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There’s something inherently fascinating about abandoned places, be they entire cities, like the one surrounding the skeleton of Chernobyl, pockets of urban blight returning to grassland, as in Detroit, old mines or creepy Japanese amusement parks. Author Alan Weisman has taken this extinctive state of mind to a new level in his book The World Without Us, in which he explores what would happen to the world as we know it if we all simply died, or left. What will remain long after we’re gone, and what will fade?
• Bronze sculpture, plastic, radio waves and some of the earliest examples of human architecture will be our most lasting gifts to the universe. Roman statues may be recognizable for another ten million years.
• In a very short time — perhaps weeks — the water in nuclear cooling towers would burn off, and the plants would melt into vast radioactive piles of goo.
• The electricity keeping the pumps on in New York’s subways would stop, and they would eventually be flooded. The streets above them would collapse, creating rivers where, say, Lexington Avenue used to be. Jungle would reclaim much of the city within a few decades.
• Copper pipes and wiring would be crushed into mere seams of reddish rock, barely detectable by (hypothetical) archaeologists of the future.
• Steel bridges will last a few hundred years, but eventually rust and crumble as windblown seeds and soil flourish in their cracks.
• As far as animals go, cockroaches would — despite popular legend — die en masse without our heated cities to take refuge in; feral cats would flourish; elephants would once again rule Africa; and the oceans and trees would add billions more fish and birds to their now-diminished populations.
Comments (10)
Comment
Sounds nice, except for the nuclear power plant meltdown thing. Isn’t there some kind of backup system should, say, everyone in the plant suddenly perish? Maybe someone out there has the answer…?
posted by Keeker on 7-16-2007 at 11:51 am
I’m not so sure about that Roman statues claim. J. J. Winckelmann in the 18th century thought a lot of Roman statues he saw were Greek. Most tourists to Rome say that their favorite “ancient ruin” in the city is the 19th-century Altar of the Fatherland (aka the “Wedding Cake” or the “Typewriter”).
posted by pica on 7-16-2007 at 12:00 pm
There are backup systems, but eventually those would run out too. I work at a nuke plant, but it doesn’t have cooling towers since it situated right on a lake. So I can’t say if that little tidbit is true or not. But eventually something would give out and –presto!– pile of radioactive goo.
posted by exile38 on 7-16-2007 at 1:38 pm
Fascinating… I’ve been thinking a lot along these lines lately. I’ll just stare at my kitchen and wonder what it would look like in 50, 100, 1000 years if no one ever touched it again… It’s weird that this is the second article about this that I’ve read in the past couple of weeks. Was this on Fark.com?
posted by Jennifer on 7-16-2007 at 3:40 pm
Discovery/BBC ran a ‘future documentary’ a fews years ago about what the planet would be like in millions of years. I was called “The Future is Wild” and was based on a book by the same name.
They imagine a world where Humans are extinct (or leave the planet, depending on what version you get a hold of.) Most of the series deals with the flora and fauna of the distant future, but some of it is dedicated to what traces of humanity will last the longest. I have forgotten all of the details, but it was kind of fascinating.
It is available on Netflix, for the curious.
posted by n2y2 on 7-16-2007 at 4:38 pm
I’ve always wondered what would happen if we were to disappear off the planet today…I took comfort in thinking the paved parking lots would crack/crumble and grass/trees would flourish there again…looks like I was on the right track and I’m glad to know the earth would swallow our ‘improvement’ and become somewhat whole again…
posted by donner on 7-16-2007 at 9:26 pm
As a member of the species currently at (or near) the top of the food chain, I quite frankly don’t give Rhett Butler’s proverbial damn.
No people = starving domestic animals, melted nuclear reactors and storage units, leaking petroleum tank farms, collapsing city infrastructures, fading art and forgotten music.
After awhile, the only things left will be the Pyramids, and they, I suspect, don’t give a damn either…
posted by Doc on 7-17-2007 at 5:08 am
But where oh *where* is this amusement park????
posted by tata36 on 7-17-2007 at 7:52 am
When the drive-in movie theater closed when I was a kid I was mildly impressed by how the lot became a miniature forest over the 20+/- years that it went unused. The return to nature wasn’t permanent. I’ll give you three guesses as to what is there now.
posted by Tdave on 7-18-2007 at 4:11 am
Hint: It begins with “W” and ends with “Mart”.
posted by Tdave on 7-19-2007 at 9:30 pm