Life After People

I have always been fascinated with thinking about what this planet would be like if there were no people on it, or what life would be like for a very small group of humans surviving after the "End of the World". How would the artifacts of our modern life fare? How long would it take before all traces of of our complex, highly-advanced civilization disappear? Books like The Time Machine and The Stand have served in the past to spark my imagination in this regard, but recent scholarship (including a book I'd like to read, The World without Us) on the subject has been equally interesting.

Last night, the History Channel aired "Life after People", a "documentary event" on the fate of life and our material cultural if every last human on Earth suddenly died off or vanished. While never addressing the reason for man's demise (you can fill in the blanks: some kind of hyper-mutative flu virus seems like the most likely candidate in this scenario), the program takes us on a bumpy ride starting only a day after the death of humanity to several thousand years into the future.

In a series of die-offs, several species would find life difficult in that first year or two after people. Of course, those most likely to be effected would be pet, zoo and domesticated food animals who rely directly on human contact for survival. Only if they escape the confines of their cages or homes would most of these animals have a chance. Other animals, such as cockroaches, gulls and rats would temporarily glut themselves on our leavings, but would soon find food difficult to come by and they would have to "earn an honest living" again . . . in the wild.

Other species, most notably plants, would immediately begin to thrive in a post-human world. All of our carefully manicured lawns and tamed green spaces (Central Park and Tom McCall Waterfront Park) would quickly revert to woodland. Every possible crack in the pavement would soon sprout dandelions and clover, and moss and dead leaves would begin to cover every trace of asphalt. Slowly, they would rip into and cover over our abandoned buildings.

For a while, skyscrapers and decaying houses would become “vertical ecosystems” with complete systems of flora and fauna, predator and prey. In time though, even our most enduring structures would burn, corrode, erode and fall to the ground, leaving no trace of our presence behind. In 10,000 years, only Mt. Rushmore, the Great Wall of China, the Pyramids and perhaps a handful of other massive structures would remain to give future intelligent life pause to wonder what came before. Strangely, the program never mentioned plastics, which, to my knowledge, is nearly eternal.

This was a great tour of the earth of the "future". The CGI and science was fair to excellent, grounded in repeatable observation. While all in all, Life after People was a good program, a few questions occurred to me as I watched it. Once I swallowed my general irritation with the History Channel's reluctance to produce programs about, umm . . . HISTORY (they were pushing yet another speculative, goofy SciFi Channel original called "UFO Hunter", a spin-off of it's "popular" "Monster Hunter" series, during the breaks, and, just before "Life after People" they aired for the zillionth time a ridiculous yet straight-faced exegesis of Nostradamus' work *sighs*), I wondered at the paradigm shift from traditional modern science's belief that man is, in some way, the dominate creature on earth, to a eco-New Age (for lack of a better term) view that the world would be just as well off without Homo sapiens. Granted, I am clearly no fan of civilization--it's far too messy, dehumanizing and exploitative not to see its shortcomings. But, there was clearly an ideological message.

But then again, you really can't help that, even in the realm of "pure" science.

At any rate, this got me thinking about what the earth might look like after Jesus returns. My wife has a hard time thinking that heaven can be on earth, with all the junk, pollution, urban sprawl and mess humans have inflicted on the planet. For me, this show only highlights the resiliency of the planet. Despite the warnings of global warming and mass extinctions, it seems to me that this world has seen it all before and that bouncing back and returning to a pristine state would only be a matter of time.

Of course, this brings up many other questions. I don't begin to have a clue how all the people on earth will live in the earthly Kingdom of Heaven without causing environmental damage. If people are here, in whatever state the Millennial Reign finds us in, then I have a hard time believing we'd let the Eiffel Tower rust and turn to dust.

Who knows?

Not I.