A doco I saw tonight...

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Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 4:51 am

It originally aired on History, but I saw this documentary called "Life After People." All I have to say is that it sent a chill up my spine when I really came to think about our existence as humans. What do you guys think about this? Quite philosophical, isn't it?

PS: For those that don't know what I'm talking about, you can watch it here:
http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=4939078184096254535

Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 5:20 am

Very interesting show. Saw it a couple of weeks ago.

Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 5:43 am

I meant to watch it tonight, but channel surfed during a commercial & didn't get back to it. Have to catch it on a replay. But my immediate thought was that the earth would be a much better place if it was free of humans.

Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 6:04 am

^^^The show proves you right.

Trophy Videos · Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 11:45 am

Humans suck!
hehehe Laughing

We must be stopped!
http://www.vhemt.org/

Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 12:31 pm

my wife and i saw it.... very interesting

Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 3:05 pm

B. A. Ware wrote:

^^^The show proves you right.

I knew it!

I wonder what the other animals would do w/ all the abandoned buildings/structures tho. Maybe plant life will take them over & grow over them. It would be nice if the Great Wall was a giant living organism supporting thousands of species that could be seen from space. Might make up for the fact that we are killing the Great Barrier Reef. Sure it may take 20 or 30k years, but it is still a nice thought.

Baiting Guru Joined: 04 Jan 2006 Posts: 3193

The show says 10k. I'd have thought it would be much faster than that.

Nothing vastly surprising. Even a lesson on why steel doesn't last long. Would you believe that there is this thing called "corrosion"? Amazing.

Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 5:39 pm

Well, the show made me think of how insignificant we really were and how nothing that we create will last forever. You need humans to have human history...

Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 5:44 pm

I'm into amateur astronomy and always feel utterly insignificant when I attend lectures and talks! So much space, so little us.

Must watch that show, it sounds interesting, thanks SP for mentioning it Smile

Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 6:08 pm

Standard Procedure wrote:

Well, the show made me think of how insignificant we really were and how nothing that we create will last forever. You need humans to have human history...

If you stretch your arms out wide, and imagine that one finger tip represents the formation of the earth, and the other represents the present time, human history could be wiped out with a single swipe of a nail file.

(I read that somewhere)

Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 6:22 pm

IF you take the entire time line of the earth from the time it started to form till today andmade it 24 hour, 23hours 53 min. was the timeit took for the panet to be created. the rest of the time was for life to form and the last 19 sec. is the time that humans have been on the planet

Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 6:56 pm

^^^ The Earth is about 4.5 billion years (give or take some millions). Single-celled prokaryote life has been found dating as far back as 3.something billion. I think your calculation about "life" is a little off. (Depends on your definition of "life", I guess.)

Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 7:19 pm

Still though, if we're only about 19 seconds in 24 hours, or a nail file in an arm-stretch, would it be possible that there was another human civilization just like us, before us, with all the evidence of their existence destroyed with the passage of time?

Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 8:02 pm

^^^ Possible, but doubtful. Our appearance here and now is dependent/contingent on a huge amount of things that happened before us. You would need to have an exact repeat of those conditions for humanity to have appeared twice. It's not just a case of that humanity's existence being wiped away, no evidence left, but all of the other paths leading to it also being wiped away. Otherwise, we'd look at , say, fossil records and it would be all "La la la, here comes humans, la la---oooh, why did it stop? What happened here?" The lack of evidence would be a massive hole that would need explaining just as much as if there weren't missing evidence.

Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 8:10 pm

Maybe they opted for voluntary extinction. Maybe the remains are in the ocean, where we bascally don't know jack about what all's down there.

Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 8:18 pm

^^For a very ancient civilization, subduction would make short work of destroying evidence.

Personally, I think this business of building cities and ipods etc. is a fluke. You don't see ants wasting time with any of that, and they've been here much longer that we have. They'll be laughing at us as they make their little farms in our crumbling buildings when we wipe ourselves out.

Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 8:24 pm

Standard Procedure wrote:

Still though, if we're only about 19 seconds in 24 hours, or a nail file in an arm-stretch, would it be possible that there was another human civilization just like us, before us, with all the evidence of their existence destroyed with the passage of time?

The archaeologist in me thinks not - evidence of a civilization is harder to destroy than you think.

Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 8:29 pm

Hekate wrote:

The archaeologist in me

How deep does he go?

Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 8:33 pm

As deep as required! Razz

Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 8:39 pm

I agree with you guys, but it makes me think if it is possible. Maybe it happened to Mars, but in a different manner...

Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 8:42 pm

I've always thought that it was more likely that something hit Mars and destroyed its atmosphere, rather than it was destroyed by its inhabitants. Then again, I might just be lacking in imagination!

To come back to Earth - look at the things that are constantly being found - cave sites or campsites where our very remotest ancestors (with apologies to any Creationists reading this!) lived and in some cases died. There are places like Hissarlik (more commonly known as Troy) which contain remnants of civilizations we know nothing about, except that they were the original builders on that site. They left no written records, but we know they existed. And they were only found because echoes of their city (or one of the successor cities on the same site) were immortalised in an ancient poem. But we have more and more accurate ways of dating what is found, so, given that we know the age of the Earth, we can now build fairly accurate timescales for our species' progress.

Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 8:43 pm

"lacking in imagination" or "living in the real world"?

Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 8:50 pm

Well, a lot of things we thought weren't possible happened, such as the attacks of 9/11. We never thought that something like that could happen, but we were wrong. Maybe the Martians many millions of years ago did something to cause their downfall. We might do the same...

Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 8:53 pm

@Otterfan - that's the first time anyone's ever accused me of living in the real world! Laughing

@SP - to come back to Earth - look at the things that are constantly being found - cave sites or campsites where our very remotest ancestors (with apologies to any Creationists reading this!) lived and in some cases died. There are places like Hissarlik (more commonly known as Troy) which contain remnants of civilizations we know nothing about, except that they were the original builders on that site. They left no written records, but we know they existed. And they were only found because echoes of their city (or one of the successor cities on the same site) were immortalised in an ancient poem. But we have more and more accurate ways of dating what is found, so, given that we know the age of the Earth, we can now build fairly accurate timescales for our species' progress.

Even events like 9/11 have their equivalents in the ancient and not-so-ancient world - and as history always repeats itself, then you could say something like it could have been predicted.

Except that nowadays people would rather study 'celebrities' than something as supposedly dry and boring as history or archaeology. Crying or Very sad