History Channel - Life after Humans

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What would happen to planet earth if the human race were to suddenly disappear forever? Would ecosystems thrive? What remnants of our industrialized world would survive? What would crumble fastest? From the ruins of ancient civilizations to present day cities devastated by natural disasters, history gives us clues to these questions and many more in the visually stunning and thought-provoking new special LIFE AFTER PEOPLE, premiering Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT on The History Channel®.

Buildings Decomposing Abandoned skyscrapers would, after hundreds of years, become "vertical ecosystems" complete with birds, rodents and even plant life. One small animal might be responsible for bringing down the Hoover Dam hydroelectric plant. Swelled rivers, crumbling bridges and buildings, grizzly bears in California and herds of buffalo returning to the Great Western Plains: In a world without humans, these would be the visual hallmarks.

Our cars would shrivel to piles of dust, our house pets would be overtaken by flourishing wildlife and most of the records of our human story�books, photos, records�would fade quickly, leaving little evidence that we ever existed. Eiffel Tower Decomposing

Using feature film quality visual effects and top experts in the fields of engineering, botany, ecology, biology, geology, climatology and archeology, Life After People provides an amazing visual journey through the ultimately hypothetical. The 1986 nuclear power plant accident at Chernobyl and its aftermath provides a riveting and emotional case study of what can happen after humans have moved on. Life After People goes to remote islands off the coast of Maine to search for traces of abandoned towns, beneath the streets of New York to see how subway tunnels may become watery canals, to the Montana wilderness to divine the destiny of the bears and wolves. Humans won't be around forever, and now we can see in detail, for the very first time, the world that will be left behind in Life After People.

This is a really thought provoking documentry, reminds me of New York in the movie "I Am Legend"

reply to post by Hyzera


If your interested in a good book that deals with a similar situation you should read the fictional novel Earth Abides by George R. Stewart. Although it was written in 1949 it goes into a lot of details that documentary goes into and seems very plausible.

in a little bit of synchronisity, while reading this book i was wondering what it would look like as a movie and a week later this documentary came on! they basically describe what the author says in his book.

If a nuclear incident occurred that was large enough to wipe out humankind all over the planet, I doubt that any animals would survive.

Plants and insects would be all that remain.

Originally posted by Desert Dawg
If a nuclear incident occurred that was large enough to wipe out humankind all over the planet, I doubt that any animals would survive.

Plants and insects would be all that remain.

Nah,

Humans are extremely dependent on others for food, water, shelter and protection against animal attack. Maybe not in the first wave, but in he inability to maintain any sort of stable population would could have the human race gone in the span of a few generations, while other species, like rats, would thrive.

They didn't mention anything about the 6 billion + dead, decaying, and disease infested human bodies..

Originally posted by vivalarevolution
They didn't mention anything about the 6 billion + dead, decaying, and disease infested human bodies..

Well, they didn't say that we all died. They said if we all just disappeared.

Anyone know if this is showing on a channel in Canada ?

I have History Television but a search of their site doesn't show it in the program line-up. It's obviously a different station than the History Channel.

Those 6 billion bodies should be taken care of pretty quickly by scavengers, insects then bacteria. They'd probably help the recovery of the rest of the world.

well, this explaines what happened to the civilication before "man"
god! I love it when "they" are spoon-feeding us information like this.

cool vid and a great find

i almost wish i would be around just to see such things

reply to post by darkspace


How do you know there was a civilization before man?

what about all the computer hard drives around, i dont think'll decay too easily. not to mention all the underground stuff governments have got!, i think if aliens came and found that lot, they'll probably realise that whatever made us disappear, we probably, on the whole, deserved it!!!

i actually caught this last night. it was interesting, but one thing that bugged me: central park being overgrown and looking more like a forest in just 5 years. their cg showed a grassy plain sprouting fully grown trees and such. i really doubt that would happen in as little as 5 years. the part that i found most intriguing was when they showed Prypiat (SP?) after it had been abandoned for 20 years following the Chernobyl explosion. I would rather have seen a documentary about that. =)

reply to post by chromatico


read the entire "stargates are real" thread. then you will understand why this is so. and why physical evidense is missing. well the show tells it all

Originally posted by an0maly33
the part that i found most intriguing was when they showed Prypiat (SP?) after it had been abandoned for 20 years following the Chernobyl explosion. I would rather have seen a documentary about that. =)

the imagery from pripyat was actually genuine and filmed on location. not much vegetation there, but that could be due to the radiation-levels.

we actually still have some areas forest in the "helgeland" area of norway, that shows the signs of the radioactive fallout folloving the chernobyl disaster.

the imagery from pripyat was actually genuine and filmed on location. not much vegetation there, but that could be due to the radiation-levels.

i know, that's why i thought it was interesting. =)

it looked like the vegetation was actually doing a pretty good job of regrowing. it's neat to see nature easily reclaim that area after humans had messed it up so badly.

reply to post by an0maly33


yeah, but still not as much as one would think it would grow over 20 years, just look at the satelite-imagery over that area in google earth.

There are places all around where i live, that dont exist anymore. Lots of old cattle towns and mining settlements, that once abandoned virtually vanished in the course of just a couple of generations.
Towns with 10,000 people at one time, the only thing left is a rotted wood laying around and fallen down chimneys.
That spcecial was very good in detailing how long it wold take for all traces of us to disappear.
Metals corrode, even stainless steel will eventually corode away. Concrete will last for a few hundred years. There is a old bridge on a nearby river, it was built in the 30's, a big concrete bridge, able to withstand a 100 year flood. Well the next year there was a 500 year flood and it washed away. Its remains still stand just downstream from the next bridge, built just after the completion of the Friant dam ,380' x 2200', just a 1/2 mile upstream.
Even though the broken old bridge is massive it is still eroding away at a rate that can be seen. There used to be a piece that I would climb up to as a kid, that has since detached and fallen into the river.
The book "Earth Abides" is one of my all time favorites, especially since I know the area and could really place myself in the novel.

reply to post by Desert Dawg


Ah but if it was a some sort of plague that wiped humanity out all his stuff would be left intact.

This was the most pointless thing I ever watched. I can't believe that no one else noticed that the whole thing is an excuse to play up the whole "Left Behind" idea. The whole program is blatantly pandering to those very strange people who think people are going to magically disappear if they have been good enough just before the end happens.

There is simply no scientifically valid way that the human species would disappear at the height of our technological development without also causing the destruction of the cities and the extinction of many species of animal. The show, if it were even remotely realistic, would have to deal with the fact that our cities would be mostly rubble on day one and would become virtual deserts for decades afterwards.

Even in Pripyat, the animals are mostly confined to the woods surrounding the city itself. Why would an animal risk it's life walking around a concrete and steal desert? There is no food, water, safety, or good shelter to be found in a dead city!

The part about zoo animals eventually escaping is when I almost threw the remote at the TV. Do you think zoo animals would live past a few weeks? Even if they did escape, they would still die within weeks. That whole part was ridiculous. They could have just said, "Everything alive will flee or die in the cities once humans are all gone." and been done with it.

Jon

EDIT: Plague? Nah, we have these things called immune systems that tend to evolve solutions to that kind of problem. We also have hundreds or thousands of fully isolated communities where the human race would survive and from which we would eventually repopulate the earth.

[edit on 2.18.2008 by Voxel]