A quote from another thread (link)...

...reminded me that I wanted to post about that relatively new program on The History Channel (link).

If you watch the channel, at all, you've seen promos for it. In fact, some time ago, I even saw a lengthy "preview" of it in a movie theater. It is called Life After People (link) and began airing on Tuesday 1/22/2008, I believe.

As you can see from the teaser on the site, they made extensive use of computer graphics/animation to give visual representation of the short and long term affects the world would experience if it woke up one day without any humans around. The premise doesn't involve any sort of destructive war or disease that would affect anything but actual human type beings. It doesn't even deal with the consequences of six billion corpses laying about.

It was interesting, however, if not a little over-hyped and repetitive. It is another one of those shows that seems to artificially "thicken the stew" by covering something for, say, 30 seconds - cutting to commercials - and then re-capping what you just saw prior to said advertisements. Guess they had to get their money's worth out of the CGI investment.

Sadly, the one thing that strongly occurred to me throughout the entire two hour sow, though was this: They interviewed various scientists, geologists, and subject matter experts (i.e. an actual engineer employed at the Hoover Dam), etc... Too many of them were not content with simply speculating about Earth's post-human condition. They truly seemed to relish the idea - seemed nigh orgasmic at the prospect - of Earth being rid of the virus that is the human race - as if the scientist, him/herself, were a member of some separate, superior, alien species - above the fray. That "strategy" seems a bit self-defeating for some crazy reason. That was the overriding theme throughout the program from what I could tell and, for me, diminished the overall viewing experience greatly. I liken it to trying to watch The Weather Channel just for the local friggin' forecast and getting repeatedly bludgeoned with man-caused global warming lefty political bullshit along the way.

In the end, though, it was amusing that much environmentalist thunder was squelched by correctly recognizing just how resilient "Mother Earth" is and how, in less than a tick on her lifetime clock, she will recover from just about anything and move on. No problem.

One point I did find interesting, though, was supposedly how a relatively brief moratorium on fishing in the North Atlantic - due to naval activity during WWII - resulted in a significant fish population rebound in that area. Makes me wonder if a world-wide maritime "crop rotation" strategy might ultimately be a good idea. Good luck getting everybody on board with something like that, though, without surrendering unreasonable power to some centralized bureaucracy.

Oh, and I also found it surprising that ancient concrete is supposedly far superior to what we use today.

Have you seen the program? What did you think of it?

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"Compassionate Conservatism"?!?! That is a stupid phrase. Conservatism is inherently compassionate. It is liberalism that is cruel for the sake of maintaining a constituency.

THC is a cool name for a TV channel. I know a coffeeshop called THC.

I bet this is gonna be on public television over here soon. I saw an interview about the book on the daily show.

Yes, I've seen the show. I even recorded it. The show had one HUGE flaw that made all of it's theories complete garbage - it worked off of the idea that 6.5 billion people would simultaneously disappear AND appearently whatever suddenly killed off every human had ZERO effect on anything else (assumming we were all killed and not abducted by aliens). I could not get this flaw out of my mind during the entire show. That said, I did find the part about the city of Pripyat most interesting. The show was about engineering more then anything. If you're curious to know how long it will take the Brooklyn Bridge to collapse if not maintained, then this is the show for you. If you hope to gain some kind of knowledge of the effect humans have on the planet, then don't bother - it basically says at the end that if you were to compress the existance of earth into 24 hours that our time on this planet would equal about 30 seconds.

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If its mainly about engineering then it doesn't really matter whether just humans died or wildlife died as well.

Well, it's an interesting fantasy, - one that appeals to curiosity and adventure. I don't think a particular death-wish towards one self, others or the entire human species enters into it.

I remember the most popular children's book when I was a kid (and it still is a popular book) was one about a boy waking up some day to find out he was all alone. Only when all the excitement was gone (free candy, no repercussions and no burden of responsibility), a link had to be re-established with the real world and the reader would find out what it actually means to be all alone. Of course, the story turned out to be a dream the boy had and the reader could start breathing normally again. But the feeling of adventure remained. Probably the same feeling that made you watch the entire show.

Well I rushed to this thread thinking it was about good ol' Tetrahydrocannabinol

yeah me too

Cannabis coffee shop - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Heh...still remember that bad movie from my teenage years called Night of the Comet. Same sort of thing where the population of Earth is killed off instantly (conveniently reduced to a red powder so as to minimize the "gore" budget, I suppose). The very few people lucky enough to not have had joined the various "comet watching parties" were the only survivors (had to be encased in metal, if I remember correctly...I.E. one person was locked in a freezer by accident). Hot little blonde cheerleader chick was, naturally, among the survivors and of particular interest to my 14 year old self, at the time. Oh, there were a few zombies, too, of course (Like, DUH!).

Same message, in the end, though... The thrill of being [finally, from a teenage perspective] able to do whatever you want with the usual trade-offs.

I find that premise particularly appetizing during my commute home from work. That and/or modifying my car Spy Hunter-style.

Nah. I like people. They can stay around as far as I'm concerned. Now that I think of it, though, I wouldn't mind Bugs Bunny sawing off California like he did to Florida in that one cartoon.

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"Compassionate Conservatism"?!?! That is a stupid phrase. Conservatism is inherently compassionate. It is liberalism that is cruel for the sake of maintaining a constituency.

I've watched the first hour and a half, gonna finish it tonight.

It's a pretty interesting show. They go into pretty good detail explaining what we pretty much already figured: everything will fall apart and loads of animals will die off.

I enjoyed the Chernobyl parts, too. I've always had a huge interest in the Exclusion Zone and Pripyat, so it was cool seeing new footage of it in high definition.

I didn't get the sense of the scientists relishing the idea because they thought it would be awesome if humans disappeared. I think they relished the idea because they're scientists and speculation like this is a lot of fun. I'm sure they do a lot of boring work, so to be asked to be on a TV show speculating on something as interesting as this certainly would be a fun change of pace. And if there's one thing scientists get a hard on for, it's explaining things and showing off their knowledge.

And I kind of like the premise, where humans suddenly vanish, without them giving an explanation. It allows my imagination to run wild trying to fill in the blanks.

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Unlikely to happen, but it is at least conceivable for the purposes of this thought experiment that a disease cold suddenly kill off all people.

Andrew

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Ethanol is a fabulous solution to our energy dilemma because it will provide more fuel for us to drive around and look for food.

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This reminds me of a book i recently read called The World Without Us by Alan Weisman.

The World Without Us - Alan Weisman

Andrew

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Ethanol is a fabulous solution to our energy dilemma because it will provide more fuel for us to drive around and look for food.

-- Unknown

Although there's no plausible scenario that could wipe out every human being without touching anything else, it's quite plausible that there could be a civilization ending event (i.e. meteorite strike, plague, etc.) which would leave some survivors but no maintenance of most of our present infrastructure. So the deterioration of the infrastructure depicted here would still occur. I guess they felt the zero population business sounded more dramatic and compelling. I enjoyed the show--wouldn't have guessed it would only take a thousand years to wipe out almost all traces of us--it is definitely humbling.

Plausible scenario - an engineered virus that only infects/kills humans.

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Still an implausible scenario if the premise is that it happens "without touching anything else". Everything from livestock to human tapeworms to a vast array of microorganims would be greatly affected, triggering second-hand effects on alot of other organisms and so on.

Damn, I missed the show (forgot what day it was on).
And now you guys ruined the rerun for me.

Oh well, I'll watch it anyways.


Humans simply vanishing without effecting other organisms can't happen.

BUT, I do consider us a virus and that our time will come to go, as the dodo birds went.

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