If Nickolay Lamm and Alan Kwan are correct about human evolution over the next 100,000 years, our distant descendants will look like poorly Photoshopped, lemur-like creatures with bulging, uncannily reflective eyeballs and enormous craniums of the sort that would do a mutated mad scientist proud.

In the future, it seems, our imageboard avatars will be ourselves.

Lamm, a visual artist, and Kwan, a computational genomics professor at Washington University, have produced a progressive set of illustrations (click to enlarge, below right) which purports to show how the human face will evolve over time.

The “thought experiment,” as Kwan described the project to Fox News(Opens in a new window), maps out “one possible timeline” for future human evolution.

Future Humans: Is this what we’ll look like in 100,000 years?

The duo’s assumption is that humans will develop “zygotic genome engineering technology” that allows our descendants to “control human biology and human evolution the way we control electrons today,” Lamm said in a blog post detailing the thinking behind the experiment(Opens in a new window).

“In this future, humankind has wrested control of the human form from natural evolution and [we] are able to bend human biology to human needs,” he said.

One way Lamm and Kwan think that will play out is that future geneticists will tailor the human face towards “features that humans find fundamentally appealing: strong, regal lines, [a] straight nose, intense eyes, and placement of facial features that adhere to the golden ratio and left/right perfect symmetry.”

So far, so good. A future where genetically engineered beauty is the norm is a common trope in science fiction such as Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series of novels. In fictional futures, those technologies always come with a moral price, but really, who wouldn’t want guaranteed sex appeal if you could have it?

Another sensible augmentation for tomorrow’s humans will be more skin pigmentation for paler members of the species, necessary to ward off the harmful UV radiation beating down on us in an environmentally ravaged future Earth or out in unprotected space. We’ll also have Google Glass-like contact lenses working in tandem with implanted “[b]one-conduction devices with embedded nanochips” to provide communications and entertainment, which should make Robert Scoble happy.

Where it gets weird is with the steady upward and outward growth of their subjects’ foreheads to “accommodate a larger brain.” Lamm figures this progression will be subtle enough over time and accompanied by the concurrent growth of the rest of the face, so that nobody will be totally freaked out when they wake up next to Hector Hammond(Opens in a new window) one morning. And strangely enough, ear-length sideburns will remain in vogue uninterrupted for the next 100 millennia, according to Lamm and Kwan’s vision.

Then there are the eyes. Oh, the eyes.

As humanity leaves Earth to settle other parts of the Solar System, Lamm explains that giant peepers will be needed due “to the dimmer environment of colonies further from the Sun than Earth.” Meanwhile, the space farers of tomorrow will also require “[t]hicker eyelids or a more pronounced superciliary arch” to counter the disruptive effect low-gravity conditions have on human eyesight, the two futurists say.

What’s more, our descendants’ eyes “would seem unnervingly large to us and have ‘eye shine’ from the tapetum lucidum … [while] sideways blink[ing] from the reintroduced plica semilunaris to further protect from cosmic ray effects would be particularly startling.”

Yep, the future’s so bright, we’ve got to genetically engineer shades.