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What Earth Without People Would Look Like
Raynor writes "Imagine a world without people. What if every human being, all 6.5 billion of us, were suddenly abducted and the planet was left to fend for itself? The planet would heal. 'The sad truth is, once the humans get out of the picture, the outlook starts to get a lot better,' says John Orrock, a conservation biologist. Pollution would cease being created. It would remain around for many years, CO2 taking as long as 20,000 years to be restored to it's natural level, but will decrease. Even if we were all whisked away and our nuclear reactors melted down, it would have a surprisingly little effect on the planet. Chernobyl gives hope to this end. 'I really expected to see a nuclear desert there,' says Ronald Chesser, an environmental biologist. 'I was quite surprised. When you enter into the exclusion zone, it's a very thriving ecosystem.' In the grand scheme of the world there would be little evidence of our existence at 100,000 years. The most permanent piece is the radio waves we've emitted of the last century. As the article puts it, 'The humbling — and perversely comforting — reality is that the Earth will forget us remarkably quickly.'"
If so I'd like to recommend Kim Jong Il
If they could, the other species we share Earth with would surely vote us off the planet.
They could try, but we'd be the ones building the voting machines.
even though buildings will crumble, their ruins - especially those made of stone or concrete - are likely to last thousands of years. "We still have records of civilisations that are 3000 years old," notes Masterton. "For many thousands of years there would still be some signs of the civilisations that we created. It's going to take a long time for a concrete road to disappear. It might be severely crumbling in many places, but it'll take a long time to become invisible."
Like the ancients, it's how we bury our dead which will be most telling to the next crop of intelligent life to evolve on Earth.
"They're all in these frames of petrified wood with evidence of metal rails, hinges and nails around them. Do you suppose they spun these things and then suffocated inside them? Or was this some way other creatures stored their food? They couldn't possibly be so vain as to try preserving their bodies after they died, HA HA HA!"
'The humbling -- and perversely comforting -- reality is that the Earth will forget us remarkably quickly.'"
Oh, I dunno. The planet itself might, with the help of perhaps another ice age to drive the remnants of our cities into so much rubble.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
There is one...try this site...
m ans-vanished-207870.php
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/gadgets/what-if-all-hu
Discover magazine has a much more poetic article on the same subject-- and there's a picture!r th-without-people/
http://www.discover.com/issues/feb-05/features/ea
It really blows the other stuff on the topic away, IMO-- it's definitely the first article in Discover to actually bring tears to my eyes.
Im so sick of hearing about native cultures living in "harmony" with nature. Such cultures do their share of damage to the enviroment, they just do it on a smaller scale, mainly because their populations were much smaller and they lacked the tools to do more. Lack of medicine and hygiene means lots of illness, add in regular tribal wars and regular famine, and the population will stay small enough to not make a massive impact on their enviroment. The culture's arent any more noble, and when introduced to the benefits of modern society almost invariable embrace them and all the enviromental impact they bring. And primitive people still managed to overhunt wildlife and destroy natural habitats with the best of them. Don't delude yourself, if they had the tools the most backwards tribe in Africa would cause as much enviromental damage as any American.
The reality of so called harmony with nature is an existence at the whims of nature, with sickness and death around every corner. Farming, and thus the civilization needed to enable widespread farming with resistance to drought and famine, was so attractive to ancient peoples because it allowed them to break free of an existence dictated by luck and the weather. They didnt give a damn about clearing forests full of animals to make farm land. Humans are, and always have been a fairly selfish lot, with little regard to far long term consequences of our actions. And even if a human culture arose that shunned civilization and lived a life with as little impact on the enviroment as possible, that culture would either quickly be destroyed by other cultures who had learned to bend the planet and it's enviroment to their own purposes.
The best example of this is the American Indians, who although hardly living in perfect harmony with nature as the tour guides would have you believe, largely lacked the tools or manpower to make signifigant changes to their enviroment. When europeans came, they brought with them the rewards of the quite savage raping of the natural European ecosystem (which, after so many centuries of heavy human inhabitance, barely resembles it's original form) and took their land, and either killed them or forced them off into tracts of poor quality land not deemed fit for european settlement. That society would grow so much by using the abundant resources of a hitherto virtually untapped continent to become the dominant military and economic force on the planet, partly through the development of a weapon capable of causing damage to the planet at a rate never before imagined.
Humans. in our lifetimes or any other, will never find "harmony" with nature, and even if a subset does, they will likely be killed by stronger cultures who want the only chunk of land not yet completely exploited.
The only realistic ways to escape total destruction of the planet, in my opinion, is technology. Technology can allow us to enjoy all the benefits of our modern society while at the same time making it easy to avoid excessive damage to the enviroment. Technology could even let us one day harvest resources from other planets, as well as allow us to use existing resources more effeciently. None of that will be accomplished by throwing away our cars and computers and screwing around in huts in the woods.