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''The Future Is Wild'' (also referred to by the
acronym
An acronym is a word or name formed from the initial components of a longer name or phrase. Acronyms are usually formed from the initial letters of words, as in ''NATO'' (''North Atlantic Treaty Organization''), but sometimes use syllables, as ...
''FIW'')
is a 2002
speculative evolution docufiction
Docufiction (or docu-fiction) is the cinematographic combination of documentary and fiction, this term often meaning narrative film. It is a film genre which attempts to capture reality such as it is (as direct cinema or cinéma vérité) a ...
miniseries and an accompanying
multimedia entertainment franchise. ''The Future Is Wild'' explores the
ecosystem
An ecosystem (or ecological system) consists of all the organisms and the physical environment with which they interact. These biotic and abiotic components are linked together through nutrient cycles and energy flows. Energy enters the syste ...
s and wildlife of three future time periods: 5, 100, and 200 million years in the future, in the format of a nature documentary. Though the settings and animals are fictional, the series has an educational purpose, serving as an informative and entertaining way to explore concepts such as
evolution
Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. These characteristics are the expressions of genes, which are passed on from parent to offspring during reproduction. Variation ...
and
climate change
In common usage, climate change describes global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its effects on Earth's climate system. Climate change in a broader sense also includes previous long-term changes to ...
.
''The Future Is Wild'' was first conceived by independent producer Joanna Adams in 1996 and developed together with various scientists, including
Dougal Dixon, best known as the author of the 1981 book ''
After Man
''After Man: A Zoology of the Future'' is a 1981 speculative evolution book written by Scottish geologist and palaeontologist Dougal Dixon and illustrated by several illustrators including Diz Wallis, John Butler, Brian McIntyre, Philip Hood, ...
,'' which also explored future wildlife. The 2002 series was an international co-production, involving the British
BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC
Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...
...
, the Franco-German channel
Arte
Arte (; (), sometimes stylized in lowercase or uppercase in its logo) is a European public service channel dedicated to culture.
It is made up of three separate companies: the Strasbourg-based European Economic Interest Grouping ARTE, plu ...
, the German
ZDF, the Austrian
ORF
ORF or Orf may refer to:
* Norfolk International Airport, IATA airport code ORF
* Observer Research Foundation, an Indian research institute
* One Race Films, a film production company founded by Vin Diesel
* Open reading frame, a portion of the ...
, the Italian
Mediaset, and the American
Animal Planet
Animal Planet (stylized in all lowercase since 2018) is an American multinational pay television channel owned by the Warner Bros. Discovery Networks unit of Warner Bros. Discovery. First established on June 1, 1996, the network is primarily ...
and
Discovery Channel. Wildly successful, ''The Future Is Wild'' continues to be broadcast to this day and has been shown on TV in more than 60 different countries.
The success of ''The Future Is Wild'' spawned a large multimedia franchise, including books, children's entertainment, exhibitions, theme park rides, educational material, and toys. There have also been cancelled projects, such as a potential movie adaptation, as well as a sequel series, ''The Future Is Wild 2''. From 2016 onwards, there has been talk of "relaunching" the franchise through various projects, such as an action-adventure TV series and The Future is Wild VR (a
virtual reality
Virtual reality (VR) is a simulated experience that employs pose tracking and 3D near-eye displays to give the user an immersive feel of a virtual world. Applications of virtual reality include entertainment (particularly video games), e ...
videogame), though no new media has yet materialized.
Premise
''The Future Is Wild'' explores twelve different future ecosystems across three future time periods: 5 million years in the future, 100 million years in the future, and 200 million years in the future. Four ecosystems from each period are explored and described.
Ice World: 5 million years in the future
The early episodes describe a world after an
ice age
An ice age is a long period of reduction in the temperature of Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in the presence or expansion of continental and polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers. Earth's climate alternates between ice ages and gre ...
, when giant seal-like sea-birds roam the beaches and carnivorous bats rule the skies. Ice sheets extend as far south as
Paris
Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), ma ...
in the northern hemisphere and as far north as
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires ( or ; ), officially the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires ( es, link=no, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires), is the capital and primate city of Argentina. The city is located on the western shore of the Río de la Plata, on South ...
in the southern hemisphere. The
Amazon rainforest has dried up and become
grassland
A grassland is an area where the vegetation is dominated by grasses ( Poaceae). However, sedge ( Cyperaceae) and rush ( Juncaceae) can also be found along with variable proportions of legumes, like clover, and other herbs. Grasslands occur na ...
. The North American plains have become a
cold desert, and Africa has collided with Europe, enclosing the
Mediterranean Sea
The Mediterranean Sea is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by the Mediterranean Basin and almost completely enclosed by land: on the north by Western and Southern Europe and Anatolia, on the south by North Africa, and on the ...
. Without water to replace it in the dry climate, the Mediterranean has dried out into a salt flat dotted with brine lakes, as it
has been in the past. Most of Europe is a frozen
tundra
In physical geography, tundra () is a type of biome where tree growth is hindered by frigid temperatures and short growing seasons. The term ''tundra'' comes through Russian (') from the Kildin Sámi word (') meaning "uplands", "treeless mou ...
. The part of Africa east of the
African Rift Valley has broken away from the rest of the continent. Asia has dried up and is now mountainous. The once warm, tropical area of Central America has been transformed into a dry area. Australia has moved north and collided with eastern
Indonesia
Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania between the Indian and Pacific oceans. It consists of over 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, and parts of Borneo and New Guine ...
.
Hothouse World: 100 million years in the future
In the scenario for 100 million years in the future, the world is much hotter than at present.
Octopuses and enormous
tortoise
Tortoises () are reptiles of the family Testudinidae of the order Testudines (Latin: ''tortoise''). Like other turtles, tortoises have a shell to protect from predation and other threats. The shell in tortoises is generally hard, and like oth ...
s have come on to the land, much of which is flooded by shallow seas surrounded by brackish swamps. Antarctica has drifted towards the tropics and is covered with dense rainforests, as it was before. Australia has collided with North America and Asia, forcing up an enormous, 12-kilometre-high mountain plateau much taller than the modern Himalayas.
Greenland
Greenland ( kl, Kalaallit Nunaat, ; da, Grønland, ) is an island country in North America that is part of the Kingdom of Denmark. It is located between the Arctic and Atlantic oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Greenland i ...
has been reduced to a small, temperate island. There are cold, deep ocean trenches. The Sahara has once again become the rich grassland it was millions of years ago.
New World: 200 million years in the future
The hypothetical world of 200 million years from now is recovering from a
mass extinction
An extinction event (also known as a mass extinction or biotic crisis) is a widespread and rapid decrease in the biodiversity on Earth. Such an event is identified by a sharp change in the diversity and abundance of multicellular organisms. I ...
caused by a
flood basalt
A flood basalt (or plateau basalt) is the result of a giant volcanic eruption or series of eruptions that covers large stretches of land or the ocean floor with basalt lava. Many flood basalts have been attributed to the onset of a hotspot reac ...
eruption even larger than the one that created the
Siberian Traps
The Siberian Traps (russian: Сибирские траппы, Sibirskiye trappy) is a large region of volcanic rock, known as a large igneous province, in Siberia, Russia. The massive eruptive event that formed the traps is one of the largest ...
, wiping out 95% of the species on the planet. Fish have taken to the skies, squid to the forests, and the world's largest-ever desert is filled with strange worms and insects. All the continents have collided with one another and fused into a single
supercontinent
In geology, a supercontinent is the assembly of most or all of Earth's continental blocks or cratons to form a single large landmass. However, some geologists use a different definition, "a grouping of formerly dispersed continents", which leav ...
, a
Second Pangaea or New Pangea. Although the formation of this new supercontinent has caused most distinctive geological features of its components to disappear, some can still be discerned, including
Hudson Bay, the
Novaya Zemlya archipelago and the
Scandinavian Peninsula, as well as the general outline of
Africa
Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent, after Asia in both cases. At about 30.3 million km2 (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of Earth's total surface area ...
. One large global ocean with a single-current system gives rise to deadly hurricanes called
hypercanes, which batter 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 prevent most of the rain's moisture from reaching a long line of scrubby
rainshadow deserts. The very center of the continent receives no rain at all and has become a barren, plantless desert. The survivors of the aforementioned mass extinction - fish, arthropods, worms and mollusks - populate the Earth and continue the process of adaptation and evolution.
Development and production
The idea for ''The Future Is Wild'' was first conceived in 1996 by Joanna Adams, a British entrepreneur
who has previously produced documentaries on modern and extinct animals.
As an independent producer, Adams wanted to create a documentary series different from anything that had come before, and something that could not be copied by larger production companies.
The series was envisioned as an entertaining, informative and inspirational way to explain planetary change and evolution, suitable for the popular market worldwide.
In 1996, the concept of the series, and ideas for an accompanying multimedia franchise, was first unveiled at the
Frankfurt Book Fair
The Frankfurt Book Fair (German: Frankfurter Buchmesse, FBM) is the world's largest trade fair for books, based on the number of publishing companies represented. It is considered to be the most important book fair in the world for internationa ...
and the
MIPTV Media Market
MIPTV (french: Marché International des Programmes de Télévision) is an event which takes place annually in Cannes, France, using the facilities and infrastructure which the town has developed over the years to host other important events suc ...
.
''The Future Is Wild'' was influenced by Scottish geologist and paleontologist Dougal Dixon's 1981 book ''After Man'', which imagines wildlife and ecosystems 50 million years in the future. Dixon was brought in as a consultant early on in the development of the series and designed many of the creatures featured. The series was not able to use any of Dixon's creatures from ''After Man'', given that the rights to adapting ''After Man'' were at this time owned by
DreamWorks SKG DreamWorks may refer to:
* DreamWorks Pictures, an American film production company of Amblin
** DreamWorks Television, an American television production company and division of the film studio
** DreamWorks Records, an American record label and ...
. Nevertheless, several creatures were similar to Dixon's earlier designs, such as the Gannetwhale, a seal-like bird similar to whale-like penguins in ''After Man''.
The series was created in close collaboration with scientists, filmmakers and animators.
Although the future creatures and environments created for the series are all fictional, they were based on evolutionary principles and grounded in science. According to Adams: "If you look at the creatures, you cannot say with any degree of accuracy that this is going to happen, but what you can say is, given certain conditions, creatures like this could develop."
Adams felt that it was important that the series would not just be dismissed as "another science-fiction fantasy", but that it would instead be seen as something credible. The geography of the future worlds depicted were designed through collaboration with geologists, and botanists and weather experts were consulted for the future environments. In addition to Dougal Dixon, several other animal experts, biomechanics engineers, and other scientists took part in designing the animals in the series.
In total, development and production of ''The Future Is Wild'' took six years.
Throughout its development, some television executives had very different and conflicting ideas of what the series should be. In particular, some were concerned about humans being absent and wished for a contrived explanation as to what happened to humanity. Adams co-produced the series with the British
BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC
Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...
...
, the Franco-German channel