25 Million Years Ago We Lost Our Tails; Today, We Have Technology To Rebuild Them

There are many theories and informed guesses, but the one thing that seems to stand out..

Is that walking and the disappearance of a tail, are very far apart.

We can’t ever be sure, but losing our tail, might not have had much influence on walking.

It might have simply been, jus the nature of DNA, in a word: change.

And even 20, 30 million years ago when early ancestors, still might have had tails, they would be of different lengths and abilities.

Impossible to tell, but there was surely a period of time, where tails, were no good for getting around trees.

Three million years ago, when Lucy was around, the tails were completely out of the picture.

Lucy and her kind deserve our respect and admiration, but with Halloween around the corner we need to talk about the tail.

Having said that, She belongs to Australopithecus Afarensis, they made simple tools, had emotions, cared for their babes, and lived in groups.

They shouldn't be thought of as primitive, they were the evolutionary pioneers of their time.

Bringing back the tail a lot less crazy that it sounds, though no matter how you look at it, it is still very fun and funny.

Unbelievably, a mechanics tail could provide balance during exercise, from lifting to dancing, actually enabling new dance moves.

I saw an inventor using a weighted tail, showing that it can provide balance, when slipping or falling for example.

I recently saw a man with a 3D printed tail connected by rubber bands, talking about using it in space as a tether, as not to float away during lunch.

This was not a powered tail, but a tail could be constructed, to change shape based on position of our limbs.

Similar to how breaches in your bicycle work, you squeeze your hand, and that motion is transferred to the break pads

In an age of exoskeletons, that help elderly sit and rest, a mechanical tail would not just be revolutionary, but evolutionary.

We’ve all seen snake robots, or Dr. Otto Octavius aka Dr. Octopus from Spiderman.

So there is plenty to imagine in this space, and there are of course movie props, and mechanical costume tails

While merely wagging, their designs and assemblies point in the right direction.

Finally, to find something that could be reinvented well, Steve Jobs only needed to walk into a newly built house.

And ask what is the first complex thing, that it added after the essentials, the phone.

But when you turn to look at our body, we actually have a missing piece.

That had little to do with bipedal waking, in fact, elderly can benefit from a tail designed to restore balance.

How serious this engineering challenge is, is all about you, how serious you are about inventing something nobody knew they needed.

I know you would ask yourself if you would wear one, but the answer is yes, if it replaced the need for a walker or ended back pain.

Or made sure that yo won't get hurt during exercise, it is just an exoskeleton like device.

This is especially wonderful, for those of you who would like to explore 3D printing, and precision modeling.

And yes, you could make some money, by selling clever tail kits, that costume makers would want to use in their designs.

Being an extended Halloween tail wearer myself, I have this to say: a tail, is only as silly, as you are.