Thanks to Nostradamus, Chris Claremont and James Cameron, we tend to view the apocalypse as a bad thing. From robot revolutions to atomic wars, the future seems to be nothing but trouble.
A 2007 interview with novelist Alan Weisman (author of The World without Us) in an issue of Scientific American has a different tale to tell.
“What would happen to all of our stuff if we weren’t here anymore? Could nature wipe out all of our traces? Are there some things that we’ve made that are indestructible or indelible? Could nature, for example, take New York City back to the forest that was there when Henry Hudson first saw it in 1609?
“There are places in Manhattan where they’re constantly fighting rising underground rivers that are corroding the tracks. You stand in these pump rooms, and you see an enormous amount of water gushing in. And down there in a little box are these pumps, pumping it away. So, say human beings disappeared tomorrow. One of the first things that would happen is that the power would go off. A lot of our power comes out of nuclear or coal-fired plants that have automatic fail-safe switches to make sure that they don’t go out of control if no humans are monitoring their systems. Once the power goes off, the pumps stop working. Once the pumps stop working, the subways start filling with water. Within 48 hours you’re going to have a lot of flooding in New York City. Some of this would be visible on the surface. You might have some sewers overflowing. Those sewers would very quickly become clogged with debris—in the beginning the innumerable plastic bags that are blowing around the city and later, if nobody is trimming the hedges in the parks, you’re going to have leaf litter clogging up the sewers.
“But what would be happening underground? Corrosion. Just think of the subway lines below Lexington Avenue. You stand there waiting for the train, and there are all these steel columns that are holding up the roof, which is really the street. These things would start to corrode and, eventually, to collapse. After a while the streets would begin cratering, which could happen within just a couple of decades. And pretty soon, some of the streets would revert to the surface rivers that we used to have in Manhattan before we built all of this stuff.”(more here)
It’s an interestingly beautiful view of a world devoid of humanity with parks, glades and wild wood taking root where once Yahoo! billboards and ATM kiosks lived. Why would a world without people be such a very bad place, anyhow? Just think, no more CMA Awards, no more tabloid press and no more junk mail.
In sci-fi and comic books the future is often depicted as a kind of dead end of ideas. The streets are run by gangs, our heroes are straggled old and tired, and the villains have prevailed. Yet isn’t it very human to look into the future and see only a selfish vision of reality rather than a selfless one? What if our problems simply did not matter anymore and the world had just moved on? Wouldn’t that be something?
The best part is that it is ineviatble. Humanity is making the planet Earth unihabitable every day for itself, but who’s to say that Nature will not prevail in the end?
Too bad we won’t live to see it.
