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| Terra Metropolis; The Future of Urban Sprawl | |
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| Topic Started: Jan 1 2016, 10:22 PM (12,957 Views) | |
| Sheather | Jan 1 2016, 10:22 PM Post #1 |
 
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 ~~~ The year is 2600. At present, after several centuries' of rise and then gradual fall, there are almost 8 billion people on our Earth, as society has spread to cover the Earth from pole to pole on every continent over the last few tens of thousands of years out from their ancestral Africa through Europe and Asia, to the Americas, and across the sea to Australia and countless islands. Antarctica came last, its true settlement only made possible in the last two centuries, when the formerly ice-bound southernmost continent was finally left habitable by a warming climate thanks to the enormous carbon emissions of the industrial age. This world, once temperate, is today predominately as warm and tropical as it's yet been since the Eocene, yet there are are no virgin rainforests left to show for it - at least of of any significance. Over the last six centuries, we have gone through the sixth major mass extinction in our planet's long history. We saw the seas emptied of life to fill our dinner plates and the jungle cleared for lumber, the casual destruction of thousands of species indirectly and hundreds more extinguished with calculated slaughter. We'd bring some back, at least in some variation, and realizing our grave errors too late, engineer superficial copies of the rest - even, once we had the technology, organisms that vanished before we set foot upon this Earth - but for most life would never be as it was before the dawn of man. It would still be centuries again before the world as a whole was ready to make the efforts needed to try and rebuild some semblance of the wilderness of the planet we'd scraped dry for our selfish needs, to give the majority anything more than an artificial captivity to call home, and change would only come after the darkest of days. War, famine, and societal collapse took many lives, but from the ashes we rebuilt again. In the end, we could never restore it to its former identity; too much was lost, unable to survive in the new world we built around theirs - or the opposite may have been true, ecosystems so altered by introduced organisms for so long that they adapted and become dependent upon the lifeforms that once threatened their existence. Our world is now a new one, far from perfect, but no longer one set upon a seemingly unstoppable path towards its utter obliteration. We are a species that, for all our faults, is here to stay - but that no longer means we can't share our world in a sustainable way. Through a combination of nature's timeless resilience to adversity and our newfound power to modify the very foundations of life as we know it to help it along, Terra Metropolis is the future of us all. The experimental colonies aside, we as a species are all bound to this little blue marble - Earth, our home - but one which we've only recently learned as a species requires as much attention going in as resources being pulled out to ever hope to be sustainable in the long run. As man and nature both learn to live side by side and with mutual give and take, not with a parasitic relationship neatly divided and single-sided, a new and promising chapter in the book of life begins today. Table of Contents
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 The Gaiaverse | Eden | Terra Metropolis | Life of the Sylvan Islands | Other Spec Evo | Sheatheria | Serina | The Last Dinosaur A Wholesome and Good Thing | Sam | | |
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| Beetleboy | Jan 3 2016, 11:48 AM Post #31 |
neither lizard nor boy nor beetle . . . but a little of all three
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Off-topic again, but I just wanted to say that I hope you won't take offence that I am about to publish another project, Sylvan. I know it might seem like I am ignoring your advice, but I have been working privately on this project (about the lifeforms of a fictional archipelago) since spring of 2015, and I see no sense in with-holding it any longer. I just wanted to be clear that it was not intended to offend you Sylvan, or make it seem like I am ignoring your advice. |
| ~ The Age of Forests ~ | |
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| Sheather | Jan 3 2016, 11:50 AM Post #32 |
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Man relax, it was only a suggestion, post however many you like. They're all better than average. |
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The Gaiaverse | Eden | Terra Metropolis | Life of the Sylvan Islands | Other Spec Evo | Sheatheria | Serina | The Last Dinosaur A Wholesome and Good Thing | Sam | | |
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| Beetleboy | Jan 3 2016, 11:52 AM Post #33 |
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neither lizard nor boy nor beetle . . . but a little of all three
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Thanks, that has calmed me down a bit. I tend to worry a lot over things. |
| ~ The Age of Forests ~ | |
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| Zorcuspine | Jan 3 2016, 12:04 PM Post #34 |
Enjoying our azure blue world
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You and me both. Given the timeframe, am I right in assuming most of the new urban wildlife in the project is genetically engineered? |
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| LittleLazyLass | Jan 3 2016, 12:38 PM Post #35 |
Proud quilt in a bag
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Part of the reason six projects work is that three of them are heavily tied together in the same universe, and a fourth is in the same universe as those, but I understand that I'm a little late to this discussion. |
totally not British, b-baka! You like me (Unlike)I don't even really like this song that much but the title is pretty relatable sometimes, I guess. Me What, you want me to tell you what these mean? Read First Words Maybe | |
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| malicious-monkey | Jan 3 2016, 12:48 PM Post #36 |
Spec Ops
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Yeah, in a way you could say they reinforce each other more than they distract. |
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"My recommendation would be to just draw things now and draw good things later." - Nanotyranus Ilion: an illustrated tour of a tidally locked planet Spoiler: click to toggle malicious-monkey.deviantart.com sunriseonilion.wordpress.com supermalmoworld.tumblr.com Redbubble - Ilion art prints and more Commissions are OPEN | |
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| Beetleboy | Jan 3 2016, 12:49 PM Post #37 |
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neither lizard nor boy nor beetle . . . but a little of all three
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Okay, okay, I understand. |
| ~ The Age of Forests ~ | |
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| Tartarus | Jan 4 2016, 05:21 PM Post #38 |
Prime Specimen
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While I will miss the future evolution concept of the original Terra Metropolis, I am still interested in seeing how this new one turns out. I'm guessing that since the gliding cats are apparently still present they are now a genetically engineered organism, as I can't really see cats evolving into gliders in mere centuries. In that case, I'm curious to hear what the reasons were behind the people of the future creating these cats. |
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| GlarnBoudin | Jan 7 2016, 04:54 PM Post #39 |
Disgusting Skin Fetishist
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I'm gonna guess pest control. As a New Yorker, I can say with the utmost certainty that pigeons are feathered Tribbles. |
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Quotes Spoiler: click to toggle Co-creator/corporate minion for the Pop Culture Monster Apocalypse! My Projects Spoiler: click to toggle Coming Soon Spoiler: click to toggle My dA page. My Fanfiction.net page. | |
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| Beetleboy | Jan 10 2016, 01:06 PM Post #40 |
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neither lizard nor boy nor beetle . . . but a little of all three
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I would be quite interested to learn if new animals have adapted to an urban living, as well as the diversification/evolution of those that are already urban.
Edited by Beetleboy, Jan 10 2016, 01:06 PM.
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| ~ The Age of Forests ~ | |
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| Sheather | Jan 15 2016, 09:57 PM Post #41 |
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The world of Terra Metropolis is the result of many years of humanity's ecological destruction combined with later and ongoing reparative efforts to rebuild from the destruction a new verdant world akin to the legends of a primordial Earth long since forgotten. The new world wouldn't and couldn't be an exact replication; the lost wilderness of Earth had evolved in an environment long gone in many areas, the herds of immense grazers which once crossed thousands of kilometers in eternal migration along paths which were now curbed by a million miles of fences and countless big and wonderful creatures extinct that even if returned by artificial means to an extant state would still be doomed to fail again without constant human support in the environments they had evolved in. Even if we wanted to, we couldn't simply undo our effect on the planet we call home and start over with the world as it used to be. Over the centuries, it was instead a gradual transition, not a trip back in time but ahead, to a new Earth. If they rebuilt it, nature would return. And return it would, in abundance; but not entirely on its own. In a world where genetic engineering has become so commonplace as to become the latest in expressive arts for anyone with enough money, the history of life on Earth - no longer limited by the slow rate of change of natural adaptation - is changed forever. Crafting a New Earth Terra Metropolis - the world of the global city - is actually somewhat of a misnomer, as the future Earth is far from a single united city of global proportion. Rather, it is a highly varied spectrum of environments. The Terra Metropolitan Earth remains highly developed, but restored wild environments free of urbanization are more common than they were in the 21st century. The general psychology of society has a whole has shifted several degrees from the mindset it carries today and many smaller, individual and widely-spaced settlements have gradually consolidated to give rise a comparably small number of immense and highly-advanced cities throughout the world, which build upwards rather than outwards, preserving space not only for comparably may more humans per square mile than in a modern city but for considerably more ground space for other developments, including the restoration of wild habitats. The most advanced of these cities flow smoothly into and within the surrounding environment, so that there is no exact moment where development becomes nature; rather, nature permeates the entire city, and the city reaches well out above and tangled within the natural environment. Every rooftop in Syndylia, the largest city in Australia and the third largest in the world, hosts its own island of foliage, connected by the touching branches to form a sky-high matrix of forest directly above and mixed smoothly around spires of steel and glass that, radiating from its central point, goes on for more than 950 miles in all directions - the approximate diameter of the country's roughly circular capitol city-state which lie surrounded by a series of smaller settlements amidst land long reclaimed by nature. Many of the largest city centers across the world boast similar integrated wilderness designs, including the world-famous elevated "greenbelts" - great elevated plains of wild habitat, farmland, and city parks built up and over the bustle of urban life underneath, bathed in refracted sunlight - of the Terra Metropolitan New York City, which has gradually integrated the majority of its entire state into a single flowing urban entity. More than two-thirds the population of Antarctica make their home in the entirely climate-controlled metropolis of Sounder, the southernmost city on Earth, a man-made tropic under glass lying at the bottom of the world. As humanity has gradually strove to re-integrate their own society into a sustainable natural biosphere, a major issue was initially what to put where as suitable wild habitat was restored. The process of rewilding had begun very marginally in the beginning of the 22nd century, but did not truly kick off for several decades more, when the GaianAdvance biotech company successfully prepared a private parcel of land in the far northern taiga of the Post-Russian union of Svobodnia, which introduced a variety of formerly extinct and locally extirpated megafaunal animals and effectively restored the historic mammoth steppe biome to the Arctic circle. The release of such animals as the GaianAdvance cave lion, wooly mammoth, and wooly rhinoceros marked the first time a genetically-engineered animal would be set free into a wild, unconfined environment and allowed to naturalize and would set a precedent for the beginning of a new era in ecological management that has come to its pinnacle today in the world of Terra Metropolis. Following the successful reintroduction of the Pleistocene ecosystem to the barren north, the same genetics research firm successfully bought large parcels of land elsewhere in the world, in the Americas, Asia, and Australia, and initiated a series of follow-up projects, restoring a variety of habitats to a primordial state in the form of enormous privately-owned park lands which brought prosperity to their respective countries through tourism. They were also the first to explore the concept of introducing foreign species to wild habitats far beyond their natural range, with the idea that in a changing world they might stand the best chance of unassisted survival in a new, safely-prepared environment in a more secure and politically stabilized region. When the 2150 introduction of a small and closely monitored population of the African elephant to the largely uninhabited northern Australian bush proved successful it kick-started a series of new introductions around the world of foreign animal species threatened with extinction in their natural habitats to new, more suitable ones elsewhere where factors contributing to their decline in their ancestral environment - such as the epidemic of poaching that extirpated the elephant in Africa - were not present. Free from the illegal hunters who had gunned them down for centuries, the last true-to-nature African elephants found haven in their new habitat, replacing extinct Pleistocenic megafauna - the enormous marsupial herbivores Diprotodon, the rhinoceros-like wombat, and the towering browsing kangaroo Procoptodon in the newly-forming, warmer and wetter Australian savannah environment that began to creep down across the formerly arid continent as a result of human-caused climate change. It wasn't what nature had intended, but nor was humanity's enormous and devastating impact on the natural world. The formation of the new North Australian savannah, which today hosts rhinoceros and antelope as well its very own adapted subspecies of lion, can be credited with saving the last remnants of the natural species from extinction. However, the transplantation of one ecosystem to an entirely new continent was in fact only one of two wild ideas simultaneously executed in the middle 22nd century. The second was to reintroduce the elephant back to its ancestral environments across Africa in the form of a genetically-engineered tuskless mutant useless to poachers. Also a success, today both populations thrive, halfway across the world from one another, each suited specifically to the environment at hand. As Africa gradually unified and rose to a stable state by the 23rd century and poaching declined, the males of certain populations gradually begin to pop up which exhibited small tusks once again; mutant sports perhaps one day destined to give rise to a mighty tusker once more. In the end, two new subspecies were produced, the naturalized population of the manufactured Loxodonta africana gainadvantica, broadly alike the ancestral form save for its lack (or near-lack) of tusks, across the species' former range in Africa, and the North Australian elephant - a naturally-adapted population of African bush elephants, Loxodonta africana australis, which are minimally smaller than their historic counterparts but sport proportionately larger tusks and longer limbs. By the mid 2100's, the African lion had also been extirpated from all of its truly wild environments, starved of prey in times of political chaos and shot for sport and as an ever-more troublesome pest of livestock and threat of human life as the human population continued to grow before and afterwards. It eventually finds itself, in the form of mixed-ancestry zoo stocks, brought to Australia from zoo populations across the world to complete a new ecosystem gradually built-up from the bare minimum in the 2300's. They found the first freedom they had seen in countless generations, and with it a strange new world which combines much of their historic natural prey with new species to learn to manage - macropods, camels, horses, and others - and an entirely new set of competitors, including the dingo, but none nearly in its own league. Replacing the long-gone marsupial lion, the real deal completed the first of Terra Metropolis' strange new mixed and matched ecosystems. A lion-free Africa gives the cheetah, an ever-threatened cat which has barely clung to its niche for the last few centuries, a new lease on life. Without lions to kill their young, populations soar - and so to do those of the African hyena, which today dominates the new plains now free of their biggest competitor. Though much of their natural prey has gone, enough remains in combination with the plentiful wild cattle long ago gone feral (as the increasingly splintered Masai gradually left behind their ancestral ways of life and integrated into modern society) to feed the spotted hunters. The rewilding process did not stop at Africa. Some creatures would be able to be returned to their natural environments; the American zoo population of Amur leopards would be used to repopulate their ancestral haunts following the formation of secure natural parks in the new Svobodnian wilderness in the 22nd century. When their population had grown sufficiently following the stabilization of Africa, a small number of cheetahs transplanted to the plains of a post-industrial India grew fat and happy, forming a sustainable population here for the first time in centuries. Certain animals would end up well away from their homelands more for reasons of novelty than to save them from extinction; an eccentric billionaire introduces giraffes to a Brazilian ranch and gradually the animals disperse over the decades upon the Ceraddo, fulfilling an open niche nature hadn't filled on its own. Others would spread far beyond their normal range entirely on their own accord, adaptable creatures which displace the specialized forms that fail to adapt to a world overruled by humankind. Canis variatus, the hybrid coyote which first appeared in the early 2000's, the result of wolf and coyote cross-breeding, entirely displaces all of the other wild members of its genus in North America by 2600. Stronger than the coyote but slier than the wolf, it can live anywhere either of its ancestors could. Many subspecies subsequently radiate, some more coyote and some more wolf, but none entirely either any longer. The red wolf and the Eastern wolf gradually disappear from captive stocks, their conservation accepted as a futile effort; The gray wolf survives in Europe, however, and spreads considerably as it becomes less and less of a threat to the livelihoods of farmers as most of the world transitions commercially to tissue cultured meat and animal products. This trend threatens hundreds of domestic livestock breeds with extinction as they become the domain only of the small-scale family farmer or the hobbyist who keeps them as pets. Hardy land races form the world wide as farmers turn loose their stock once it becomes commercially unsustainable in competition with new modern farming practices where any sort of animal tissue can simply be grown in a sterile laboratory, more quickly and more efficiently than through factory farms which are looked back on with the same sort of disdain as so many destructive and harmful practices of the so-called "modern age". Today, the vast majority of commercial farming is done indoors in climate-controlled farm-scrapers which are exponentially more efficient users of water, making them much more sustainable in drought-stricken areas, and of nutrients than outdoor plantations, the provision of such resources now able to be entirely controlled and excesses reclaimed and re-used rather than lost in ground water to cause ecological harm. These buildings, sometimes open to the wind and at other times entirely enclosed, are commonplace around the world and in a variety of models in use by all major cities. Though most of the buildings of this sort in commercial farming application, which may tower to two-hundred stores, are not accessible to wildlife, superficially similar models are also commonplace worldwide as skyline parks, equipped with elevated forests, ornamental gardens, walkways and recreational opportunities which provide valuable wildlife habitat above and right within the busiest urban centers. Small personal gardens are also almost a universal feature of every apartment's balcony, providing fresh and healthy produce right outside one's window, and in conjunction with even the occasional rooftop farmstead operation, perhaps specializing in raising free-range roof-garden goats, small groups of adaptable but docile and very palatable dragon-hens, or succulent free-flying forager pigeons, there do exist plentiful alternate opportunities to bring healthy food to the plate even in the most urban environments in addition to the more super-modern commercial farming methods. Wild animals, particularly small birds and rodents, thrive in the new re-wilded cities of the Terra Metropolitan world, gleaning a rich living nesting in the verdant city canopy and feasting off of the effectively infinite supply of garden produce and fast food and restaurant wastes from the lower levels of the ecosystem. Even very large animals can do remarkably well, however, assisted by green-belts and naturalized pockets of wilderness where they may shelter away from the bustle around them, and a particularly common adaptation among many disparate animal groups is the evolution of an instinctive wariness of moving cars and roads that animals in our era, so often struck by cars, have yet to master. Six more centuries of evolution alongside powered transportation is plentiful time for an animal to learn to look both ways. Animals of all kinds adapted for centuries to live in close contact with humankind are also naturally less aggressive and confrontational than wild animals, for any individual which behaved aggressively would quickly be culled from the breeding pool. As an unintended result of this selection for docility, many large wild city animals exhibit a degree of neotenic traits, retaining juvenile features into adulthood - a symptom of their walking the border of falling into a truly domesticated state, kept just outside it by their retained position in the wild food chain. As a result of their street smarts and retained juvenile temperaments, creatures as large as deer, kangaroos, and even elk and bison have adapted to make a living directly within the city wherever sufficient green space is allotted for their needs without making themselves too much of a nuisance even in the busiest spaces - and wherever prey exists, its predators follow. Small cats, martens, badgers, civets, genets, and even black bears can thrive here too; even leopards - undoubtedly the most successful big cat in Terra Metropolis - make a healthy living in these new urban jungles, a small but extremely successful subspecies of urban leopard having spread through cities all across Eurasia from an initial Indian radiation. The opposite of herbivores, they survive despite, not because of man, by becoming extremely timid and wary and avoiding man at all cost, hunting by night and hiding by day. They make their living by feeding on the smaller "babyfied" creatures, which being less aggressive tend to be a little easier to catch than animals that live outside the city, as well as upon and alongside a host more of new manufactured lineages of animals engineered with the actual intention of completing the urban ecosystem, including tiny cats which glide by night to keep pigeons and rodents in check and specialized, naturalized populations of genetically-engineered weevils, beetles, and termites which convert plastic litter to biodegradable droppings and keep the city remarkably clean. These insects, with specialized stomach bacteria, provide solution for a sticky issue and even provide a whole new tropic level to the food chain, transferring the useless energy stored in styrofoam and plastic into nutritious food for birds and other animals. It is the ultimate example of urban adaptation; though kicked into action by humans, the city ecosystem now recycles not only its own waste, but formerly permanent human garbage back into the ecosystem. Less groundbreaking natural adaptations to the less beautiful side-effects of human civilization, no less interesting in their own right, include races of city birds and rodents which have specialized to feed entirely on the endless quantity of sugary human refuse, pastries and candies, and in the process have become immune to diabetes. Even the most polluted, toxic pool of water probably supports a few extremely resilient cyprinids, carp adapted to survive water high enough in mercury to kill a man outright, while in the world's few remaining still-developing nations, many subspecies of pigeons have become so tolerant to environmental contaminants and airborne carcinogens they build their nests directly upon smoke stacks where the air would sicken any predator which dared to threaten them. In many places, food in the form of human refuse is so over-abundant that the stomachs of animals such as rodents and songbirds have shrunk to sometimes less than a fifth their natural size, preventing them from eating more than a tiny serving of food in a sitting. This unusual trait, seemingly counter-intuitive to survival, has been selected for because those creatures which ate too much of the endless resources in this strange, artificial world and became fat and lethargic were quick to fall prey to waiting hordes of predators. A shrunken stomach means one must constantly be alert and constantly nibbling to survive. With no way to over-eat, and no time to sit and rest with a full tummy - something that would be beneficial in a wild environment where food was not so constantly abundant but actually rare - it is these animals which ironically fair best in the lower realms of man's city. |
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The Gaiaverse | Eden | Terra Metropolis | Life of the Sylvan Islands | Other Spec Evo | Sheatheria | Serina | The Last Dinosaur A Wholesome and Good Thing | Sam | | |
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| LittleLazyLass | Jan 15 2016, 10:16 PM Post #42 |
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Proud quilt in a bag
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...can I get a tl;dr on that? |
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totally not British, b-baka! You like me (Unlike) I don't even really like this song that much but the title is pretty relatable sometimes, I guess. Me What, you want me to tell you what these mean? Read First Words Maybe | |
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| Sheather | Jan 15 2016, 10:23 PM Post #43 |
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It's the equivalent of less than four pages in a book... |
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The Gaiaverse | Eden | Terra Metropolis | Life of the Sylvan Islands | Other Spec Evo | Sheatheria | Serina | The Last Dinosaur A Wholesome and Good Thing | Sam | | |
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| Velociraptor | Jan 15 2016, 10:55 PM Post #44 |
Reptile
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Are dragon-hens descendants of the escaped Yi from Eden? |
 Unnamed No K-Pg project: coming whenever, maybe never. I got ideas tho. | |
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| Martin | Jan 16 2016, 10:25 AM Post #45 |
Prime Specimen
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Neat stuff, mayne, but I do have a few questions. When you say that the urban leopards feed on these "babified" creatures, what sorts of creatures are we talking about. Are we talking stuff like the goats you mentioned, or are we talking stuff like raccoons and rats? |
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