The World Without Us describes how Earth could react to our as hypothetical as istantaneous disappearance. It is clearly a pretext to write about some fundamental properties of this planet and, indirectly, about the temporary nature of our human adventure.
How could I have refrained myself from reading a book so close to the concept of temporariness that gives the name to this blog? I’ve previously written about this subject, although from a slightly different point of view.
The book, that is definitely interesting, describes, among other things, which remains will remain in the very long period: at the top of such a list we find objects made to last (Mount Rushmore might last 7.5 million years – the same time that divides us from our furthest ancestor – or Channel Tunnel, that could survive in the deep darkness for a few million years too… anyhow it would be much less than the rests of the Voyagers) while others were not intentionally designed to survive us such a long time, like many kinds of very large artificial polymers that we, not so wisely, spread all around every single day.
As described in the book, even though in many ways this planet could mostly return to itself within a few hundred thousand years, from many other aspects it is deeply signed by us and, surely, those who accidentally come after would find what we left as well as the empties we created during our passage (like huge underground volumes once filled with carbon, gas, petroleum and alike): a poorer planet compared to the one we’ve got just 7.5 million years ago but with a still strong Nature.
I’ve thought many times that while our instantaneous disappearance is very unlikely (it’s just the idea that the author used to write about those subjects) it could be more realistic reading his pages thinking about a still populated planet in which, for the reasons that the Olduvai theory describes, we couldn’t be any more able to control most of the dangerous activities we’ve already started.
