If anybody else watched the History Channel’s fascinating speculative documentary *Life After People * last night, it seems to me they overlooked space junk and the lunar lander. They set a time frame of about 10,000 years, and I was surprised that they allowed the Hoover Dam and Mount Rushmore would still be standing long after our cities had basically disappeared. But how many satellites and how much space junk would still be in orbit in, say, 1000 years or 10,000 years after people disappeared? How about the lunar lander and other stuff we left on the moon’s surface? Won’t they still be around for a long time?
It talked about dogs, cats, and zoo animals, but what about cows, sheep, chickens and other livestock? Would any of them survive the extinction of the human race?
That look at Chernobyl was a disturbing reminder of just how fragile the physical aspects of our civilization really are. A friend of mine once remarked that 80% of civilization is maintenance. I didn’t really appreciate just how on the mark that observation was until now.
All in all, it was a fascinating, if somewhat morbid, look at what the world would most likely be like once people have disappeared from the scene. In particular, watching our cities in various stages of decay, and the odd ecologies that might evolve within them, was probably the most interesting part of the show.
I watched it, and it made me want to hop in the car to drive to the History Channel and smack around whoever it was that overdid the editing effects. One staticky-dissolve or flicker-in-and-out appearance of a talking head after another. Ugh.
Some of the effects were good, some not-so-good – the CGI bear walking on the highway, and the CGI wolf-dog hybrids hunting were laughable. And they sure wanted to get their money’s worth out of their other CGI sequences: they must’ve shown the Space Needle falling a half-dozen times.
In fact, they could’ve cut the run time in half by cutting down on the CGI clip repeats. Teaser before every commercial, recap after every commercial, recap again when they move to the next time-frame discussion.
I thought it was cool that one of the talking heads was David Brin. But white-haired talking head guy got a big ol’ eyeroll for suggesting that housecats would evolve patagia like flying squirrels… after 150-years (!) of living in overgrown skyscrapers. :dubious:
I was half watching this last night. I thought it must been based on the book The World Without Us / by Alan Weisman, but I didn’t notice him in the show.
The book did go further and deeper into everything. It depressed me, but it was great. A recommended read.
For what it’s worth, he didn’t really suggest that. He just basically said, sure, if we’re going to wildly speculate about such things, then yeah, maybe it could happen.
It seemed to me that if humans vanished somehow (and left their pets behind for some reason), I don’t think it would matter to anybody or anything that the Eiffel Tower would eventually collapse.
I assume humans didn’t actually die and leave rotting corpses everywhere causing horrendous disease, especially since whatever caused their death would probably kill a fair chunk of domestic animals too.
If…by the premise of the show… we got Raptured or something, suddenly people-less cars going down the road would crash, followed minutes to hours later by trains and planes.
That’s what I was thinking. Without humans, nothing would care. (Unless, of course they were living in a collapsing structure.) I think this is appropriate:
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pool singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
I thought that Mount Rushmore had to be maintained. IIRC there are many cracks that have been repaired, and maybe some plates have been added too. Eventually the faces will fall.
According to this, porcelain will last a very long time. I would guess maybe hundreds years and still be recognizable as a toilet bowl. But ultimately, temperature cycles, plant growth, and abrasion will grind down a toilet bowl into sand.
Gold coins thousands of years old have apparently been found.
The Yuka Mountain waste disposal facility is supposed to be designed to safely store waste for 10,000 to one million years.
There Will Come Soft Rains was written by Sara Teasdale in 1920.
It is used in a Ray Bradbury story of the same name, concerning an automated house that carries out its routines (making breakfast, doing dishes, etc. … and reading the poem) after a nuclear war.
**Fish, and plankton. And sea greens, and protein from the sea. It’s all here, ready. Fresh as harvest day. Fish and sea greens, plankton and protein from the sea. And then it stopped coming. And they came instead. So I store them here. I’m ready. And you’re ready. It’s my job. To freeze you. Protein, plankton… **
To answer the OP, I found the show very interesting. I’ve often wondered how long it would take for things to “fall down” if they weren’t cared for. I hope the show is on again so I can tape it this time.