Humans of the future could be much faster than Usain Bolt or Michael Phelps

At the Rio 2016 Summer Olympic Games, some of the fastest and strongest people in the world showed us what humans in peak physical condition can accomplish.

Some think that athletes who are the best of the best could already be pushing up against the limits of what's physically possible. At least one researcher claims that Usain Bolt in 2009 already came within .1 second of the fastest possible time for the 100 meter dash.

But we're not even close to peak human performance, according to Stephen Hsu, a physicist who is the vice president for research and graduate studies at Michigan State University and an advisor to the genomics researchers at BGI. Hsu is a member of BGI's Cognitive Genomics Lab, a research group that's trying to unlock the genetic codes that account for complex traits like height, obesity risk, and intelligence.

Writing in Nautilus, Hsu argues that athletes like Bolt represent our current-day genetic outliers, people who are so uniquely adapted for their sports that they leave their competition in the dust. Training, nutrition, and equipment clearly make a huge difference, but scientists have written that Bolt has changed our ideas about what physical characteristics a top sprinter needs.

"The whole enterprise of competitive athletics has been, in effect, a search algorithm for genetic outliers, but it’s been running for less than a century, and it hasn’t been particularly efficient," Hsu writes. "Its approach has been to passively wait for random recombinations to produce those variants, and hope that athletic programs find the best individuals."

Hsu thinks that we're headed towards a future where we'll be choosing preferred genetic variants for our children soon. Not long after that, he thinks we could start actually editing our DNA to achieve optimal variants.