Life After People, new documentary
Life After People is a new TV documentary airing on the History Channel that attempts to forecast what our planet would be like if we were gone. It premieres this coming Monday, January 21. Looks like a lot of post-apocapalyptic fun! From the show's mini site:
Link (Thanks, Jason Tester!)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.
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.
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This sounds like a TV version of a recent book by Alan Weisman, The World Without Us.
Well, long after the traces of our modern civilization are wiped out, the pyramids, cave paintings, etc., will linger on.
Who's to say it hasn't happened already, more than once?
...The only problem I see is the strong hints that dogs and cats would be replaced by other wildlife and unable to survive without human intervention due to their being domesticated. Anyone who's come across wild dog packs in rural areas knows that's a load of horse-hockey. The feral instincts aren't eliminated by domestication, they're just temporarily suppressed by conditioning, and like any animal can easily revert to type on proper provocation.
The commercial for this show looks a lot like the first 20 minutes of I Am Legend to me...at least that movie was released so long ago that there would be no way that Life After People might rip it off.
I'm stoked for this--I've been looking forward to it since the commercials first aired!
Rubu, WTF?
Oh-My-Gosh! Detroit! Urban archeology anyone? Seriously, we have some great urban ruins to explore. Espeically fun when it's dark.
The show looks cool .. I've always thought that a skyscraper would make a killer farm, if you had high enough ceilings to let light in or low-light tolerant plants. Irrigation would be interesting, though. Let's try it the next time an abandoned skyscraper is available!
Indicog (#5): I Am Legend broke very little new ground in this arena.
The Chernobyl accident itself was caused by human action - not inaction. I am not a nuclear scientist, but as far as I know most modern nuclear reactors would not suddenly go 'critical' if people walked out on them while operational. I think they would hit safety margins and shut down.
Chernobyl was also exacerbated by the fact that Soviet nuclear reactors had absolutely no containment buildings. Most nuclear reactors have containment buildings. US reactors in particular are contained well enough to restrain a pretty severe meltdown including steam explosions. (barring maintenance problems, of course.) Many other nations have even safer reactors - I'm just more familiar with the ones here.
swelled = swollen?
This reminds me about BB's post about Gunkanjima -- the once-populous, now deserted japanese island: http://www.boingboing.net/2004/05/22/deserted-japanese-is.html
It's now been about 35 years without human influence. I would love to visit, but it's privately owned and normally off-limits. The closest I got was an exhibit at the Meiji Mura museum.
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunkanjima
dculberson, I was talking about the visual effects and style, not the conceptual basis for the show.
JEFF(#8)'s comment about the urban ruins of Detroit reminded me about this Flickr set I never got around to recommending to BoingBoing:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sweetjuniper/sets/72157603302647339/
It's an abandoned and decaying book depository.
Ahh, gotcha! Sorry.
I Am Legend, post-apocalyptic city-wise, took a few cues from Weisman's book (which was inspired by his own 2005 article), according to an interview with the fx people. Doesn't matter, it's interesting stuff.
Detroit is such a strange place, because in some areas it's just utter urban blight, but in others, it's been left alone long enough that it's starting to be reclaimed by nature. I remember feeling that if that abandoned lot would just stay abandoned a little while longer, it would repair all the damage that was done to it and just be green grass.
I am really curious about the Alan Weisman connection, is this a History Channel rip-off or was it done with him? Every description I have read makes it sound like a pretty literal visualization of his book; which would suck if he is getting no credit for the work.
I'm just trying to understand the premise of the show - a cataclysmic event kills off all humans but leaves the rest of the living world relatively unchanged as evidenced by the fact that nature as we currently know it slowly takes over the humanized world? Not saying I have a problem with that, but I just want to know upfront if that is a leap of faith I need to make to enjoy the show.
Both #4 and #17 creep me out, but #17 creeps me out far more.
Amusing it might be, but documentary? How about fantasy? The commercial features a rhino. As if.
Who knows if any megafauna will survive us. But the poor rhinos sure as hell won't.
#13: Wow, pretty amazing photoset there. All those books. Maybe that's where Google tosses them once they are digitized.
If it does derive from Weisman's work, the point isn't why people disappear. That happens offscreen, and is neither good nor evil. His book is an exploration of what would happen, and how long it would take to happen, if we suddenly weren't here to maintain the world we've made.
Oops, here's the link for that interview I mentioned: http://www.vfxworld.com/?sa=adv&code=319b255d&atype=articles&id=3487&page=2
#17, great point. I'm sure you'd agree that the best thing that could ever happen to a Jew would be to be made into a bar of soap and a lampshade, right?
Aelfsine said,"Detroit is such a strange place "
"Detroit, the armpit of the American Midwest, seems to embrace its urban decay like some crazy streeter who won’t give up their smelly old clothes or shopping cart filled with refuse, even when offered better. Detroit, it seems, is a city possessed by an acrimonious demon, one that thrives on ghetto despair and the misery of entrenched poverty. Poverty that is held at bay by the opulent wealth of the surrounding burbs--disturbia USA."
Way to go, #25! Classic Internet debating technique! *applause*
Thanks, I've been practicing.
Ooooh. Trolling, Nazi references and a grammatical correction. Time for pie.
According to his blog, SF author David Brin has some screen time during the series.
One of his novels (actually, a trilogy) is set on a colony world that was deliberately abandoned and its cities left to rot; the illegal current inhabitants have to live in a way that won't leave traces for future legal colonists to discover.
Check out the amazing web site: http://www.kiddofspeed.com/chapter1.html
A young Ukranian woman rides through the "ghost towns" of the Chernobyl disaster on her motorcycle. The images of nature reclaiming these abandoned buildings are chilling, particularly the amusement park photos.
Bottle Kid, wasn't that just a hoax?
http://www.boingboing.net/2004/05/26/girl-photoblogs-cher.html
Thanks ACACIA, I never saw Xeni's post. (I didn't BB in 2004). The backstory doesn't make the photos any less amazing tho.
I agree, and I'm sort of fascinated by the whole narrative framing, though I'd recommend Polidori's book of Chernobyl photographies for better image appreciation (if that's the right word). The book of recollections, Voices from Chernobyl, is gripping as well.
re: #19
I'm thinking it'll have to be a disease that kills off all of us.
Maybe the primates too, but that would still leave a lot of species.
Or maybe it doesn't kill off ALL the humans, the Inuit people way up North could be safe. In the event that most of us died off, even if our species hasn't gone /extinct/ though, the world would still be of course, waaaaay different. Humans don't have litters, it would be quite a long time before the world is populated with us again.
#4 We are a part of our planet as much as everything else, our fault is in forgetting that. We are the /willfully/ ignorant species that has no excuse because we do know better.
...and LOL, 28 Years Later?
@ #17 WWEBoing: The best thing that ever happened to a tree is a piano, a baseball bat, or a piece of paper.
Thank you, Ronald Reagan. Because trees pollute and ketchup is a vegetable. Nature exists to serve us. Gotcha. Completely unegocentric. Thank you for putting us in our places with your sterling logic.
I'm not 100% on board with popular ecological doom n' gloom, but taking precautions, even from a pragmatic point of view due to the societal ills 20th century industrialism has wrought, is far better than the energy being expended to promote ignorant denial. Now THAT'S suicidal.
@38
License Farm, I think you're off the mark with the Reagan slam. It's not about nature serving us at all. He's making a point about the larger system. Hence the bit about storms and recovery. It's a bit...detached, but it's seeing the whole of the process, from sapling to tree to paper to mulch to food for more saplings. If we stop and weep over the butchery of the tree we're missing the whole of the cycle, of which we are a part.
Are we disproportionate? Is our impact in the cycle radically upsetting the cycle itself. Again, depends on what level you're looking at it. Go more macro and we're not that consequential. The planet can shake off even our love of nuclear waste and plastics. It's an elegant way of viewing the human race and it's place. Very humbling really.
Does that mean we should crap all over the earth now, polluting like it's a hobby? Of course not. But it heartens me to know that our best efforts at self-harm are all but meaningless in the face of the forces of nature.
Simplehuman, you are kind. I just figured he reacted that way because he suspected that Life after People might have some kind of environmentalist message.
I'm now imagining the world through a macro lens, and it really looks like she's on drugs...
This seems like the sort of thing one should read after watching History Channel "documentary" as a sort of reality check:
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/007751.html
"this once was a parking lot, now it's all covered with flowers" david byrne did it first.
@SimpleHuman: It may be heartening, but it is self-deceiving as well. All we really know is that our _current_ attempts at self-harm are not causing significant harm _in the short run._
And is anyone as freaked out as I am that this is on the History Channel? Talk about depressing...
I heard awhile ago that as far as the fossil record goes, humans have existed for such a short period of time that there is an off-chance that we may not even make it into the fossil record, if life were to cease to exist and all humanity was wiped out tomorrow.
and, conversely, there could have been other intelligent civilizations that have become extinct that we never knew about.
WOW... the Hoover Dam is impressive. Seems that they are not dependent on grid stablity like all of the other power plants in the U.S. Other generators that attach to the grid have many protective features that will "trip" or shutdown the generator that produces the power for shipment to the grid. One consideration will be the VAR loading that is setup for the generator as the load some distance from the plant changes. Unless they have auto VAR loading circuits. As the various generators go down it will produce a cascade effect on almost all generators on the grid. There are switches that open to protect major sections of the grid for the U.S., but not all are automated. Am curious if the generator protection for the Hoover Dam generators will be bypassed or defeated if no humans exist. I predict that it will not be loss of cooling (Q=uadT) that brings down the Hoover Dam but a generator protection circuit or switchyard fault.
The assumptions about the nuke plants are close to correct. As dilution by the reactor operator stops the coolant temperature will drop and the cooler water will help to maintain the positive reactivity needed. There will be a RCS low temperature setpoint that may be encountered to trip the reactor and generator offline. Unless the rod control system is in automatic. Some plants run their rods in auto and some in manual.
More later....My wife calls.... back to reality.
there's always earthquakes
I watched this last night and thought it was all right. The continual reuse of the more impressive bits of animation (and some of the lesser ones, too) began to grate after a while. I'd also have liked to see more about how animals would develop without our influence; there's a great book by Dougal Dixon called After Man that explores where evolution would go if the larger mammals became extinct.
But it did reinforce the idea of how fleeting our civilization is, and that if we were to just vanish tomorrow most signs of our existence would disappear in short order after us. Perhaps we ought to consider "backing up" our greater works in a vessel not subject to the conditions terrestrial housings are, such as the moon.
@license farm #48
"Perhaps we ought to consider "backing up" our greater works in a vessel not subject to the conditions terrestrial housings are, such as the moon."
why? what would be the necessity of that? why should we be so pompous as to inflict ourselves on our successors?
I don't believe it to be pomposity, Sonny. If anything, it demonstrates that we understand we may be little more than a passing phase. That's pretty humble, if you ask me. And our successors might appreciate knowing where we went right, but also perhaps more importantly where we went wrong, so they don't cover the same turf.