Analysis: Sunburns, evolution, and aliens

Last week I was sitting there, covered in cooling ointment, my arms (and my face) completely red. How come? I caught a bad sunburn after spending the day outside with my bro, doing research for my novel.

How is that possible? How do you get a sunburn when you actually are climbing about rocks and boulders, and you’re surrounded by fog?

It seems as though our bodies are just not capable of dealing with so much sun. But, wait- we are a species that evolved on a planet with a sun, right? Have you ever seen a giraffe complaining about sunburn? An ape? A jellyfish? So, how come animals can deal with the sun, but we can’t?

Aren’t our bodies used to the sun anymore? Were our ancestors not always outside? OK, troglodytes were supposedly dwelling in caves, but they did come out of them from time to time, didn’t they? So, what’s the deal?

Apparently, we lose abilities if we don’t train them. I for example was thrown out of ballet classes in drama school because I didn’t train enough. So, could this apply in evolution? If we only use dictation and autocorrect to write, could we actually lose our ability to write? Could our hands shrink? If we look up everything in the internet instead of learning it from books, could we damage our ability to actually learn things?

And if we were to invent devices which would allow us to communicate telepathically, would that mean that our ability to hear, and to talk would suffer?

I could very much imagine an alien species that has become so intelligent that they literally only need their brains to steer computers, which steer AIs, which steer, I don’t know, anything from administrating the society to provide food (but then, would such a species need food? Or would brain food be sufficient?), to choosing your outfit (maybe caps would be a trend).

If we had AIs doing everything for us from tidying up our kitchens to working for us, could that mean that we might lose the ability to…you know, everything? We would be nothing but brains, but unable to do anything without the help of our AIs, because we would have no limbs, no abilities left, and we would have forgotten everything about how we built all of this because our AIs are storing the information, not we. We couldn’t even talk, because we would use the AIs to speak.

So should we stop using sun lotion, to prevent evolution from taking away our ability to speak? Literature (and every physician) advises us not to. It might not be such a good idea.

And maybe, if we were composed only of brains, we would at least have become intelligent enough to invent a treatment against sunburn, because that really hurts.

Conclusion: You should really use sun lotion.