The Future Is Wild

For the animated TV series, see The Future is Wild (TV series).

"FIW" redirects here. For Feature Interaction Workshops, see Feature interaction problem. For Family interference with work, see Work-family conflict.

The Future Is Wild
Genre	documentary, speculative science
Starring	See Scientists below
Country of origin	United Kingdom
No. of episodes	13 (List of episodes)
Production
Producer(s)	Jo Adams Television
Running time	20–25 minutes
Broadcast
Original channel	Animal Planet Discovery Channel BBC (2007-present)
Original run	April 2, 2002 (2002-04-02) – June 25, 2002 (2002-06-25)
External links
Website

The Future Is Wild (often shortened to F.I.W.) was a 2002 seven-part documentary television miniseries. Based on research and interviews with several scientists, the miniseries shows how life could evolve in the future if Homo sapiens became extinct; the Discovery Channel broadcast changed this outlook by stating the human race had completely migrated from the Earth and had sent back probes to examine the progress of life on Earth. The show was played out in the form of a nature documentary.

The miniseries was released with a companion book written by geologist Dougal Dixon, the author of several "anthropologies/zoologies of the future" (such as After Man: A Zoology of the Future), in conjunction with natural history television producer Jo Adams. For a time in 2005, a theme park based on this program was opened in Japan. In 2008, a special on the Discovery Channel about the development of the video game Spore was combined with airings of The Future Is Wild.

A film version of the series was picked up by Warner Bros.

Ecosystems

Twelve ecosystems were chosen at three points in time after the present.

5 million years' time

The episodes describe a potential view of the world after an ice age and giant seabirds roam the beaches and carnivorous bats rule the skies. In the scenario, ice sheets extended to as far south as Paris in the northern hemisphere and as far north as Buenos Aires in the southern hemisphere. The Amazon Rainforests dried up and opened into grasslands. The North American plains became cold desert. Africa collided with Europe and closed off the Mediterranean Sea again. With no water to replace it in the dry climate, the Mediterranean dried out into a salt flat dotted with brine lakes, as it has been in the past. Most of Europe became frozen tundra. The part of Africa east of the African Rift Valley has broken off of Africa. Asia has dried up and is now mountainous. The once dry area of Central America has now been transformed into warm dry tropical forests. Australia has moved north and collided with eastern Indonesia.

Profiled species

• Brine flies, flies that thrive on hypersaline water, the same species alive today.

Hypothesized species

• Babookari, a ground-living New World monkey, descended from the present-day Uakari.
• Carakiller, a giant, flightless bird of prey, descended from the present-day Caracara.
• Cryptile, a frilled Lizard that inhabits salt flats and has a sticky frill for catching flies.
• Deathgleaner, a giant, carnivorous bat.
• Gannetwhale, a large, flightless, seal-like seabird, descended from the present-day Gannet.
• Rattleback, an armoured, turtle-like rodent, descended from the present-day Agouti. There are two species, one in the southern grasslands, and the other in the northern deserts.
• Gryken, a slender terrestrial Mustelid, descended from the present-day Pine Marten.
• Scrofa, a long-legged, rock-dwelling wild boar descendant.
• Shagrat, a giant, Capybara-like rodent which lives in herds and migrates with the seasons in northern Europe, descended from the present-day marmot .
• Snowstalker, a large, white, saber-toothed Mustelid, descended from the present-day wolverine.
• Spink, a small, mole-like, burrowing bird, descended from the present-day quail.

100 million years' time

The world in a scenario placed 100 million years after the present is much hotter than the present. Other changes involve octopuses coming onto land and enormous tortoises. Much of the land is flooded by shallow seas. The surrounding land has become brackish swamps. Antarctica has drifted towards the tropics and is covered with trees, as it was 300 million years before. Australia has collided with North America and Asia, forcing up an enormous, 10-kilometre-high mountain plateau taller than the modern Himalayas. Greenland has been reduced to a small, temperate island. While low lying land is warm shallow seas, cold deep ocean trenches form. Africa's Sahara Desert has once again become rich grasslands as it was millions of years ago.

Hypothesized species

• Falconfly, a giant, predatory wasp, descended from the sand wasp.
• Grass Tree, a species of plant in the Great Plateau that is harvested by Silver Spiders to feed the Poggles, descended from bamboo.
• Great Blue Windrunner, a giant, blue, four-winged bird: its legs have flight feathers on and can act as gliding surfaces, descended from the present-day crane.
• Lurkfish, a giant, big-mouthed, electric fish.
• Ocean Phantom, a giant Portuguese Man o' War descendant.
• Poggle, the last mammal, living inside mountains.
• Reef Glider, a giant, swimming sea slug.
• Roachcutter, a swift species of Flutterbird.
• Silver Spider, a large colonial spider.
• Spindle Trooper, a giant sea spider. They live in Ocean Phantoms, which they defend against enemies.
• Spitfire Bird, a species of Flutterbird which shoots acidic flower nectar from its nostrils as a defence.
• False Spitfire Bird, a Flutterbird species that mimics the Spitfire Bird to frighten off predators like the Falconfly.
• Spitfire Beetle, a cooperative, predatory beetle which preys on Spitfire Birds.
• Spitfire Tree, a flowering tree that makes two chemicals collected by the Spitfire Birds, which in the process pollinates the tree.
• Swampus, a semi-terrestrial, brackish swamp-dwelling octopus.
• Toraton, a giant tortoise, grows to 120 tons.

200 million years' time

Map of a hypothetical future Earth (~200 million years hence)

The world in the episodes describing a possible scenario 200 million years from now is recovering from a mass extinction caused by a flood basalt eruption almost as large in size as the one that created the Siberian Traps. Fish have taken to the skies, squid to the forests and the world's largest desert ever is filled with strange worms and insects. All the continents have collided into one another and fused into a single supercontinent, a second Pangaea. Due to one single current system and one large global ocean, deadly hurricanes, called hypercanes, smother the coastlines of the continent all year long. The northwestern side of Pangaea II, drenched with an endless supply of rain, has become a temperate forest. Mountains resting at the end of the coast block most of the rain's moisture from reaching a long line of scrubby rainshadow deserts. The very center of the continent does not receive rain at all and has become barren plantless desert. At this time most of the vertebrate life forms such as mammals, reptiles, birds and amphibians are extinct, leaving fish, insects, worms and mollusks to populate the Earth.

Hypothesized species

• Bumblebeetle, a fast-flying beetle which lives and breeds inside the carcasses of dead Ocean Flish.
• Deathbottle, a carnivorous plant, residing in the Rainshadow Desert.
• Desert Hopper, a hopping snail with a modified single foot.
• Forest Flish, a small, forest-dwelling, hummingbird-like fish that no longer lives in the oceans, but instead flies like birds.
• Ocean Flish, another type of Flish that relies on the ocean more than the Forest Flish.
• Garden Worm, an algae-filled worm that feeds only on sunlight.
• Megasquid, a 5 meter high, 8 ton, omnivorous, terrestrial squid. Its 8 arms have evolved into walking legs like an elephant's. It uses its two long tentacles for feeding.
• Rainbow squid, a 25 meter long, gentle, ocean-going squid.
• Sharkopath, a bioluminescent pack-hunting shark.
• Silverswimmer, fish-sized neotenous Crustaceans.
• Slickribbon, a cave-dwelling, 1 meter long, predatory worm with a striking resemblance to Opabinia of the early Cambrian.
• Slithersucker, a large, predatory slime mold.
• Squibbon, a terrestrial tree branch-swinging squid. Relatively intelligent; the likeliest ancestor for future sapient life.
• Terabyte, a colonial termite descendant that has become highly specialized.
• Gloomworm, a primitive-looking, bacteria-eating worm.

Episodes

Main article: List of The Future Is Wild episodes

Each episode generally focuses on just one food chain within a particular ecosystem.

1. Welcome to the Future (a brief summary of the coming episodes)
2. Return of the Ice (5 million years time, in the new frozen wastes of Europe)
3. The Vanished Sea (5 million years time, in the Mediterranean salt desert)
4. Prairies of Amazonia (5 million years time, in the grasslands where the Amazon Rainforest once existed)
5. Cold Kansas Desert (5 million years time, in North America)
6. Waterland (100 million years time, in the swamps of Bengal)
7. Flooded World (100 million years time, in the shallow seas)
8. Tropical Antarctica (100 million years time, in an Antarctica which is now on the equator)
9. The Great Plateau (100 million years time, at the spot where Asia, North America and Australia have collided)
10. The Endless Desert (200 million years time, in the vast desert of central Pangaea II)
11. The Global Ocean (200 million years time, in, the ocean of the world)
12. Graveyard Desert (200 million years time, in a rainshadow desert)
13. The Tentacled Forest (200 million years time, in the rainforest)
14. The Future Is Wild and the Making of Spore (a special on the Discovery Channel about the development of the video game Spore was combined with airings of The Future is Wild.)

Production

The Future is Wild is a £5-million co-production of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), French-German channel Arte, ZDF of Germany, ORF of Austria, Mediaset of Italy, and Animal Planet and Discovery Channels Inc of the United States.

The BBC intended that the miniseries would repeat the success it had with Walking With Dinosaurs, its prehistoric documentary series which attracted 17 million viewers in 1999. The program used computer-generated imagery to show the possible future of life on Earth. The 13-part series was produced in four years by independent producer John Adams, who conceptualised it in 1997.

Scientists involved

Scientists involved in the project include the following:

• R McNeill Alexander, zoologist
• Leticia Aviles, evolutionary biologist
• Phillip Currie, paleontologist and paleoornithologist (the study of prehistoric birds)
• Dougal Dixon, geologist
• Richard Fortey, paleontologist
• William Gilly, cell biologist, developmental biologist and marine biologist
• Stephen Harris, mammalogist
• Kurt M. Kotrschal, zoologist
• Mike Linley, herpetologist
• Roy Livermore, palaeogeographer
• R. McNeill Alexander, specialist in biomechanics
• Karl J. Niklas, botanist
• Stephen Palumbi, marine biologist
• Jeremy Rayner, zoologist
• Stephen Sparks, geologist
• Bruce H. Tiffney, palaeobotanist
• Paul Valdes, paleoclimatologist

Distribution

The Future is Wild doubled the previous ratings record for the Animal Planet channel when it was aired in the United States. The series was shown on BBC2 in autumn 2004.

ZDF Enterprises sold the television rights of the series to 18 markets, namely, Belgium, Canada, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Ecuador, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, Japan, Korea, Mexico, the Middle East, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovenia and Venezuela.

Merchandise

DVD release

The series was released on three DVDs. The first DVD in the series includes episodes 1–5, the second includes episodes 6–9, and the third includes episodes 10–13. The three DVDs have also been released together as a set.

Both the DVD singles and the 3-DVD set are available for DVD regions one and two. Although the singles are available for region four, the 3-DVD set is not. Magna Pacific, the company contracted to market the Future is Wild series to Australasia, originally planned to release the 3-DVD set in May. When asked in December 2005, the Executive Director of Magna Pacific stated, "We have this scheduled for a May release." However, when asked again in August 2006, the National Marketing Manager of Magna Pacific announced, "Unfortunately the 3-DVD set of Future is Wild has been withdrawn from release, but the singles will continue to be available, yet plans for the release of the 3-DVD set have been placed on hold with no future date set at this stage."

CD-ROM

An educational CD-ROM entitled 'The Future Is Wild' was produced by Sherston Software in 2006 and remains on sale. It is designed to fit in with international school curricula including science, mathematics, geography and history.

Book

A book version was released in 2003, published by Firefly Books.

See also

• Human extinction

Books

• Future Evolution by Peter Ward
• Life After People
• The World Without Us
• After Man: A Zoology of the Future
• Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future

External links

• Official website
• The Future Is Wild at the Internet Movie Database
• Unofficial Wiki
• Book at Amazon