Anyway, I did this little thought experiment today. Suppose we would like to see evolution in action. In humans. Now, the major problem here is that for evolution to occur, you need your subjects to reproduce. At best, we could observe three or four generations before our own demise. Now, three or four generations, by regular odds, is not going to yield any significant change in genetic structure(although I would be inclined to argue that each subsequent generation is magnitudes of order dumber than the previous). We would thus need to be able to observe these specimens over hundreds of thousands of generations, and in different conditions to our own.
So now, to overcome our problem of dying, and therefore being unable to observe our results. We'll assume that no human rights people burn our houses down, and that we'll die of natural causes*. We'll need to somehow extend our lives beyond the natural limit. I've thought of a few ways we could achieve this. One would be to exploit this nifty phenomenon known as time dilation. The principle is basically that when something moves faster, time slows down for that object, in reference to the rest of the universe. So here's what we'll need: A vehicle of some sort that can travel near lightspeed, and for extended periods of time. Also, there will have to be toilets on it. Next, we'll just need to find a suitable location to set this vehicle in motion. Outer space sounds like a good idea, so long as we stay clear of little meteoroids that'll blow holes in the machine.
We start off by gathering a few human beings, preferably has genetically average as possible. For a fair test, we'll have to wipe their memories of modern civilisation. They'll be set into a large enclosure, with environmental conditions similar to that of the Triassic. The oxygen level would be about 80% that of our current conditions, so they might... Not die. For flora and fauna, I really don't know yet. I figure that by the time I embark on this experiment, mankind will probably have the technology to clone any animal or plant, allowing us to place whatever beast or flower we like into the enclosure.
Now, assuming that our test subjects have not died from eating poisonous plants or being killed by Tyrannosaurus Rexes that weren't supposed to be there, us jolly scientists would then get into the aforementioned spacecraft, and fly around a bit. Relativity will help us to predict how much time would have passed in the universe around us, per unit time spent in the spacecraft. After some time, we'll stop, get out of the spacecraft, and look at our subjects.
Assuming that we have been moving fast enough, the world would have changed dramatically. Our test subjects would have gone through multiple generations. Basically, we just need to stay in our superspeed spacecraft until say... Five hundred thousand generations have been reached in our subjects. Hopefully this would not take more than several years on board our spacecraft.
So, then we just get off and see what our population has turned into. They probably wouldn't have changed dramatically, but there are bound to be differences. What differences, I don't know. It would depend on what conditions we set for them initially, and how these conditions changed over time.
Also, everyone else we knew would be dead, so maybe this isn't that good of an experiment.
Then, again, everyone we knew and didn't like would be dead.
Mumble mumble.
Okay... So that's the experiment. Alternatively, we could somehow make cryogenic sleep not destroy us.
-Joe