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Documentary, Welcome to the Future: The Future 1-Is Wild 2002
#PermianTriassic #AncientEarth #Cretaceous #Prehistoric ##Evolutionary
#PermianTriassic #AncientEarth #Cretaceous #Prehistoric ##Evolutionary
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00:00Imagine a world millions of years in the future.
00:11A world where evolution has written a new chapter in the story of life.
00:24The world is inhabited by very strange creatures.
00:28Like nothing the earth has ever seen.
00:58Today, planet earth is dominated by humans.
01:08There are over six billion of us.
01:13But what would happen to the planet if there were no people?
01:19Just imagine that people were to disappear from this world.
01:25Many familiar animals, the big cats, the bears and the wolves, already endangered, already under threat from us, will disappear in a few thousand years.
01:41The planet, and the survivors, will carry on without us.
01:49And evolution, natural selection, will create new and bizarre life.
01:55These future worlds, millions of years from now, are populated by strange creatures.
02:12But they're not just fantasy.
02:15These worlds are experiments in the imagination of some of today's top scientists, based on what they know about the world now.
02:24If we look around the world right now, we see a huge number of very different things.
02:28Organisms you would never in your wildest dreams invent.
02:31Organisms you couldn't possibly imagine could make their lives that way.
02:35Beetles that live off of tiny bubble aqualungs under water.
02:40Or the rhinoceros. Imagine the rhinoceros.
02:43If you didn't know they existed, would you have drawn one?
02:46But how could scientists predict the future course of evolution?
02:52From studying the past, we can see certain trends in animals and animal evolution.
02:58And we can say that in the future, certain things are going to result because of circumstances developing in a certain way.
03:06So there are a whole series of rules, as it were, of how life has evolved, how life has changed and adapted through time,
03:14that we can test by taking our understanding of the present day and looking back in the past.
03:19It is no great leap of faith then to turn around and go in the other direction to the future.
03:25To go forward and create some of the organisms which are unusual, imaginative, but possible.
03:33This team of scientists created three periods in the future.
03:37The first is five million years from now, when life is challenged by a new ice age.
03:46Anything that survives here has had to adapt quickly to a freezing glacial world.
03:51The next future world, a hundred million years from now, presents the opposite challenge to life.
04:05This world is hot and humid.
04:08And has been since the end of the ice age, giving evolution a long time to shape the animals of this hothouse world.
04:16And finally, the scientists chose a period 200 million years from now, when the Earth is unrecognisable.
04:34One giant continent and one global ocean.
04:38But even in 200 million years time, the geography of the planet is not hard to predict.
04:43We know that the continents are moving.
04:46We can even measure the rate of movement.
04:48For example, the Atlantic Ocean is opening just about the same rate as fingernails grow.
04:55Australia is moving northwards at an even faster rate.
04:58So, with the right computer modelling, we can predict where continents will finish up.
05:04And this allows scientists to predict the future climate.
05:07The series begins in five million years time, when the ice caps have advanced from the poles,
05:18and much of the planet is in the grip of a bitter cold.
05:22We live in an ice age today.
05:26But ice ages follow repeating patterns.
05:2810,000 years of relative warmth are followed by 100,000 years of intense cold.
05:37All of human civilisation occurred in one brief 10,000 year warm period.
05:43In five million years time, the ice caps will advance yet again, covering much of Europe in two-kilometre-thick ice.
05:54But there will still be life on these frozen wastelands.
06:00Creatures that live in today's Arctic, like polar bears, arctic foxes and timber wolves, will disappear.
06:08Extinct.
06:16There are no whales and dolphins.
06:19Yet something has taken their place.
06:22This isn't a mammal.
06:24It's a bird.
06:26The gannet whale.
06:30Five million years isn't very long in terms of evolution.
06:33So animals won't look very different from today.
06:38These are shag rats.
06:42Giant rodents.
06:44And they show how animals adapt to the cold.
06:47Arctic animals tend to be large, with a long, thick, shaggy coat to keep them warm.
06:53They have short, stocky legs and small ears to reduce heat loss.
06:57Shag rats can survive in the open, in temperatures as low as minus 50.
07:10The real threat comes from a predator.
07:15The snow stalker.
07:17This may be an ice age, but not everywhere is a frozen wasteland.
07:28This isn't snow, but salt.
07:31A vast salt desert has replaced what was once the clear blue water of the Mediterranean.
07:50The Earth's continents don't move far in five million years, but when Africa collides with Europe, the Straits of Gibraltar will be closed.
08:03An ice age climate is very dry, so this will have a devastating effect on the Mediterranean.
08:10The Mediterranean will dry out until it becomes one vast salt pan.
08:20There will be small lakes of hypersaline water left behind, the only water in the Mediterranean.
08:27But the old holiday islands of Cyprus and Malta and Crete will stand up as small mountains in the middle of this sea of salt.
08:36Not much can survive in the centre of these salt flats, but there is something living here.
08:45Cryptiles.
08:50Cryptiles share the desert with billions of flies, their only source of food.
08:55Cryptiles.
08:56Cryptiles.
09:07On the bare, rocky plateaus of the old holiday islands, the Grykon hunts along the deep, narrow crevices.
09:13In the dry, ice age climate, the vast Amazon rainforest died out, to be replaced by grass.
09:31Without the cover of the forest, a few monkeys survived and adapted to life on the prairie.
09:49Life on the prairie.
10:00But there are predators here as well.
10:06Carakillos.
10:08Carakillos.
10:09Carakillos.
10:10Carakillos.
10:11Carakillos.
10:30In North America, what was once the huge fertile agricultural centre is now a barren, cold, windswept desert.
10:39Armoured rodents. Rattlebacks. Struggle to find enough to eat, scratching for roots and tubers.
10:50Their digging disturbs strange underground creatures.
10:55Spinks. Flightless birds.
11:09Eventually, the Ice Age will pass. Greenhouse gases from volcanoes will warm the Earth, and the ice caps will melt completely.
11:39A hundred million years from now, the Earth is much warmer than today, and has been for millions of years.
11:50The sea level has risen, covering much of the low-lying areas of land.
11:55The map of the globe looks completely different due to the movement of continents and the rise in sea level.
12:09These shallow seas support a very strange creature, the ocean phantom.
12:16It is not one animal, but a colony of creatures that work together, feeding on swimming sea slugs, reef gliders.
12:39Around the shores of these seas are huge swamps, and this is where life has really changed.
12:57Over tens of millions of years, new creatures have evolved.
13:02The giants of the swamp, Toratons.
13:05They've evolved from tortoises.
13:11The adults are enormous, the biggest animals that have ever walked on the face of the planet.
13:16A hundred and twenty tons. That's bigger than even the biggest dinosaur.
13:35In the dark, murky waters of the swamp, the lurk fish senses its prey by electricity.
13:45Then kills it with a shock of over a thousand volts.
13:48The lurk fish's prey is a swampus, an octopus that can live on land.
14:06They communicate by changing colour patterns on their bodies.
14:17But if the warning flashes are ignored, a swampus can attack.
14:22The swampus has a bite so poisonous, it can even kill a toraton.
14:40In the hothouse climate of a hundred million years in the future, much of the land is covered in forest.
14:56Even the continent of Antarctica, which has moved off the South Pole.
15:00Over a hundred million years, Antarctica has drifted as far north as the tropics.
15:09The seabirds that once lived on Antarctica have also changed, into small, colourful flutter birds.
15:17And there are huge, bird-eating insects in this forest.
15:32But although the falcon fly attacks some birds, others can defend themselves.
15:36These insects, spitfire beetles, have another way to attack flutter birds.
15:50They cooperate.
15:51To survive in this crowded future world, many creatures have formed strange partnerships and alliances.
16:10Living underground, the very last of the mammals, the Poggle.
16:15This small rodent lives in the caverns of spiders, feeding on the seeds that the spiders have collected.
16:29But the spiders are farming the Poggles, then feeding them to their massive queen.
16:34There's been a hothouse world for millions of years, constant and unchanging.
16:50But the forces that created this world will also destroy it.
16:54Volcanoes become more active, spewing out poisonous gases and clouds of dust, and wiping out most of life on Earth.
17:07Every once in a while, the biology of the world is punctuated by a terrible event.
17:30Often external, sometimes erupting from underneath seas.
17:34Those terrible environmental events wipe out 80%, 90%, 95% of the species of the world, and they're called mass extinctions.
17:50Only a few animals will survive this mass extinction.
17:54When 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.
18:07The environment shifts. It becomes potentially cold, dark.
18:11Volcanoes can create a variety of environmental shifts.
18:13Only those organisms which by chance can survive under those circumstances are the ones that are going to live through to the other side.
18:25After a mass extinction, the world is full of new opportunities for evolution to exploit, as nature repopulates the planet.
18:33In the third time period, 200 million years in the future, a hundred million years after the mass extinction, life has bounced back.
18:56But 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.
19:17In 200 million years' time, the continents will once again come together to form one huge landmass.
19:28This has already happened in Earth's history.
19:32200 million years ago, the continents were fused into one huge landmass, which is called Pangaea.
19:38So in 200 million years' time, we will have a new Pangaea, a new supercontinent, surrounded on all sides by ocean.
19:57The global ocean stretches for 20,000 kilometres.
20:00But there are no fish anywhere in the surface waters, they all died out with a mass extinction.
20:08Instead, there are silver swimmers, evolved from microscopic plankton.
20:15There are thousands of different species.
20:17And silver swimmers are preyed upon by completely new creatures.
20:40Flish.
20:41Flish.
20:42Flish.
20:46200 million years from now, in the absence of birds, they rule the skies.
20:56Beyond the mountains that stretch down the coast of the supercontinent, most of the land is empty.
21:02But there are very isolated oases where water reaches the surface.
21:06Here, garden worms bask in the sun.
21:14But their enemies are on the warpath.
21:21These are terabytes, evolved from termites.
21:25They attack the garden worms with elaborate chemical weapons.
21:42Which animals survived the mass extinction was simply a matter of chance.
21:47Left alone, with enough time, even a snail can evolve to live in a desert.
21:57This is a desert hopper.
22:00It lives on the scrubby desert plants.
22:17But not everywhere in this future world is desert.
22:20In the northwest corner of the supercontinent, moist winds from the global ocean have created a forest where it rains every day.
22:30The mass extinction left a land almost empty of life.
22:36A new opportunity for bizarre new creatures.
22:38There are flesh living inside the forest.
22:49And lichen trees ten metres high, that are descended from the tiny lichens that encrust rocks today.
22:59Most bizarre of all, an eight-meter-high, eight-legged squid.
23:10A mega-squid.
23:12And a totally flexible, bone-free body would be perfect for life in the treetops.
23:23Squibble would be even better at swinging through the branches than today's gibbons.
23:35But the idea of squid swinging through the trees 200 million years from now, is it really feasible?
23:45We can't be 100% sure that this is exactly what an animal will look like in the future.
23:50But we can be sure that as long as new environments continue to open up, as long as animals continue to exist,
23:57as long as there's still food for them to eat and air for them to breathe,
24:01they're going to continue to adapt and change.
24:04And the sky is the limit.
24:06There are no limitations to what animals can do in the future.
24:10All these organisms are plausible.
24:12Are they going to happen?
24:14We don't know.
24:15But they could, and that's part of the beauty of it.
24:17So join this scientific voyage through time to see one possible future for planet Earth.
24:24It's a voyage that's scientifically feasible and truly wild.
24:29Wild.
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