Slashdot Mirror
How Will Animals Look 250 Million Years From Now?
angkor writes "'How will Earth look 5 million, 100 million, even 200 million years from now?' Fantasic and fun speculation from Animal Planet. It's the work of Dougal Adams, who started this idea years ago in the out-of-print After Man: A Zoology of the Future."
see subject..
I bet they'll still be good eatin'! :}
====
Crudely Drawn Games
Apparently in 5 million years the earth will be people-less and in an ice-age covering most of Europe.
;)
I am still a staunch believer in the fact that "global warming" is something that the Earth will fix on it's own.
Whether or not we are part of that process is of no concesquence.
Animal Planet agrees!
We're in the last age of the Church now, and the world isn't going to last 250 million more years.
I do think he got carried away with the carnivorous monkeys and all that, but it was still an interesting exploration.
Super ninja monkeys will one day rule the world!
Like this...
Aren't we going to kill off life on this [planet eventually. I know that even if we manage to not do it soon it would be hard to imagine humans never just saying fuck it and ruining this planet possibly after we have another place to live...
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
I saw it last night and I have to say that any scientist willing to describe down to the size and weight of an animal 250 million years from now must be smoking something good... It is full of decent CG, some of it's almost worth dealing with the over sensationalization all this 'science' has attached to it. anyone else tired of hearing "the most extreme" attached to whatever they're talking about?
--- eman I don't know what it does, but I like the blinking lights.
I was watching animal planet's show about this tonight, and was not all that impressed. They seemed to have a lot of information that they could not back up with respect to how evolution would take place, and why for certain species and not others. I found many holes in their "plots", including the fact that they did not account for any technology that humans would leave behind when they left the planet. It was as if they (we)had left and taken all traces of their (our) existence with them...
As for animals, they will be genetically developed to grow human faces and replacement butts. We're already growing human ears on rats, so you just know we're going to be growing full blown cosmetic replacements for every starlet in Hollywood.
Sex - Find It
as in, so long, and thanks for all the fish.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Is this true? I can't find anything about it in Google News or CNN, but this would really suck :(
If you think about it, well - just take the dinosaurs. If you never saw their bones, would you have EVER thought something of that magnitude could exist? Probably not - unless you are nostradomous.
And when you give it more thought, humans could have existed long long ago - after all, it has only taken a half million years for humans to come to be where the dino's had hundreds of millions of years.
I believe that something really big came across the earths path - beit metor, virus, name your poison - that totally disrupted things on this earth.
And this will be offtopic, but I also believe there is life on this planet that probably came from others. So with that all said, I don't belive there will be much on this earth that hasn't had a similar clone way back in the past.
I was sort of expecting them to examine several possibilities for future evolution. Sort of like "This could happen, but this could also happen." Unfortunately, there was none of that. They only had one 'possible' evolution and I was actually somewhat disappointed in the one they presented. It seemed to involve too many squid derivatives, including two land squids. Their explanation how they can be land animals without a skeleton was kind of sketchy, in my opinion.
It also seemed to think that the same Classes (Amphibian, Fish, etc) would exist 200 million years from now, which seems a bit off.
Also, the show was filled with horrible names (like the Flish and the Terrabyte).
The only possibilities I can visualize stem from one stage or another of a spectacular end of one civilization or another. Frozen or baked wasteland. Full of green or purple life. Totally obliterated. The rest are only glimmers.
A rotten corpse I'm sure. Grey meat hanging of brittle bones by now
I wonder if he's related to Douglas Adams...their names are awfully similar.
"Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"
Oh, Christ, not this troll again... Please get a life or come up with something new.
I also disliked the concept that most animals will get bigger. That seems contrary to what we've observed in the last million years. Animals like Sharks and Alligators have survived millenia without many changes. What makes one think the radical changes proposed in the program would occur?
Funny thing is that I had my nephew (11 years old) watching the program with me. He laughed most of the time and thought the ideas were mostly ludicrous. And see, he's 11...
Also, the platypus evolves to look like a perfectly normal duck.
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
http://www.corona.bc.ca/films/details/projectmanki nd.html
They are planning on making a movie about it, based upon the original idea by Douglas Dixon. I wonder why they have the name as Douglas Dixon instead. The book is still called After Man
Defender of Microsoft and Communism!!!
Life starts in the sea, life emerges from the sea, animals grow really big and most life is reptilian, animals get smaller and become mostly mammals... and thats the story up until now.
Animal planet is proposing that animals get bigger, turn into reptiles, and finally go back into the sea from wence they came. IS it just me or is that somehow ironic, stange and possibly WRONG.
I find it hard to believe that life on earth will DE-evolve... thats sort of a depressing thought though isn't it.
Course what do I know... I'm not a biologist.
"Entropy is the bad-guy, and he is everywhere"
who started this idea years ago in the out-of-print After Man: A Zoology of the Future.
Freaky. I was going through some old books, and found my copy of this not 20 minutes ago (haven't looked at it in ages) Then I go on slashdot and see this.
The book is AMAZING. Wish they'd reprint it, my copy's showing it's age.
I didn't get to see the show (hopefully they'll run it here in Oz sometime soon), but I used to have the book, and it was very interesting and well thought out. I particularly liked the ground-dwelling descendants of bats and (IIRC) the giant penguins that had evolved to resemble whales. I turned the bat things into AD&D monsters that were among my favourites -- and among those that my players LEAST enjoyed encountering, buahahaha.
Land-going squids, eh? Cool!
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
The post that this post is in reply to makes only slightly less sense than the show on Animal Planetabout evolution.
The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution was another book by Dougal Adams which provided a zoology of an alternate Earth where mammals never evolved past rodents. He painted a picture of Earth's ecology with all the modern niches filled by the decendants of dinosaurs. It even included a chapter which discusses the evolution of a sentient reptilian species.
Unfortunately, it is also out of print. I have a copy sitting on my shelf next to "After Man". I haven't dusted either off in years, but perhaps it's time.
Just ask Marvin.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Warning! Goatse link in parent! Do no follow that link unless you like looking at some guy's arse!
Oops. My mistake.
Super ninja monkeys will one day rule the world!
In the future all men will be white, since we are evolving away from monkeys and niggers. Jigaboos will get lighter skin and probably be motivated to get a job and quit leeching from the white master. The fried chicken industry will dry up, and orange soda will cease to exist. For the first time in history, there will be quiet in a movie theater. That's evolution - more like natural selection because we're apt to kill all those niggers off first since they keep ending up on death row for raping white girls.
Speaking of mammooths.
a much more relevant question:
will humanity survive another 10,000 years?
i think not.
Actually it's worse than that...
I laughed so hard at this show. It's not just wild speculation, it's wild, rampant speculation. "What will nature be like 250 million years in the future? Beats the hell out of us, but we're gonna take a wild ass guess anyway!" Beyond he geology side of things, this show was nothing but fluff. And even then, the geology is highly specualtive... Mental masturbation at it's best. Nice CG though.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
I have a mammooth penis.
*NT*
Yes... I think I read this before, and saw it again and again... it's a horrible story by the way. Perhaps you should post different stories instead of the same one over and over... just an idea.
It was a series of full color plates like you would find in a Victorian biology book decepting an alien flora and fauna. I only had a short look at it, but was impressed, and would like to know the title and author. Anyone know what I'm talking about??
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I don't ever recall them speaking about dolphins in any respect. Dolphins are believed to be very intelligent (perhaps as intelligent as us). Their intelligence seems to make them a likely candidate for the next civilization, yet there is no mention of them.
...penguins will be able to actually sit down.
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
We are not talking about predicting what kinds of particles will pop out of a high-energy collision of heavy ions, we are talking about what life will look like in 200 million years. The former is good science, the latter is not. Did anyone notice that the DC's productions on Neanderthals, Dinosaurs, and Prehistoric Beasts were full of the exact same type of pseudoscience speculation? Worst of all, they had the animals doing such things as looking at the camera repeatedly, and even spitting out water towards the TV screen!!! I mean, come on! This makes for great ratings (maybe), but pisspoor science, AFAIAC. They had the Neanderthals going around stealing women and raping them without a shred of evidence that such things occurred, save that in our modern human society they do. Baboons that make fish nets? It seems that there is an overanthromorphization of just about every creature that is CG-rendered by these programs.
Please, when you watch these programs, don't be afraid to enjoy them- but make sure you take them with a grain of salt. To a certain extent, I believe that these programs work against getting the American public to accept evolution as scientists do, instead encouraging misconceptions about basic principles of evolution, as well as providing fodder to anti-evolutionists. Hopefully, in the future, these will be done a bit more professionaly, with less emphasis on the art, and more on the science.
I apologize, this was supposed to be in reply to the "Kike Thomas" story. (The first one, not the second, third, fourth, or even any in between that and the sixth one.)
With the way humans are going, it will be interesting if we will indeed last the next 500 years? I read that our newest bridge named Anzac Bridge in Sydney has a 400 year warranty. Just wondering if we will be around to claim it in the event of it needing a serious service :)
We will have some serious global issues if we don't start to discourage the use of fossil fuels, hell its upsetting we have the power to use hydrogen + solar energy but our business and world powers are more interested in here and now profit.
We start genetic engineering with the aim to increase human intelligence. We are at a point where our maths and science at nearly at the peak of our ability to comprehend. What we need is start increasing our IQ so that we can continue to discover theories and facts in science and maths, and at a much quicker rate.
Not that this is done to human, it can also be done to animals. Just like we can breed faster running dogs and cows with better meat, it would be rather interesting if we can increase their intelligence as well.
I know that animals on this planet have a 40 million year shelf life with very few exceptions (crocs, cock roaches, turtles etc..).
After the last E.L.E. that killed off all the dinosaurs the animals that survived tended to shrink in size because of the lack of food. Cock roaches used to be quite large, something the size of say a football. Crocodiles were enormous and so were sea turtles. But since the larger animals require more food, evolution kicked in and the species naturally shrunk for survival.
Considering the abundance of life on this planet and likewise food. It seems reasonable that species will continue to grow larger, that is unless insects take over which is quite possible considering they out number us greatly and carry some really nasty diseases.
Humankinds downfall wont be global warming or nuclear war. We will be killed off by the only thing that is higher on the food chain than us, virii. We still can't cure virii, not even the common flu has a cure, and given it's yearly mutation (evolution) there is virtually no hope of curing viruses. We can postpone but not stop them i.e. AIDS. Biowarfare is happening today, but not from Iraq, mother nature has found our supierior.
We may develop the technology to fight off the bugs, but thats a long shot and could be worse than the buggers themselves. Time will only tell.
Aditionally, someone correct me if I'm wrong but isn't the moon supposed to leave our orbit in the next 60 thousand years? It's orbit is degenerating at a certain rate, meaning it will eventually leave us altogether. What impact will this have on life here? The moon is responsible for the tides correct?
Only 200 years it takes for death to die.
It seemed to involve too many squid derivatives, including two land squids.
The author must have a squid fetish. Will Part 2 have "intelligent" squid that build tools and talk? The author can then use this as an excuse to put on the show he really wants: squid prostitutes, or Hosquid. The only TV sqid I know is Sponge Bob's neighbor. Sounds like a pretty good unexplored niche for news scripts and material to me. "Squid Trek: To slosh where no squid has sloshed before!"
Table-ized A.I.
I did a search for After Man: A Zoology of the Future, cause when I read Dougal Adams I thought it was Douglas Adams. Amazon however says the author of After Man is Dougal Dixon.
Without music, life would be a mistake. --- Nietzsche
Having said that, consider what organisms have been around for the previous 250 million years, and why:
Tube worms, mosquitos, reptiles, dragonflies, and my faves, the octopus and cockroach, to name but a few.
That's how animals will look 250 million years from now.
Dolphin Brother
DCMonkey
They'll look dead.
It's true.
Everybody knows what's coming after us - the Great Race of Yith, inhabiting big beetle bodies.
That 'toraton' looks like a giant erect penis!
About the only thing I like about my country is the food. The difference in meat tastes are huge. Trust me animals here pumped up with drugs are nowhere near as tasty as naturally grown animals elsewhere.
Hmmm... Pie...
I found this essay not very convincing nor really exciting. If you look for strange animals look at a good book about coral reef species. You'll see really stranger animals than what's in this website.
I totally disagree with your idea that man will be killed off by viruses. At the pace medical technology is advancing today, we will be able to cure any virus-borne disease in no more than one hundred years. If all else fails, we can just use nanomachine virus death squads. Unless mankind loses all of their technology somehow, there is no chance of us being exterminated by a virus. And I can't think of a single feasible way, short of alien invasion, that that could happen. Even global thermonuclear war followed by nuclear winter wouldn't do it: there would be pockets of technology and knowledge held by the (many millions of) survivors.
And it's not like there are, or can be, incredibly deadly viruses. The worst in the world (arguably) is AIDs, and it is hardly threatening mankind's survival. Far less than one percent are infected and even fewer die from it. Furthermore, no virus will survive if it is really good at killing. Viruses exist not to kill, as you seem to imply, but rather to propagate. Evolutionarily, a virus wants to hurt its host as little as possible. A virus that kills its host super-fast would burn itself out. Why do you think smallpox was so easy to eradicate? It was one of the most deadly viruses known to man, yet it was one of the easiest to kill off. Same with Ebola: it is incredibly lethal and contagious, yet far fewer than one hundred people die from it a year.
In fact, there's no reason at all that man will ever become extinct. We will eventually colonize other planets and galaxies, exponentially reducing any threat to the species. Our technology will speed evolution up a million fold, eventually making humans effectively immortal. Nothing short of a Borg-like sentient race hell-bent on our destruction (or a planet-killing disaster in the next few hundred years) could kill us off. Sorry, universe, you're stuck with us.
Did anybody else notice that half of the animals of the future are bizarre land-squids? They had a squid for every role, one was the size of an elephant, one was amphibious and crawled around like a sac of jell-o, they even had a squid swinging from the branches of a tree like a monkey. I was waiting for the squid in a business suit with a yuppie pony tail and a cellphone, but I guess squid will never become that advanced...
#1 What do these people have against mammals?
#2 Why did humans "have to leave" and why didn't they come back?
#3 Why does this look like a subtle ad for the game "Impossible Creatures?" Does anyone actually think that sometime in the next few million years an Elephant, a turtle and a rhinoceros will interbreed?
#4 Why do these so-called scientists apparently believe that intelligence is a survival trait that A) doesn't work and B) won't find its way to the top of the food chain?
#5 Why the radical changes in the particular species that have remained largely (fundamentally) unchanged for aeons (sharks, squid, insects, etc), and a tailing off of the most radically advancing species (mammals)?
#6 What do they have against mammals anyway?
#7 Why couldn't they just admit it's a speculative head-party instead of the website taglines like "it could happen... it will happen."
#8 Did I mention that mammals rule?
signed, a mammal
(Here is the properly formatted comment... what a /. newbie I am)
Tru they [viruses] wont survive if we don't, but they don't know that. What's to stop the process?
In one word: evolution. The fact that viruses aren't sentient isn't at all important. No one but humans are sentient: is every species but us just lucky that they don't all decide that it might be fun to stop breathing? Viruses that act in unfit ways, that is, contrary to their survival's best interest, become extinct. It's called "survival of the fittest"; I'm sure you've heard that phrase, but you clearly don't understand it.
I don't see AIDS as a bad example considering 80% of the population in Africa is now infected.
Uhh... 80%? According to the United Nations AIDs Program, there are 42 million people in the entire world currently infected with Aids. The population of Africa is around 800 million. Even if every single person infected with AIDs in the world happened to live in Africa, only 5% of the population would be infected. Not exactly 80%.
will be pimply adolescent computer geeks living in hermetically-sealed bubbles with really powerful computers.
The new videogame craze will be zapping protozoa that exhibit jock tendencies while frantically upping the booby size DNA strains (and comparing them to the best ones.
I think the real question is what will we look like in 100 years? Assuming we are able to ride the accelerating technological curve into utopia instead of oblivion, in less than 100 years we are likely going to gain the ability to morph into almost any imaginable shape and/or becoming uploads traversing the universe.
Planet P Blog - Liberty with Technology.
www.enthea.org
"Free access to public information by the citizen. Permanence of public data. Security of the State and citizens.
To guarantee the free access of citizens to public information, it is indespensable that the encoding of data is not tied to a single provider. The use of standard and open formats gives a guarantee of this free access, if necessary through the creation of compatible free software.
To guarantee the permanence of public data, it is necessary that the usability and maintenance of the software does not depend on the goodwill of the suppliers, or on the monopoly conditions imposed by them. For this reason the State needs systems the development of which can be guaranteed due to the availability of the source code.
To guarantee national security or the security of the State, it is indispensable to be able to rely on systems without elements which allow control from a distance or the undesired transmission of information to third parties. Systems with source code freely accessible to the public are required to allow their inspection by the State itself, by the citizens, and by a large number of independent experts throughout the world. Our proposal brings further security, since the knowledge of the source code will eliminate the growing number of programs with *spy code*.
In the same way, our proposal strengthens the security of the citizens, both in their role as legitimate owners of information managed by the state, and in their role as consumers. In this second case, by allowing the growth of a widespread availability of free software not containing *spy code* able to put at risk privacy and individual freedoms."
after ?much? drooling re-search, we see only wan species (figure a.) that has evolved significantly enough to survive the ongooing fud0cide buy Godless corepirate larcenists.
in 250 billyun years? look for: va.msn.net, ticker symbol: (VAST)
This sounds a lot more like new car models than species evolution.
Cars usually get bigger, come in more colors, and have more chrome with each new model year, until the model is retired after 10 years.
Bush will destroy the world.
What will animals look like in 250 million years? Who cares as long as my car runs.
...the animals of the future will look like a blue puzzle piece?
Prescriptive grammar:linguistics
If we look at history, we can clearly observe a pattern of increasing empathy in human behavior. Granted the biggest changes have probably only happened in a few recent centuries, but they have regardless.
My point being, of course, things like slavery and other sort of inequality between people. These are things that were considered perfectly normal -- surely a slave owner in their time would've answered almost exactly like you did now to a question about what the slaves would be like in millions of year, substituting eating with working, of course.
These were values of the time only perhaps questioned by a niche group at the time which the majority only ignored or laughed at. Slowly, however, the niche gained momentum, and suddenly you have a vastly different worldview like what we have today, where slavery is a purely negative thing. The Romans used to say that you can't have freedom without slavery; a vastly different interpretation to today's, don't you think?
My hypothesis would thus be that the niche of animal rights activism today will grow to be a phenomenon supported by the majority. You can already clearly see the change by looking at statistics that show younger generations are adopting vegetarianism, veganism, or any of the many forms of conscious choice to abstain from supporting killing of animals. There's of course no guarantee the change will continue in that direction, but history, I think, shows it will.
One thing also speaking in favor of this is the fact that just like for inequality of people, there is really no factual explanation for why a human life would be so much more important than the life of an individual of another species, and these tend to lose importance over time, when we move onto a (hopefully) more and more logical and scientific society. The value of human life consideration doesn't follow any logical pattern, i.e. a baby for all practices and purposes is perhaps even less sophisticated than many animals, but it's the potential people see in them that makes them important. On the other hand, a person with serious brain damage can also be on a much lower level than many animals, yet it is only the stamp of "being human" that is enough.
This logical inconsistency is based on mostly on emotions and beliefs, partly on Biblical tradition, which is not nearly as important in defining society's values anymore as it was before, but also partly just for evolutionary instict to preserve one's own species, and since today the human race is hardly anymore in the danger of extinction, it has begun to fade in importance.
I'm certainly unable to point a clear timeframe in which a change in these values will occur on a large scale, but the thing I think can be almost said for certain is that it will.
I think Carlin has it right.
~S
I see sharks becoming land creatures before squid do. And just on a personal level, I can respect a shark taking my place before I can a squid.
~S
Hell I did this back in high school in 1979. And my science teacher knew we were just guessing!
So what's new here?
I bet they say that there will still be sharks waaaaaayy into the future. After all, what would Animal Planet be without sharks?
-- Cheers!
From the guy who brought you Hitchhiker's Guide to th.... oh, not DogalAS Adams. Damn.
Human nature is violent enough that such isolated cases will probably pop up forever, unless some miraclous change suddenly happens. The 20th century was the bloodiest, because advanced lethal technology allowed it, not because human nature suddenly changed in a bloodier direction.
The fact remains that overall humans today have more empathic values than before, otherwise we would automatically fall back to basic primal responses to different skin colors, religion or what have you. Some people still do, of course, but at least now these are things that are on a societal level forbidden, at least in the western world, and that's a definite change.
As others have pointed out, the author is Dougal Dixon. And the books aren't out of print either. You can order After Man from here:
3 12 194331/qid=1041771018/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/002-459043 2-5004812?v=glance&s=books&n=507846o wells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=7-0312 011628-1n key=7-0312 194331-0a rch/isbnIn quiry.asp?userid=2VCMTHDF9B&isbn=0312194331&it m=3
8 81 623016/qid=1041771301/sr=1-47/ref=sr_1_47/002-4590 432-5004812?v=glance&s=books
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0
http://www.p
http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?i
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/bookse
All ship in 2-3 days.
The New Dinosaurs does appear to be out of print, but you can find used copies at:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0
I suspect that while they may have talked to Dougal Dixon at some point, they didn't give him final approval of the the show because of some of the glaring errors (not to mention the stupid voice overs). The biggest error I saw go by was the giant turtle, the Toraton which had splayed out front legs. No animal that big would have a splayed leg arrangement; the legs become pillars directly under the animal. I also had a hard time believing the giant bats could take off from the ground. They would either need to be be redesigned with more pectoral muscles or once they are down have to take off from cliffs to soar. The Flish had the same problem -- the body shaped wasn't right for how the muscles should need to attach.
That Darwin's theory explains why things are the way they are, with regards to survival, it doesn't explain the HOW, which is mutation. Mutations occur and natural selection drives the duplication of the mutated genes 'til a new species is differentiated from the old.
However, the nature of how mutations really happen, and how "good" ones that are "prefered" arrive (as we're very keyed in to hating anything "different" ourselves and often shun it in humans or kill it in animals) is what we as humans have not been able to truly see or test. Its hard to test, as mammals have too long a breeding period, and colonial insects (ants and bees) are usually dominated by the queen's genes. Most genes that change behaviours tended to have already been on the planet somewhere, and are only spreading now because we're accidentally spreading them (e.g., "africanized/killer" bees).
The show did a good job of suggesting what natural selection might do, given a set of mutations over X million years to produce said animals, but the fact is that the mutations themselves are what's utterly unpredictable...and truth be told, rather boring by comparison to the end-results we saw.
I consider evolution a fact, but not a law in the Newton/Einstein sense, because evolution can't be used to predict the future with any accuracy since evolution doesn't explain mutations; it only relies on them. It would be like trying to use Einstein to predict something in electrons without the use of calculus.
--
There's more of my commentary on the show in my journal @ slashdot, most of it influenced by talk from the same boards.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Evolution of species from one type to another never happened. All that could be expected is changes within each species limits. The sun is something that goes against the idea evolution in the past, and applies in this case also. The not going to last forever, nor has it been around for the billions of years that evolution theorys suggest. The sun currently burns away at a rate of approx 37 meters in diameter per day, around 14 km in diameter per year. The suns diameter is 1,400,000 km. Assuming that the suns rate of decay is going to decrease with its size due to lack of surface area, let us take a generous 1/4 of the current rate of decay, and calculate how much of the sun would be missing in just 100,000 years: 1/4 if 14km is 3.5 km per year. 3.5km per year * 100,000 years = 350,000 km 1,400,000 km - 350,000 = 1,050,000 km diam Sure, One would have to work out the rate of change of decay and apply it, however it aught to be obvious that the sun is not going to last 250 million years. It also aught to be obvious that the sun would have been WAY to huge 10 million years ago ( letalone billions ) to support life on earth ( or even let earth exist, its gravity would have been enourmous ).
will finish the entire works of Shakespeare.
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
I don't see any content - only advertisement headers.
Less is more !
unicellular, but damged by radiation caused by some bizarre rogue multicellular colony species called mankind long ago
I haven't seen it yet (forgot about it before, VCR set now), but I see a lot of people complaining that their speculations didn't make much sense.
I don't think that's the point. If a show like this can get people to think beyond their own lifespans, to think for even a minute that the planet will be here and building strange and wonderful things not only after they're gone but after their SPECIES is gone, that can't be bad.
I personally can't believe the number of people that I talk to that, when some kind of calamity is talked about, if you say "It may happen in about 1000 years" they say "Well, who the fuck cares then?" - Damn, man, don't you have aspirations for your species?
The number of people living for themselves, and BARELY even for their children let alone their grandchildren, and fuck all the rest is very disturbing to me. If anyone can introduce even a flicker of a long view to them, more power to them.
The original work was "After Man", "a zoology of the future", by Dougal Dixon, with an introduction by Desmond Morris.
First published in Great Britain by Granada Publishing, 1981.
ISBN 0 586 05750 1
I had high hopes for the show until the totally miserable science made it so annoying I quit watching. If it was going to be that light on content why didn't they add a main character and call it a new "series" like the rest of the television companies?
I would supply it, but i can't remember the exact reference. Wasn't there a scene where Lisa tells Bart about something she saw on TV where they predicted that humans would have five fingers instead of four? Bart's answer was something like "Oooh! Freakshow!"
Ah yes, the obligatory politcally correct "global ecological catastrophe", which in this case drives humans off the planet into space.
Hmm, come again, it drives the most resourceful species in known existence off a planet, and into space - which has no ecology, period, and is the most hostile location yet known (outside of volcanoes or the deep ocean)? Scared of ice and smog, one retreats into a radiation saturated desert of hard vacuum?
Eco hippies are so clueless sometimes.
And even this whole "unable to survive their own pollution" thing is BS. Walk outside and smell the air. 19th century london pea-souper it is not. The environment is getting better, not worse. And even if it were not... We are the only species that lives in the cold core of antartica. We are the only species that has an outpost in orbit. And yet a tad of funky air is supposed to scare us off the planet? Hah, don't make me laugh.
I suppose it's a cheap way of wishing humans out of the picture, but they could at least have invented something original.
Remember MAD in the 60s on future animals: "The Highway Beaver uses its flat tail to remove the wheel caps from cars stranded on the highways"
will humanity survive another 10,000 years?
H. G. Wells once predicted in The Time Machine that the human and orc races will be present in some form in 800,698 years, except humans will look more like Precious Moments figurines. And unlike in the recent movie, they won't speak English.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Douglas Adams wasn't the first SF writer to discuss this. I could come up with a bunch of examples of "prior art", but I won't bother.
...why do they live in igloos?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Surely you meant Dougal Dixon?
His best work was Man After Man, in my opinion.
Much of the tv show on animal planet and the animals on the show were also derived from a book called 'Expedition : Being An Account In Words And Artwork of the 2358 A.D. Voyage To Darwin IV" by Wayne Douglas Barlowe. It speculates on the future evolution of animals, a little more far fetched but equally more exciting. This book and the previously mentioned After Man (which i think has the evolution of Bats into 6 foot walking beasts where the legs have flipped over, bizarre and fascinating...) were constant take out books from the library when i was in high school.
r ch-handle-fo rm/103-6166871-0260617
here's the Amazon page for Expedition
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/sea
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Or have Dr Zoidberg from Futurama as the evolved Squid(with claws)
I watched the show. I had severe problems with it. Now, I can buy the extinction of the Lion, Tiger, Leopard, Mountain Lion, Lynx, etc. in 5 million years, but Kitty Cats! NO WAY! And if domestic cats survive human dominance, and they will because we protect them, then by 5 million years from now there will be analogs of all the above mentioned creatures (though not as developed). There are other species that are equally well protected by Humans (dogs are the classic). Geneticly engineered species will tend to dissapear as they will be modified for our, not their, benefit, and may not be able to lose the modifications fast enough. For the longer term the writers of the show seemed to ignore some basic trends in evolution, namely: Warm blooded life tends to replace cold blooded life in the same ecological niche. During mass extincions the bias is against large bodied and specialized forms of land life that cannot burrow into the ground. No more deer after the big rock, but lots of rats and ferrets. Ice ages push everything towards the equator. And I do mean everything! Rocks too! In the oceans the bias during mass extinctions is against Life that lives in shallow waters of the continental shelves. Deep water species may not notice a problem. Continental coalecence, ice age and meteor stike you say? When did that happen? There is a reason that the mix of life in the deep seas look a lot like it did 500 million years ago, and I don't think it's going to look much different in 200 million years. There will still be fish in the sea. Side note about flish, flying fish exist today. They don't flap their "wings" which are actually fins, but glide instead. Only warm-blooded creatures have the stamina to flap. No gill breathing form of life will ever be warm blooded. Their entire blood supply comes within 1 cell (That's how thick the exchange membranes are in lungs and gills) of the water they live in. They would need a nuclear reactor in their guts to keep warm. I think I've ranted and raved enough for one day.
Did anyone else notice that at the begining of the show, the claim to have based it on "the law of evolution" ? Last I checked, it was still a theory, but maybe in 5 million years it will be a law. :)
did anyone notice that none of the animals from the 5m and 10m ages seemed to evolve any further and each of the ages had animals that had evolved from animals of the 21st century. to do it properly they should have made a cohesive evolutionary tree not just 21st century animal + 20 million yrs = x which ignores the other 2 stages' animals
...been going on for years. At its heart, really, it's a religious-political issue, as some people find a measure of relief in calling it a "fact" instead of a theory; people don't like uncertainty, even when they're uncertain. I should say "some people" don't like it; others recognize that uncertainty is the foundation on which all real knowledge is built. A few hundred years ago it was also a "fact" that the world was flat. I imagine that there are many so-called "facts" in our current scientific vernacular which will give future citizens quite a chuckle--just as we often chuckle and shake our heads over the antics of past generations. Whatever you do, though--stay aloof from the argument. Zealots on both sides of this issue are voracious.
I think they will look rather fossilized....
The dumber people think you are, the more surprised they are when you kill them.
They'll look pretty damned good, if my sex life remains as barren as it's been lately!
discovery.com wants to set a cookie. Do you want to allow it?
No, I most certainly do not.
www.discovery.com wants to set a cookie. Do you want to allow it?
No, I most certainly do not.
This page requires flash. Click ok to download the plugin.
[Cancel].
Bye.
Is it just me, or is this show implying that squids are going to take over the earth? It seems like half the animals featured are descendents of squids. And 200 million years from now giant squids will walk the earth while the most intelligent animal is a tree-dwelling squid? Come on! When they say they consulted "experts on particular groups of organisms" do they mean they went down to the local sushi joint and asked the guy behind the counter what he thought?
where the comment ends and sig begins
You guys might be interested to know that the famous illustrator Wayne Douglas Barlowe ("Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials," "Expedition," "Barlowe's Inferno," plus a hell of a lot of book covers you've probably seen) has accused illustrator Dougal Dixon ("After Man," "Man After Man") of plagarism.
See, after he wrote "After Man," Dixon published a book called "Man After Man" that speculated about how humanity might evolve with genetic engineering and whatnot. Barlowe accused Dixon of plagarizing one of Barlowe's unpublished sketches to use in the book. Barlowe has since published the sketch in one of his books with a note explaining the situation. I don't know if anything legal was ever done on the matter, but I know that Barlowe has a real stick up his ass about Dixon.
I write in my journal
So... I bet you're hoping that Punxsutawney Phil doesn't predict 6 more weeks of winter, eh? ;)
No
Ok, there seems to be some confusion here:
1. AIDS can not become airborne, because;
2. AIDS is not a virus, it's a condition. HIV is a virus.
Slagborr
It's possible that the mass extinction we are causing will cause a diversity of new body plans to spring up. But, more likely, the next 5 million years won't look very different from the last 5 million years, and, for the most part, animals weren't all that different or unusual over that period. The dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago, and, except for their size, even they weren't all that unusual in terms of morphology.
Besides Rats and Roaches and Pigeons, there won't be any left.
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
I don't know if blindness would really do that much one way or the other; they use calls to alert each other of impending danger, they have a keen sense of smell and their methods of defending against predators doesn't really rely upon their speed (nonexistent) or sight (pretty poor). Blindness _may_ not be necessary, but of course it might be going to far to say they would lose it entirely...
Kind thoughts do not change the world
Judging by the last 5 million, I'd expect animals in 5 million years time to look like pretty minor variations on what they do now. Perhaps the most startling change to us will be not so much on appearance but behaviour as some of the other great apes perhaps follow in our footsteps and develop greater intelligence for greater flexibility in the face of habitat destruction (assuming we don't just make them extinct, which of course is much more likely - probably within a few hundred years or less).
Of course the answer to the question depends on whether we're just talking about wetware evolution, or life in general. Never mind 5 million years, or even a thousand, we should soon see artifical species as a result of robotics/AI, and in 5 million years time these may even have become the dominant type of life outside of critters like plants, bacteria and insects and fish.
Most of these programs are intended to cause one common thought among viewers: make them believe that the near future is guaranteed to be not much different than the present. But what about the many programs I've seen on such cable channels, that speak of natural disasters, catastrophes, ancient prophecies about the 'end'?? That's a different message altogether, right? Depends on what the public really cares about. And I can safely say that the public usually doesn't care about anything that doesn't directly concern them. And that's usually everything that they aren't intelligent enough to be concerned about, as a collective. Evolution is just one of many things that the public truly doesn't understand because of the skew in what is taught and how, AND the skew in what is researched. Teaching more than one thing leads to independent thought and the increased ability to make decisions, the worst thing to do if the public is to remain easily distracted and manipulated via money. That aside, what I choose to stress is the pattern in programming on these channels, not simply a collection of mutually exclusive information sessions. The entire scope of sciences being discussed across the breadth of cable channels paints a picture, if you know what the canvas looks like.
What's a second? An hour? A day?
It has much more to do with
the Earth's rotation than with cesium.
GOD DAMNIT when will Slashdot add the ability to EDIT THE ORIGINAL ARTICTLE? It's fucking DOUGAL DIXON, not Douglas Adams, and we'll have 300 people (including me) pointing out this error, repeatedly... it would be so much easier if once the article poster read these responses, he could go into the article and CHANGE WHAT HE WROTE so that no more people would have the same stupid response to a stupid mistake.
*sigh*
I have no reason to think they or us would look any different in the next 500 million years than they have in the past because they haven't changed since they were created by God way back when. A lot of these question lately would be answered if you people would actually believe in something other than evolution. I know that will happen when hell freezes over...oh wait, you probably don't believe in hell either.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
I have both Man after Man and A Zooology of the future, I love them both to death.
However...
I do remember reading that Wayne Barlowe (Barlowes Guide to ET's) accused Dougal of essentially "stealing" several pieces of his work to put in Man After Man.
In any case, both books are must haves.
*Fortitudo, aequitas, fidelitas.*
I watched this on its second and third consecutive showing, and something immediately jumped out at me: in 5 million years, Paris will be an arctic wasteland, the inhabitants of which will be hunted by a creature with NO FAT. Snowstalker is "all bone, muscle, and fur", which means if it doesn't find a meal it metabolises its own muscle and organs and dies. Are there any examples of arctic dwelling mammals (or even non-mammals) today that have less than 30% body fat?
Also, I think whomever they got to be their evolution "expert" was a big anime fan, as massive, multi-tentacled squid-creatures were featured in every other segment. At least on the Walking with Dinosaurs show on Discovery Channel they had some actual PhD Archaeologists talking about the dominant dino theories.
Green-voting, republican-registered, socialist-libertarian.
- A focus. While they couldn't give us a mother and cubs, they could've given us the evolutionary equivalent. Take a couple of classes or orders and get us to care what happens to them over then next 200 million years. Introduce the squids early on. The only continuity TFIW had was "location of former cities"
- Drama- rather than suddenly show the last mammal, they should've shown 100 million years of decreasing diversity.
- Digressions. TFIW had few animals per time zone. If TFIW didn't have the computational budget to animate more they at least could have had more still shots. Documentaries tend to be filled with side loops, constantly showing local diversity- while the predator waits, we take five minutes to check out a cute symbiotic relationship, or a flock of colorful birds, or the prey's prey, or a dung beetle (which also is part of my next point...)
- Humor. Let's see some baby spiders falling off the web before going into the extinction of mammals next time.
A few random points relating to other threads in the comments:We aren't subject to the same evolutionary constraints as most other animals. Evolution comes from animals adapting to changing environments. I.E. The fast squirrel will get to the limited food supply before the slower one. The faster one lives the slower one dies. Humans by and large don't have this survival issue. If you're slow you still live, you still breed.
Humans getting taller and smarter are a result of no evolutionary issues. More simulation at an early age and better health and nutrition.
for a quarter billion years old, you look marvelous! Absolutely marvelous!
'nando
I have yet to see this program, but TiVo's on the case... However this Dixon book sounds familiar. The few online sources I can find of it make it sound a lot like a book I've been looking for for years.
It was about the fictional future evolution of the earth and it's animals. I only flipped through it in one of those outlet mall bookstores back in 1986, but there was a section on the evolution of the beaver... Solid front tooth mass, back legs merging with the widening tail...
The thing that seems to set it part from Dixon's book (as far as i can tell) was how it showed the decomposition of world landmarks based on their construction and environment. For example, the Space Needle swallowed up by temperate rain forest and the St. Louis Arch collapsing in the middle?
Is this the same book? If not, any idea what it was called?
I am surprised to see so many otherwise informed people make such an optimistic assumption; that our species will live another 500 years, let alone 5 million, is in serious doubt.
No?
La via sola al paradiso incommincia nel inferno
drumroll.. how Richard Stallman looks now.
And it's not like there are, or can be, incredibly deadly viruses. The worst in the world (arguably) is AIDs, and it is hardly threatening mankind's survival.
*cough* HIV is rated as level 2/3 on a 1-4 rating, four being the worst.
"Although HIV is listed as level 3, laboratories engaging in primary isolation and identification may perform these activities in Level 2 laboratories, using Level 3 operational requirements. All research and production activities require Level 3 physical and operational requirements."
Also, as humanity gets better at bioengineering, we could presumably create viruses far more deadly than the current level 4 viruses, Ebola, Lassa and a few more. Even those would probably kills lots and lots of people if the deadliest variants escaped from isolated areas where it is containable, it burns out as you describe there. But drop it at an international airport and you'll presumably kill more people than the Black Plague and every war since then put together.
One of the things you miss is co-hosts, they live on in other hosts. The worst strains of Ebola are air-born (not touch, not sexual) and 100% fatal *to humans*. Once you reach critical mass fleeing people will bring the disease everywhere, and unlike the Black Plague people now don't move in ships and horse&buggy, but on international airliners and with cars. Besides, there doesn't have to be a connection between fast and lethal, it could still 100% kill you if it takes a week or a month, and by the time anyone notices just how bad the situation is, it could be around the world already.
I'd say the world has been pretty lucky as it is. Granted, I don't think any virus could take out 100% of humanity, but I'd be willing to bet on 99%...
Kjella
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
This work is by Douglas Dixon. ISBN 0312011636 published in 1981 by St. Martin's press in NY.
If it was a Douglas Adams book we (being the Slashdot Mental Collective) would have heard about it and read it by now.
Unless we start telling the diffrence between man made disasters and natral selection we will put evolution on hold in the name of protecting the environment.
On the other hand with street gangs and food poisoning I not only believe we are evolving I think we are on an evolutionary fast track.
I don't actually exist.
In 200 millions years from now there should be a new dominant species. I think that is time enough for either dolphins, including porposis (sp?), and/or other primates to evolve into the new dominant species. How long did it take humans? Didn't we hear just a few days ago of a chimp that has about a four word language. That language developed independently and might even be just the beginning. Maybe dum damn dirty apes will be ruling when humans come crashing down again and meeting Dr. Zaues and Troy McCluer.
Watched the show(thanks, Tivo!) and quite frankly, it was a waste of time.
The show didn't show much in the way of explaining why the animals would evolve the way they do and even why humans would leave the planet entirely.
Some problems I had with the program's assumptions and ideas:
In general, I just found the show to be horribly inaccurate and lacking in entertainment value. They people who created the show should go back and have a good look at biology, physics, and concepts of evolution in general.
If it was a for-pay movie, I'd ask for my money back.
Winged Power Photography
The key is, you need to not really think of it as a science show, and just think of it as someone's entertaining creative output. Use some squibbons or swampuses the next time it's your turn to DM.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.