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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."
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.
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).
yeah, and why squids? As well as the running backgroud bit of a human 'probe' sent to view the planet... things like "the probe sends cameras down to see this" and "with the probe's last power it performs one last task" just seemed like a poor attempt at sci-fi... and detracted from the whole squid loving show...
--- eman I don't know what it does, but I like the blinking lights.
I'll second that. I must admit it sounded a little presumptuous when they said that squids would take to the land to fill the void. I also have a hard time buying that in 200 Million + some odd hundred thousand years smart calamari will be running the show.
:)
Of course when you boil it right down, I think it's pretty presumptuous to think you can predict what the future will be like. If we can't even predict what the short term effects of global warming are going to be, how can we determine that squids will become super muscular, grow lungs, and swing through the trees basically acting like modern day monkeys? Some of those beasties would make a nice addition to a Dungeons and Dragons world, but I really don't see how we can even venture a remote guess as to what life will look like in 200 Million years and expect it to be at all accurate.
Besdies the natural events that could occur that we can't even predict, none of this really takes into account the human factor. I am one of those "the planet's not going any where, we are" people, but we DO have the ability to drastically (some might say "traumatically") alter the environment in a very short amount of time.
Plus the idea of whats left of my mortal remains being sucked out of the ground to fill the gas tank of some land squids car is just something I would rather not think about
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"
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
Also, is there a fish that can fly like a bird these days or any indication in that sense? The contrary is pretty common (penguins, et al).
Flying fish. Yes, I have seen them, and they do propel themselves through the air quite impressively.
According to the program, to "guide the other sharks and hunt in packs". C'mon... We all know light gets filtered rather rapidly by water. Wouldn't sound be a better choice?
Evolution works with what it's got. Titanium would make a great skeleton, but calcium was the best that natural selection could do.
He laughed most of the time and thought the ideas were mostly ludicrous.
Did he laugh through Star Wars and Lord of the Rings too over their implausibility? Nobody involved really thinks this is what life's going to look like 200 million years from now; it's an intellectual exercise.
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.
... yet another argument to add to the many that advocate the end of "anonymous coward" postings.
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?
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.
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.
This is why environmentalists make me laugh.
SAVE THE PLANET!
Yeah, right, like it's not big enough to look after itself.
Heh. While my wife and I were watching this show, they cut to commercial after showing a short teaser segment of the squids. My wife's comment was something like "So they're saying that Cthulhu gets the planet in 200 million years?"
My response- "If the stars are right."
I did find the HPL connection amusing, though.
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.
Interesting observations, but you might consider alternative explanations for the some of the ways things have turned out.
1. In a capitalist, industrialized society, slavery is less than useless. A slave's consumption of goods and services is limited by the resources and desires of his/her owner and with few exceptions--most notably, traficking in women in the southern parts of Eastern Europe--it is pretty much absent from anywhere where there is an industrial base.
2. Sympathy for animals and for one's enemies can be seen as related to the level of material comfort that a society offers.
Contrast the levels of development.
Hunter-gatherer societies often revere their pray in religious rites, while Judaism, Islam and Hinduism have extensive rules governing what animals can be eaten (if any) and how the animal is to be slaughtered, dressed and otherwise prepared if its flesh is to be ritually pure.
The followers of the ancient religions that have survived to the present did not proscribe meat-eating but they did regulate everything that surrounded it--even Hindus can be carnivores.
It is only now, however, that we find ourselves in societies so rich that they give rise to psychologies where people are so filled with sympathy for animals that they adopt that part of foreign religious traditions.
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"Yeah. It smells, too..."
Climbing up took us for a long time, but not nearly long enough for that to happen.
... That's of course assuming our way to "greatness" is the only one, us humans are damn resourceful, who knows what kind of premises could science and some kind of technology be found.
Fossil fuels have been formed in the course of million, not mere thousands of years. I seriously doubt it would take any more than few thousand years to be back at "point zero" (if we even fall further than that) something like middle ages or the roman empire, real civilization but not much in the field of technology.
And it's not only the fossil fuels, lots of metal ores that are near enough surface and easy enough for such an upstart civilization to access are long gone.
Plants will continue to grow, etc, and that will keep them alive