I was watching The Daily Show the other night as I hadn’t seen an episode in a while, and heard about a recent book called “The World Without Us.” The book is exactly as the title describes – it is a narrative revealing what might happen to the earth were human beings to simply disappear. What would happen to our buildings? Our sewers? What animals might die as a result of our absence?
I haven’t read the book yet but it does sound interesting. So this morning I checked out the books website and much to my surprise it was a fairly informative site. On the homepage is a video that shows what might happen to your house without you – I was surprised that the house lasted until about year 120, though in the grand scheme of things I suppose this is a very short time.
Another cool feature on the site is a timeline that shows, for each time period, what would be happening to the earth. For instance, 2 days after humans disappear, New York’s subway stations would flood, as no one would be there to man the pumps. 300 years after human disappearance, bridges would collapse and cities like Houston, built in river deltas, would be washed away.
Weisman mentioned on The Daily Show that there are few things that we have created that would really last forever, but one of those things is plastic. There are no microbes in existence that have evolved to eat plastic. Plastic, as we know it could last for hundreds of thousands of years. On the books site, one of the last stops on the map is 5+ billion years after human disappearance, when, “The Earth would burn as the dying sun swells to envelop the inner planets.” This is to be expected, I suppose.
I’m going to get off topic here because what really sparked my interest was the last stop on this timeline, “forever,” in which, “our radio and television broadcasts…would still be traveling outward.” The sci-fi geek in me loves this idea – that no matter what, even after everything is gone, even after the sun has swallowed the earth, and microbes have evolved to eat plastic, our voices would still carry on somewhere. It reminds me of a terrible yet great movie, Contact, and the scene when a broadcast of Adolf Hitler from the ’36 Olympics gets bounced back to earth from somewhere, or someone:
“The Hitler broadcast from the...’36 Olympics was the first television transmission of any power that went in to space. That they recorded it, and sent it back, is simply their way of saying,'hello, we heard you.'"
"Or, Sieg Heil, you're our kind of people."
But if this could really happen -- if our television or radio broadcasts really lasted forever, out in space somewhere, would anyone actually hear us?
“Dad, do you think there's people on other planets?”
“I don't know, Sparks. But I guess I'd say if it is just us... seems like an awful waste of space.”
