Welcome to Planet Earth: Population 0.
This is what our world would look like without people.
The images were created to illustrate what would happen if human
life ceased tomorrow, if, for whatever reason, mankind was obliterated.
The question it raises is: how long would the remnants of our civilisation remain?
How much would we leave behind? What would an alien visitor learn about
us upon landing on our planet a century or more after we had
disappeared from it?
The answer, astonishingly, is: almost nothing.
Within a hundred years most traces of our modern-day lives would be so
destroyed by weather, corrosion, earth tremors, surviving animals,
insects and bacteria that the monuments and hieroglyphics of ancient
civilisations would be better preserved than our buildings and our
billions of books and electronic records.
An alien visiting Earth might well believe that the last civilisation on the planet were ancient Egyptians.
The prophetic forecast for the longevity of our 21st-century
civilisation is contained in research for a History Channel documentary, Life After
People.
And it's not guesswork. The two-hour special uses scientific
expertise and understanding of history in order to predict the future.
Principal advisor on the TV programme is a 53-year-old Scot,
Gordon Masterton, former president of the Royal Institution of Civil
Engineers.
He says: "The lights will start going out around the world
almost immediately. The last power will be produced by wind turbines
but, after a few weeks, the planet will be plunged into a deep darkness
it has not experienced since primitive Man huddled around camp fires."