I May Be Mentally Disordered

Sunday, January 27, 2008

10,000 Years

According to scientists gathered by The History Channel to contribute opinion and theory for their Life After People program, it would take Mother Nature 10,000 years to completely erase any obvious evidence of Man's presence on this Earth. Were we to vanish tomorrow, most of our structures, machines, and mechanisms will be rubble or be reclaimed by nature within 150 years of our vanishing. By 500 years, most cities would be unrecognizable as cities at all, and 1,000 years after a sudden human extinction, there would be nearly no trace of our existence beyond massive objects like Hoover Dam, the Great Wall of China, and a massive sand dune covering the Great Pyramid.

It's an interesting coalition of theories. The show suggested that we might see lush wildernesses and even rivers where cities like New York and Chicago now stand by 5,000 years. The Hoover Dam would probably hold for nearly 10,000 years, but it too would eventually crumble, freeing the Colorado River to resume its natural flow. The oceans would flourish and thrive without our overfishing and depositing of billions of gallons of sewage into its seemingly endless waters. One scientist noted that humans simultaneously treat the oceans as a toilet and a food pantry and I laughed at the obvious and honest irony.

I have to say, this is one of History Channel's most interesting programs ever, which is saying quite a lot. They head out to the Chernobyl zone (outlying cities and villages, as I think the area immediately surrounding the plant is still too toxic) in order to get a feel for what 20 years of total human absence can do to a city. Already, wild life populations were exploding and plants were finding ways to compromise and destroy the cities buildings. Seeing the level of decay that occurs in only 2 decades, caused by an event I clearly remember watching on the news, is impressive, and in some ways reassuring.

Man's time here is temporary, both in the micro and the macro context. As they mentioned in the show, if the entire history of the planet were to be condensed into 24 hours, our species time on this planet would account for less than 30 seconds. All of human recorded history would be a fraction of that and the modern era would be shorter still. We often worry, or at least let other worry, about the long-term effects of our perpetually adversarial relationship with the world around us, but in just 10,000 years, most, if not all, of the damage and work we've done as a species could be totally erased. In geologic time, 10,000 years truly is nothing.

The irony is, people championing the cause to save the planet should really be talking about saving the species. The planet will persevere and continue its monotonous march around the Sun until the start burns itself out, or a massive object knocks it out of that orbit/obliterates it outright. But our species does not have the longevity or collective potential to last that long. We reproduce like bacteria and show no signs of slowing down, even with famines breaking out in numerous locales around the globe. We play with weapons that could literally erase nearly all of the planet's larger life forms in a matter of minutes, and show no sign of giving them up. Honestly, there are serious questions surrounding the next 100 years of human habitation on the planet...10,000 more almost seems absurd.

So eventually the species will no longer be able to maintain its many creations. Eventually, 6,000 or so years worth of work will be completely erased or overrun by Mother Nature. Ther's something beautiful and completely amazing in that. Mother Nature's patience is near limitless and really, in many ways, she is simply biding her time at this point. I find the idea fascinating and even a little inspiring.

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Now playing: Tool - Ænema
http://foxytunes.com/artist/tool/track/AEnema