Life After People: Welcome to Earth. Population 0.

Welcome to Earth. Population: 0. LIFE AFTER PEOPLE
Uploaded by HistoryChannel - Watch feature films and entire TV shows.

Life after people is a television documentary film, seeking the answer to a rather creepy question: what would happen if humans suddenly vanished from the surface of the earth? With an audience of 5.4 million viewers, it is the most watched program ever on History Channel. The film examines the gradual disintegration of the urban civilization in a time span of 10,000 years after the sudden vanishing of the humans, by interviews with scientists and engineers, CGI dramatizations and a very close example from today's world, city of Pripyat after human evacuation because of Chernobyl disaster. It does not speculate about why and how this human disappearance may happen and it does not mention the fate of radioactive wastes and some of the materials (and artifacts) people use in modern urban civilisations, such as plastic, ceramic, glass and styrofoam.


So, suddenly earth's human population runs down to 0. Now, this is, at the first few minutes of the film is an idea hard to get used to and extremely surreal. This is briefly explained such as many species have passed from the surface of the world for millions of years, and they faced an apocalyptic extinction at some point of their lives, so the same may happen to humans as well; and yet it is very likely that this extinction may be caused by humans themselves, though they are the most self-destroying species ever to live on earth.

The first impact happens on electricity. Within 48 hours the whole lights in the world go out and for the first time since the finding of the fire by humans, the image of the earth from outside becomes so dark. In the first 10 days, nuclear power plants shut down, many parts of the New York subway is flooded and food in the markets, at homes etc gets rotten. In 6 months' time, small forms of wildlife such as coyotes who live in the periphery of civilization, begin to come downtown, while home dogs try to get used to life outside. It is said that the first few months will be extremely harsh on our dear cute dogs, since they are not used to living out in the wild. Those smaller ones which are very precious breedings in today's world, such as bulldog or pekingese will not have so much of a luck at that point, compared to the medium sized dogs. Eventually, some of the dogs that could pass this first few harsh months will be accepted to wolf packs and breed with them. Cats, rats/mice, seagulls, cockroaches etc who are also very dependent on humans to get their food in today's world will be just fine too, after a period. As well as the richening of the animal life on the earth, life in the seas and oceans will be as rich as how it used to be before the human intervention.

While animals find a way to live perfectly without us around, plants start invading the urban areas as well. Thinking that where there is the civilizations' artifacts today, there used to be fields, forests, streams etc, one need not be genius that nature will come back to those places to take back what she had before. First, grass coming out of the cracks in streets, buildings etc will appear and within 1,000 years the cities will be unrecognizable lying under the wild flora. During this nature invasion, the buildings, bridges, concrete structures etc, except for maybe the pyramids in Egypt and the Great Wall of China, will collapse without human maintenance due to corrosion, invasive plant life and ground water. So, in 10,000 years, nothing will remain from humanity, and it will be as if we had never existed.

It is disappointing to realize that us, modern humans, have not succeeded finding materials as enduring as those that the ancient civilizations used. However, this disappointment does not result from the idea of leaving something behind. Human-like species ever to develop again on the surface of the earth, making researches and thinking about our long gone civilization is very unlikely, the scientists believe, though while nature tends to evolve in a more intelligent way, the humans' development to think has been a bit of luck during the stages of evolution, almost like a mutation even. What is disappointing is looking around in today's world, looking at humans, and seeing how immodest they are, thinking that they are the owners of the world and that they have brought all elements of nature to its knees, while in reality humans are the ones that are dependant and that life will go on, even perfectly, without humans' disturbance.