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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 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!
Like this...
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!
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
It's only 'de-evoltion' to you, but certian perfectly normal for the creature 'de-evolution- has occured.
It is veryy likelt that humans are just a blip on the scope. We have a tendency to think we're the ultimate creature, or the peak of evolution, when really we are just one of many creature that will exist until the end of time.
do while not EOT
Evolve
loop
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Truthfully, though, I have nothing but respect for anyone who's willing to go on record as predicting that one day, giant squid will roam the forests.
(Fortunately it sounds like we have plenty of time to stockpile garlic and olive oil.)
...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.
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.
Er, Viri aren't on the food chain. They're a parasitical life form that simply won't survive if they kill off all of the hosts. (And AIDS is a particularly bad example. The "simple" act of killing, neuturing, or ostracizing every HIV+ individual & blood sample would eliminate the virus in a way that, oh, killing TB infections wouldn't.)
Plus, don't forget that humans aren't the only ones to suffer from virii. EVERY animal has its parasites; we just happen to know more about ours, AND we've got enough tech to beat back even the nastiest of them.
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.
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.
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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