Life After People
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Life After People is a television special documentary film that premiered on January 21, 2008 on the History Channel. In the program, scientists and other experts speculate about what the Earth, animal life, and plant life might be like if, suddenly, humanity no longer existed, as well as the effect humanity's disappearance might have on the artificial aspects of civilization. Speculation is based upon documented results of the sudden removal of humans from a geographical area and the possible results that would occur if humanity discontinues its maintenance of buildings and urban infrastructure.
Synopsis
Edit
The documentary features the gradual and post-apocalyptic disintegration of urban civilization in a time span of 10,000 years after humanity suddenly vanished. The hypotheses are depicted using CGI dramatizations of the possible fate of iconic structures and landmarks (i.e. the Empire State Building, the Willis Tower, the Space Needle, the Eiffel Tower, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Hoover Dam).
With an audience of 5.4 million viewers, Life After People was the most watched program ever on the History Channel The program was broadcast in the United Kingdom on Channel 4 on May 26, 2008. The program was broadcast in Australia on Channel Seven on November 27, 2008, edited down to air for 90 minutes, with narration by Australian television presenter Simon Reeve.
Prediction timetableEdit
The special assumes that humanity disappears suddenly and immediately, but does not speculate as to what would cause such an event. Below is a list of some of the highlighted events that could theoretically take place once humans are gone.
| Time Period | Predictions |
|---|---|
|
1 hour | At an oil refinery in Houston, pressure in the oil distillation tanks, which is monitored by a human operator, is released into the atmosphere by emergency valves in a cloud of flammable gas. A spark ignites the cloud and the whole refinery explodes. The fuel tanks catch fire and burn for days. |
|
1 day | Most fossil fuel power stations shut down, causing cascading black outs worldwide once they run out of fuel. Wind-driven turbines may continue to provide power, but without proper maintenance, their rotors will seize up over time. In the American West, the Hoover Dam's generators are driven by the flow of water from Lake Mead, and the plant could remain operating unattended for months or even years. From space, the glitter of Las Vegas may be the only point of light on the surface of an otherwise dark planet. |
| 2 days | Without steady power consumption, most nuclear power plants will shut down and enter an automatic safe mode to avert a possible meltdown. In New York City, water pumps in the subway system pump out 13 million gallons of water a day; once the power fails, the tunnels will fill with water in about 36 hours. |
| 3 days | The first heavy rainstorm floods Chicago when man-operated flood gates remain open, leading to a series of events that will eventually flood the entire city. Without air conditioning, the wax celebrities at Madame Tussauds in Las Vegas melt. The machinery that filters and oxygenates the tanks at the Aquarium of the Americas shut down and the fish begin to suffocate and succumb to increased bacteria levels. Without human hosts, Head lice begin to die off. In the Gulf of Mexico 34,000 miles of undersea pipes clog with undelivered oil. Watertight valves will keep the oil from leaking into the ocean for now. |
| 4 days | Near Pearl Harbor, the hands atop the clock of the iconic Aloha Tower in Honolulu stop moving. In Rio de Janeiro, the Christ the Redeemer statue is claimed by the night as its illuminating lights turn off. |
| 1 week | In London, Big Ben stops running when no one is around to rewind it. Without people to control their spread, water hyacinth (imported from South America) takes over Florida and Texas. Without humans to clear them away, they absorb all the oxygen from the water and suffocate surrounding plant life. In the vast fresh water bayous outside New Orleans, escaped and abandoned pets make new treats for alligators. In Vatican City, at St. Peter's Basilica a black cats roam freely without fear of being killed as pests. |
| 10 days | Most food on supermarket shelves and inside home refrigerators has rotted. Pets still trapped inside houses can drink the water leaking from thawed freezers, but a mass die-off of domestic animals begins; those that can escape homes and yards will begin to scavenge for food, but many domestic dog breeds, especially small dogs and those bred for special qualities like stubby legs and short muzzles, will be unable to survive long in the wild. Meanwhile, household pests like rats and mice thrive on the remaining food supplies; once it runs out, they return back to the wild where their populations will quickly diminish as they become food for predators. Some greyhounds have escaped from the many dog tracks around the United States. Their competitive nature keeps them from working together to get the food they desperately need. In New York City, the Asian Long-horned beetle which arrived from China in the 1990s easily infest the trees in Central Park without humans to curtail the infestation. |
| 2 weeks | At Buckingham Palace in London, the Queen of England's corgis have been trapped inside and are desperate for food. Worldwide, animals trapped inside homes die unless they can escape. In zoos, many animals suffering from starvation will have escaped their cages. From Japan to California, 3.5 million tons of garbage goes uncollected and storms wash some of it out to sea increasing the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. In North America, starving wolves begin to make their way to the smell of rotting food in kitchens formerly occupied by humans. |
| 3 weeks | The pumps that send water down the aqueducts from Owens Valley to Los Angeles fail and the water supply has run out. |
| 1 month | The 400,000 human embryos cryonically frozen in clinics in the United States begin to thaw and decompose. Aboard the International Space Station the "Immortality Drive", a computer disk containing the digitized genetic information of some extraordinary humans remains the last hope for some future intelligence to restarting the human race. Kudzu grows freakishly in the southern United States. In Los Angeles, without water, the green grass has dried up and many non-native species of plants like the Canary Island palms wither and the city begins to be reclaimed by the desert. In Washington, D.C. the opposite is happening, with no water being pumped away from the city, it begins to flood. |
| 2 months | Most starving domesticated pigs will have broken out of their barnyards. They begin breeding with wild pigs creating a leaner, more aggressive species of wild hog. Without electrical power, the automatic relighting system of the John F. Kennedy Eternal Flame fails when a heavy rainfall extinguishes it forever. |
| 3 months | In Rome, Michelangelo's artwork on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel has been without protection since the computerized climate control system failed, but the lack of moisture and body heat from visitors is actually helping preserve the works of art. After depleting all the food supplies in Buckingham Palace, the Queen of England's corgis try to survive in the outside world. With no one to inoculate them, escaped domestic animals catch rabies. |
| 4 months | Deep in the ice of Norway, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is the world's reserve of crops. Seeds from every plant in the world are kept here in case agriculture ever needs to be restarted on Earth. Without people, it is beginning to warm up, threatening the lifespan of the seeds. |
| 6 months | Without people to suppress them, wild animals will return to the urban landscape. Small predators such as coyotes and bobcats, which roamed on the outskirts of populated areas, will be the first new residents, followed next by larger species such as cougars, wolves and bears. On Ross Island in Antarctica, the expedition hut of Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton remains preserved as it has for 100 years. With the help of abandoned swimming pools, mosquitoes thrive and the West Nile Virus spreads. Lakes and rivers all over Arizona completely dry up, killing everything that once lived there. |
| 8 months | In Boston, the USS Constitution, the world's oldest commissioned warship, is still afloat, but the automatic bilge pumps have stopped working when the power died causing the ship to fill with water that will sink it within the year. |
| 1 year | Plants have taken over, turning manicured lawns into overgrown fields. Weeds grow in cracks in the roads, eventually forming a layer of nutrient-poor topsoil where clover fields take root. Plants and ivy take root in stone and masonry work, and begin to damage the foundations of buildings. Wild animals will have found shelter in the abandoned cities. At the Hoover Dam, a mollusk called the Quagga mussel begins to clog the pipelines feeding cooling water to the generators and they shut down. As a result, Las Vegas goes dark. Without the generators running, no water passes through Hoover Dam, and eventually the Colorado River will run dry. Meanwhile, the waters rise in Lake Mead and eventually spill over the dam. Sparked by lightning storms, many wild fires will go unchecked without people to fight them. These fires can burn down entire towns and damage cities such as Chicago, San Francisco and Rome. The charred rubble provides the nitrogen that plants need to grow, and plant life consumes the ruins. The ivy at Wrigley Field in Chicago begins to grow out of control. In New York City, the ice rink at Rockefeller Center Plaza becomes a garden while the gold skin of the Prometheus statue is stripped away over the years exposing the bronze beneath. Plants begin to grow in the multiplying cracks over the highways of Los Angeles. The last survivor of the Aquarium of the Americas, a rare white alligator dies. In Dubai, along the Persian Gulf, humid air ravages the Burj Al Arab hotel with mold and bacteria. Burmese pythons, once escaped pets, begin an invasion in the Florida Everglades, growing so large they compete with alligators. The series takes a look at the Americana Amusement Park in Ohio showing a real example of a level of decay that can take place in just a few short years after people. |
| 2 years | The wires holding the trolleys in San Francisco rust and snap, sending the cars careening out of control all over the city. Across the bay, the weakened ropes holding a 50,000 ton ship snap sending it adrift on a collision course with a bridge that will sink it. |
| 3 years | The International Space Station loses altitude and falls to Earth, destroying the "Immortality Drive" with it. The wind powered Ricoh sign in Times Square finally goes dark when the light bulbs burn out. Horses go wild and thrive on America's grassland. Those used by the NYPD and to pull carriages leave the city and may roam to the grassy beaches of Long Island. |
| 4 years | Some cities have fallen victim to floods. With no people to repair the damage, homes succumb to decay and the foundations of buildings slowly erode. This future has already happened in New Orleans; four years after Hurricane Katrina, much of the flood damage remains. |
| 5 years | Most roadways begin to disappear under a carpet of grass. In London, Buckingham Palace is breached by vines and moss. Red Square in Moscow turns green as it is overtaken by plant life. In New York City, the great lawns of Central Park sprout sapling trees. Before long, it will become a spreading forest. The monuments of Washington D.C. are swallowed by greenery. If they had escaped, it is possible that some zoo animals from exotic areas such as Asia or Africa such as lions, tigers, elephants and rhinos may still survive in the wild if they migrated to the southern climate of the United States. Weeds transform the historic streets of Boston. The walls and stands of Wrigley Field are now covered in ivy and thick buckthorn while shrubbery takes over the ball field. In Miami, escaped chimpanzees from Miami MetroZoo follow flocks of birds into downtown apartment buildings such as the Everglade Bay towers, to eat their eggs. One intelligent chimp realizes that they need to let some of the eggs survive to extend the food supply. Every casino in Atlantic City has become a potential bat cave as the animals move in. |
| 10 years | The Willis Tower (formerly known as the Sears Tower) is slowly deteriorating. Forest fires spread out of control and parts of Los Angeles burn to the ground – including the interior of the U.S. Bank Tower, the plant life in between the fireproof stainless steel panels of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Grauman's Chinese Theatre, and the latex paint of the Hollywood Sign. At Independence Hall, broken windows allow sunlight to beam down on the Declaration of Independence. Protected from the elements in it's airtight case, the light will cause the letters to fade away over time. Massive sandstorms called haboobs run rampant over Phoenix. In France, "Lascaux 2", a plaster replica of the prehistoric cave Lascaux crumbles away, but the original cave remains on. |
| 15 years | In Atlantic City, the deteriorating structure known as Lucy the Elephant is on its last legs and soon a bad storm knocks it down. In Hawaii, the lines holding the USS Missouri to the docks succumb to corrosion and decay. The warship, now free of its moorings, floats away but only gets so far when it bottoms out in the mud. |
| 20 years | Houston turns back to a swamp and the Astrodome becomes an enormous bat cave where insects and fungi also thrive. Miami begins to look like a subtropical jungle as invasive plants like Brazilian Pepper begin taking over habitats. At the Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Center, the hundreds of stored military aircraft begin to decay once their protective tarps open and coatings peel and off in the wind. Birds build nests in the exposed engine intakes and cowlings. The 7,000 foot seawall protecting downtown Seattle from the Pacific Ocean gives way, turning the city into a saltwater marsh. Here the show examines the ruins of Prypiat, Ukraine, which were abandoned in 1986 after the Chernobyl disaster. They are used as a real-life example of the level of decay that could happen after 20 years of humanity's disappearance. Despite initial high radiation levels that killed the local flora and fauna near the nuclear plant, in 20 years, the plant and animal life has returned to the area, with much of it flourishing significantly without human interference. |
| 25 years | Concrete structures begin to crack and crumble, pried apart by freeze and thaw cycles, as well as invading vegetation. Without people to maintain levees, low lying cities such as Amsterdam and London will have flooded. As their metal frames corrode from rust, windows crack and fall from buildings, exposing the interiors to the elements. Birds can now take up residence inside these structures. The copper lightning rods on top of skyscrapers will have corroded, and a lightning strike could turn a building into a towering inferno. In cities, gutted buildings provide pigeons a new home. Cockroaches still survive after people, now thriving on rotting paper and cardboard. With no humans to control their numbers, the wolf population has exploded, and they follow the deer herds into formerly populated areas. Without road traffic, most wild life migration routes are restored and predators such as bears expand their feeding grounds. In museums, without functioning environmental systems to preserve them, insects and fungi ravage the Egyptian mummies. The same fate happens to the embalmed body of Lenin. Soon nothing is left but dust and bones. Without people to maintain levees, low lying cities such as London will have flooded. At the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, a nuclear Russian submarine lies intact, but water pressure and corrosion develops cracks in the casings of its payload of nuclear warheads and they explode when chemicals inside make contact with seawater. The explosions however, are not powerful enough to detonate the nuclear warheads. In Southern California, the nearly all-glass Crystal Cathedral becomes a greenhouse as plant life invades the interior. Meanwhile in the concrete Jubilee Church in Rome remains untouched by nature because of a protective coating.The series gives a real life example of 25 years of abandonment by visiting Centralia, Pennsylvania, whose population has largely fled since 1981 – the result of a coal mine fire which began in 1962 and continues to burn to this day. |
| 30 years | By now, most of the world's dairy cows have died out. Those that figured out how to mate have managed to preserve the species and the process of evolution starts taking them back to the wild. Flooded and overrun by vegetation, New Orleans is in shambles. |
| 35 years | Without humans caring for the land and fortifying the beaches, Long Island's low-lying areas become flooded. In Boston, the steeple of the Old North Church collapses. The series gives a real life example of 35 years of decay by visiting Hashima Island, once a thriving coal mine where thousands of people were housed in apartments. Abandoned in the 1970s, the island now holds a small city of skeletal and gutted buildings battered by the sea. |
| 40 years | Small wood structures, such as houses, crumble away as they are attacked by mold and termite infestations. Although they can stand for years, stone and masonry deteriorates quickly when exposed to salts, such as from bird droppings or exposure to seawater. With no one left to repair them, minor leaks in earthen dams, such as the Trinity Dam in California, will get worse and eventually cause them to break. |
| 45 years | The series gives a real life example of 45 years of decay with North Brother Island just off Manhattan Island in New York City. The island has served many purposes over the years, from housing returning World War II veterans to quarantining victims of infectious diseases, and as a rehabilitation clinic for drug addicts. For the last 45 years however, it has been abandoned and structures on the island are in shambles. |
| 50 years | Most buildings in Atlanta are brought down by invasive kudzu. In Chicago, Wrigley Field is almost unrecognizable under a heap of overgrown vegetation and shrubs. In Seattle, the Space Needle corrodes and the windows have blown out. In Los Angeles, a 8.0 magnitude earthquake collapses the top floors of the U.S. Bank Tower. The quake also topples the Los Angeles City Hall once the foundation shock absorbers fail to steady the structure. The metal letters of the Hollywood Sign are finally brought down by the quake. Ravaged by pyrite disease, dinosaur skeletons in museums across the globe begin to fall apart. In New York City, the gargoyle statues of the Chrysler Building fall to the ground after corrosion loosens their mounts. By now, the plant seeds frozen in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault will have died. Smashed by waves, Atlantic City's Steel Pier is now just a skeleton of its former self. In San Antonio, the Tower Life Building leans to such an extremity that it topples. In the Gulf of Mexico, only one oil platform remains after 50 years of hurricanes. Mold and metal corrosion is finally collapse the Burj Al Arab in Dubai. In orbit, uncontrolled satellites begin colliding into each other. The series gives an example of 50 years of abandonment with diamond mining town of Kolmanskop in Namibia which has been sandblasted and nearly swallowed up by the desert. |
| 60 years | Without vigilant maintenance, the steel cables of the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco have been weakened by corrosion and the structures threaten to collapse. The Last Supper of Leonardo Da Vinci is unrecognizable. |
| 65 years | Here the series gives a real life example of 65 years of decay with the British village of Tyneham which was abandoned during World War II when the British government took over the area to use it as a training ground for American troops. No one has lived there since 1943 and nature has partially collapsed the stone buildings. |
| 70 years | In Shanghai, flooding in the city weakens the foundation of the Oriental Pearl Tower and causes the tower to collapse. At Pearl Harbor, the USS Missouri is now covered in green as seeds dropped by birds have caused vegetation to grow all over the wooden deck. |
| 75 years | By now, most of the roughly 600 million automobiles in the world, even in the most forgiving of environments, will have rusted away to barely recognizable skeletal heaps. The tires will have deflated within a few years after people, but the synthetic rubber and plastic components will last for centuries. Bridges begin to collapse when their protective paint flakes off and are no longer protected from moisture and corrosion. In Kuala Lumpur, the supports under the sky bridge of the Petronas Twin Towers buckle because of corrosion, and it falls to the ground. In Philadelphia, the Liberty Bell falls to the ground and cracks completely in half. The former village stray dogs have now devolved back into the wild predators they were before domestication. Their population however, has dwindled. The weakened glass and corroded steel structure of the Crystal Cathedral in Orange County give out |
| 90 years | Here the series gives a real life example of 90 years of decay with the western ghost town of Rhyolite, Nevada. A former gold mining town it was once a booming city built on the backs of miners. Now, 90 years after the gold dried up, the town has been left to die. The masonry buildings have nearly withered away by winds and sand. |
| 100 years | The Brooklyn Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge finally collapse when their rusted cables snap and can no longer support the weight of the road deck. Big Ben, the Houston Astrodome, the Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge and the Chicago 'L' collapse as well. Within a controlled environment of a preservation vault, materials such as paper and film can last 200 to 300 years, but once exposed to moisture and unregulated temperatures, they will have deteriorated away in half the time. In a humid environment, most books will have been eaten away by mold. Digital media such as CDs and DVDs will take longer to degrade, but ironically, they will not last nearly as long as the information once recorded by primitive cultures on clay tablets. Washington D.C. reverts back into a swamp where beavers thrive damming up the Potomac River. In Los Angeles, some areas of the former highways collect rainwater forming small lakes and ponds that attract wildlife during their migrations. In New York City, the Roosevelt Island Tramway collapses. Phoenix's office towers such as the Chase Tower are crushed from the overwhelming weight of composited sand. Without humans there to constantly rebuild the beaches of Miami, once luxurious beachfront hotels are completely overrun by the ocean water. The Blue and Green Diamond towers collapse into each other and the Seven Mile Bridge falls apart. In Phoenix, many of the buildings collapse from the weight of mud and sand that have collected after decades of sand storms and monsoon rains. At Cape Canaveral, the Rocket Garden is destroyed by hurricanes. At the Louvre Museum in Paris, Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa is eaten away by death watch beetles. In Las Vegas, the "Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas Nevada" sign is faded away by windblown sand and the Luxor Hotel Pyramid is now in ruins. The Ambassador Bridge between Detroit and the Canadian border collapses. In Turin, the Shroud of Turin is exposed to the elements when the roof of the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist collapses. Mold and humidity consume the cloth and the image of Christ the Redeemer statue finally fades away. |
| 110 years | Ocean waters have transformed sunken oil rigs into brand new underwater ecosystems. |
| 125 years | In Moscow, after 125 years of fighting water damage and corrosion, the St. Basil's Cathedral finally collapses to the ground. |
| 150 years | In major cities, the support columns of flooded subway tunnels fail, causing cave-ins and collapsing sections of the streets above. Vines have climbed up and into the gutted buildings where pools of water collect. Plants now grow throughout the floors, forming vertical ecosystems. In many cities, skyscrapers have become high-rise ecosystems, with birds, rodents and snakes moving in, followed by the descendants of house cats as the apex predators, who find all they need to survive in one place. After generations of breeding with wolves, domestic dogs have returned to their pack hunting nature. Without the interference of man, the oceans recover from pollution and populations of sea life will have exploded. Seagulls, once dependent on human refuse for survival, would have a large die off decades ago, but the birds make a comeback once the fish populations return. In Boston, the Hancock Building collapses and eventually disappears under the lush gardens that have overrun the city. Elephant herds roam free in the American West filling the ecological niches that mammoths and mastodons left vacant at the end of the last ice age, Detroit's Renaissance Center shatters and collapses after decades of extreme weather. The levees in New Orleans finally give way after 150 years of being gnawed at by local animals, and the city floods with saltwater. The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum collapses by an earthquake, but the ancient Colosseum in Rome will remain standing for centuries more. |
| 200 years | In the midst of the "Era of Collapses", many of man's greatest structures, such as the Eiffel Tower in Paris, Alamo in San Antonio, the Tower Bridge in London and the Space Needle in Seattle, will have fallen. Once their iron structures succumb to corrosion, a strong wind would be enough to cause them to collapse. An example given in the show is the collapse of the neglected Kinzua Railway Viaduct in Pennsylvania in 2003. In Houston, the JPMorgan Chase Tower finally collapses. The same thing soon happens to most tall structures in Chicago, such as the Willis Tower (formerly known as the Sears Tower). With the collapse of the apartment buildings in Miami, the inhabiting chimps have moved to the Everglades. What they have learned over the last 200 years could give them the building blocks they need to create a new civilization. The "Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas Nevada" sign falls flat on the ground. In San Francisco, only the skeletal towers of the Golden Gate Bridge remain after the road deck collapses. The Grand Canyon Skywalk breaks away from its mountings and falls into the Grand Canyon. In New York City, the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building finally collapse. In Denver the Wells Fargo Center collapses way under the weight and corrosion caused by 200 years of snowfalls. Outside of Denver on the Colorado prairie, the descendants of domestic cattle have carved out a new way of life. Bison, however, dominate the landscape once again. In Taipei, the Taipei 101 collapses when the tuned mass damper fails. Some zebras from harsst castle survive in areas near it along with predators including pumas. |
| 250 years | In Chicago, the John Hancock Center finally collapses but outlives the more massive Willis Tower. In Washington D.C, the weight of the Statue of Freedom on top of the United States Capitol collapses the corroded iron dome. By now, the United States Constitution has faded away inside the crumbled rotunda of the National Archives and Records Administration. In St. Louis, the Gateway Arch falls when the keystone buckles and finally gives way. In Hawaii, water has penetrated the hull of the USS Missouri. It floods and begins to sink deeper into the mud of the harbor bottom. It could last as long as 20,000 years, but eventually the warship will become an underwater reef teaming with sea life. In Rio de Janerio, a strong wind topples the weaken Christ the Redeemer statue leaving only the pedestal and part of the feet. |
| 300 years | In New York City, the Statue of Liberty breaks in pieces and sinks into the Atlantic Ocean. In Las Vegas, the Stratosphere Tower collapses during an earthquake. The rabies outbreak finally reverts to natural levels. Philadelphia is now a forest, but the Liberty Bell still remains proudly within its protective walls. 100 yards away, the Declaration of Independence lies in the rubble of Independence Hall. Heat and light have left the paper brittle and a blast of air penetrates the worn case causing the fragile document to disintegrate. New Orleans's One Shell Square is subdued during a strong hurricane. |
| 500 years | Though Michelangelo's frescos are still recognizable after so many centuries, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel collapses, bringing down the entire building. In Georgia, The Confederate Memorial on Stone Mountain outside Atlanta, and the Washington Monument in Washington D.C. may stand as the sole evidence of those city's locations. On the other side of the Earth, the Petronas Twin Towers finally collapses after five centuries of tropical sun and moisture. The pedestal of Christ the Redeemer statue becomes what looks to be an overgrown tree. St. Peter's Basilica's dome collapses after the weakening of its steel support chains. |
| 600 years | By now, most reinforced concrete structures will crumble away once the iron rebar supports inside them succumb to moisture and the expansion of rust bursts them apart. Without humans to maintain them, it is believed that long standing ancient structures, like the Sphinx at Giza, will have eroded away within 500 to 1000 years. What remains of the U.S. Bank Tower in Los Angeles finally collapses after a moderate earthquake. The series gives a real life example of 600 years of abandonment with Cambodia's Angkor Wat temple city where nothing is left but stone structures overgrown with trees. |
| 1,000 years | Nature has re-established itself and nearly all evidence of modern civilization are buried beneath vegetation and sand. The Earth itself will have buried all of man's cities. Most modern cities would be collapsed and become barely recognizable husks overgrown by a jungle of trees, waters, flowers and vegetation. The ruins of New York City may look as it did when it was first explored by Henry Hudson in 1609. Rivers flow where taxicabs once drove. The Taj Mahal in Agra collapses after a fairly large earthquake, and rising sea levels flood the area where Washington D.C. once stood, leaving a highly degraded, but still erect Washington Monument emerging over the waves. After ten centuries without people, Las Vegas and Detroit has completely disappeared. Meanwhile, on the Moon, the three Lunar Roving Vehicles left behind from the Apollo 15 through Apollo 17 missions will remain in near-mint condition barring degradation or destruction from meteor impacts. New Orleans is now completely under water. The cities famous above ground cemeteries, or "cities of the dead," are also underwater. The tombs fill with water and mud, fossilizing the remains of the dead. The Colosseum in Rome falls from an earthquake. After ten generations Anatolian Shepherd Dogs didn't interbred with the wild dogs that prey on their herds as they see them as predators, and the sheep will still have their protectors. |
| 2,000 years | As it was after the last ice age, Phoenix again becomes a vast savanna. Because it is basically held together by gravity, the medieval Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris may still stand and be recognizable. Honey is the only food item that remains intact and edible. The American side of Niagara Falls disappears. |
| 5,000 years | The Confederate Memorial, carved on Stone Mountain in Atlanta, is one of few indications that man ever inhabited the area. Most of what man has built has long eroded or been destroyed. |
| 10,000 years | By now, little evidence is left of mankind. Even our radio and television signals that were beamed into space, and once thought to traverse for hundreds of light years, will have faded to unrecognizable static at close to two light years and not even reach our closest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri. The Great Wall of China in Beijing will have aged like a mountain as it decays very slowly over the centuries. The Pyramids of Giza remains, but will have stood long enough to be swallowed up by the Sahara Desert's sands. Hoover Dam remains to be the last of the great collapses. Mount Rushmore in Rapid City will be one of the last symbols of man. Carved from granite, it will remain visible for millennia, possibly to be viewed by man's replacements, which may be chimpanzees if they evolve to take up the mantle of civilization. Descendants of escaped New York City horses roam the beaches. Because of the lack of nutrients available, they have evolved to be much smaller than their ancestors. Buried underground, the vault of the Federal Reserve Bank in New York City, still holds $200 billion of gold bars intact. In New Orleans, plastic and glass Mardi Gras beads can still be found buried under soil and vegetation. |
| 20,000 years | The final seeds in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault die. Atlantic City is now surrounded by an inland forest. |
| 1,000,000 years | The Golden Records aboard the Voyager space probes are damaged beyond recognition after centuries of collisions with dust and space debris. A new species of camelid, descending from escaped camels from a ranch near Las Vegas, evolves in the plains to resemble the guanaco with the low lying vegetation created by the new ice ages. |
| 10,000,000 years | San Francisco has completely disappeared. The fossilized corpses of New Orleans are a mile and a half underground. Pressure and heat have transformed the soft tissue that remained into oil. |
| 100,000,000 years | All that will remain from the existence of human beings are our fossilized bones. |
| Time Period | Predictions |
|---|---|
| 1 day | Most fossil fuel power stations shut down, causing cascading black outs worldwide once they run out of fuel. Wind-driven turbines may continue to provide power, but without proper maintenance, their rotors will seize up over time. In the American West, the Hoover Dam's generators are driven by the flow of water from Lake Mead, and the plant could remain operating unattended for months or even years. From space, the glitter of Las Vegas may be the only point of light on the surface of an otherwise dark planet. |
| 2 days | Without steady power consumption, most nuclear power plants will shut down and enter an automatic safe mode to avert a possible meltdown. In New York City, water pumps in the subway system pump out 13 million gallons of water a day; once the power fails, the tunnels will fill with water in about 36 hours. |
| 10 days | Most food on supermarket shelves and inside home refrigerators has rotted. Pets still trapped inside houses can drink the water leaking from thawed freezers, but a mass die-off of domestic animals begins; those that can escape homes and yards will begin to scavenge for food, but many domestic dog breeds, especially small dogs and those bred for special qualities like stubby legs and short muzzles, will be unable to survive long in the wild. Meanwhile, household pests like rats and mice thrive on the remaining food supplies; once it runs out, they return back to the wild where their populations will quickly diminish as they become food for predators. |
| 6 months | Without people to suppress them, wild animals will return to the urban landscape. Small predators such as coyotes and bobcats, which roamed on the outskirts of populated areas, will be the first new residents, followed next by larger species such as cougars, wolves and bears. |
| 1 year | Plants have taken over, turning manicured lawns into overgrown fields. Weeds grow in cracks in the roads, eventually forming a layer of nutrient-poor topsoil where clover fields take root. Plants and ivy take root in stone and masonry work, and begin to damage the foundations of buildings. Wild animals will have found shelter in the abandoned cities. At the Hoover Dam, a mollusk called the Quagga mussel begins to clog the pipelines feeding cooling water to the generators and they shut down. As a result, Las Vegas goes dark. Without the generators running, no water passes through Hoover Dam, and eventually the Colorado River will run dry. Meanwhile, the waters rise in Lake Mead and eventually spill over the dam. Sparked by lightning storms, many wild fires will go unchecked without people to fight them. These fires can burn down entire towns and damage cities such as Chicago, San Francisco and Rome. The charred rubble provides the nitrogen that plants need to grow, and plant life consumes the ruins. |
| 5 years | Most roadways begin to disappear under a carpet of grass. In London, Buckingham Palace is breached by vines and moss. Red Square in Moscow turns green as it is overtaken by plant life. In New York City, the great lawns of Central Park sprout sapling trees. Before long, it will become a spreading forest. The monuments of Washington D.C. are swallowed by greenery. If they had escaped, it is possible that some zoo animals from exotic areas such as Asia or Africa such as lions, tigers, elephants and rhinos may still survive in the wild if they migrated to the southern climate of the United States. |
| 20 years | Here the show examines the ruins of Prypiat, Ukraine, which were abandoned in 1986 after the Chernobyl disaster. They are used as a real-life example of the level of decay that could happen after 20 years of humanity's disappearance. Despite initial high radiation levels that killed the local flora and fauna near the nuclear plant, in 20 years, the plant and animal life has returned to the area, with much of it flourishing significantly without human interference. |
| 25 years | Concrete structures begin to crack and crumble, pried apart by freeze and thaw cycles, as well as invading vegetation. Without people to maintain levees, low lying cities such as Amsterdam and London will have flooded. As their metal frames corrode from rust, windows crack and fall from buildings, exposing the interiors to the elements. Birds can now take up residence inside these structures. The copper lightning rods on top of skyscrapers will have corroded, and a lightning strike could turn a building into a towering inferno. In cities, gutted buildings provide pigeons a new home. Cockroaches still survive after people, now thriving on rotting paper and cardboard. With no humans to control their numbers, the wolf population has exploded, and they follow the deer herds into formerly populated areas. Without road traffic, most wild life migration routes are restored and predators such as bears expand their feeding grounds. |
| 40 years | Small wood structures, such as houses, crumble away as they are attacked by mold and termite infestations. Although they can stand for years, stone and masonry deteriorates quickly when exposed to salts, such as from bird droppings or exposure to seawater. With no one left to repair them, minor leaks in earthen dams, such as the Trinity Dam in California, will get worse and eventually cause them to break. |
| 50 years | Without vigilant maintenance, the steel cables of the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco have been weakened by corrosion and the structures threaten to collapse. |
| 75 years | By now, most of the roughly 600 million automobiles in the world, even in the most forgiving of environments, will have rusted away to barely recognizable skeletal heaps. The tires will have deflated within a few years after people, but the synthetic rubber and plastic components will last for centuries. |
| 100 years | The Brooklyn Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge finally collapse when their rusted cables snap and can no longer support the weight of the road deck. Within a controlled environment of a preservation vault, materials such as paper and film can last 200 to 300 years, but once exposed to moisture and unregulated temperatures, they will have deteriorated away in half the time. In a humid environment, most books will have been eaten away by mold. Digital media such as CDs and DVDs will take longer to degrade, but ironically, they will not last nearly as long as the information once recorded by primitive cultures on clay tablets. |
| 150 years | In major cities, the support columns of flooded subway tunnels fail, causing cave-ins and collapsing sections of the streets above. Vines have climbed up and into the gutted buildings where pools of water collect. Plants now grow throughout the floors, forming vertical ecosystems. Birds, rodents and snakes have moved in, followed by the descendants of house cats who find all they need to survive in one place. After generations of breeding with wolves, domestic dogs have returned to their pack hunting nature. Without the interference of man, the oceans recover from pollution and populations of sea life will have exploded. Seagulls, once dependent on human refuse for survival, would have a large die off decades ago, but the birds make a comeback once the fish populations return. |
| 200 years | In the midst of the "Era of Collapses", many of man's greatest structures, such as the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Tower Bridge in London and the Space Needle in Seattle, will have fallen. Once their iron structures succumb to corrosion, a strong wind would be enough to cause them to collapse. An example given in the show is the collapse of the neglected Kinzua Railway Viaduct in Pennsylvania in 2003. The collapse of the Willis Tower (formerly known as the Sears Tower) in Chicago and the Empire State Building in New York City will soon follow. |
| 500 years | By now, most reinforced concrete structures will crumble away once the iron rebar supports inside them succumb to moisture and the expansion of rust bursts them apart. Without humans to maintain them, it is believed that long standing ancient structures, like the Sphinx at Giza, will have eroded away within 500 to 1000 years. |
| 1,000 years | Nature has re-established itself and nearly all evidence of modern civilization will have vanished. Most modern cities would be collapsed and become barely recognizable husks overgrown by a jungle of trees, waters, flowers and vegetation. New York City may look as it did when it was first explored by Henry Hudson in 1609. |
| 10,000 years | By now, little evidence is left of mankind. Even our radio and television signals that were beamed into space, and once thought to traverse for hundreds of light years, will have faded to unrecognizable static at close to two light years and not even reach our closest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri. The Great Wall of China in Beijing will have aged like a mountain as it decays very slowly over the centuries. The Pyramids of Giza remains, but will have stood long enough to be swallowed up by the Sahara Desert's sands. Hoover Dam remains to be the last of the great collapses. Mount Rushmore in Rapid City will be one of the last symbols of man. Carved from granite, it will remain visible for millennia, possibly to be viewed by man's replacements, which may be chimpanzees if they evolve to take up the mantle of civilization. |
