Why might it be desirable to engineer aquatic humans?
Consider a space opera sort of universe in which there exist communities of water-dwelling humanoids. These ocean people are derived from rootstock humans, descendants of genetically engineered human-variants who pioneered the colonisation of water worlds, or of Earth's oceans. They may live their entire lives without setting foot on land or contacting the open air above the surface.
We set aside the technical complications of actually performing the handwavery of genetic engineering for the moment. This question concerns how it still appears rather difficult to justify the existence of the ocean people: in most cases, it tends to seem much easier to first construct closed environments, fill those with air, put usual humans in them and work from there.
What good reasons might there be for undertaking a project that would result in engineered humans adopted for survival underwater?
Potentially relevant constraint: despite the setting being futuristic in tone, introducing alternative history (perhaps some events that end up causing biotechnology to have developed comparatively faster, or cultural developments that change the way people evaluate different strategies of space colonisation?) is also an open option. Neither does the original goal of the project have to specifically be space colonisation; this question only asks for some combination of circumstances to exist at some point such that building a race of merfolk would be something that would reasonably be done.
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/91897. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
For science - just to see whether we can really do it or not
Making an air filled habitat for normal humans is boring. That would probably work if your technology is on a level like the one you described. But engineering a new race of humans that could live underwater without the need for such a special habitat? That sounds like an interesting project!
Humans are curious. Very curious. Finding out how such a race would develop would be incredibly interesting for most scientists. Just to see how evolution might progress with a certain set of differences introduced, like the ability to live underwater without any need for other structures.
It's also safer because the supporting structures cannot be destroyed - after all there are no such structures.
But the overall point is: People do things because they are interesting. We are very curious. Testing our limits and trying to go beyond is in our nature. To learn how this race would behave and how they would evolve over time and to to get new insights they might not get from normal humans adapting to a new environment would be more than enough reason to genetically engineer such a race.
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