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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."
see subject..
I bet they'll still be good eatin'! :}
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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!
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
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).
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!
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"
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 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
Oops. My mistake.
Super ninja monkeys will one day rule the world!
a much more relevant question:
will humanity survive another 10,000 years?
i think not.
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
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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 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.
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.
Everybody knows what's coming after us - the Great Race of Yith, inhabiting big beetle bodies.
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.
(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%.
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.
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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.
What will animals look like in 250 million years? Who cares as long as my car runs.
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 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
I bet they say that there will still be sharks waaaaaayy into the future. After all, what would Animal Planet be without sharks?
-- Cheers!
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
I don't see any content - only advertisement headers.
Less is more !
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
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.
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?
Or have Dr Zoidberg from Futurama as the evolved Squid(with claws)
...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.
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Compare an American chicken to an Italian (or, more generally, western European) chicken and say that again. European chickens are generally scrawny, tough, gamey birds. American chickens are fatter, and more succulent. This is partly because of different farming methods, but also due to the genetics of the different populations.
There are other benefits to selective farm breeding. Farm-raised pigs have sweeter, more pleasant flesh than wild pigs, and are virtually free of Trichinella nematodes. Farm-raised veal results in a meat that is simply unavailable in free-range animals. And, of course, farm-raised seafood is almost universally superior to wild seafood.
I write in my journal
"Say, I wonder if this Homer Nixon is any relation?"
"I doubt it, sir. They both spell and pronounce their names differently."
The author of the book was Dougal Dixon. Not Dougal Adams, Douglas Adams, Gomez Adams, or John Astin. Okay?
I write in my journal
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
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.
And, of course, farm-raised seafood is almost universally superior to wild seafood.
My dad works with seafood a lot (in the industrial sense), and he mentioned this issue recently. Farm-raised seafood is typically very consistent, in the respect that every salmon (for instance) tastes very good and nearly exactly the same. However, he also said that the best wild salmon will still taste better- quality control is just much harder. This is in Washington state, and the way the fisheries seem to be going farm-raised is probably the superior alternative for a number of reasons, but it's not necessarily the best fish you can buy.
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.
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:for a quarter billion years old, you look marvelous! Absolutely marvelous!
'nando
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
If it really is the last age of the church, we stand a much better chance now of lasting 250 million years than we ever have in the past.
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
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.
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