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Life after people
BillieTheBot
Posts: 8,721 Bot
Just watched this on TV. It was amazing to realise that in 100,000 years the only remnants of human civilisation will be the Hoover Dam and the Pyramids at Giza..!
Everything else will have decayed and crumbled within 10,000.
Everything else will have decayed and crumbled within 10,000.
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I can remember seeing a bit of wall dating from 3000BC in the British Museum and being impressed at seeing something which was 5000 years old - i can't imagine seeing anything as old as 10,000
Then again, once oil runs out...
I'm also fascinated by the hypothetical scenario of how quickly society and man-made infrastructure would break down. Apparently within a day of mankind disappearing 70% of the world's electricity would be lost. Within 2 weeks all the lights would have gone out.
For anyone interested in such scenarios I can recommend The Stand by Stephen King.
According to the research, very little would be intact after a few HUNDRED years, let alone 10,000.
Within 1000 years most of Manhatten for example would be a series of unrecognisable hills. The empire state building and other large super structures would have collapsed over 500 years before. Cars would have disintergrated, bridges would vanish, it's a sobering thought that despite our percieved power as masters of the earth, we're nothing more than a blip in creation.
A funny thing though, if we just vanished, planes would keep flying for upto 36 hours if they were high enough lol.
In 100,000 years the only remnants of humanity would be radiation, ceramic, plastic and Mount Rushmore and anything we've sent into space.
Or Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond, the guy who wrote Guns, Germs and Steel. An excellent look at the collapse of a number of civilizations from the past for a number of different reasons and possible lessons for the future.
Some other books that come up in wikipedia links include -
The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter
A Study of History by Arnold J. Toynbee
and A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright
For instance, nuclear bunkers? Dumps for storing nuclear waste? "Time capsules"? That "apocalypse bunker" of crop seeds the Norwegians (or was it the Swedes) just built? Or other resilient materials and human artefacts. Titanium structures? Cut diamonds?
Also, wouldn't human radio/satellite broadcasts and light images of humans continue to travel across the universe indefinately?
Nevethless, interesting doc.
thought provoking though. Wonderous and depressing at the same time. It sort of exposes the futility of human life.
edit: the part with paper and digital media disintegrating is no surprise, but i've never given it much thought. Basically within a hundred years there won't be a lot of anything left.
I would like to look into things like skeletons, plastics, time capsules, and any areas away from north america, which the docu foced on.
Even supposeduly "resilient" structures would decay over time. The building blocks of a nuclear bunker are the same as those in a skyscraper. Just concrete but deep underground, and whilst the bunker itself might survive, the doors would eventually rust and plants and vegetation would eventually take over. Titanium is just an alloy of iron, and would rust eventually.
As for transmissions into space, it's been found quite recently that most of the stuff we've transmitted will have decayed into background noise a few light years from Earth, so when we go out it'll be with a whimper into the ether.
Plastics would survive, as would fossilised bones, but after 100,000 years of absence even these would have vanished. You've got to remember, 100,000 years is an impossibly long time, longer than current human history. It would be very arrogant of us to assume we could construct something capable of beating back nature for that long.
Our only hope for our memory to live on is to send it into space.
and they forgot to tell you that in 100 years we will have destroyed ourselves anyhow !