The natural history of the future(predicting evolution)

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Dr Lou Natic

Unnecessary Surgeon
Registered Senior Member
I had the thought a while ago that it would be possible to predict possible directions different species might take in the future of evolution.
Coinidently, I just stumbled on a website for a documentary that apparently aired on animal planet recently addressing this subject. It was called "the future is wild", did anyone see it?
I didn't, I don't get animalplanet but damn I wish I did. The very idea is extremely fascinating to me. I would be content to dedicate my life to it actually.

But from viewing the website I got the feeling the documentary would have been disappointing. They said it was made by a crew of diverse scientists but I just can't see flying fish that nest in cliffs ever evolving. That is one of the many animals they imagine(and apparently have good reason to imagine). Also the names for the animals they come up with are very lame and distracting, the "flish"? :rolleyes:

There was however, one of their ideas that , although again not particularly believable, was incredibly cool. The "squibbon"(yeah, I think they should have fired whoever came up with these names) was an intelligent air breathing social tree squid. As intelligent as humans they say. They are small and live high in trees where they build little huts and villages out of twigs and branches.
Very creative if nothing else. They vaguely explained how and why squids adapted to life on land, I don't think it would be absolutely impossible. Pretty improbable though.

I think it is possible to predict short term evolutionary changes within species, the predictions "the future is wild" made were meant to be in 200 million years and stuff like that but I think by examing the breeding habits of todays species you could predict likely physical changes.

For example maybe lions will develop armadillo like neck and chest armour, the "manes" they possess today seem to be in the process of becoming something like that.
What do you think?

Any animals you want to invent? Make sure to give them ridiculous immature names:rolleyes:

.... "flish".... I can't get over that...
 
It depends how far you want to predict, anyways I can only assure you that for paleontologist of the future will record this era as a very big mass extinction! For all intensive purposes most higher life forms will not survive the “Hominid induced extinction era” so they have no evolutionary future.

Also I thought the squibbon was the most stupidest hypothetical creature ever! Mollusk have been around for over 300million years and without a skeletal structure they will remand limited to snails and slugs on land.
 
pointless?

Is they truly any point in wondering whether the squids will ever set up villages in trees? i mean come on.. as soon as they did that they would be wiped out for being a nuiscance.. or wiped out purely because they are showing signs of intelligence..

maybe they are such creatures.. but they just hide since they have intelligence, and having intellligence means they know to hide it from us..
 
DR Lou it was on also on Discovery Channel and i saw it. It was three hours long and damn it was amazing. It predicted the course life will take in as much as 200 million years from now. I think they went in time increments and predicted the different species that would exist in certain times.....and guess what mammals lose in the future.

At one point they showed....(when Australia would have carshed into Asia according to plate tectonics theory) how a species of spider called silver spinners go through this whole tedious routine just to attract the last mammal on the Earth...these spiders have gotten so smart that they actually feed this mammal just to get him fat and juicy and then the queen silver spider kills the poor bastard for food.

The animation was done by the same team that did the amazing animation for walking with dinosaurs. It also had interviews by scientists from Harvard University describing the new species....i must admit however the names of these new animals were stupid....

At the very end....200 million years from now it was predicted that Squids will become the dominants creatures with impressive cognitive ability. They showed a giant ass land squid and a cool one called..SQUIBIN..i think.....this thing put monkeys to shame.

Stupid names....but amazing documentry...i am going to try to find it on kazaa;)
 
Did it mentions how the earth will not be able to support life in 1 billion years and that the oceans will boil way in 2-3 billion years?

I think predictions like those are impossible to get accurate, even if it was all done with Maya 5.0. They could have had a better time show the biospheres of alien planets!
 
WCF got it right. It doesn't seem likely that there will be much left to evolve a couple of hundred years from now that isn't a human, human pet, human livestock or a human parasite.

I can't remember ever seeing one single science inspired piece of fiction in which the future is not portrayed as urban or barren. Science fiction writers are usually somewhere near the mark.
 
Originally posted by Canute
WCF got it right. It doesn't seem likely that there will be much left to evolve a couple of hundred years from now that isn't a human, human pet, human livestock or a human parasite.
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It isn't couple of hundered...more like couple of million


I can't remember ever seeing one single science inspired piece of fiction in which the future is not portrayed as urban or barren. Science fiction writers are usually somewhere near the mark.
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;)


This documentry looked way past that....infact humans die out pretty early according to those scientists predictions...as well as all the mammals.


WCF...it doesn't hurt to try..that documentry was just guesing of all the new creatures that can come about based on the known species today. It was fun and made a good watch;)
 
I saw it, it was really cool. Weren't the last surviving mammals-- rats reared as food by giant spiders?

i must admit however the names of these new animals were stupid....
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Come on, what do u except from a bunch of over-enthusiastic nerds?
 
sargentlard:
Read Canute's first point again...
WCF got it right. It doesn't seem likely that there will be much left to evolve a couple of hundred years from now that isn't a human, human pet, human livestock or a human parasite.
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I think he, affirming WCF's earlier comment, is implying that humans will kill off most other species. This will not take millions of years, if it happens.

From what it I can see, as far as we humans don't destroy all that we've created, then we control our environment to the point where further adaptation is unnecessary.
 
Idle Mind got it right! except for the fact they we are already killing off 30 speices a day!

I would like to see a show on what life is like on other planets: like what life is like under half and double our gravity, what life is like breathing sulfar, life on non-rotating planets and planets with very odd orbits, what life is like in the clouds of venus, in the oceans of Europe, ect, ect.
 
I know this may sound like a stupid idea, but, ah, hell, I guess it is a stupid idea. How about interstellar life? Perhaps a creature that is so huge it consumes all of a planet's resources, and then leaps from planet to planet, kinda holding it's breath along the way. Wait a minute! We could be the interstellar life! We just have to squeeze into a tin can for the jump.

Gurglo
 
Originally posted by WellCookedFetus
I would like to see a show on what life is like on other planets: like what life is like under half and double our gravity, what life is like breathing sulfar, life on non-rotating planets and planets with very odd orbits, what life is like in the clouds of venus, in the oceans of Europe, ect, ect.
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Yes that would be cool. Lets make it wellcooked :D Except I wouldn't bother with any of the planets in this galaxy.

Canute, yes science fiction writers always do picture the future to be a barren wasteland but I'm on the side of the geeks that made this show. There is no denying humans will go exctinct or at least leave this planet very soon(in the next hundred thousand years). A million years after we were gone it would be hard to tell we were ever here. Different niches would be left over from all the animals we killed and what was left would go in many different directions. It would only take a small number of one type of squid to eventually make thousands of different types of squids doing many different things.
But that is just one possibility. Thats all you can really do is predict possibilities.
You can see why mammals would go exctinct eventually due to the time it takes them to reproduce. Many catastrophic extinctions will occur in the future from natural events just like they have in the past, the ones that are most likely to make it through are the animals that release thousands of eggs at a time and stuff like that.
I haven't seen the show but judging by the website I don't think they did too bad of a job. Although some of the animals seem to have been invented to purely to grab peoples interests.
 
gurglingmonkey, you wound not happen to know spuriousmonkey would you?

Ok ok Here is my prediction: A new family of mammal will take over the earth after the humans have left, Rodentia Infiste basically most mammals of the future will be rat based, rats love people and live well with us also they reproduce really fast. Spiders and squids will not take over the earth because there skeletal structures will not never be able to support them at larger sizes. In the future there will be giant herbivore rats and carnivore rats as well as rats that walk on two lags.

I started a new thread for the Alien life idea:
http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=23372
 
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Originally posted by Idle Mind
sargentlard:
Read Canute's first point again...

I think he, affirming WCF's earlier comment, is implying that humans will kill off most other species. This will not take millions of years, if it happens.

From what it I can see, as far as we humans don't destroy all that we've created, then we control our environment to the point where further adaptation is unnecessary.
Click to expand...


Well that's puerly speculation for now...i doubt every single species will be wiped out before we leave....unless we leave with a bang..(a nuclear holocaust)......

The show predicted on us getting commen sense and leaving with peace ;) ..still was good though
 
I actually don't know spuriousmonkey, I came up with my name for an email address during a psychotic episode. It doesn't really mean anything.
And I think you might be right, Fetus, because we replaced the dinos and when they were around we were just the creatures dinos scraped off their feet. I thought I learned somewhere (through osmosis) that cockroaches would be the ones to live through a nuclear disaster. They could replace us, maybe. It would only make sense to experiment with all different kinds of creatures if you want a sentient species. You know, first lizards and dinos, that didn't work, wipe the slate clean, start with mammals, maybe that don't work, try with insects.

Gurglo
 
Originally posted by WellCookedFetus
gurglingmonkey, you wound not happen to know spuriousmonkey would you?
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i can confirm that I don't know gurgling monkey. Names with monkeys are good though, because everybody knows that monkeys are funny...the comical value of a fetus is much lower.
 
We may hope that life will survive on Earth for millions of years. But no life will survive without an atmosphere, and it is well within our powers to destroy that, so we almost certainly will. I'd like to be more optimistic but can't find any reason to be.
 
Let's have a look at the future of evolution from first principles.

First of all, Mankind is killing off species at a high speed, but not all animal and plant life is likely to be exterminated;
and soon genetic engineering will begin to create new species and to operate in a way that it never has before on this planet. So given a few million years there might be a more varied biota on this planet than ever before.

Alternatively the Earth might become a biological reserve, as it is a self sustaining biosphere; humanity and all the genetically modified species coulld construct habitats on other planets, moons and asteroids, leaving Earth to continue natural evolution unmolested(this is the scenario we adopt in Orion's Arm);

or humanity might die out spontaneously, perhaps destroying itself without utterly destroying the environment.
In this case what ever life is left will have to recover and replace the vacated ecological niches; possibly rats and domestic animals will diversify into a wide range of body shapes and adaptations.

If current trends in climate continue, once the effects of human global warming fade away, the ice ages will return, and Earth may be an icy planet withh giant wooly rats and sheep megafauna.
A hundred million years later the gradual warming of the Sun towards its red giant phase will end the ice ages- for maybe a billion years longer Earth will be inhabitable, with a population of creatures which might take any form (although I think squibbons are unlikely, I don't discount them).
___________________
SF worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html
 
Dont go too hard on them.... Who would have thought something like us would have ever evolved out of a mammal-like reptile?
 
Good point. Actually when you put it that way I don't think their guesses were nearly crazy enough.
You are correct about humans and all mammals descending from one single little dinosaur species. I can't remember its name. It just evolved to live like todays mammals, mother and father forming a bond and taking care of their young in burrows and so on.
Its pretty amazing when you look at the diversity of animals that spawned from that one successful species after the other dinosaurs died out.

After the mass extinction we are experiencing now is over I wouldn't be surprised if just one of the many humble animals around today started up a whole new class of animal families just like the mammal-like dinosaur did. Mammals didn't exist when it was around and perhaps "whatever will be" doesn't exist yet either.
 
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