Welcome Guest [Log In] [Register]
Add Reply
  • Pages:
  • 1
  • 2
Starting Scenario, Five Million Years
Topic Started: Oct 7 2013, 01:23 AM (377 Views)
Citrakayah
Member Avatar
Administrator
[ *  *  * ]
We didn't go out with a bang.

We didn't go out with a whimper, either.

We're still here. Honestly, I can barely believe it. War, plague, climate change, famine--humans have basically been the universe's chewtoy. Also our own chewtoy, really. Humans endured everything everyone threw at it. We continued to improve our technology. We united, solved many of our old problems, even if we replaced them with new ones all too easily. Finally, we developed FTL, by opening wormholes connecting gravity wells. The stars were opened to us. We built a fleet of ships, big ones so we could travel the universe. They were designed to carry colonies, and they were wonders.

In 2400 BCE, we left Earth. Most of the entire population, eleven billion people, left, with the rest retreating to isolated, self-sufficient cities. We used our technology to terraform Mars, built a wormhole generator, and went off to live life as a rogue planet, hopping between solar systems.

But we never forgot Earth. How could we? It was our birthplace. We kept an eye on it, watching it with interest. With us gone, how would it fare?

Winners and Losers

Winners:

  • Introduced species did quite well. Cats, dogs, ferrets, goats, camels, all had been introduced to new environments, often with few competitors. Often they were introduced to islands, and the result was rapid speciation after we left.
  • With the extinction or decline of several species of large apex predators, mesopredators moved to fill the gap. Wolves, despite our best efforts, became functionally extinct in the United States, so coyotes took advantage of the niche. In Africa, lions went extinct, and the result was that cheetah, jackal, fox, and small cat populations exploded and diversified. An arms race was on.
  • While cetaceans never went completely extinct, they did decline. Pinnepids took over some of their niches, though dolphins continued to dominate truly pelagic niches.
  • As with pinnepids, varanid lizards. Several species of monitor lizard adapted to a littorial existence quickly.
  • Macropods, of all things, actually invaded Hawaii, of all places. They did well there, maintaining a breeding population and gradually expanding outwards, into the rainforest and the hardened lava floes.
  • Of all the organisms that one would expect to suddenly colonize a new habitat, trees would be the last one. But colonize they did. Trees, descended from the mangroves, began to colonize deeper and deeper parts of the ocean. Mangrove seeds began to elongate, until they could root in nearly a meter of water. Even better adaptations would come soon enough.
  • With the extinction of several predator species, and having their range greatly expanded in some cases by humans, bovids, especially sheep, did particularly well (though a fair percentage of sheep species went extinct, feral sheep diversified).


Losers:

  • Panthera never entirely went extinct. In Africa, leopards survived, and fragmented jaguar populations managed to persist. But the tiger completely vanished, the lion went extinct, and snow leopards (turned out they were Panthera uncia after all), while they didn't go completely extinct, were all moved to Mars, where we take care of them, and they prowl the frozen glaciers of the poles. Someday perhaps we'll bring them back. Maybe. But probably not.
  • The roquals suffered heavy losses. Of all the species, only a few survived. We didn't render them extinct, not completely, but we reduced their numbers so much that they could not survive without our help.
  • Toothed whales also suffered a decline, enough of one that pinnipeds started encroaching on some of the niches they had formerly controlled.
  • Large pachyderms nearly went extinct. All Asian rhinoceroses went extinct, as did all elephants but the African bush. The Southern white rhinoceros survived in a few parts of its range.
  • Frog biodiversity declined by 50% in some parts of the world as they were ravaged by chytrid fungus. They were hardly going to go extinct as an order, but it would be a long time before they returned to their former glory.
  • While tree ferns and cycads didn't go extinct, locally many species vanished, the result of overcollecting.


The World
The world can be described, roughly, by the projection at right; the world is in an ice age, there's a great big desert in North America, etc. However, there are significant differences.

It's significantly drier than showed on the right, comparable to the climate of the late Pleistocene, because of this some species can be remarkably similar to its Pleistocene counterparts. One example is the swamp lion being similar to the Pleistocene owen's panther.

In Africa, the savannah has turned dry (drier than it already was, that is) and is close to turning to desert. Woodland remains in Central Africa, and is heavily present in the section that has broken off of Africa, but is less wet than it used to be. It is more comparable to a temperate rainforest, at least in terms of rainfall. The forests of the area that has broken off of Africa (hereafter referred to as Somaliland) are especially wet, however, due to constant fog and mist being sent in from the ocean. The freshwater lake in the center of Somaliland is extremely deep, rather akin to Lake Baikal, and has a great many interesting species living in it.

In what was one the Mediterranean Sea, the land has become almost completely a salt flat. What life does survive mainly lives on former islands. Interestingly, due to the vertical barrier, different species often live on the islands than the salt flats, even if they were fairly recently related.

The Americas are significantly drier than shown on the map. Central America has retained woodlands, and Florida has developed one. Much of California is a rich grassland, and California has been separated from the rest of the United States by a shallow strait of water for some time.

Despite what the map shows, the Himalayan Mountains remain very cold.
Attached to this post:
Attachments: 5mio_globe.png (172.69 KB)
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Replies:
martiitram
Member Avatar
Very Active Member
[ *  *  * ]
JaggerTheDog
Oct 28 2013, 01:20 AM
How does this count as a crumbling ruin? When it has five million people? When there's lots of buildings and it's perfectly stable?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit
Look at the photos.
Also , will you give me a watch in deviantart?Please!
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Citrakayah
Member Avatar
Administrator
[ *  *  * ]
Stop derailing the thread, both of you. This is not the place for off-topic conversations.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Zirojtan
Active Member
[ *  * ]
Quote:
 
Look at the photos.



Look at the photo in this article, or this photo, or this one, or this one, or may see what I got when I typed in "Detroit" on Google. It is also the largest city in the United States to file for bankruptcy, and it is the metropolitan area, not the city itself that houses 4,292,000. The city has enough buildings in it to house upwards of 2 million people, but only about 5-700,000 people live there because most of it is actually abandoned. It is frequently cited as one of the poorest places in the country.


And guys, I don't mind working with younger kids, but the Terms of Service for Zetaboards are very clear about how to work with users under the age of 13, and by mentioning your age publicly, you may have created an administrative problem. I'm going to confer with the admins and see what we need to do here.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
JaggerTheDog
Member Avatar
Beginner
[ * ]
martiitram
Oct 28 2013, 02:10 PM
JaggerTheDog
Oct 28 2013, 01:16 AM
It wasn't me who planned wolves will be extinct. :ermm:
Also, that was a long time ago. New cities might form over a period of time; but the city that your talking about has only a few million, present day cities have over twenty-two million, nineteen million, etc. It's impossible that they'll form new cities and abandon that city if there's that much people.

PS- You don't want to know my age, Citrakayah knows. :3
No problem about the age thingy.In deviantart all of my friends know my age and in here dragontunders and citrakayah know my age too.
12 is okay, but 10. That's just bonkers.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Zirojtan
Active Member
[ *  * ]
Quote:
 
12 is okay, but 10. That's just bonkers.



No bud, neither are ok. We're supposed to have a parental consent form for you to fill out if you're under the age of 13. I talked it over with the other admins yesterday. Where are we on that?
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Citrakayah
Member Avatar
Administrator
[ *  *  * ]
Indeed, what Zirojtan says is correct. I'm sorry, Jagger, but legally we have no other choice. ZetaBoards could easily shut us down.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
1 user reading this topic (1 Guest and 0 Anonymous)
« Previous Topic · Future of The World · Next Topic »
Add Reply
  • Pages:
  • 1
  • 2

Black Water created by tiptopolive of the Zetaboards Theme Zone