Things fall Apart

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Adrienne and I passed an abandoned house the other day. It couldn’t have been more than 60 years-old. It was off the side of the freeway, in a stand of trees. the roof had collapsed in some parts, but the walls looked fairly sound. The windows were all broken.

It got me thinking. What would the world look like 100, 200, 500 years from now if all the humans were instantly removed?©™

In 100 years with absolutely no upkeep how many homes would still stand? I imagine most, but I wonder. In the U.S. homes aren’t built to last more than 50 years. In 200 years or 500 how many would still be standing? I am guessing that Las Vegas would be perfectly preserved like some kind of sprawling city-mummy. I am sure you could go to the Belagio and see the art a thousand years from now.

If lightening hit a house or apartment and there was no one around to put it out, how many more would burn? Would huge chunks of cities burn to the ground? What about earthquakes and tornados, hurricanes? How long would it take for some large cities to be leveled? How long would it take the earth to completely wipe away any trace of us?

What would the highways and streets look like? Would the freeze-thaw cycle crack them and let trees and grasses grow over them? For how long would their still be huge swaths of concrete and asphalt across the nation?

How tall would my lawn get? How long before native grasses replaced my non-native grasses’ thirsty blades? What about non-native plants like kudzu vine? I suspect that the U.S would be covered about 10 feet deep in it.

What would the sky look like? Just how clear could the sky get? What would it smell like? I think I know, it isn’t like I haven’t ever been anywhere remote, but how tainted are those areas? Do they just look pristine by comparison?

Would the weather change much?

What would happen with the animals? If I came back and looked in 200 years would there be huge herds of deer in my neighborhood? Would the salmon quadruple in size (Not the salmon in my neighborhood)?

You see where I am going here people.

What I want is for the Discovery channel to make a show about this. OK, let me clarify that. What I want is for the Discovery channel to pay me for my idea©, and then make a show about this.

I would love it if they got experts in different fields to theorize about how things would change. Engineers to tell us what cities might look like. Wildlife biologists to theorize about the enormous packs of wild german shepherds roaming the land….

Then, of course, I would want a couple of hours of incredible computer graphics to show me just what all of this would look like.

Come on Discovery Channel, you know you want to pay me for this idea!

How do you, dear readers, think things would change?

7 responses for Things fall Apart

  1. joe says:

    I think discovery channel did make a movie about that, there were apes and I remember something about the statue of liberty at the beach.

  2. old prof says:

    But there were no monkeys with red behinds. That I think was a mistake.

  3. martin says:

    I think you must live in a really nice part of town. Maybe if you spent some time in working class nieghborhoods you would see current examples of modern decay. Better yet next time you visit chicago talk a long walk through the South Side. But I guess that’s to “real.” You want a CGI psuedo documentray with fake time laspe photography showing a 2003 Hummer gradually decay into nothing over 1000’s (?) of years. How about a a show on how long before there is no evidence that society has any morals? – oh for those of you who think I’m bitter and mad at josh – (j/k)

  4. dave says:

    How about a show with pseudo time lapse about how 1000 years in the future we will look back and reminisce about how truly stupid we all were in 2000, but how smart we thought we were. Then it jumps forward like 200 years, and again we can’t believe how stupid we were 200 years ago, but we really are smart now. After a few more sequences of this redundant yet brilliant equation, we have a pseudo time-lapse in reverse and hypothisize that we’re actually pretty smart compared to the idiots in the future–and even if we aren’t smarter, atleast we’re not obsessed with gaging our intelligence on past stupidity, you know?

  5. josh says:

    Brilliant Dave!

    Martin, none of that is too “real”, it is just WAY too short term. Chicago hasn’t been around long enough to really decay. Somone get this show made!

  6. dave says:

    It would be so easy to combine all of these ideas into one magnificent computer graphic with thematics to boot. Just superimpose it all onto a picture of the detached head of the Statue of Liberty, and as the deep voice is making sense of it all at the the end of the show, they do a slow zoom towards earth that starts from outer space and it zooms past satellites and stars. Then as we see the earth we see it in rewind, rewinding and zooming until we inevitably end up on a close-up of a certain monkey with the red behind. Forget Discovery, I’m calling Spielburg.

  7. nancy says:

    I live in Iowa. The smog is not thick, but if you look you can see brownish clouds.