The Future is Wild (2003) s01e01 Episode Script
Welcome to the Future
Imagine a world, millions of years in the future.
A world where evolution has written a new chapter in the story of life.
The world is inhabited by very strange creatures, like nothing the Earth has ever seen.
the FUTURE is WILD Today, planet Earth is dominated by humans.
There are over 6 billion of us.
But what would happend to the planet, if there were no people? Just imagine that people were to disappear from this world.
Many familiar animals: the big cats, the bears and the wolves, already endangered, already under threat from us will disappear in a few thousand years.
The planet, and the survivors, will carry on without us and evolution, natural selection, will create new and bizarre life.
Welcome To The Future These future worlds, millions of years from now, are populated by strange creatures.
But they are not just fantasy.
These worlds are experiments in the imagination of some of today's top scientists, based on what they know about the world, now.
When we look around the world right now, we see a huge number of very different things, organisms you would never in your wildest dreams invent, organisms you couldn't possibly imagine could make their lives that way.
Beetles that live off of tiny bubble aqualungs under water, or the rhinoceros.
Imagine the rhinoceros, if you didn't know they existed, would you have drawn one? But how could scientists predict the future course of evolution? From studying the past, we can see certain trends in animals and animal evolution and we can say that, in the future, certain things are going to result because of circumstances developing in a certain way.
So there are a whole series of "rules" as it were, of how life has evolved, how life has changed and adapted through time, that we can test by taking our understanding of the present day and looking back into the past.
It is no great leap of faith, then, to turn around and go in the other direction, to the future.
To go forward and create some of the organisms which are unusual, imaginative, but possible.
This team of scientists created three periods in the future.
The first, is 5 million years from now, when life is challenged by a new ice age.
Anything that survives here has had to adapt quickly to a freezing, glacial world.
The next future world, 100 million years from now, presents the opposite challenge to life.
This world is hot and humid, and has been since the end of the ice age, giving evolution a long time to shape the animals of this hothouse world.
And finally, the scientists chose a period 200 million years from now, when the Earth is unrecognisable.
One giant continent, and one global ocean.
But even in 200 million years time, the geography of the planet is not hard to predict.
We know that the continents are moving, we can even measure the rate of movement.
For example, the Atlantic Ocean is opening just about the same rate as fingernails grow.
Australia is moving northwards at an even faster rate.
So, with the right computer modelling, we can predict where continents will finish up.
And this allows scientists to predict the future climate.
The series begins in 5 million years time.
When the ice caps have advanced from the poles and much of the planet is in the grip of a bitter cold.
We live in an ice age today, but ice ages follow repeating patterns.
10,000 years of relative warmth are followed by 100,000 years of intense cold.
All of human civilisation occurred in one brief, 10,000 year warm period.
In 5 million year's time, the ice caps will advance yet again, covering much of Europe in two kilometre thick ice.
But there will still be life on these frozen wastelands.
Creatures that live in today's Arctic, like Polar Bears, Arctic Foxes and Timber Wolves, will disappear.
Extinct.
There are no whales and dolphins.
Yet something has taken their place.
This isn't a mammal, it is a bird.
The Gannetwhale.
5 million years isn't very long, in terms of evolution, so animals won't look very different from today.
These are Shag Rats, giant rodents.
And they show how animals adapt to the cold.
Arctic animals tend to be large, with a long, thick, shaggy coats to keep them warm.
They have short, stocky legs and small ears to reduce heat loss.
Shag Rats can survive in the open, in temperatures as low as -50.
The real threat comes from a predator, the Snow Stalker.
This may be an ice age, but not everywhere is a frozen wasteland.
This isn't snow, but salt.
A vast salt desert has replaced what was once the clear, blue water of the Mediterranean.
The Earth's continents don't move far in 5 million years, but when Africa collides with Europe, the Straits of Gibraltar will be closed.
An ice age climate it is very dry, so this will have a devastating effect on the Mediterranean.
The Mediterranean will dry out until it becomes one, vast salt pan.
There will be small lakes of hypersaline water left behind, the only water in the Mediterranean.
But the old holiday islands of Cyprus and Malta and Crete will stand up as small mountains in the middle of this sea of salt.
Not much can survive in the centre of these salt flats, but there is something living here.
Cryptiles.
Cryptiles share the desert with billions of flies, their only source of food.
On the bare rocky plateaus of the old holiday islands, the Grychan hunts along the deep, narrow crevices.
In the dry, ice age climate, the vast Amazonian rainforest died out, to be replaced by grass.
Without the cover of the forest, a few monkeys survived and adapted to life on the prairie.
But there are predators here as well.
Karakillers.
In North America, what was once the huge, fertile, agricultural centre is now a barren, cold, windswept desert.
Armoured rodents, Rattlebacks, struggle to find enough to eat, scratching for roots and tubers.
Their digging disturbs strange, underground creatures.
Spinks: Flightless birds.
Eventually, the ice age will pass.
Greenhouse gases from volcanoes will warm the Earth and the ice caps will melt completely.
A hundred million years from now, the Earth is much warmer than today and it has been for millions of years.
The sea level has risen, covering much of the low lying areas of land.
The map of the globe looks completely different, due to the movement of continents and the rise in sea level.
These shallow seas support a very strange creature, the Ocean Phantom.
It is not one animal, but a colony of creatures that work together, feeding on swimming sea slugs, Reef Gliders.
Around the shores of these seas, are huge swamps.
And this is where life has really changed.
Over tens of millions of years, new creatures have evolved.
The giants of the swamp.
Torratons.
They have evolved from tortoises.
The adults are enormous, the biggest animals that have ever walked on the face of the planet.
120 tonnes, that's bigger than even the biggest dinosaur.
In the dark, murky waters of the swamp, the Lurkfish senses it's prey by electricity, then kills it with a shock of over 1000 volts.
The Lurkfish's prey is a Swampus.
An octopus that can live on land.
They communicate by changing colour patterns on their bodies, but if the warning flashes are ignored, a Swampus can attack.
The Swampus has a bite so poisonous, it can even kill a Torraton.
In the hothouse climate of a hundred million years in the future, much of the land is covered in forest, even the continent of Antarctica, which has moved off the South Pole.
Over 100 million years, Antarctica has drifted as far north as the tropics.
The sea birds that once lived on Antarctica have also changed, into small, colourful Flutterbirds.
And there are huge, bird-eating insects in this forest.
But although the Falconfly attacks some birds, others can defend themselves.
These insects, Spitfire Beetles, have another way to attack Flutterbirds, they cooperate.
To survive in this crowded future world, many creatures have formed strange partnerships and alliances.
Living underground, the very last of the mammals, the Poggle.
This small rodent lives in the caverns of spiders, feeding on the seeds that the spiders have collected.
But the spiders are farming the Poggles, then feeding them to their massive queen.
There has been a hothouse world for millions of years, constant and unchanging.
But the forces that created this world will also destroy it.
Volcanoes become more active, spewing out poisonous gases and clouds of dust and wiping out most of life on Earth.
Every once in a while, the biology of the world is punctuated by a terrible event, often external, sometimes erupting from underneath the seas, those terrible environmental events wipe out 80%, 90%, 95% of the species of the world and they are called "mass extinctions".
Only a few animals will survive this mass extinction.
When you have a major environmental perturbation like huge volcanism, none of those organisms that have evolved for that preceding hundred million years are in any way adapted to deal with this.
The environment shifts, it becomes potentially cold, dark, volcanoes can create a variety of environmental shift.
Only those organisms which by chance can survive under those circumstances are the ones that are going to live through to the other side.
After a mass extinction, the world is full of new opportunities for evolution to exploit, as nature repopulates the planet.
In the third time period, 200 million years in the future, a hundred million years after the mass extinction, life has bounced back.
But 80% of the planet is a desert.
And that's because most of the land is a long way from the moisture of the Ocean.
In 200 million years' time the continents will, once again, come together to form one, huge landmass.
This has already happened in Earth's history.
200 million years ago, the continents were fused into one, huge landmass which is called Pangea.
So in 200 million years' time, we will have a new Pangea a new supercontinent, surrounded on all sides by the Ocean.
The global Ocean stretches for 20,000 kilometres.
But there are no fish anywhere in the surface waters, they all died out with the mass extinction.
Instead, there are Silver Swimmers, evolved from microscopic plankton.
There are thousands of different species.
And Silver Swimmers are preyed upon by completely new creatures.
Flish.
200 million years from now, in the absence of birds, they rule the skies.
Beyond the mountains that stretch down the coast of the supercontinent, most of the land is empty.
But there are very isolated oases, where water reaches the surface.
Here, Garden Worms bask in the sun, but their enemies are on the war path.
These, are Terabytes, evolved from termites.
They attack the Garden Worms with elaborate chemical weapons.
Which animals survived the mass extinction was simply a matter of chance.
Left alone, with enough time, even a snail can evolve to live in a desert.
This is a Desert Hopper.
It lives on the scrubby desert plants.
But not everywhere in this future world is desert.
In the North West corner of the supercontinent, moist winds from the global Ocean have created a forest, where it rains everyday.
The mass extinction left a land almost empty of life.
A new opportunity for bizarre new creatures.
There are Flish living inside the forest, and lichen trees 10 metres high that are descended from the tiny lichens that encrust rocks today.
Most bizarre of all, an eight metre high, eight legged squid, a Mega Squid.
And a totally flexible bone-free body would be perfect for life in the treetops.
Squid would be even better at swinging through the branches than today's Gibbons.
But the idea of squid swinging through the trees 200 million years from now? Is it really feasible? We can't be 100% sure that this is exactly what an animal will look like in the future, but we can be sure that, as long as new environments continue to open up, as long as animals continue to exist, as long as there is still food for them to eat and air for them to breathe, they are going to continue to adapt and change.
And the sky is the limit, there are no limitations to what animals can do in the future.
All these organisms are plausible.
Are they going to happen? We don't know.
But they could, and that is part of the beauty of it.
So, join this scientific voyage through time to see one possible future for planet Earth.
It's a voyage that is scientifically feasible.
And truly WILD.
A world where evolution has written a new chapter in the story of life.
The world is inhabited by very strange creatures, like nothing the Earth has ever seen.
the FUTURE is WILD Today, planet Earth is dominated by humans.
There are over 6 billion of us.
But what would happend to the planet, if there were no people? Just imagine that people were to disappear from this world.
Many familiar animals: the big cats, the bears and the wolves, already endangered, already under threat from us will disappear in a few thousand years.
The planet, and the survivors, will carry on without us and evolution, natural selection, will create new and bizarre life.
Welcome To The Future These future worlds, millions of years from now, are populated by strange creatures.
But they are not just fantasy.
These worlds are experiments in the imagination of some of today's top scientists, based on what they know about the world, now.
When we look around the world right now, we see a huge number of very different things, organisms you would never in your wildest dreams invent, organisms you couldn't possibly imagine could make their lives that way.
Beetles that live off of tiny bubble aqualungs under water, or the rhinoceros.
Imagine the rhinoceros, if you didn't know they existed, would you have drawn one? But how could scientists predict the future course of evolution? From studying the past, we can see certain trends in animals and animal evolution and we can say that, in the future, certain things are going to result because of circumstances developing in a certain way.
So there are a whole series of "rules" as it were, of how life has evolved, how life has changed and adapted through time, that we can test by taking our understanding of the present day and looking back into the past.
It is no great leap of faith, then, to turn around and go in the other direction, to the future.
To go forward and create some of the organisms which are unusual, imaginative, but possible.
This team of scientists created three periods in the future.
The first, is 5 million years from now, when life is challenged by a new ice age.
Anything that survives here has had to adapt quickly to a freezing, glacial world.
The next future world, 100 million years from now, presents the opposite challenge to life.
This world is hot and humid, and has been since the end of the ice age, giving evolution a long time to shape the animals of this hothouse world.
And finally, the scientists chose a period 200 million years from now, when the Earth is unrecognisable.
One giant continent, and one global ocean.
But even in 200 million years time, the geography of the planet is not hard to predict.
We know that the continents are moving, we can even measure the rate of movement.
For example, the Atlantic Ocean is opening just about the same rate as fingernails grow.
Australia is moving northwards at an even faster rate.
So, with the right computer modelling, we can predict where continents will finish up.
And this allows scientists to predict the future climate.
The series begins in 5 million years time.
When the ice caps have advanced from the poles and much of the planet is in the grip of a bitter cold.
We live in an ice age today, but ice ages follow repeating patterns.
10,000 years of relative warmth are followed by 100,000 years of intense cold.
All of human civilisation occurred in one brief, 10,000 year warm period.
In 5 million year's time, the ice caps will advance yet again, covering much of Europe in two kilometre thick ice.
But there will still be life on these frozen wastelands.
Creatures that live in today's Arctic, like Polar Bears, Arctic Foxes and Timber Wolves, will disappear.
Extinct.
There are no whales and dolphins.
Yet something has taken their place.
This isn't a mammal, it is a bird.
The Gannetwhale.
5 million years isn't very long, in terms of evolution, so animals won't look very different from today.
These are Shag Rats, giant rodents.
And they show how animals adapt to the cold.
Arctic animals tend to be large, with a long, thick, shaggy coats to keep them warm.
They have short, stocky legs and small ears to reduce heat loss.
Shag Rats can survive in the open, in temperatures as low as -50.
The real threat comes from a predator, the Snow Stalker.
This may be an ice age, but not everywhere is a frozen wasteland.
This isn't snow, but salt.
A vast salt desert has replaced what was once the clear, blue water of the Mediterranean.
The Earth's continents don't move far in 5 million years, but when Africa collides with Europe, the Straits of Gibraltar will be closed.
An ice age climate it is very dry, so this will have a devastating effect on the Mediterranean.
The Mediterranean will dry out until it becomes one, vast salt pan.
There will be small lakes of hypersaline water left behind, the only water in the Mediterranean.
But the old holiday islands of Cyprus and Malta and Crete will stand up as small mountains in the middle of this sea of salt.
Not much can survive in the centre of these salt flats, but there is something living here.
Cryptiles.
Cryptiles share the desert with billions of flies, their only source of food.
On the bare rocky plateaus of the old holiday islands, the Grychan hunts along the deep, narrow crevices.
In the dry, ice age climate, the vast Amazonian rainforest died out, to be replaced by grass.
Without the cover of the forest, a few monkeys survived and adapted to life on the prairie.
But there are predators here as well.
Karakillers.
In North America, what was once the huge, fertile, agricultural centre is now a barren, cold, windswept desert.
Armoured rodents, Rattlebacks, struggle to find enough to eat, scratching for roots and tubers.
Their digging disturbs strange, underground creatures.
Spinks: Flightless birds.
Eventually, the ice age will pass.
Greenhouse gases from volcanoes will warm the Earth and the ice caps will melt completely.
A hundred million years from now, the Earth is much warmer than today and it has been for millions of years.
The sea level has risen, covering much of the low lying areas of land.
The map of the globe looks completely different, due to the movement of continents and the rise in sea level.
These shallow seas support a very strange creature, the Ocean Phantom.
It is not one animal, but a colony of creatures that work together, feeding on swimming sea slugs, Reef Gliders.
Around the shores of these seas, are huge swamps.
And this is where life has really changed.
Over tens of millions of years, new creatures have evolved.
The giants of the swamp.
Torratons.
They have evolved from tortoises.
The adults are enormous, the biggest animals that have ever walked on the face of the planet.
120 tonnes, that's bigger than even the biggest dinosaur.
In the dark, murky waters of the swamp, the Lurkfish senses it's prey by electricity, then kills it with a shock of over 1000 volts.
The Lurkfish's prey is a Swampus.
An octopus that can live on land.
They communicate by changing colour patterns on their bodies, but if the warning flashes are ignored, a Swampus can attack.
The Swampus has a bite so poisonous, it can even kill a Torraton.
In the hothouse climate of a hundred million years in the future, much of the land is covered in forest, even the continent of Antarctica, which has moved off the South Pole.
Over 100 million years, Antarctica has drifted as far north as the tropics.
The sea birds that once lived on Antarctica have also changed, into small, colourful Flutterbirds.
And there are huge, bird-eating insects in this forest.
But although the Falconfly attacks some birds, others can defend themselves.
These insects, Spitfire Beetles, have another way to attack Flutterbirds, they cooperate.
To survive in this crowded future world, many creatures have formed strange partnerships and alliances.
Living underground, the very last of the mammals, the Poggle.
This small rodent lives in the caverns of spiders, feeding on the seeds that the spiders have collected.
But the spiders are farming the Poggles, then feeding them to their massive queen.
There has been a hothouse world for millions of years, constant and unchanging.
But the forces that created this world will also destroy it.
Volcanoes become more active, spewing out poisonous gases and clouds of dust and wiping out most of life on Earth.
Every once in a while, the biology of the world is punctuated by a terrible event, often external, sometimes erupting from underneath the seas, those terrible environmental events wipe out 80%, 90%, 95% of the species of the world and they are called "mass extinctions".
Only a few animals will survive this mass extinction.
When you have a major environmental perturbation like huge volcanism, none of those organisms that have evolved for that preceding hundred million years are in any way adapted to deal with this.
The environment shifts, it becomes potentially cold, dark, volcanoes can create a variety of environmental shift.
Only those organisms which by chance can survive under those circumstances are the ones that are going to live through to the other side.
After a mass extinction, the world is full of new opportunities for evolution to exploit, as nature repopulates the planet.
In the third time period, 200 million years in the future, a hundred million years after the mass extinction, life has bounced back.
But 80% of the planet is a desert.
And that's because most of the land is a long way from the moisture of the Ocean.
In 200 million years' time the continents will, once again, come together to form one, huge landmass.
This has already happened in Earth's history.
200 million years ago, the continents were fused into one, huge landmass which is called Pangea.
So in 200 million years' time, we will have a new Pangea a new supercontinent, surrounded on all sides by the Ocean.
The global Ocean stretches for 20,000 kilometres.
But there are no fish anywhere in the surface waters, they all died out with the mass extinction.
Instead, there are Silver Swimmers, evolved from microscopic plankton.
There are thousands of different species.
And Silver Swimmers are preyed upon by completely new creatures.
Flish.
200 million years from now, in the absence of birds, they rule the skies.
Beyond the mountains that stretch down the coast of the supercontinent, most of the land is empty.
But there are very isolated oases, where water reaches the surface.
Here, Garden Worms bask in the sun, but their enemies are on the war path.
These, are Terabytes, evolved from termites.
They attack the Garden Worms with elaborate chemical weapons.
Which animals survived the mass extinction was simply a matter of chance.
Left alone, with enough time, even a snail can evolve to live in a desert.
This is a Desert Hopper.
It lives on the scrubby desert plants.
But not everywhere in this future world is desert.
In the North West corner of the supercontinent, moist winds from the global Ocean have created a forest, where it rains everyday.
The mass extinction left a land almost empty of life.
A new opportunity for bizarre new creatures.
There are Flish living inside the forest, and lichen trees 10 metres high that are descended from the tiny lichens that encrust rocks today.
Most bizarre of all, an eight metre high, eight legged squid, a Mega Squid.
And a totally flexible bone-free body would be perfect for life in the treetops.
Squid would be even better at swinging through the branches than today's Gibbons.
But the idea of squid swinging through the trees 200 million years from now? Is it really feasible? We can't be 100% sure that this is exactly what an animal will look like in the future, but we can be sure that, as long as new environments continue to open up, as long as animals continue to exist, as long as there is still food for them to eat and air for them to breathe, they are going to continue to adapt and change.
And the sky is the limit, there are no limitations to what animals can do in the future.
All these organisms are plausible.
Are they going to happen? We don't know.
But they could, and that is part of the beauty of it.
So, join this scientific voyage through time to see one possible future for planet Earth.
It's a voyage that is scientifically feasible.
And truly WILD.