The Earth in 50,000 Years | 50,000 Subscribers Special

this channel has now reached over 50,000 subscribers and we are also thankful for the support we've received and the chance to educate and share a passion for the natural world to such a large and ever-growing audience to celebrate this remarkable milestone we thought we would make a video looking at what the future of our incredible planet could be like fifty thousand years from now and yes we have just reached 60,000 subscribers - which is another incredible milestone that we're very thankful for so this video is a little bit late anyway we've split this look to the future into three main parts first oli is going to be examining how the planet's climate could have changed next I'll be seeing how non-human animals and their evolution could be affected in this time and finally Doug is going to explore what could happen to our own species in 50,000 years now it's important to keep in mind that a lot of this will be speculation and it's never quite possible to predict with complete accuracy what the future will bring but we're going to speculate away nevertheless begin this video by considering the environment and climate of Earth and remember this is all speculation as you all know our climate is changing rather rapidly due to human activities soon 50,000 years who knows what could happen there are a number of possibilities as to what our thermogenic climate change may do to our planet but probably the most obvious and also most devastating is sea level rise National Geographic released an amazing in-depth map of what the earth will look like if all the ice melted due to global warming it is estimated that at humanity's current rate of greenhouse emissions this would take about five thousand years to achieve so fifty thousand years is more than enough time for humanity to destroy itself in this way assuming this did occur and no other environmental processes interfered we are looking at most of the world's largest cities going under greater Tokyo which is the world's largest metropolitan area with around 37 million people is almost completely submerged along with Shanghai the American East Coast a huge amount of Europe and the largest city in Africa Lagos as you can see this is obviously devastating to the world but if this occurs in 50,000 years due to anthropogenic climate change then many other drastic change in the environment will occur as well the melting of permafrost in Arctic tundra will release huge amounts of methane into the atmosphere helping with global warming however not just me then will be released many dormant diseases such as the plague and Spanish flu are buried in the permafrost but that is more of a harm to human so I'll get back to the environment also if you want to look more of the map it's linked in the sources along with sea-level rise that will decimate humanity's largest cities other burgeoning climate change will also cause massive desert vacation the process of deserts expanding this is already happening right now on earth in areas like this a whole region of Africa below the Sahara so give him fifty thousand years it's likely that a large amount of the earth may become desert so all the ice melting and destroying massive amounts of the coasts and deserts swallowing up most of the remaining Latin leaves humans and other animals little in the way of suitable habitat meaning society and civilization as we know it would most likely not exist think more along the lines of Mad Max also super hurricanes and storms may occur as well heat waves and flash floods but this videos too long to get into that this devastation could very well occur humanity's current rate of self-destruction but there is another possibility what if somehow against all expectations humanity managed to come together and solve global warming yes this is one of the more unlikely outcomes but it's not least a dream isn't it now there are many ways to do such a thing as reversing at the progenitor imma change probably the simplest would be to stop producing greenhouse gases and given enough time and hoping at this point we hadn't cut down most the trees on earth most of the co2 would be reabsorbed into trees oceans and other carbon sinks once again and our atmosphere would balance out returning the earth to its normal cycle of climate change not the massively accelerated climate change that we have caused another possibility is carbon capture where we would capture the co2 from the air like a plant and turn it back into usable fuel in a loop instead of putting new carbon into the atmosphere when burning fuel this method has problems though as it isn't just co2 that is causing the enhanced greenhouse effect it is also methane from livestock and rice farming and all the gases but it would certainly help another solution that is perhaps the most crazy but also the one I want to see happen because it's so crazy is building massive reflective satellites in orbit of the earth that will reflect some of the sun's rays so assuming we did do one of these methods and managed to halt anthropogenic climate change then in 50,000 years our client would be fine and humans would thrive right well it's not that simple there are many other factors that may change our climate in 50,000 years one of which is ice ages this error of our climate is probably the hardest to predict due to how little we know about I'd say jizz and how little we know about how our actions will affect them there are many possibilities as to what may happen at the progenitor climate change may get to the point where a glacial maximum is simply impossible due to global temperatures however there are some strange effects that global warming may have on the earth global warming leads to increased moisture in the air which leads to more snowfall which could potentially increase the albedo effect the effect of how much of the sun's energy is absorbed by the earth and how much to reflect it back so a high albedo means and mostly reflected back and snow has a high albedo this would cool the earth and potentially cause another glacial Maxim as long as global temperatures don't get ridiculously high so you can see how hard it is predict what will happen at in Milankovitch cycles altering the Earth's distance until from the Sun and potential super volcanoes such as Yellowstone erupting and it becomes almost impossible to predict if there will be a glacial maximum in the next 50,000 years or not another thing to consider is that in the last 800,000 years when glaciations have occurred that has only ever been around 170 to 280 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the air whereas now is thought to be around 400 so the question is whether the Milankovitch cycles and other processes are enough to change the earth's temperature anymore another interesting climate event that could occur is the previously mentioned super volcano eruptions Yellowstone National Park is one of the most beautiful places on earth but in 50 thousand years it's likely to erupt if the worst-case scenario were to occur and all the magma in its chambers was to erupt then we would have a problem Yellowstone has erupted like this three times in its history the last was 640 thousand years ago and the time before that was 1.3 million years ago so in 50,000 years we are do another erupted the immediate effect of the eruption would be the death of everyone in the park from either the air reaching 300 degrees Celsius or the pyroclastic flow now this is all bad but so far only the park has been affected now comes the world-changing consequences of the eruption ash of varying thicknesses would coat the entire US and parts of Mexico and Canada this gets worse if it rains as wet ash is very dense so only a few tens of centimeters could cause buildings to collapse ash also destroys clean water electrical grit in infrastructure but again it gets worse as at this point only North America has been affected an eruption of this size could potentially lower global temperatures by quite a few degrees causing crop failures and famine and depending on how long it lasted maybe even a mini glacial period all completely messing up the Earth's climate in the end the earth could be anything from a hot desert to a frozen wasteland a climate is unpredictable and erratic and that's even without humans interfering so it's truly unknown what lies in the future of our earth and from looking at the possibilities I'm kind of glad we won't be around to see them next we'll be looking at how other non-human animals might have changed in 50 thousand years obviously this is not exactly enough time for significant macro evolutionary changes to have occurred in most animals but we can still speculate how these future creatures could have adapted their behaviors or small parts of anatomy to better suit whatever the coming years hold depending on how long humans managed to last for it seems likely that some of the most successful animals in the future will be those we currently consider as pests in after man Dougal Dixon suggests that rabbits will eventually fill the niches left by extinct ungulates such as deer and rats will evolve to become large predators as well as developing into other forms taking on some of the roles performed by carnivorans today this certainly does seem fairly plausible given the rodents thrive in human constructed landscapes such as cities and rabbits have been spread around the planet by our species interfering with farming practices and breeding like rabbits so how might these organisms change in the next fifty thousand years from the moment we're going to assume that humans are still somehow around in 50,000 years in this case surely the rabbit and rodent populations would grow to ever larger numbers if the human population were also to increase expanding cities would provide more habitat for rats and other such rodents and perhaps slight modifications between generations would make the animals better detecting food sources for more effective scavenging maybe also larger sizes in these creatures could be reached with even more humans producing even more and more waste that could be accessed other animals that have taken residence in city environments may also prove to be the most successful animals in the future with organisms such as pigeons gulls cats raccoons squirrels and even some primates for example rhesus macaques possibly seeing booms in their populations as their newly acquired concrete habitats expanded further average body size increases could additionally be expected for these species since they'd have more resources to exploit in the case of the rhesus macaques larger troops might end up forming in cities since currently the animals grouped together in more numbers in urban environments than in their natural habitats another interesting adaptation to existence alongside humans is the evolution of louder and differently pitched calls in songbirds to allow their vocalizations to be heard over the city noise this has already been observed in living bird species as a study on silver eyes living in urban Australia showed so he could expect surviving songbird species to develop incredibly loud high-pitched cools there would also probably be many other species of various organisms that would adapt well to continued human existence far into the future especially certain invertebrates such as cockroaches and silverfish that are able to thrive in houses domesticated animals such as those kept as pets and those used in agriculture would also certainly manage to survive under the protection of humanity on the other hand it seems to be an upsetting certainty that a lot of species will go extinct in the next few thousand years and even in the next few centuries and decades if humans continue to grow and exist in a similar fashion to today endangered animals that are now under threat of habitat loss will sadly probably not make it for much longer the human population continues to grow and requires more land for living and agriculture modern amphibians which are currently undergoing a tragic decrease in biodiversity could be particularly badly hit along with the iconic megafauna of Africa including elephants rhinos and giraffes cetacean species would likely not fare too well either we've already experienced the almost certain extinction of one family of tooth - whales with the death of the last Bhaiji sometime in the early 2000s this extinction was the direct result of human activities and it's very probable that several other whale dolphin and porpoise species will follow this path - thankfully there are certain cetaceans that are actually recovering from the decimation during the whaling period such as the largest animal ever the blue whale which currently has an increasing population trend we can only hope that incredible creatures such as this managed to remain alive for as long as possible and all of these predictions are not even fully considering the effects of anthropogenic climate change with the drastically altering climate and rising sea levels it seems even more habitats will end up being lost to the various species that called them home not helping the survival of organisms already on the edge a certain possibility could be that at some point in our future once numerous species of iconic animals from our time have disappeared in the wild we could have parks filled with these organisms it could be a sort of Jurassic Park for more recent creatures containing cloned individuals of the various animal species seemingly doomed to be wiped out from the wild or the descendants of captive animals in zoos today obviously I hope this is not the eventual destiny for much of the incredible life inhabiting earth right now but it could be one way to preserve the memory of these remarkable organisms and teach future generations about the very real danger of extinction another factor to consider when thinking about the possibilities of animal life in a human dominated future is the effect of genetic modification even today domesticated animals are being selectively bred to improve the yield of meat or to produce more lean meat for example the Belgian blue cattle and there are also certain organisms that have already been genetically modified currently these modifications are primarily to reduce the risks of diseases affecting livestock although there are examples of animals engineered in different ways such as modified salmon in Canada that are able to reach sizes they can be sold out in half the time it would usually take so we can probably expect genetically engineered animals to become far more common in the future as they become more and more of a normality to us and even an eventual necessity to feed a larger population perhaps if livestock are actually still being consumed fifty thousand years from now there will be modified creatures akin to the creepy food species in Dixon's man after man where cattle and other domestic animals have been turned into large bulbous mounds of meat that are able to grow at an accelerated rate to provide for the future humans let's hope not though there'll be a bit messed up of course everything I've talked about so far is assuming that humans manage to survive on earth another fifty thousand years and the population continues to grow to a point that can still be sustained which seems like a relatively unlikely future the alternative outcome is that humans are no longer around this far into the future possibly having completely left earth in search of another planet or due to our own extinction obviously there are far more possibilities than this but for the purposes of the video let's assume that humans just disappear in about 200 years what would a natural world leftover from human habitation look like 50 thousand years from now well possibly much like the future I've already described rodents and other organisms suited to life in cities could still end up being some of the most successful survivors of the age of humanity there would likely be a bit more diversity of life left over - if certain at-risk and threatened animals managed to make it out alive before they fell prey to the effects of humans and too much of their habitat was taken so hopefully that still be some giant cetaceans around maybe even some African megafauna - and whatever animals were left would be able to continue evolving and reclaiming the environments taken by our species but sadly still probably be a lack of quite a few endangered organisms though and so the predictions made in after man might be starting to become a reality in 50,000 as time with pest species beginning to fill the empty niches left by those animals that were not able to survive the effects of humans as an example of this sort of thing perhaps at this time we would be seeing the early stages of the evolution of the rabbits as the lagomorph spread into more and more niches and replaced certain angular species that may have become extinct perhaps to the giant predatory rats of after man known as the Phalanx could be in the first stages of their evolution it does seem unlikely that large fielitz such as lions tigers and leopards will be able to survive much longer under the current pressures and by the time humans have disappeared in this hypothetical future they may not be around any longer as truly regrettable as this is it would open up the niches for other groups of organisms to fill and rodents that have been prospering from life in big cities seen as good a candidate as any to start evolving down this path after the age of humanity it's also interesting to consider what may happen to the domestic animals of our time once our species departs in after man Dougal Dixon suggests that animals kept as livestock will have grown so dependent on human care that they can simply no longer survive without us and end up dying out this could be possible in 200 years especially if as previously discussed genetic modifications make various breeds of livestock incapable of living in natural conditions however I'm not so sure every kind of domestic animal will die out sure some of them almost certainly will without the influence of humanity but animals such as domestic cats seem like they could survive without us and chickens which currently outnumber our own species massively potentially have a high chance of making it another fifty thousand years if only due to the sheer number of them and therefore the large likelihood of some populations managing to find and exploit one niche or another now we would obviously need a lot more time to go into more detail of the possible future outcomes that await non-human life in 50,000 years and my part of this video only serves as a brief overview of a few entertaining ideas for what could happen what I've said here is also in absolutely no way certain to occur which is why I've tried to avoid getting into too much detail since we can never really know what changes future animals want to go through however I would be very interested to know what you think had happen to animals on earth fifty thousand years from now so be sure to comment below your ideas for how things could change in this time right then you know this isn't never mind let's just get to it humanity's future is currently very uncertain but there's so much that can happen so much opportunity and a lot of danger to this is going to be the wildest one I'm sorry guys because it's just so unpredictable with so many fascinating opportunities let's start off with the shorter way to go it is of course entirely possible that in 50,000 years humanity all no longer exists the most dramatic and often the most talked about way that we could no longer be here is the lovely possibility of nuclear war I'm not going to go into the political details but there are currently enough nukes on the planet to easily wipe out the major cities if all of humanity's nukes were used it could plunge earth into a nuclear winter not a particularly nice prospect because this is where the masses of debris and smoke produced by all-out nuclear war blocks out the Sun for potentially years and we get to experience freezing temperatures and probably all die depending on how long it lasts humanity could survive this though but rebuilding would be difficult in these circumstances another way we could go is the predicted devastating effects of climate change this again isn't often talked about scenario for human extinction and not without reason human activity is dramatically increasing the rate of climate change and this is called anthropogenic climate change I won't be going into detail on this one though all he's already done that for you alarmingly those aren't the only ways humanity could end there actually loads and I'm not even going to go through all of them overpopulation could also kill us all the earth isn't an infinite size obviously and its resources and landmass are finite so eventually something will have to be done or we'll all die in 2017 Stephen Hawking's warned that due to the continued rise of human population and the increasing energy needs of the human race humanity needs to become a fully fledged spacefaring species in the next 500 years or face extinction basically we haven't got long to get our act together and become a multiplanetary species which brings me to our next Avenue leaving the death of everything aside perhaps one of the most exciting possibilities for future life is the human race going beyond the Stars and exploring and colonizing the galaxy it's extremely hard to say where this kind of technology will be in 50,000 years time though but we can safely say if all goes well we could have spread throughout the stars Einstein's widely used theory of relativity prohibits ordinary matter from even matching the speed of light meaning that exploring particularly far would mean doing something other than traveling it gets weird in order to well loophole around relativity we need to look towards our good old friend quantum physics in 1994 Miguel Alcubierre created the theory that uses quantum physics to solve the problem of faster than light travel the theoretical warp drive was called the Alcubierre Drive and would effectively use negative energy to walk space around it making it smaller in front of the craft and larger behind the specifics of this are obviously a little unknown to us though for example the amount of energy from the negative mass needed could be anywhere between the mass of the Voyager 1 spacecraft and the mass of the observable universe let's hope it's closer to the former but what is negative energy good question but perhaps from another time how would we live on these other planets though all of the other planets in our solar system are currently inhospitable for an unprotected human so in order to take full advantage of a planet we need to make it hospitable for Humanity we need to terraform it this at least to start off with our current knowledge is going to take quite a while Mars for example will probably take hundreds of years to terraform but that's okay we've got 50,000 so how would Mars be terraformed very quickly and in a nutshell it would have to be heated up so the Martian ice would melt to create oceans if we could all officially sustain plant life there this could eventually convert the co2 rich atmosphere into a more oxygenated one so as a whole species if we're still here we probably expanded throughout the stars but what are we like as humans it's widely believed that in the future designer babies will become a thing this means genetically modifying embryos to have certain character later on in life this is a highly controversial technique and has allegedly recently been done in China in order to give a baby the ability to resist HIV once this starts happening it's extremely likely that it will very quickly become a normal practice so it seems as though this will be our future speaking of Balaji humors could look very different in the future there's quite an interesting book on speculative evolution for humanity could man after man an anthropology of the future it's kind of post-apocalyptic and it suggests that in 50,000 years time Homo sapiens would have split into many different subspecies are to experiment with genetic engineering for example homo nanos Islanders who feast almost exclusively on meat and homo Votto's chimpanzee like people who are evolved to detect water from long distances it's really cool weird and actually quite fun so check it out there is a more popular theory that humans will evolve into two distinct subspecies one more ugly and less intelligent and the other the opposite super intelligent and attractive I'm personally going down that second route but hey that's just me there's just so much that could happen in the next 50 thousand years would you be an underground species that can't deal with sunlight scuttling around tunnels that dart around inside the earth we could be slaves of an alien race come to exert dominance because of their technological prowess we could be enslaving an alien race to exert dominance because of our technological prowess three people could have found the secret to eternal life but accidentally wiped out the rest of humanity war there are assets so now just roam around the universe as gods or not wiped out the rest of humanity and be ruling as benevolence beings of ultimate power we could have uploaded our consciousnesses to the internet and be roaming around an eternal virtual plane of existence or perhaps quantum computers will take off and revolutionize everything on the other hand they could just make every digital security system ever including nuclear codes completely obsolete or they could be a very specialized tool for simulations to boost scientific research we could also be taken over by a super intelligent rogue AI that learns everything in three seconds flat decides to wipe out humanity we could have accidentally merged all of our DNA with spiders we'll be walking around with spider people we could have a Galactic Empire and dominate lesser species or we could be part of it anyway we hope you enjoyed this 50,000 subscribers special thank you so much it really is a brilliant and unbelievable milestone and this video has been a bit different but one we all enjoyed making nonetheless also we recently received a shout out from a channel called scholar gladiatorial which was a rather kind gesture we thought we'd try to repay this by mentioning the channel here so if you're not already subscribed to him you absolutely should be Matt makes great videos about military history and they're honestly a joy to watch so gets stuck in most of the stuff we've covered today especially in the final part is widely speculative so enjoy speculating yourself and give a few suggestions yourself in the comments to what you think life could be like in 50,000 years also if you enjoyed the music in the video I certainly did it is written by our good friends Matt and Tom to hear more of their stuff you can subscribe to Matt's channel and follow Tom on soundcloud both links will be down there in the description if you haven't already and you want to learn more about the wonderful life around you feel free to subscribe if you think we deserve it and thank you so much again for 50,000 subscribers [Music] you

Channel: Ben G Thomas

Views: 50,494

Rating: 4.7399282 out of 5

Keywords: Biology, Science, Paleontology, Palaeontology, Dinosaurs, Animals, Nature, Wildlife, Ben, Thomas, Prehistory, Anatomy, Fossil, Bones, News, 7Daysofscience, Days, of, after man, man after man, dougal dixon, speculative evolution, zoology, climate change, global warming

Id: t8mswD5UHKc

Length: 25min 29sec (1529 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 23 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/OliverSparrow]

H. sapiens emerged about 300,000 years ago and started using tools about 90,000 years before present. To guess at what will be happening 50,000 years into an exponential future is, at best, entertainment. If anything alive at the time looks like a human, it will be a fashion statement. If anything with a higher brain function that was alive at the time were to have an identity, in the sense that naturally evolved animals do so, that too will be elective. What existed then would be so far away from our terms of reference and capacity to understand that we would probably fail to perceive its existence. Or it, ours.

[u/TemporaryLowEntropy]

Probably without humans, evolution plus synthetic self DNA manipulation (which bargain this year) would probably mean we would have evolved into a different form a together.

[u/moon-worshiper]

The human ape starts going extinct after 2100, if the birth rate increase, longer average lifespan, consumption rate, emissions increase stay on the exponential path upwards that they are now approaching. The problem with exponential curves in reality; they never approach the infinite asymptote. The curve up either hits a plateau, then gradually decays downward, or ends up being a spike function, collapsing to zero very quickly.

The human ape is an animal that has forgotten it is an animal, and that is the underlying reason for the species extinction after 2070, when the Earth's troposphere goes into Thermal Runaway and starts the exponential average global temperature rise. Desertification is going to happen before extinction.

Desertification projection map 2060-2069