On the average, women need about 1500 calories a day. Men need 2000. (These are actually kilocalories which are once, twice, 1000 times the calorie.) I had a pet snake once. It ate one rat a month. I don't know how many calories a rat has in it. I'll leave this as an assignment. But I'm sure it's less than 60,000, unless you're really generous with the hollandaise. Snakes are much more efficient because they derive their body heat from a combination of food and rocks mounted with electrical heating elements. On the other hand, human beings and other mammals regulate their own body temperature. This cannot last. Maintaining your own internal body temperature solely by metabolizing carbon based food is expensive. The population is exploding. What happens if the food runs out?
The fact is, food supplies will dwindle. Fish populations are plummeting or coming up cancer all across the globe. Clean sources of water are disappearing. Rapid global climate changes could bring unexpected droughts to once fertile areas. Calorie rich lodes of chocolate and toffee are becoming harder and harder to locate and mine (citation needed). For food supplies to sustain our growing numbers, we simply must become more efficient organisms.
By funding research to turn us into efficient, clean burning organisms, we will guarantee our legacy as humans. I propose creating in a lab, reptile-human hybrids that can go literally months without the merest morsel to eat. I know there will be objections: "I don't want to sit on a heat rock all the time", "I want to regulate my own body temperature. I need a knife to cut this rat, yet I have no arms." We can no longer afford such selfish thinking. Besides, some scientists speculate that by the time we've developed a viable reptile-man (or a reptile-WOMAN, hubba-hubba), after years of painful, grotesque experiments have been covered up and buried, the average surface temperature of the earth could well be near our precious 98.6 F. Let greenhouse gases be our heat rock.
I'm no scientist. I don't know about all the details. I don't know if reptile-human hybrids of the future will have legs or slither. I don't know where their genitals will be. I don't even know what rats taste like. I do know that the time to act is now. Hopefully one day in the future, efficient human-animal hybrids will give way to completely self-sufficient, solar-powered, human-plant hybrids that create energy through photosynthesis. Such a dream is a long way off, but even a journey of one thousand Li (里) begins with a single step. We know we can mix animals and plants. It's time to take the next step. Write your representatives and tell them to support hybrid research.
