Life After People

Today I started watching the first episode of the History Channel’s Life After People, which as the name suggests, is all about what happens after humans are gone. 

The part that really hit me was how as soon as we leave the planet, within a few days countries will go dark without anyone to feed the stations that power our world and our grid. On top of that, Vegas will probably be the last place lit up in the entire world due to the automation of the Hoover Dam which supplies Sin City with its power. Within a few decades nature would begin to take back the cities and the roads, most domesticated dogs would die as we’ve bred them to be cute, not to survive in the wild.

They showed a town in the Ukraine that was evacuated after the Chernobyl disaster which basically serves as a model for scientists to study what happens to the planet after we leave. The town has been empty for more than 20 years and already vegetation has reclaimed the buildings and roads. The school now houses wild birds and rodents that come through for food and shelter. 

Basically, what the show is trying to say is that as hard as humans try to hold back nature, destroying it and building around it, nature will ultimately take back the planet. Plants and animals will fill in the areas that we have blocked off and within a few hundred years the world will barely remember the reign of human-kind.

I think in general it’s hard for us as individuals to imagine a planet without us but at the same time it’s hard not to wonder what would happen if we all left in one way or another.

  1. girlwearsmascara reblogged this from zackshapiro and added:
    scary. I saw it when it...only watch until...dogs started...
  2. zackshapiro posted this