Imagine if one minute from now, every single person on Earth disappeared. All 6.6 billion of us. What would happen to the world without humans? How long would it be before our nuclear power plants erupted, skyscrapers crumbled and satellites dropped from the sky? What would become of the household pets and farm animals? And could an ecosystem plagued with years of pollution ever recover?
The World Without US is a documentary film created by Mitch Anderson and Jason J. Tomaric. Released in 2008, the documentary explores what might happen if the United States were to leave the international arena, rescind its global reach and become an isolationist nation for the first time since the early 20th century. [6][7]
The World Without Us is a non-fiction book about what would happen to the natural and built environment if humans suddenly disappeared, written by American journalist Alan Weisman and published by St. Martin's Thomas Dunne Books.[1] It is a book-length expansion of Weisman's own February 2005 Discover article Earth Without People .[2] Written largely as a thought experiment, it outlines, for example, how cities and houses would deteriorate, how long man-made artifacts would last, and how remaining lifeforms would evolve. Weisman concludes that residential neighborhoods would become forests within 500 years, and that radioactive waste, bronze statues, plastics, and Mount Rushmore would be among the longest lasting evidence of human presence on Earth.
The idea of exploring the effects of the depopulating of the Earth is an old one, having been a regular trope in science fiction novels for decades. Post-apocalyptic literature in general had often tried to imagine the fate of civilization and its artifacts after the end of humanity. Indeed, an extremely popular 1949 novel, Earth Abides, portrayed the breakdown of urban systems and structures after a pandemic, through the eyes of a survivor, who muses at the end of the first chapter: What would happen to the world and its creatures without man? That he was left to see.
