An earth without people
Fascinating! I see the earth has about 5 billion years left to exist.
An Earth Without People: A new way to examine humanity's impact on the environment is to consider how the world would fare if all the people disappeared (Scientific American):
Watch video showing animation of earth without people.
It’s a common fantasy to imagine that you’re the last person left alive on earth. But what if all human beings were suddenly whisked off the planet? That premise is the starting point for The World without Us, a new book by science writer Alan Weisman, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Arizona. In this extended thought experiment, Weisman does not specify exactly what finishes off Homo sapiens; instead he simply assumes the abrupt disappearance of our species and projects the sequence of events that would most likely occur in the years, decades and centuries afterward.
According to Weisman, large parts of our physical infrastructure would begin to crumble almost immediately. Without street cleaners and road crews, our grand boulevards and superhighways would start to crack and buckle in a matter of months. Over the following decades many houses and office buildings would collapse, but some ordinary items would resist decay for an extraordinarily long time. Stainless-steel pots, for example, could last for millennia, especially if they were buried in the weed-covered mounds that used to be our kitchens. And certain common plastics might remain intact for hundreds of thousands of years; they would not break down until microbes evolved the ability to consume them.
Scientific American editor Steve Mirsky recently interviewed Weisman to find out why he wrote the book and what lessons can be drawn from his research. Some excerpts from that interview appear on the following pages.
Timeline of the Fall of New York City:
- 2 days: New York City subway system floods
- 7 days: Nuclear reactors burn or melt down as their water cooling systems fall
- 1 year: Street pavements split and buckle as water in the cracks freezes and thaws
- 2-4 years: Weed covered streets cave in
- 4 years: Without heat, homes and office buildings fall victim to the freeze/thaw cycle and begin to crumble
- 5 years: Large parts of New York may burn
- 20 years: Dozens of streams and marshes form in Manhattan
- 100 years: The roofs of nearly all houses have caved in, accelerating the deterioration of the structures
- 300 years: New York's suspension bridges have fallen
- 500 years: Mature forests cover the New York metropolitan area
- 5000 years: As the casings of nuclear warheads corrode, radioactive plutonium 239 is released into the environment
- 15000+ years: The last remnants of stone buildings fall
- 35000 years: Lead deposited in the soil from automobile emissions in the 20th century finally dissipates
- 100,000 years: The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere returns to preindustrial levels
- 10 million years: Bronze sculptures survive as human era relics
- 1 billion years: New forms of life appear
- 5 billion years: The earth vaporizes as the dying sun expands and consumes all the inner planets
An Earth Without People: A new way to examine humanity's impact on the environment is to consider how the world would fare if all the people disappeared (Scientific American):
Watch video showing animation of earth without people.
It’s a common fantasy to imagine that you’re the last person left alive on earth. But what if all human beings were suddenly whisked off the planet? That premise is the starting point for The World without Us, a new book by science writer Alan Weisman, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Arizona. In this extended thought experiment, Weisman does not specify exactly what finishes off Homo sapiens; instead he simply assumes the abrupt disappearance of our species and projects the sequence of events that would most likely occur in the years, decades and centuries afterward.
According to Weisman, large parts of our physical infrastructure would begin to crumble almost immediately. Without street cleaners and road crews, our grand boulevards and superhighways would start to crack and buckle in a matter of months. Over the following decades many houses and office buildings would collapse, but some ordinary items would resist decay for an extraordinarily long time. Stainless-steel pots, for example, could last for millennia, especially if they were buried in the weed-covered mounds that used to be our kitchens. And certain common plastics might remain intact for hundreds of thousands of years; they would not break down until microbes evolved the ability to consume them.
Scientific American editor Steve Mirsky recently interviewed Weisman to find out why he wrote the book and what lessons can be drawn from his research. Some excerpts from that interview appear on the following pages.
Timeline of the Fall of New York City:
- 2 days: New York City subway system floods
- 7 days: Nuclear reactors burn or melt down as their water cooling systems fall
- 1 year: Street pavements split and buckle as water in the cracks freezes and thaws
- 2-4 years: Weed covered streets cave in
- 4 years: Without heat, homes and office buildings fall victim to the freeze/thaw cycle and begin to crumble
- 5 years: Large parts of New York may burn
- 20 years: Dozens of streams and marshes form in Manhattan
- 100 years: The roofs of nearly all houses have caved in, accelerating the deterioration of the structures
- 300 years: New York's suspension bridges have fallen
- 500 years: Mature forests cover the New York metropolitan area
- 5000 years: As the casings of nuclear warheads corrode, radioactive plutonium 239 is released into the environment
- 15000+ years: The last remnants of stone buildings fall
- 35000 years: Lead deposited in the soil from automobile emissions in the 20th century finally dissipates
- 100,000 years: The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere returns to preindustrial levels
- 10 million years: Bronze sculptures survive as human era relics
- 1 billion years: New forms of life appear
- 5 billion years: The earth vaporizes as the dying sun expands and consumes all the inner planets