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| Terra Metropolis; The Future of Urban Sprawl | |
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| Topic Started: Jan 1 2016, 10:22 PM (12,953 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 29 2016, 10:50 AM Post #91 |
neither lizard nor boy nor beetle . . . but a little of all three
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Hell, you're pumping these things out fast, Sheather. Not that I'm complaining, very interesting idea with the domesticated thylacine, reminds me of my domesticated pygmy elephants. |
| ~ The Age of Forests ~ | |
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| Sheather | Feb 15 2016, 10:37 PM Post #92 |
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Today and Tomorrow ~~~ Terra Metropolis is a society slowly transitioning towards a single circular economy on a global scale. The idealistic goal is eventually the creation of a post-scarcity society on a worldwide level. In the many wealthy, progressive nations which are allied under the modern Progressive Union - which include all of the nations of Europe and North America, the inhabited territories of Antarctica, Australia, Brazil, India, China, Japan, and Svobodnia, among others - these goals are most closely approached. Throughout these countries poverty is almost eradicated, homelessness is effectively an archaic concept, and as a result of modern automation resources have become available so readily to all that the majority of people are freed from the constraints of a day-to-day employment simply to make ends meet. All of the nations in the Union are closely tied in ideology and function similarly to divisions of a single nearly global government, but almost enigmatically, almost all city-states are self-sufficient. Though a healthy trade in luxury items exists between states and nations and across the globe, most cities produce within themselves all the basic goods necessary for their inhabitants. In the event trade between them were for any reason halted, the vast majority would continue to function as normal. The fundamental nature of this governing system is a form of publicly-controlled democratic socialism. Everybody within this system is socially free on an individual level, but it is a society founded on limits. The wealthy share their wealth through taxation - by no means all of it, but proportionately more than those who have little. The end result is a society where everyone can afford not only to survive, but to truly live. Some people have relatively little, some people still have more than they could ever need, but everyone has enough. People live to work, doing what they enjoy. Ideally, they no longer have to work simply to stay alive - though employment certainly helps one to procure the luxuries of life; you may not have to worry about where your next meal is coming from, but if you don't make some effort, you will never have much extra spending money. Subsequently, the vast majority of people do find employment, but freed from life or death concerns, it comes in forms they enjoy. Manual labor and indeed a great majority of medial low-wage employment has been almost completely automated. On a commercial level, the production of virtually all goods is also now significantly automated. Crops are grown in vertical indoor aeroponics systems and animal protein is produced through tissue culture in sterile laboratory factories. Animal husbandry and the cultivation of exists only on an individual or local community level. Small-scale urban farmers may supply their own plates, those of their neighbors, or even sell to local neighborhood markets, but there are no massive animal farming corporations that supply entire nations. In this day and age, this is no longer sustainable or commercially viable given alternatives. Inedible goods are no longer as often "produced" as simply recycled and re-purposed endlessly. Plastic still exists in wide use even though the Earth has commercially exhausted its crude oil reserves - much of it is the same plastic we used in the 20th century, technology now allowing its potentially limitless recycling. A throw-away economy like that of the 21st century, where goods are produced in enormous quantity from raw materials and regularly discarded and buried under the ground when their use runs out, is plain and simply unsustainable in a world that no longer has the fortune of more raw material to dig from the Earth and churn into new products. Today, the world relies on recycling and reclamation to survive. Waste is fuel, raw nutrients, or raw material to grow or produce a new material, and ideally nothing is wasted. In combination with large-scale and community-based composting programs for organic waste, there is subsequently no need for landfills as we know them in the most progressive Terra Metropolitan communities. Though the immense cities of Terra Metropolis are perhaps the most iconic vision of the era, they are not the only option for human habitation. In fact, across most of the world immense city centers are uncommon and few and far between, with much larger expanses of semi-wild land between them which supports a balance of wildlife habitat and human recreational and residential opportunity. The southern and western United States in particular are relatively sparse in major vertical cities, as is most of the United Kingdom and eastern Europe through Eurasia. Central and coastal Australia, western Europe, Antarctica, and the American East and West coasts are the home of more than 80% of the world's truly urbanized city centers. A great percentage of the rest of the world is remarkably similar to the modern day. Towns are greener, but rural areas and even suburbs do exist. They are considerably more expensive than similar urban housing and subsequently less popular, but they are present. Cities are so popular because people want to live in them, to be among other people, to be free of the troubles of a more isolated life and nearer to all the entertainment, business, and excitement society has to offer - but just as today, not everyone wants to be in the heart of it all. Opportunities exist elsewhere - practically everywhere - for a fulfilling life to any particular person, be it living in a sky-high condominium in New York City, surrounded by the human world, or a humble cabin in the mountains with only mother nature for company. "Futuristic" living does not mean the abandonment of all that we find pleasant today - solitude and personal space - even if the predominant global culture shifts in another direction. Terra Metropolis is a diverse place, hardly a single planet-wide city of skyscrapers and glass. In a post-deforestation world, where virtually all of the primordial forest has been destroyed and rock-bottom struck, civilization could then only go up from the dust and ashes. Centuries ago, new forests were planted, cultivated, but now directly under man's guidance to grow in such a way between and around his towns and villages that one day both would be able to live in harmony. Today, in the modern meshed landscape of man and nature, this can finally be seen: cities built above and below the natural ecosystem, bridges of wilderness crossing above dense urban centers, green rooftops, and man-made organisms to bridge the gap between the natural and civilized world. Though more than 75% of all life on Earth perished in the last five centuries, what remains or could be engineered has been sufficient to reproduce the natural world, albeit much more homogeneously across the planet. Earth's total biological diversity is lower than it was just a thousand years ago by quite a magnitude, yet fundamentally the human extinction event has not been as severe as those of past epochs. While it is true perhaps nearly as many species overall were lost to humanity as to the K-pg asteroid or perhaps even the Great Dying at the end of the Permian, this was much more on a species level, or perhaps a genus level, rather than a family or order one. Many species of frogs - hundreds, perhaps thousands - were wiped out by climate change, but frogs on the whole were not killed off. Some species have in fact come to range across the entire planet. The same is true of most other animal groups, not even to mention the endless possibilities brought by the rise of genetics technology. The loss of biodiversity has been significant, but within five million years in a natural environment it would have been but a hiccup in the progress of evolutionary progress. In a world where genetic engineering makes anything possible, some say the world could be restored to its prior biodiversity within the next two centuries. Life always endures. But it will never be quite the same again. Man can repopulate the ecosystem and produce a new sustainable world. He can bring back some of what he destroyed, but for every plant or animal that died out that he had known, how many had flourished and died without ever being discovered? A thousand? A million? A billion? Man can't recreate what he never knew was there. Even when he knows what something was, it's a matter of debate whether it remains the same when he recreates it in the lab. Even in the age of de-extinction, you can never truly go back in the game of life. We can only march on forward. This is what the world is now. It's not an improvement... but whose to say it isn't what mother nature intended? Man is but an animal himself, after all. |
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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 | Feb 15 2016, 10:46 PM Post #93 |
Reptile
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So, are there zoos in Terra Metropolis? |
 Unnamed No K-Pg project: coming whenever, maybe never. I got ideas tho. | |
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| Sheather | Feb 15 2016, 11:16 PM Post #94 |
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There are absolutely zoos in Terra Metropolis. They are varied, of course, but most I'd imagine would be world-class by modern standards. Will get into discussing them in the future. |
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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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| Tartarus | Feb 16 2016, 07:53 PM Post #95 |
Prime Specimen
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Really random question but did the future genetic engineers of Terra Metropolis ever create bioluminescent trees? I ask because there have actually been real world suggestions using such engineered trees in the future as light sources (one of the advantages of this is that with a tree you don't need to change any bulbs or batteries like you might need to do with a technological light source). |
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| Sheather | Feb 16 2016, 08:10 PM Post #96 |
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This was indeed one of the very ideas I planned to incorporate. |
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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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| GlarnBoudin | Feb 17 2016, 02:28 PM Post #97 |
Disgusting Skin Fetishist
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Um, a lot of the links in the OP just lead to the same post. |
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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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| Sheather | Feb 17 2016, 02:32 PM Post #98 |
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A bracket was missing in the first URL code, should be fixed now. |
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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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| Sheather | Feb 17 2016, 04:53 PM Post #99 |
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New York City They come down the parkway like a steadily flowing stream, a tapestry of color and form flowing simultaneously to and fro. Some carry with them bags, coats, pushing strollers or pulling suitcases. They speak with one another, both directly to adjacent fellows or to acquaintances halfway across the world. Technology brings the entire human race together as one. It is in everything they wear and carry; often all but invisible, concealed or integrated into everyday items or within their own bodies. Pocket computer devices that need to be carried are an idea long obsolete, replaced along with so many physical objects by interactive holographic interfaces projected from their own clothing when necessary. This clothing, however, is otherwise nothing absurdly out of the ordinary on an aesthetic level. Personal phones are all but a thing of the past, virtually invisible ear buds and speakers which slip unnoticed over the user's ear being the norm. People in Terra Metropolis have taken the modern desire for smaller and less obtrusive carry-on items in everyday life to its expected extreme, and it is no longer necessary to carry any sort of wallet or handheld device. Everyone is immediately identified whenever necessary by a chip within their own wrist which is harmlessly put into place before a child is even born, performing all the uses of an ID card and a bank account paperlessly and instantaneously - there is no physical currency in the future's digital world. Crime is incredibly rare because the perpetrator can instantly be apprehended by merit of this same digital identification system. To a 21st century individual thrust from our world to this one without intermediate introduction, this would likely come across as a great if not immense breach of privacy, but everything is relative; it would be equally hard for a man living in the year 1910 to ever imagine the internet, Facebook, microchips, or credit cards, after all. To him the very idea of a cellular phone or roadside assistance in a vehicle, constantly emitting a signal pinpointing his exact location to a third party might be equally intrusive. Change comes slowly but surely, just a little at a time. Like the hypothetical boiling frog argument, society at large has thought nothing of these arguably very invasive shifts. They are simply life, and nobody has known it any other way. Life is now extremely convenient, and extremely safe, but at the cost of privacy. But freedom in any society is always a matter of perspective. Even in the modern "free world", we are all bound by our own set of constraints, necessary cages for the survival of our social system, but cages nonetheless. We simply may not notice them, for what else do we know? A canary raised in a cage and never let to fly could be said to be content, for it knows nothing more than its tiny world. But what would a wild bird feel when taken from its home in nature and locked in the very same cage but great agitation. Humans are the same; what would a Native American from eight hundred years ago - an individual from one of the last close-to-free, semi-natural human civilizations - think thrust into modern society? Into a world of money, property, government? Even the most free modern life would be comparably restrictive. And yet the very same transition over many generations might feel like nothing at all, exactly as might occur if a wild bird were first taken into a large aviary and gradually shifted into smaller and smaller cages. At first the confines of the bars around it might stress it, causing it to try and escape. Eventually however, it becomes accustomed to its new life. It grows less and less aware of the shrinking borders of its captive home. Eventually, that very same wild bird might be sufficiently content in its cage to breed, its wild memories not forgotten in entirety but numbed over the years. Its own offspring, now raised in the very same cages as the canary without any wild memory, will be equally amicable. What more freedom could there possibly be then such a spacious enclosure as this? And they will be happy, just like the Terra Metropolitan people. Their life is all they've known, and they are happy by default. The illusion of freedom can be as strong as the real thing itself with none of the risk, so long as it can be maintained. Absolute freedom in modern society is only possible in anarchy, perhaps both the most dangerous and most idealistic of all societal concepts: perfect in theory, but disastrous in practice. Let the pet canary back into the wild after twenty generations as a caged bird, and it will fly freely for a while, singing joyously under the sun, until eventually a falcon takes it to feed its waiting young or food goes scarce and it starves. Everything is a two way street. Government exists to protect the people - or at least, it should. But that protection is only made possible by imposed limits, exactly alike the trading of the canary's wild spirit for its safety and ease of finding food. There is no black or white answer to which situation is better. ~~~ The humans crowd the streets of the future city, each going about their daily business, just a tiny piece of the big picture. Millions of individual lives go down their own paths simultaneously, all meeting for just a second or two in the subdued evening sunlight in the park. Some walk on foot, from building to building, shop to shop, terrace to terrace. They stop for a bite to eat, to meet with an old friend, to glance briefly at some spectacle. Their lives are fundamentally like ours, perhaps without so much stress, though their environment is at times quite alien. The entire city is alive with the sounds of conversation, a steady hum of laughter, sorrow, quiet whispers and lively discussion just like in the busy streets of any big city today, but beyond this the ambiance could not be more different. There is no honking of horns or screeching of breaks. There are vehicles throughout the city - small scooter-like vehicles, carrying one or two, sometimes more, that hover just a few inches over the ground, but they are utterly silent. Larger variations, like airborne taxis, travel in orderly fashion above the streets on automated pathways, programmed to never strike one another. Running without pollution, the air of the city has never been so clear since Europeans colonized the land in 1625. Birds sing loudly from green spaces as the sun sets, to be replaced by thousands of bats as the night is born. Coyotes howl in the distance, prowling parkland and rooftops for rodents or unwary birds just barely illuminated in the otherwordly glow of genetically-engineered bioluminescent garden plantings - trees which produce bright bio-flourescence on their green tissue, lighting city streets with completely - and literally - green energy free of pollution. Crickets are everywhere, chirruping in gardens and window boxes in a world without pesticides, feeding healthy populations of geckos that scurry up and down buildings with utmost ease, themselves hunted by cats and other small predators of the new urban landscape. Friendly pet dogs, cats, and foxes roam the city often at will, without risk of being struck by cars, again allowed a level of freedom simply impossible in the urban environments of prior times, similar to that of pets in the pre-industrial era. Raised in such a stimulating, social environment from the youngest age, pets are on the whole extremely well-socialized, both with one another and humans. Dog attacks are at an all-time low even though there are more dogs loose on the streets than ever before. They run together, playing and roaming, but like the pigeons, always returning home in time for supper and to spend quality time with their families - though it's not uncommon at all for animals these days to have a number of families they visit and spend time in the homes of, at times behaving as if they are completely free of ownership at all and simply enjoying the company of friends. In many ways, this may be the case. Terra Metropolitan humans are on the whole less viewing of their companions as property and more as family than ever before. Domestic animals, still very much associated with humankind, find a unique place in the city environment, straddling the wild-domestic line, but surely very content with their world. Dogs in particular learn from one another how to navigate the complex city environment with remarkable simplicity, where to find a bite to eat, how to find their way around, who makes a good friend and who doesn't like dogs, sometimes developing home ranges of many miles yet never forgetting the location of their own homes; that is, the habitations of their humans. Domestic dogs and foxes sometimes form a novel alliance - all raised in one strange and immense multi-species pack, both species selected for similar behavior by humans, they readily learn to associate and cooperate. Both species behave distinctly differently from the truly wild members of their families - the wild red fox and the wolf or coyote - rarely associating and thriving in completely different realms of the city; the domestics the human world, the wildlings out of the hustle and bustle of prying eyes. Cats run a different line - pets interact with truly feral animals relatively regularly, less removed from them than their canine compatriots - but strict spay and neuter programs and controlled breeding of companion animals mean interbreeding is very infrequent, as the pets stay tame, of the human word, and the ferals go down a new evolutionary path as increasingly wild animals once more. Depending on the region, a variety of other domestic animals may also thrive in similar near-freedom. As long as they mind their manners - which they do, provided they are well-socialized - most people in the future city welcome all of their animal neighbors. ~~~ Periodically throughout the city, maglev trains emerge from between the shops or from grassy hills on concealed trackways underground or just above the city streets, carrying passengers at incredible speeds of more than 380 miles per hour throughout the city or, if so desired, virtually anywhere in the world. The system is global, running underneath even the seas in a magnificent feat of engineering, uniting the progressive world on a scale never before seen, accessible to anyone. Never before have so many nations existed in union, or was travel so simple a prospect. Anyone can go anywhere and do anything they like almost without restriction, and at very high speed. Planes are faster, of course, but plane trips are expensive, exhausting, and limiting. Trains are much more affordable, not to mention convenient, in comparison, and if you so decide you may get off anywhere between destinations, visit for a while, and move on again - impossible in aircraft. It takes just over a day to reach Australia from New York city under the Progressive World United Maglev train line on a direct shot, speeding over the entire North American continent from east to west in roughly 8 hours and then diving under the Pacific for another 20 before you reach the Australian east coast. |
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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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| Sheather | Feb 18 2016, 11:20 PM Post #100 |
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Glow-trees The Future of Illumination ~~~ Nighttime in the Terra Metropolitan city is a beautiful sight to behold. Brilliant displays of color and light abound in bustling city squares, advertising cafes, theaters, and entertainment, but these are nothing in comparison to the otherworldly displays that run along the less congested residential streets and sweep in artistic arcs throughout parks and public spaces in the form of the glow-trees.  A bioluminescent silver maple in northern New York. ~~~ Glow-trees are any sort of many different species and cultivars of genetically-engineered bioluminescent plants which produce their own phosphorescent light in their green tissues - leaves, stems, and blossoms - in delayed response to sunlight. Modified chlorophyll in their tissues absorb light energy by day in the normal process of photosynthesis but additionally store a significant amount of solar radiation, releasing it later on in dark conditions in the form of a subtle, aesthetically-pleasant light. More than 250 species of plants have been genetically manipulated to produce light in this way, mainly large trees but also a number of small ornamental plants and flowers. Glow-trees are heavily cultivated and utilized as eco-friendly sources of outdoor illumination in the urban environment, producing free light without the use of electricity. Though the species utilized varies with the local climate, most glow-trees behave identically, beginning to glow dimly as the sun sets in the evening and reaching full illumination within the next half hour. Modern production cultivars are able to emit light at full capacity for as long as fifteen hours and when planted in quantity are sufficient to illuminate streets and public places, replacing electrical street lamps in many applications. Different varieties produce different shades of light, including many shades of blue, green, and purple as well as white. The light emitted from dense plantings may be sufficiently bright to aid in the growth of other plant species growing underneath the trees or to power nearby solar-panels. By day in broad daylight conditions glow-trees are superficially indistinguishable from normal specimens of their respective species. Overcast conditions may induce the partial emission of solar energy from the plants' tissues, resulting in a faint glow, but so long as any level of sunlight remains present the tree will continue to store light energy to illuminate them throughout the coming night. It is often recommended to plant glow-trees in groups, for closely-grouped plants will serve to energize one another by absorbing their neighbor's emitted light, plants in the midst of these plantings keeping up a brighter condition for longer than singly-planted trees. No matter the species, all glow-trees today marketed and cultivated are supposed to be sterile under international regulation. If they do produce flowers, they do not produce pollen or develop fertile seeds, in order to prevent their establishment in the wild or hybridization with normal representatives of their species. They are generally produced by tissue culture and are unable to propagate themselves without human assistance. Nonetheless, sporadic mutations in supposedly genetically-identical clones known as "sports", as occasionally pop up in plants cultivated this way, have resulted in a number of notable introductions of the engineered genes into wild environments. Even if only a single branch on a tree mutates in such a way to revert to a fertile flower, a glow-tree can reproduce and occasionally does. Though the mutation is recessive and subsequently unlikely to show up in a first-generation cross between a glow-tree and its wild relative, seeds subsequently produced by the first-generation hybrid may show the engineered trait. As tree generations can be several decades long or longer, by the time these accidents appear they are often widely spread and far away from their cultivated ancestors, making both their control and the determination of their source very difficult. In general it does not appear that glowing trees in the wild have a significant negative effect on the environment, though browsing animals do not readily consume them when illuminated, at times giving them a potentially unfair competitive advantage to wild-type trees. The genetic mutation which produces the bioluminescence in glow-trees does not affect the plants exhibiting the mutation in any other respect, and such specimens, though they may appear unattractive to herbivores when illuminated, are completely innocuous if consumed either by humans or wildlife. In city environments birds are known to preferentially roost within them over normal trees, for they are better able to spot predators in the night within the glowing branches. This can be a double-edged sword, however, for certain novel variations of the glow-tree produce light only when touched, similar to the oceanic dinoflagellates that produce glowing blue tides, bursting into a brilliant show of light in the event a squirrel or other small animal attempts to cross through one's branches and potentially giving away their direct location to predators. Variations on the glow-tree theme are also utilized to produce other forms of light. Glowing vines or lianas cultivated vertically may form entire walls of illumination while small flowers or bushes may be used to border walkways and paths in home gardens. Similarly-engineered algae are cultivated in transparent vesicles both indoors and out where smaller electricity-free lighting is desired. Non-biological variations on the same principle also exist, paint and building materials which perform a similar job of absorbing and re-emitting sunlight, and most indoor lighting is produced this way. Sunlight is absorbed by radiation-absorbing materials outside the building, often in the outer walls or rooftops themselves, and refracted through a system of optical fibers into any number of indoor fixtures - indoor lighting powered by the sun free of charge. Truly electric lighting in the future, so relatively expensive, is effectively obsolete. |
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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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| Martin | Feb 19 2016, 08:27 AM Post #101 |
Prime Specimen
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This is pretty cool, man. Nice. How much would these glow-trees replace normal street lights though? |
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| Sheather | Feb 19 2016, 12:05 PM Post #102 |
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Almost entirely in warm climates, seasonally in temperate ones - at least in the most progressive areas. |
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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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| Sheather | Apr 28 2016, 11:35 PM Post #103 |
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The world of Terra Metropolis is heavily urbanized, with human influence affecting - in one way or another - virtually every environment on the planet. But while the urban jungle is a major presence in man's new global garden, there are still wild spaces left. The majority are secondary developments, re-wilded farmland and plantations left vacant after the shift from historic outdoor agricultural practice to one indoors and artificially controlled in every respect. At least fifty years and sometimes as much as several centuries is plenty enough time to return even the most damaged plot of land to a respectable natural environment suitable again for the survival of large wildlife, and hundreds of millions of acres of former farmland and range has been returned to native forest, grassland, and marsh across the modern world by the year 2600. But even though life always finds a way, the life that reclaims these reborn habitats isn't always the same that was forced out of them many centuries earlier. Mankind's mark has been made, and the global biosphere will never again be as it was before his rise to power. Humanity is the modern system of biological distribution - plants and animals once reliant on land bridges or freak events of rafting or weather to spread far and wide across the world now find themselves transplanted all across the world, to environments they would never have encountered in nature. As often accidental as they are intentional, these artificial introductions can have enormous ecological impacts in the short-term, but eventually the ecosystem readjusts. It will take many millennia to see any degree of re-speciation comparable to planet Earth's faunal diversity before the human extinction event, but even a few decades of adaptation can manage to produce a new functioning ecosystem from one once damaged with a little help - intentional or otherwise. ~~~ Some of the most starkly strangely re-wilded environments of the Terra Metropolitan world can be found across the southern United States. One of the larger nations and surely among the most climatically diverse, America was also one of the most strongly affected by Holocene climate change. Rising global temperatures flooded low-lying coastal regions from New York to Texas and brought near-tropical temperatures considerably further north than in the modern day, allowing for the spread of such wildlife normally associated with much more southerly regions into much more northerly locales - such as the American alligator, now able to survive the mild winters from the Florida up through southern Kentucky and north Texas. Once thriving coastal cities such as New Orleans have been abandoned for centuries and now lie entirely reclaimed by nature as floodplains and estuaries where migratory shorebirds and waterfowl once again thrive away from the direct influence of human development. ~~~ The South Texas Delta From central Texas to Florida, once dry prairies used to range cattle and grow cotton and other mono cultures have become tropical wetlands, prairies, and floodplains home once again to thriving herds of large grazers and the carnivores that prey upon them. A region not considered to be of particular commercial value any longer in the era of indoor agriculture, the southeastern United States has become one of the largest single tracts of pristine wilderness in the nation. Herds of millions of deer, antelope, horses, and countless other herbivores both native and introduced today thrive in the region. They are hunted not only by Canis variatus, the Eastern coyote, but also the native and much rebounded mountain lion, in addition to a very unexpected new competitor; an initially regulated population of American cheetah, the descendants of captive-bred and initially genetically-engineered stock produced by the GaianAdvance firm in the 22nd century, were introduced to open range the central plains states just under a century ago. It was an experiment, inspired by the successes in the north of Europe, to recreate the historic Pleistocene environment and to regulate the number of pronghorn, which increased dramatically as range lands used by cattle farmers for centuries were abandoned and allowed to revert to their natural state once more. The cheetahs' introduction was a success, and the cats today range from the Dakotas, where they hunt their ancestral prey species, the pronghorn, to the waters of the south Texas delta, where they take native deer and introduced gazelle. ~~~ Along a lush riverbank somewhere in the delta, a colony of white egrets some twenty-thousand strong nests in the branches of the trees all along the shore of a wide and lazy river - some new tributary of the Mississippi - as it heads southwards to the sea. Chicks jostle and battle for their parents' attentions in the branches, while in the murky waters below, the hidden bodies of alligators lie in wait, just eyes and nostrils peering above the surface, for one to lose its footing and plummet into an open mouth. Just a few tens of meters further down the river, a solitary alligator suns on the sand. It is a smaller specimen than the giants that gambol in the river, at about seven feet in length, but sufficient in size to no longer have many predators... or so one would think. With a rapid splash, the young reptile suddenly takes fright and bolts into the muddy water to join its fellows. The source of its scare soon emerges from the tall rushes alongside the water's edge - a young mountain lion, likely just recently independent of its mother and still in search of a territory to call its own. Its interests do not lie in the alligator however but simply in the stream itself; looking around quickly beforehand to ensure it is alone on the bank, it cautiously crouches to quench its thirst in the shallowest of algae-filled puddles near the bank, trying to keep itself as far back from the deeper water where the predators hide as it can. A yellow-headed blackbird screeches an alarm call and alights just a few feet alongside the predator on the stem of a reed, fluttering its little wings in a fierce display of aggression: a nest is nearby, and this is a most unwelcome neighbor. The cat takes notice and flicks an ear in the direction of the little warrior, but doesn't waiver until the bird launches from its perch and hits the youngster upon the top of the head with beak and claws. Dazed and confused by the tiny and agile aggressor, it growls and raises the hair on its hackles in agitation. The blackbird grows bolder, making repeated dives and hitting the inexperienced predator again and again on the rump and shoulders until it grows meek and turns quickly and climbs back up the muddy bank to slip like a spirit back into the tall marsh grasses. The little bird follows close behind for a distance, giving it a final series of jabs before returning in a beeline back to a waiting mate in a nearly invisible nest suspended in the rushes just above the water. It has kept its budding family safe and secure for another day. A few hundred feet away, in an upland thicket, an antelope rests leisurely under a dense brushy cover, only the occasional flick of its large pointed ears giving away its presence in the hot air. Eventually it rises and emerges from the brush and cautiously moves out into a clearing, where the afternoon sunlight reveals a beautiful near-white pelt broken up along the neck and chest by a soft chestnut brown band. She is an elegant and majestic animal, with large, arcing horns that point backwards over its shoulders and dark shadow markings along her eyes. She is a scimitar-horned oryx, and though her species has not run free in its native North Africa for more than 600 years, here - in the south Texas delta, where they were brought centuries ago as game animals for sport hunters - her kind number more than 250,000 and thrive where once only beef cattle and soybeans were granted survival. She steps from the shade of the live oak trees to join several fellows in browsing alongside where a dense tangle of Kudzu vine has engulfed a dead tree along the forest edge to such an extent that its own weight finally brought the giant back to Earth. In highly disturbed urban areas or wherever it reaches into the canopy, this highly invasive plant overtakes and suffocates native plant life and is classified as one of the most noxious weeds known to man. Upon the naturalized range land, however, a resurgence in the numbers of grazing and browsing herbivores has resulted in a stark decrease in the prevalence of the plant, which is coincidentally not only very nutritious but highly palatable to ungulates. Creatures as diverse as native white-tailed deer and introduced Sika deer, Asian water buffalo - even Plains zebra, ancient escapes of the open-range zoological parks that were all the rage in the 22nd century, and Indian elephants, a still-regulated but technically free-roaming population introduced by the United States Rewilding Society fifty-five years ago - browse the rich plains all around the river, producing a fascinating new biome, forged from disparate creatures from all around the world yet strongly reminiscent of the ancient ecosystems the continent supported just a few million years ago. Remarkably, the result isn't ecological chaos and destruction, but a level of balance the region - which not long ago held its own native horses, antelope, and even elephants (in the form of the Mastodons) - has not seen in countless generations. Every creature, from the smallest gazelle to the largest elephant, has found a place in this strange but successful new ecosystem. What was once will never be again, but from a nearly wiped slate, a functioning substitute has reformed here from the remains of the global biosphere. Macaques too now scurry through the trees and bushes of their new American home in the south Texas delta, taking advantage of their rich new territory exactly as the first monkeys to raft naturally from Africa to South America so many millions of years ago did. One group reached its new home through natural events, the other through human interference. In the end, the result is the same - biological distribution. It is a process that has gone on since the first life form on Earth evolved and moved from wherever it first arose to somewhere else, be it across a puddle or across the sea. If one day these clever monkeys continue to spread northwards and one day give rise to a culture like our own, long after we're gone, they won't look back on their history and condemn mankind for transporting their ancestors across the Atlantic anymore than we would the forces of nature that brought lemurs to Madagascar. To them - and to Earth itself - man is but another in the long, long list of the Earth's influential situations. Nature will always survive in spite of us - and, now, even because of us. |
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| Martin | Apr 29 2016, 07:25 AM Post #104 |
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Prime Specimen
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Nice. Great update, Sheather. I have to ask though, are columbian mammoths descended from the Eden ones found in the delta, or really, are there any reintroduced populations of columbian mammoths? Also, what of saber-toothed cats? Have any populations been reintroduced to the wild. |
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| Sheather | Apr 29 2016, 04:45 PM Post #105 |
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There are few free populations of extinct elephant species established outside of Europe, though in the western plains states the "re-evolved" Columbian mammoth can be found across several disparate populations. One of the largest is found within Yellowstone National Park, which is considerably larger in area than it was in the 21st century - by about 500% - as a result of the conversion of abandoned cattle range land across Wyoming and Montana to protected park land. The first of the species were introduced in the late 2160's. The populations are all continually regulated to ensure they does not overrun the land's natural carrying capacity, as there none of the species' historic predators have been reintroduced alongside it. Smaller semi-wild populations that are much more restricted in range and not considered to be totally free-ranging per se also exist in California, Oregon, Kansas, South Dakota and Illinois. Sabre-toothed cats have not been introduced into the wild anywhere on Earth, though they're relatively widespread in private ownership and in open-range zoological gardens. It is a greater legal hurdle for large carnivores to be introduced into the wild where they were not formerly native, particularly in the case of species capable of causing human harm, and has occurred much less frequently than the intentional relocation of smaller or plant-eating animals. |
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12:01 PM Jul 13