S1E09 The Endless Desert: The Future is Wild

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200 million years from now, the world has come full circle. During the Permian and Triassic periods, Earth’s landmasses were once fused into a single supercontinent — Pangea. Now, after eons of tectonic drift and collision, the continents have merged once again to form Pangea II.

At its heart lies a vast, searing desert — one of the most extreme environments the planet has ever known.

In this parched world, evolution has taken bizarre turns. Terabytes, distant descendants of termites, have become master architects, constructing towering, air-conditioned fortresses where they farm green algae to survive. Their colonies are made up of highly specialized castes dedicated to building, watering, and hunting.

But to grow their algae gardens, they must first inoculate them — and the best source is found inside Garden Worms, creatures that host algae within their body tissues in a symbiotic relationship. If the terabytes can catch them, they’ll harvest the algae.

But Garden Worms have an escape route: diving into subterranean pools. Yet even here, danger lurks — in the form of Slickribbons, metre- long agile predators that hunt in the deep underground reservoirs.

In this episode, we enter a world where survival depends on cooperation, specialisation, and strange alliances — in a desert that never ends.

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