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."

Comments

5 millon years we will be in an ice-age?

[garcia]

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! ;)

Re:5 millon years we will be in an ice-age?

[juhaz]

I dont think anyone has ever claimed that global warming, or much about anything else we can do, is somehow permanent. And most people agree that we indeed are in the middle of rather short warm period between ice ages, yes, temperatures will go down again.

Life survives, but any drastic changes are of course going to wreak havoc on all things we are now accustomed to and most depend on, man's position may seem stable, but it's not really very hard to imagine how easily we could be knocked back to stone age. Thus, better be carefully monitoring whichever way change is going, and be damn careful not to accelerate it in any way, and if possible, even try to brake.

Re:Frankly, I didn't like it

[Ojuice]

I whole heartidly agree. Their explanation for why the "smaller" of the two squids was so lame; "naturally squids will move to land to fill the void of humanity". I mean come on, that's the fuzziest logic since producers signed on to film Kangaroo Jack..

Was I the only one...

[dasunt]

...who looked at the squids and realized that H. P. Lovecraft might have been onto something?

Only 200 years it takes for death to die.

See Singularity.

[cosmosis]

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.

Evolution requires mutation, not predictable

[acroyear]

A comment I left in the "Future Is Wild" boards @ discovery.com:

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.

Re:I saw it and wasn't impressed...

[transiit]

I taped it. I'm watching it in segments because I get too angry at the junk science it's based on.

My problems:
Every single animal they had was just a slight modifcation of current specimens. Ok, so maybe things wouldn't change that much for the first part (5 million years), but in 100 million years, the best they could come up with is babookari? (The baboon is allegdly extinct, and that bald, redfaced monkey is all that's left of the primates.)

Disregarding Cope's rule: The idea is that as things evolve, they get bigger. Bigger animals tend to win fights over mates, get more food, have fewer predators. It just makes sense. The last of the mammals being herded by spiders bigger than it? Nope.

Disregarding Dollo's law: Evolution is a one-way path. Dinosaurs evolve into birds which evolve into dinosaurs?

Stupid-ass names: snowstalker. deathgleaner. buttpicker. assgoblin.

The awful subplot: Humans are gone and are sending probes back to check out the earth (but clearly not recolonizing it, even if it has gotten past any environmental damage and is just chock full of raw natural resources) Don't forget the bad tech.: 95 million years of technological progress, and the new space probe not only is just slightly larger and silver, it also can't operate without first attaching to the ancient probe.

Just generally weird ideas:
The spiders are silver to avoid UV radiation.
The birds are blue to avoid UV radiation.
The birds sleep in midair.
One gopher-sized spink is enough to feed an entire flock of deathgleaners.

Bad writing:
The deathgleaners (highly evolved bats) exit their cave "like bats out of hell"

I especially like the egotism that intelligence never really returns to the earth (I've only made it 2/3rds through, so it might).

-transiit