Would we What if the Moon suddenly began getting closer to Earth? To the point where it was on a collision course with our planet? Would the Earth survive the crash? Humans have explored the Moon, Mars, and of course, Earth. But what do we know about Jupiter? For the most part, this gas giant is a mystery. So what would happen if you Thanks for writhing this! Related videos. You may also like. Our lungs might be fine in that short a time frame, but the rest of the planet?
Not so much. Connect with. I allow to create an account. When you login first time using a Social Login button, we collect your account public profile information shared by Social Login provider, based on your privacy settings. We also get your email address to automatically create an account for you in our website.
Once your account is created, you'll be logged-in to this account. Disagree Agree. Meanwhile, countless other ruins remain hidden, sealed beneath forest and earth. This scene from the rainforest allows us a glimpse of what our planet could look like, if humans simply stopped existing.
Lately, that idea has been especially pertinent, as the global COVID pandemic has kept people inside, and emboldened animals to return to our quieter urban environments — giving us a sense of what life might look like if we retreated further into the background. Weisman, who wrote "The World Without Us" Thomas Dunne Books, , spent several years interviewing experts and systematically investigating this question: What would happen to our planet — to our cities, to our industries, to nature — if humans disappeared?
Related: What could drive humans to extinction? There are several developing theories for what could drive humanity to extinction, and it is unlikely that we'd all simply disappear in an instant. Nevertheless, imagining our sudden and complete eradication from the planet — perhaps by an as-yet undiscovered, human-specific virus, Weisman said — is the most powerful way to explore what could occur if humans left the planet.
In Weisman's own research, this question took him firstly into cities, where some of the most dramatic and immediate changes would unfold, thanks to a sudden lack of human maintenance.
Without people to run pumps that divert rainfall and rising groundwater, the subways of huge sprawling cities like London and New York would flood within hours of our disappearance, Weisman learned during his research. Lacking human oversight, glitches in oil refineries and nuclear plants would go unchecked, likely resulting in massive fires, nuclear explosions and devastating nuclear fallout.
And that's a real wildcard, it's almost impossible to predict what that's going to do," Weisman said. Similarly, in the wake of our demise, we'd leave behind mountains of waste — much of it plastic, which would likely persist for thousands of years, with effects on wildlife that we are only now beginning to understand. Meanwhile, petroleum waste that spills or seeps into the ground at industrial sites and factories would be broken down and reused by microbes and plants, which would probably take decades.
In time, however, they will be safely buried away. But that doesn't necessarily mean total destruction: We need only look at the rebounding of wildlife at the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster to understand that nature can be resilient on short timescales, even under such extremes.
While that polluting legacy unfolds, water running underground in cities would corrode the metal structures that hold up the streets above subterranean transport systems, and whole avenues would collapse, transformed suddenly into mid-city rivers, Weisman explained.
Over successive winters , without humans to do regular de-icing, pavements would crack, providing new niches for seeds to take root — carried on the wind and excreted by overflying birds — and develop into trees that continue the gradual dismemberment of pavements and roads. The same would happen to bridges, without humans there to weed out rogue saplings taking root between the steel rivets: coupled with general degradation, this could dismantle these structures within a few hundred years.
Related: Are trees vegetarian? With all this fresh new habitat opening up, nature would stoically march in, pasting over the formerly concrete jungle with grasslands, shrubbery and dense stands of trees.
That would cause the accumulation of dry organic material, such as leaves and twigs — providing the perfect fodder for fires sparked by lightning, which would go roaring through the maze of buildings and streets, potentially razing whole parts of cities to the ground. The streets will convert to little grasslands and forests growing up within years," as Weisman tells it. Over hundreds of years, as buildings are subjected to sustained damage from erosion and fire, they would degrade, he said.
Also read: 5 factors that could turn America into another collapsed empire. Here are some of the highlights A few week later, those adorable small dog breeds will no longer exist as packs of bigger dogs hunt them down and take them out. After years, metal constructions like the Eiffel Tower and steel bridges, without maintenance, will crumble to the ground. The only evidence of man-made buildings after 10, years will be stone constructions, which can last several hundred thousand years.
Everywhere they go they thrive. One theory holds that intelligence evolved because it helped our early ancestors survive environmental shocks. A third is that intelligence is merely an indicator of healthy genes. All three scenarios could plausibly occur again in a post-human world.
They can gather food in savannahs really well, they know how to band together against predators. Life is really good for them the way it is. The shocks that could drive baboons or other species out of their comfort zone could be set in motion by the disappearance of humans. The evidence from Chernobyl suggests that ecosystems can bounce back from radiation releases, but there are about nuclear reactors around the world that will start to melt down as soon as the fuel runs out in the emergency generators that supply them with coolant.
The decades following human extinction will be pockmarked by devastating oil spills, chemical leaks and explosions of varying sizes — all ticking time bombs that humanity has left behind. Some of those events could lead to fires that may burn for decades. Below the town of Centralia in Pennsylvania, a seam of coal has been burning since at least , forcing the evacuation of the local population and the demolition of the town. Today, the area appears as a meadow with paved streets running through it and plumes of smoke and carbon monoxide emerging from below.
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