Let’s suppose that all human beings on Earth suddenly disappear or just drop dead. Not some slow disease that takes time to spread or to kill, nothing violent like bombs or super volcanoes. Just suddenly every human is gone or dead, all at the same time, so no one has time to react or do anything.
Now let’s suppose that one person, say in some reasonably large US city like LA, Chicago, or New York, is somehow mysteriously left alive.
How long would that person have working electricity? Let’s say he has cable TV. How long would various channels still be broadcasting something? I would think that local stations would probably go to snow pretty quickly, especially ones that normally broadcast their own stuff (i.e. not network feeds). Or if a station happened to be showing something live (like the evening news) when the catastrophe happened, tuning to that station would show an empty studio, or maybe the ceiling if the camera operator tipped the camera up as he died.
But what about cable stations like HBO or TNT? Are they all automated so that many hours of material are scheduled and the computers will just keep playing that scheduled stuff without the need of human direction?
Back to electricity, I’m assuming that most of that is automated, not needing human intervention. But eventually something would fail, or the coal will run out of the coal plant or something like that, right? And once one part of the grid goes down, wouldn’t the rest fall? Would that take hours, days, weeks?
There is a really good series on the History channel that I sometimes see called “Life After People”, they cover several of topics like this, it could be worth a look if you are interested.
TV will be gone pretty quickly, even with taped recordings real people are involved in the process. Radio might be a different story, a lot of stations are automated to a large extent. XM radio might be able to broadcast till the power went off. I have been to the studio in DC it is amazingly automated.
As a whole infrastructure will break down rather quickly, power plants will go in short order without people to fuel and maintain them. Hydro power stations might make it a year or so but you clog the inlets with silt and say bye to electricity.
For either TV or radio, assuming that the station still receives power, it would depend on how long they have things scheduled. For major TV stations, I can’t see them having content in advance for that long. Certainly the news slots will be broadcasting a logo or whatever else the final default option would be.
Radio can be programmed for much longer in advance, but even then there will be limits.
I suspect that the power system would be more likely to fail sooner than a radio station.
The power grid moves enormous amounts of destructive power. Safe keeping systems revert to "“shut down” when human intervention fails.
At any given moment there are thousands of people who are making decisions about adjustments to the grid. (grid dispatchers and plant operators) Even with people present to make decisions blackouts can occur if a section of the system fails and takes out another section of the system (a domino effect).
But those situations are few enough and far enough in between that they are tolerable.
Now consider a scenario where people are suddenly not there to make the necessary adjustments. Within minutes some section will probably fail. And that failure will cause automated shut down of generators and load centers. The effects of shutting down a section will affect other sections and they too will shut down. The result is a cascading blackout throughout the country.
Some sections may successfully isolate themselves automatically but they would probably shut down within minutes from their own lack of human decision making.
My guess is that most of the US would blackout within 5 min of the “event”.
some photovoltaic panel could be producing for many years. if it was sending out a radio beacon it could be luring aliens expecting human meat onto a dead fishing hole.
I thought it was very implausible that they had electricity the entire time, including in Bill Murray’s palatial mansion and in the amusement park at the end.
It’s possible a non grid-tied PV system could operate for years but it would take a considerable amount of luck. If you could set it up from the start to minimize the need for human intervention, for example, it’d have a much better chance of surviving.
Photovoltaic panels will generate voltage when exposed to the sun but there’s a lot that could shut down a real-life system not set up for the non-human world. The grid-tied systems will all shut down as soon as the grid is lost, for instance.
I was thinking about the things that will keep running without our help.
Flashing school zone signs, here in Texas many are solar powered so quite a few are going to turn on a couple times a day till the bulbs burn out or they get damaged.
Chemical plants, while their operations require electricity they often make their own and many reactions are self sustaining. I guess they run till something really bad happens. There could be fires and explosions for quite a while.
Nuclear Power Plants, these babies can run for a long time and if not shut down automatically, will happily chug along until really bad things happen
Some Ocean going vessels will chug right along until they hit something
I imagine the Earth would play out like some extreme disaster movie for several months, big crashes, huge fires, big explosions. You could watch it from the ISS til it ran out of fuel to correct its orbit and it came down to Earth. Spectacular, Nasty show
