Imagining the Future

By R. McNeill Alexander, professor emeritus of zoology at University of Leeds, UK. Excerpted from The Future Is Wild: A Natural History of the Future by Dougal Dixon and John Adams.

The Future is Wild tells of 8-ton squids roaming the land in a world where all the continents have merged into a single, huge landmass. It tells of snails that hop like kangaroos, fish that fly like butterflies through forests, and birds with four wings. This future world may seem incredible, but it is firmly grounded in science.

Imagining the planet Earth 5, 100 and 200 million years in the future is no easy task. To bring the habitats and creatures of tomorrow to life, the producers of The Future Is Wild have worked closely with an international team of scientific advisers to ensure that everything presented is possible.

We began by imagining how the Earth's continents might be distributed in the future. For this, we called on an earth scientist. By studying rock magnetism, earth scientists have discovered how, over the past several hundred million years, the continents slowly moved, regrouped and crushed together to form mountain ranges. There have been no sudden changes of direction in these movements, and our consultants expect them to continue more or less as our future world maps show. The position of landmasses and mountains also determine the climates of the future. By studying world maps, a climatologist was able to deduce the climates of our future habitats.

We have had advice from many biologists. Some are acknowledged experts on particular groups of organism, while others are known for their breadth of knowledge in fields such as ecology, biomechanics and physiology. But even with this fund of knowledge, we have to accept that our predictions, though rooted in science, will necessarily contain some conjecture. In our rich, diverse world, there are simply too many species interacting with each other and with their environments in subtle, complicated ways. The theory of chaos tells us that it is impossible to make reliable long-term predictions for highly complex systems.

Despite the difficulties involved, we have done our best to ensure that the plants and animals of our future worlds are viable, and could evolve from existing species in the time available. Our team of biologists has suggested many remarkable possibilities, such as the mega squid, a giant terrestrial squid living in the Northern Forest 200 million years from now. This animal is a result of detailed advice and calculations from an expert in squids and a specialist in biomechanics.

Our suggestions are based on certain assumptions. We have assumed that the plants and animals of the future will be made of similar materials to present-day plants and animals. For example, we have assumed that wood and bone will be as strong as present-day wood and bone, and muscles will exert about the same force as present-day muscles of equal size. We also assumed that the maximum rates of animal growth or photosynthesis in plants, will be no faster than at present. These assumptions have been applied in numerous calculations, to check, for example, that a large land animal would be strong enough to support its own weight or that a flying animal could carry enough fat to fuel its journeys.

A few simple rules, based on observations of present-day animals, have helped us to work out what the lives of future animals would be like. One general rule states that an animal 16 times heavier than a close relative will need about eight times more food each day and take about twice as long to grow to maturity. The large animals that we imagine might inhabit the world in the future have all been created with this in mind.

In the course of evolutionary history, several amazing patterns of change have occurred repeatedly. We can expect to see similar patterns in the future, in other groups of animals and plants. For example, birds, bats, insects and pterosaurs have all, separately, evolved the ability to fly. Amphibians, lungfishes, land snails, crabs and insects have evolved the ability to breathe air instead of water. Ostriches and certain salamanders have evolved to become sexually mature while retaining juvenile characteristics -- with its fluffy feathers and rudimentary wings, an ostrich resembles an overgrown chicken. Aphids, water fleas and rotifers all reproduce by parthenogenesis, or virgin birth. In creating the plants and animals of tomorrow, we have used our knowledge of the past to help us imagine the future.