanks, unjessiccalbanized though it may be.
I'd rather live forever.
