If we abandoned the Earth - breakdown of infrastructure
- Thread starter FatherRob
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If anybody is interested, "The World Without Us" by Alan Weisman set up a website for his book. He posted some pretty interesting multimedia clips about a future without humans.
The World Without Us - Multimedia Gallery
The World Without Us - Multimedia Gallery
TBonz said:
Thanks, MikeGainer.
And guess what book I got from my daughter for my birthday?
Yep. Will enjoy reading this.
Awesome! I should pick up a copy myself. Good brain food.
No, modern concrete buildings will disintegrate after a few centuries. (Its hard enough to keep them from disintegrating after a few decades)
...they're not building them like the pyramids anymore...
...they're not building them like the pyramids anymore...
I haven't read the book yet, but it sounds very interesting based on the Scientific American report and I should head over to the library and see if they have it.
The persistence of our buildings will obviously vary quite significantly. Buildings in the desert would last for much longer than those in somewhere with a wet or variable climate. But there are a couple of ways in which we will leave lasting records - something that can be discovered by some hypothetical future civilization.
First, we will fossilize quite well - because we bury our dead. Most other vertebrates fossilize very rarely because their skeletons sit out on the surface after they die, exposed to the elements, trampling, scavenging, etc.
Second, there will likely be a very distinctive sedimentary horizon that contains fragments of metal, glass, and plastic. Millions of years from now, you could walk up to rocks and see bottlecaps and glass chips.
Woohoo - post number 1701!
-MEC
The persistence of our buildings will obviously vary quite significantly. Buildings in the desert would last for much longer than those in somewhere with a wet or variable climate. But there are a couple of ways in which we will leave lasting records - something that can be discovered by some hypothetical future civilization.
First, we will fossilize quite well - because we bury our dead. Most other vertebrates fossilize very rarely because their skeletons sit out on the surface after they die, exposed to the elements, trampling, scavenging, etc.
Second, there will likely be a very distinctive sedimentary horizon that contains fragments of metal, glass, and plastic. Millions of years from now, you could walk up to rocks and see bottlecaps and glass chips.
Woohoo - post number 1701!
-MEC
Welp...I've been reading the book for the past few days and I'm pretty disspointed. It's more of a focus of how much the world sucks "now" because of us (and the various us's over the past several dozen thousand years) and there's very little about the world without us.
Mostly, it's the world WITH us.
Mostly, it's the world WITH us.
That sucks. I know the feeling - I felt the same way about the movie "The Corporation." It billed itself as an analysis of the rise of the modern corporation, so I expected some good historical perspective on how corporations got to be treated like individuals and so on. But it was just a ranting anti-globalization screed. I wouldn't even have minded a more sober analysis of the pros and cons of globalization, but it was pretty sophomoric. I'll still get the book from the library at some point, but now I'll know what to expect so I'll won't experience that same letdown.
-MEC
-MEC
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