The Future is Wild

***The Future Is Wild*** is a British speculative evolution docufiction miniseries created by Joanna Adams, and is a multinational production between several companies, including the British BBC, the Franco-German Arte, the German ZDF, the Austrian ORF, the Italian Mediset and the American Animal Planet and Discovery Channel. The series is designed in the style of a nature documentary, exploring ecosystems and wildlife of three future time periods. Though the setting and animals are fictional, the series is meant to serve as an educational and entertaining way to explore concepts such as evolution and climate change. It was narrated by Christian Rodska and originally aired in the United Kingdom in 2002 before subsequently airing in the United States in 2003.

The series proved to a huge success worldwide and spawned a franchise that has branched out into several other forms of media, including books, an animated series, exhibitions, theme parks, educational material and toys.

## Premise

The series explores three different future time periods: set 5, 100, and 200 million years in the future. Each period is divided into four different ecosystems, bringing a total of twelve to be explored and described.

### Ice World: 5 million years in the future

In this time period, the world is in the grip of a new Ice Age. Giant seal-like birds rule the seas in place of marine mammals and bats rule the skies in place of birds of prey. In the northern hemisphere, ice sheets extend as far south as Paris and as far north as Buenos Aires in the southern hemisphere. The Amazon rainforest has dried up and become a grassland. The plains of North America have become a cold desert, and Africa has collided with Europe, enclosing the Mediterranean Sea, which has dried out into a salt flat dotted with brine lakes (much like it has in the past) now that there is no water to replace it in the dry climate. Most of Europe is now 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. Central America, once a warm tropical area, has become dry and. Australia has moved north and collided with eastern Indonesia.

### Hothouse World: 100 million years in the future

In this scenario, the world is much hotter than at present. Much of the land is flooded by shallow seas surrounded by brackish swamps, and octopuses and tortoises have come onto land. Antarctica has drifted toward the tropics and become more tropical, as it has been in the past. Australia has collided with North America and Asia, forcing up an enormous, 12-kilometer-high mountain plateau taller than the Himalayas. Greenland has been reduced to a small, temperate island. There are cold, deep ocean trenches. The Sahara has once again become a rich grassland, as it was millions of years earlier.

### New World: 200 million years in the future

This hypothetical world is recovering from a mass extinction created by a flood basalt eruption even larger than the one that created the Siberian Traps and has wiped out 99% of life on the planet. Only fish, arthropods, worms and mollusks have been left to repopulate the Earth. Fish have taken to the skies in place of birds, squid have come onto land and into the forests, and strange worms and insects inhabit the world's largest desert. All the continents have come together and formed a new supercontinent, a second Pangaea. There is one large global ocean with a single-current system that gives rise to deadly hurricanes which batter the coastlines all year round. The northwestern side of the continent has become a temperate forest that has been drenched with an endless supply of rain. There is a long line of scrubby rainshadow deserts surrounded by mountains residing at the end of the coast, which prevent most of the rain's moisture from reaching there. The very center of the continent receives no rain at all, and has become a barren, plantless desert.

## Episodes

*This is the series as it was originally presented in the United Kingdom, prior to its North American broadcast*.

### American version

*The Future Is Wild* premiered in North America on Animal Planet as a single 90-minute special on January 1, 2003, and was narrated by Tim White. For this version, the premise was slightly modified at the behest of the network to suggest that humans simply left Earth to colonize other planets, as opposed to going extinct as the original version of the series suggested, and have sent back probes to study the new species. An extended version of this broadcast was released, with the episodes condensed into three two-hour programs, each focusing on one of the three periods presented. It aired on July 8-22, 2003.

## Reception

*The Future Is Wild* proved hugely successful, garnering several accolades and high ratings. The premiere of the ninety-minute version featured on Animal Planet in particular garnered a 2.24 household rating on an average of 1.8 million households, doubling the channel's previous highest viewership, and to this day remains one of the network's highest-rated series.

## Home media

Main article: *The Future Is Wild (videography)*