Did anyone else catch this on Discovery Channel last night? It was perhaps one of the coolest things I'd ever seen.
For those not in the know, the show took a look at the wildlife of Earth & the process of evolution--at 5, 100, & 200 million years in the future. It showed how the animals we know today would turn into stranger creatures. Swamp-dwelling octopi, land-living (& intelligent!) squids, snails that turn into monopods, underground-dwelling rodentlike birds, ginormous shaggy rats, killer planets & birds, moderately intelligent insects & arachnids...all these things & more.
If they air it again (& they WILL, in perpetuity), then you simply MUST see it.
Posted by leuckinc (Member # 729) on :
You know, I wanted to see that! I was too busy playing Enter the Matrix though... Anybody know if it will be on again?
Posted by Cartmaniac (Member # 256) on :
Yeah, I did. And it left me a bit bewildered... Discovery has this habit of popularizing science by exaggerating fiction and downplaying fact for, erh, digestive purposes. See, the one thing science can't do is extrapolate the course of evolution, because it's a blind & unregulated & ongoing process that's steered by chance alone - it doesn't have a destination, or terminus, or whatever. Their predictions were off by a few billion mutations, give or take... then again, they might not be, pity we won't be around to verify them. :]
Gotta commend these guys though, they came up with some pretty funky animals. Earth's wildlife doesn't get any closer to "alien" than that.
[ May 19, 2003, 03:39 PM: Message edited by: Cartmaniac ]
Posted by Nim (Member # 205) on :
And here I was holding out for gills.
Posted by Futurama Guy (Member # 968) on :
Actually this originally aired around New Years, and the couple weeks following, so its already well on its way to perpetual-land. Posted by Mucus (Member # 24) on :
quote: killer planets
Hmmm, now we're boned.
Sounds like an interesting show. Extrapolating evolution would seem to be a rather difficult task, but you could probably make certain predictions. Unfortunately, the one largest environmental influence would probably be us. (Well, baring a new ice age, meteor strike, or some such)
As a result, I doubt any many large/interesting intellegent organisms could evolve, that would probably require a certain amount of nerve tissue, which would require a certain size of body to sustain it....a body we'd be likely to eat/hunt to extinction. Cephlapods included.
Posted by Masao (Member # 232) on :
I actually bought the companion book for that series last year. Some of the renders are sort of crappy-looking close up and without animation, sort of like the book for "Walking with Dinosaurs." Dougal Dixon, the creator of the series, had some interesting evolutionary SF books in the 1980s and 1990s, including After Man (most niches are filled with descendants of rats and rabbits) and The New Dinosaurs (dinosaurs didn't go extinct and now fill all niches). I'm looking forward to seeing this.
Posted by Woodside Kid (Member # 699) on :
This was on several months ago, and in a slightly different form. The first version had a background explanation that manhad left earth and was sending probes back to see how life had evolved. There were several scenes showing the probe in orbit, along with scenes in the later timeframes showing later versions of the probe docking with their predecessors. (How the original probe managed to remain in orbit for 195 million years was never explained.)
In place of these scenes were several scenes with new animals (or previously seen ones doing more). The new scenes included the vomit-spitting bird/whales in 5,000,000 A.D., the bird-eating dragonfly one hundred million years from now, and both the hopping snail descendant and the carnivorous plant in the last timeframe.
Posted by darkwing_duck1 (Member # 790) on :
quote:Originally posted by leuckinc: You know, I wanted to see that! I was too busy playing Enter the Matrix though... Anybody know if it will be on again?
I wouldn't doubt it...this was the second or thrid time it had been on...
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