Slashdot Mirror
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
"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."
This excess anthropomorphising has reached a new heights for slashdrivel.
We are not hurting the planet with pollution. We are primarily hurting each other. As TFA notes, we have left very few permanent traces on the earth. Pollution is - or ought to be - a tort.
PS: and we should continue as the dominant species on the planet. If we don't the chimps will take over.
PPS: and if Mr. Orrock, the writer of the article, thinks that the global demise of the human species is a good idea, I invite him to act locally. Very locally.
'The sad truth is, once the humans get out of the picture, the outlook starts to get a lot better,'
But for what purpose? That's like never opening a package, so it never gets finished.
Who would even appreciate it? Is the Earth something so deistic and magical that's its mere existence is good enough by itself? Or, is some alien race (no doubt evilly destroying their own planet) going to come by and appreciate its pristine beauty?
The planet is here, and we are using it. We are becoming better, and making it more capable. To say that to conserve, take notice, and be proactive, to make it last longer, is not only true, but it is helpful. To say, however, that if we were gone it would be better, is an unproven theory, and would remain unproven, being noone would be here to care.
Growth takes a toll somewhere. But not for naught. The Earth is here for us, and we have made quite some progress based on her resources. There's no reason to replace our pride with some pessimistic view that promotes nihilism in some strange way.
Have you read my journal today?
You can view this as we are abnormalities in our ecosystem. We are atypical organisms living beyond what we are supposed to.
Or you can acknowledge that if other organisms were intelligent enough to make their existence better for them (at the expense of others), they would. That's one of the laws of nature and we're just reverting back to our primal instincts. Now, we're fairly civil and modest in reproducing and killing, so we're a bit better than the animals in that respect. If we chose to acknowledge that we're destroying earth for the rest of the organisms, it would probably be both civil and intelligent. Unfortunately, about half of us don't give a shit. Well, that's what we deal with.
Every organism is in competition for resources with every other organism in some way. A symbiosis rarely occurs and when it does, it's usually forced (humans raising cattle for milk).
Is there any scenario we can reach where we won't destroy the environment?
Probably not but, in my opinion, humans are entropy.
And, if you acknowledge the very long history of the earth, we are remarkably new to the earth. The dinosaurs had a longer reign and they are forgotten with the exception of their bones.
My work here is dung.
...nobody would be running Windows.
Bah, this fellow lacks imagination.
Imagine how beautifully clean and preserved the planet would be without life of any type! No more messy leaf litter, buzzing flies around dungheaps, the occasional lightning-sparked forest fire besmudging the sky with ugly smoke...
Is all the environmental hype about styrofoam over blown? Will some ancient civilization mine for it like we mine for oil? ... or will it disappear?
In 1.5 billion years the sun will start to grow into a red giant and solar winds winds will strip the Earth of its atmosphere.
Then in about 5 billion years after that, the sun will have consumed the Earth and whatever life remains on it.
(Source)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Sun_Life.png
This is of course barring large iron metorites or collision with large space bodies and of course a passing of another solor system or galaxy in the meantime.
So if man went away tomorrow... Life would be peachy for nature for a while, but then it would die by itself due to reasons far beyond non-intelligents life control (unless dolphins evolve into space faring creatures on their own)
So nature has to put up with man for a while to we figure out how to get off this rock... Or get used to not being around in a few billion years.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
"The sad truth is, once the humans get out of the picture, the outlook starts to get a lot better,'"
not to me.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Falling trees would never again make a sound. So sad.
If you're interested in what the United States would be like without humans, there is a nifty map developed by A.W. Kuchler in 1964 and refined periodically since of what would grow where without human interference. It is called Potential Natural Vegetation of the Coterminous United States and can be found at the US Forest Service.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Uh, what? Why would you expect to see a nuclear desert there? Armed with some research papers and some estimates of how much nuclear material was released, it should have been easy enough to figure out that no, all life will not fail. In fact the plants are doing great (and some of the shorter-lived animals) because there aren't a bunch of people running around destroying them.
Anyway, this is not a big surprise. There are some indications that it might rebound even faster than these studies suggest. One of the major indications is the continued presence of complex animals (like land-based vertebrates) after all the cataclysms which have occurred since they first crawled out of the ocean. I mean we only even know about a few and some of them are major impacts, some are ice ages, etc.
Just as an example the earth has a built-in mechanism for regulating global temperature. As temperatures rise, the ice caps melt, and sea levels rise. This has two major effects: One, it leads to additional evaporation, which causes cooling; the other is that it covers more land, which results in more light being reflected back into space, which also causes cooling. This pitches things towards an ice age; the globe cools, the ice caps refreeze, the sea level falls, evaporation decreases, more land is exposed, the earth retains more sunlight and the planet heats up. The cycle continues.
Of course, we may not be too happy about this, and there are things that we can do to make a difference and maybe (at some point) stabilize the system. Every year we put out (as a species, on average) something like 20 times as much CO2 as active surface volcanoes...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Modern "food" turkeys have such huge breasts that they are physically unable to breed without human help. Even if they escaped their pens, they'd be doomed to extinction.
Modern bananas have been bred totally seedless, like various grape varieties. They spread entirely by grafting. So they too would soon die off.
The article mocks Poodles, but I wonder a bit about that. They're actually considered one of the smartest breeds of dog there is, and that must be worth something when a major change in lifestyle is called for.
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, although definitely not one of Clancy's best, deals with a enviro-nut case group that wants to eradicate all human life on earth (except their own cult, of course).
Here's an enviro-nut case group that wants to eradicate all human life on Earth, including their own cult. (They don't want to do it violently, though -- they just want everyone on Earth to agree not to have children, and let nature take its course.)
Voluntary Human Extinction Movement
It could be a hoax website, but it's at least plausible.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
I wonder if they would be able to spell "truly".
Uh, those who kill to live are not simply criminals, although some system of law could make them so. Killing to live is perhaps the only reasonable purpose for killing. (It doesn't make it right, but it does make it understandable.)
But in response to your question, it's not so much a criminal act as an act of negligence - but at the same time, the powers-that-be are doing everything they can to make us forget about the real issues so that they can rape the planet. Since humans are pack animals, this is typically a highly successful venture.
Unfortunately, we have given our planet to the people with money and are unwilling to take it back. We elect the incumbent to congress something like 95% of the time but people always complain about how corrupt government is and how badly we need a change.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Probably the biggest PR mistake that environmentalists ever made was that they made their activism about "The Earth", and not about our ability to survive on it.
Nature is a resilient bitch. We could hardly do the kind of damage necessary to make Earth unlivable by something.
We can, however, make life very unpleasant for mankind. And that's why we need to preserve the environment as best as possible. For us, not the environment.
I was really hoping the article would come with a picture.
Bottles.
We find dinosaur bones after a hundred of millions of years. But there wouldn't be a single trace of the gigantic structures we've built? Sounds unlikely. I'm surely one of those concrete buildings will accidently not get meddled with too much (and in turn shield its contents a little better). If in just a few million years our presence would go unnoticed by an intelligence similar to our own, then wouldn't that imply that for all we know this hypothesis actually did happen to the dinosaurs and possibly species before (or even since) them?
fine, go hate yourself. but don't think that your self-hatred is a component of all of us or has any power over your fellow man. i for one have faith in humanity in doing the right thing. am i stupid? am i crazy?
i don't know. humanity could fail. but i also know that giving up on humanity entirely guarantees that you will fail. so have some simple faith in your fellow man. or, frankly, shut up. because you're not helping anything with empty pointless doubt and pessimism
constructive criticism is helpful. but empty gloomy pessimism is worth absolutely nothing at all. it is self-fulfilling prophecy to doubt the future of mankind. if you don't believe in the future, you sit there, and you do nothing, and therefore ensure that there is no future. that means you are just damage to be routed around. you're not helpful or useful to anyone else in any way if you don't believe in a future
and you are quite arrogant if you think no one else believes in a future either, that your lack of faith is supposed to have any meaning to anyone around you. lack of faith does not beat faith. lack of faith doesn't grow anything, it doesn't spread, it just dies. it's just damage to be routed around. faith is something that creates and grows and spreads. faith always beats lack of faith, because it acts and creates. lack of faith just sits there, inert and useless
join in humanity in faith, or go away, and shut up. seriously, if you don't believe in the future of humanity, why are you talking? there's no future right? so what's the point of trying to add anything? you're not being constructive. being constructive is based on the supposition that it's the worth the effort, that there is a future worth working towards
so make up your mind:
but to continue talking, and not believe in a future, is not a logically cohesive position for anyone to take on the subject of humanity. it's an unfounded and incoherent position in life. so work it out, teenaged human, and get back to us later when you are worth something to yourself and others and have words worth our time for us to listen to
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This is just plain stupid. Nice he harps on CO2.
Little does he know. During the Ordovician CO2 levels were 13x to 17x higher than now. The earth slipped into a deep freeze snowball phase during this time. Throughout the Carboniferous CO2 levels were much higher than now. Back in the PreCambrian CO2 was much higher than now... up into the 80,000 ppm range in fact compared to 370 ppm now.
So not only is the story just plain tripe - it is also based on a poor understanding of the history of the planet.
I always thought the Dinosaurs were the most dominant life form. Give me a break!
"advanced civilization" is a meaningless term. How advanced? I think we still have a lot of room for advancement. I also think the only way out is through - through technology. Have you noticed that the trend in technology is to use less and less power, and to be smaller and smaller (meaning requiring less materials?) We're moving in the correct direction in a lot of ways.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
As with any vehicle, how you drive can affect mileage. I once had a behemoth 1965 Oldsmobile with a 425 ci. engine. With an electronic ignition and careful tuning, I regularly achieve 18 mpg. When I didn't have time to keep it in tune it could drop as low as 11 mpg.
It's not the engine, it's the size of the vehicle and the tires. Your "behemoth" Olds isn't 8-10 feet tall and doesn't have 4 foot high tires. I seriously doubt these trucks could break 10mpg even driven slowly. There's too much wind resistance, and the rolling resistance from the tires is immense. And that's when cruising; any acceleration is going to seriously guzzle gas because the wheels/tires weigh so much and have so much inertia to overcome.
I knew a guy at work a few years ago who had a jacked-up Chevy truck, and he claimed he got 10 mpg no matter how or where he drove it, in the city or on the highway. And his didn't even have the gigantic monster offroad tires that a lot of trucks have (with four shocks on each side, etc.), just a standard lift kit. I think my 8-10 estimate is probably quite generous.
Rubbish!
Aliens will find:
Fscking AOL CDs
Chewing gum stains on all underfoot surfaces
The Duke Nukem Forever development team still hard at work
AT&ROFLMAO
There is one...try this site...
m ans-vanished-207870.php
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/gadgets/what-if-all-hu
Animals hurt the planet they live on too. Throughout evolution, there have been entire species killed off by more dominant species, and groups of animals have spread to other areas and changed the environment there to the detriment of what already lived there.
I think some people put up an anti-mankind mindset to make themselves feel like they're hip and intellectual, and I doubt our impact on the environment is as great as global warming alarmists have made it out to be (I notice Slashdot didn't report about the lack of an active hurricane season this year or the recent below-average temperatures).
"Sufferin' succotash."
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.
Quoting that link:
One of Pianka's earliest points was a condemnation of anthropocentrism, or the idea that humankind occupies a privileged position in the Universe. He told a story about how a neighbor asked him what good the lizards are that he studies. He answered, "What good are you?"
Pianka hammered his point home by exclaiming, "We're no better than bacteria!"
I've heard estians, aka estholes (est, renamed Landmark Forum) say "We're all just tubes."
SPOILER: Have barf bag ready as you read:
The tubes thing refers to the human digestive system - our sole purpose in life is to eat and shit.
The "environmentalist" movement was taken over by socialists/anti-capitalists (if it looks like they have more than one agenda, it's because they do), but even more, they want to reprogram everyone's mind, just like a cult. "We're all no better than bacteria."
They're debasing the whole of humanity. How quaint.
Tag lost or not installed.
There are presumably millions of planets like ours in our galaxy alone - what would be the point in having another one without intelligent life? Why do people think that a world without humans is better than one with humans? Why is a green, leafy planet inherently better than a radioactive wasteland?
Because of human values - the same human values that the author is talking about eliminating in such a positive light.
You green guys are so wierd! Earth has no value except to be used by humans - I can understand preservation and conservation in the context of preserving value for future humans, but the humans must come first, not nature (or other animals)!
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
'the recent below-average temperatures'
In your neck of the woods, maybe, maybe. Australia is just right now experiencing the worst drought in a 100 years and I should maybe remind you that it's only spring there. Farmers won't even plant seeds as they know they would be wasted (wheat producers in the rest of the world rejoice, it's only human). September in Europe has been one of the warmest on record...
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.
Eventually, the dam's power systems would notice nobody was around and close all the penstock gates. But the dam needs power to hold the gates closed, and it's no longer making power. Once external power fails (yes, electricity flows to the dam as well as from) and the battery backups fail, the penstock gates will open about a quarter of the way, and the turbines will start to spin up. But the breakers have all tripped, so there's no electricity coming out of the generators. This is important, because without electric power, you can't lubricate the generators' bearings. So after a while the bearings seize, which is guaranteed to be dramatic.
After the powerhouse destroys itself, the dam itself will probably survive until the end of the next ice age. That's when a lake the size of Montana eventually bursts through the ice and about half its contents slam into the dam all at once, tearing its top off and chewing apart the rock all around it. There will be enough rubble left over for Lake Mead to partially and permanently reform, at a third its original depth.
Has anybody else ever read this article? That's all I remember from it.
This is not my sandwich.
This is one of the great ironies of the "environmental" movement. To move forward with energy creation into more modern, less wasteful and polluting forms of energy production, we MUST take risks on technologies that in the short term (50-100 years) may run the risk of causing more environmental problems. However, many of these technologies are so villified by the Eco-religion that has taken over much of our scientific community, that little to no research is being done in those areas, and the eco-politics have (in some cases) outlawed or out-regulated these technoligies from being used. Thusly we end up stuck using old, outdated, wasteful and polluting energy technologies rather then moving forward into better alternatives.
A prime example of this is Nuclear power. A modern nuclear reactor is the safest and cleanest form of power generation around. Research into this area continues to improve the technology, making it safer and easier to use with less and less risk to the environment. Yet there hasn't been a nuclear power plant built in the United States (the world's largest energy consumer) in over 30 years! Why? Because of the eco-religionising of politics and education in the US and the world over the last 50 years. Eco-religion teaches that Nuclear = Bad. Your kids will grow up with extra limbs and three eyed fish will swim through the rivers of Springfield. It's all bullshit, of course, but that's the kind of pap that's being fed to our kids and the general populace. So much so that the NIMBY factor alone has been enough to stop most attempts at reactor building in the last 20 years. I won't even START on the ABSURD level of regulation the nuclear industry has to deal with.
I live in the Western New York area. We just had to deal with a freak October snow storm that crippled our power infrastructure due to heavy snow crushing the trees and ripping down power lines and poles. I spent 6 DAYS without electrical power or heat in my home. While I could have a backup generator to help out, my question is, why in 2006 doesn't every home have a built-in Carbon-Block nuclear power generator? Why are we still dependant on coal-fired power plants and overhead (or buried) WIRES to deliver our power? Because Eco-religion has kept our power generation capabilities in the 1950's.
Until we grow up and dump the Eco-religion for good, hard science, it will remain this way in-perpetuity or until we dont have any other choice but to move forward or return to the 14th century technologically.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
Personally, I was driving around about 3-4 years ago up here in Rochester, NY when we had that huge blackout. Exactly what I expected would happen did happen...
without power ALL of the massively inefficient electric devices STOPPED. In doing so, they stopped producing massive amounts of heat. All of those building AC units, all the electric motors, and a plethora of other devices.
I was trapped in bumper to bumper traffic because people in this country get all freaked out and impatient. So, they don't handle the the whole "when the traffic light is out treat it as an all way stop" thing.
In any event, I watched the temperature on a bank display. In the course of about 30 minutes it drop about 5-7 degrees and the wind picked up. Additionally, it was much quiter. It was wonderful. I am not saying we should just drop all technology. I am simply saying that most of our devices are incredibly inefficient and it seems obvious what would happen on this planet if all humans just vanished from the face of the Earth is very straight forward.
The temperature would start to drop, dramatically. The wind would pick up and in a matter of a few years the Earth would start to reclaim the spaces we used to inhabit.
I disagree with the article in one area. I don't think it would take tens of thousands of years. I think it would happen MUCH faster then that.
That's my two or three cents.