---
title: "The Future Is Wild"
chunk: 1/4
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Future_Is_Wild"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:51:21.564426+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

The Future Is Wild (also referred to by the acronym FIW) is a 2002 speculative evolution docufiction miniseries and an accompanying multimedia entertainment franchise. The Future Is Wild explores the ecosystems and wildlife of three future time periods: 5 million, 100 million, 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 and climate change.
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, which also explored future wildlife. The 2002 series was an international co-production, involving the Franco-German channel Arte, the German ZDF, the Austrian ORF, the Italian MFE - MediaForEurope (via their Mediaset division), and the American Animal Planet 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 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 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, 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.