The Future Is Wild

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, when giant seal-like sea-birds roam the beaches and carnivorous bats rule the skies. Ice sheets extend as far south as Paris in the northern hemisphere and as far north as Buenos Aires in the southern hemisphere. The Amazon rainforest has dried up and become grassland. The North American plains have become a cold desert, and Africa has collided with Europe, enclosing the Mediterranean Sea. 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. 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. Hothouse World: 100 million years in the future In the scenario for 100 million years in the future, the Earth has a muggy hothouse climate. Octopuses and enormous tortoises have come on to the land, much of which is flooded by shallow seas surrounded by brackish swamps surrounding jungles. 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 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 caused by a flood basalt eruption even larger than the one that created the Siberian Traps, 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 heavily desertified supercontinent, 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. 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 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. In 1996, the concept of the series, and ideas for an accompanying multimedia franchise, was first unveiled at the Frankfurt Book Fair and the MIPTV Media Market. 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 co-produced the series with the Franco-German channel Arte, the German ZDF, the Austrian ORF, the Italian Mediaset and the American Animal Planet and Discovery Channel. In total, the series cost £5 million to make. == Episodes ==

The Future Is Wild aired on Animal Planet in the United Kingdom, on the Discovery Channel winning several accolades and achieving high ratings on channels worldwide. The premiere of The Future Is Wild on Animal Planet in the United States doubled the channel's previous highest viewership (being viewed by about 1.8 million households) and The Future Is Wild to this day remains the number one most viewed series in Animal Planet's history. ZDF Enterprises sold the television rights of the series to 18 markets: Belgium, Canada, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Ecuador, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, Japan, Korea, Mexico, the Middle East, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovenia and Venezuela. The series continues to be licensed internationally. As of 2021, The Future Is Wild has been broadcast in over 60 countries. == Multimedia franchise ==

Following the airing of the series, The Future Is Wild branched out into various other media, including books, children's entertainment, exhibitions, theme park rides, educational material and toys. Internationally, the book has been released in eBook and iBook format as an augmented reality book, under the title The Future Is Wild: The Living Book. The book has received scholarly attention as a work that showcases how augmented reality can encourage readers to connect with a book. Consisting of 26 episodes, each 22 minutes in length, the series was also simply called The Future Is Wild, and followed the four children C.G., Ethan, Emily and Luis, and their pet Squibbon, as they travelled through time and explored the settings and animals seen in the original series. and Dinosaurierpark Teufelsschlucht in Germany. There have also been exhibitions elsewhere, for instance in Japan. The exhibition at Futuroscope was called '''' and was inaugurated on 5 April 2008 by French politician Hervé Novelli. The exhibition itself was fully interactive, utilizing augmented reality technology, Like the Futuroscope exhibition and ride, the Sydney Aquarium exhibition, open from 2010 to 2011, employed advanced technology such as holograms, computer-generated imagery, animatronics and augmented reality. In contrast to most special exhibitions, The Future Is Wild installations were separated into species-specific installations spread throughout the aquarium, rather than concentrated in one place and each showcased new technologies. The exhibition also intended to encourage school participation, launching a competition called "Design a Future Marine Creature", which saw the winning design become a "life-size" permanent exhibit at the aquarium. Other In 2004, The Future Is Wild was adapted into a 20-minute fulldome film. The Future Is Wild had a very strong fanbase in Japan. In 2006–2007, the series was adapted into a story-driven manga, written and illustrated by artist Takaaki Ogawa. The figures were also released in France in 2008 to coincide with the opening of the exhibition at Futuroscope, and in Australia in 2010 to coincide with the exhibition at the Sydney Aquarium. Among other things, lessons include children creating their own future environments, plants and animals. In France, experimental educational projects were coordinated with The Future Is Wild exhibition at Futuroscope, and included classroom resources such as printed charts and an interactive CD-ROM programme. which met with positive response at the 2016 Frankfurt Book Fair. was in development in 2016. Planned revival of the franchise In 2016, John H. Williams, a producer of the animated Shrek franchise, and his animation company Vanguard Animation, acquired the rights to produce an animated TV series based on The Future Is Wild. In a January 2016 interview, Williams stated that "we believe The Future Is Wild will be a spectacular franchise launch point for us into quality television" and also mentioned that Vanguard Animation was working on creating a 26-part science fiction action-adventure series, planned to be produced as an international co-production. == Notes ==