Imagine an apocalyptic future in which humanity disappeared. If we go extinct, the Earth will continue to be where it is, but without the presence of people. How would the world fare in that kind of case? What would the cities and facilities that we use today in a normal way be like? It could be a bleak world.
We are going to do a creative exercise with which we are going to imagine what the world would be like without people. Exactly, let’s put ourselves in the situation of imagining the state of the planet one year after the disappearance of humanity. What would be the first thing we would notice if we returned to the world for some reason?
everything is silence
For some reason, you return to Earth after the extinction of humanity. Maybe you are an astronaut who has returned from space. Upon landing, your eyes would see where you landed, but that first glance might not come as a shock. What you will notice, instantly, will be the silence. The noise will have dissipated and the world will have been enveloped in the maximum tranquility you can imagine. Since only humans have become extinct, you will hear animals, birds or even the way the wind causes the movement of the leaves. All of this, sounds that, at least in such a clear and natural way, people have stopped hearing.
After the silence, you will breathe and appreciate how clean the air is. A year has passed since the extinction and that means that all the pollution caused by humans has disappeared. There will not be those dense fogs generated by pollution, the sky will be clearer, there will be no garbage, waste or dust that is derived from the day to day of people. Imagine that sky that could be seen decades ago in any country, and now imagine one that is even clearer and cleaner. With a year to spare, the rains would have taken care of cleaning everything, which would also have been helped by the effect of the wind.
This would be the cities
All services would have stopped working. Zombie movies that set you in a post-apocalyptic world usually take into account that people are still around the cities and they take care, with the knowledge they have, to maintain some of the basic services. But if all the people had disappeared, there would be no solution: nothing would work. There would be no more electricity, because the plants dedicated to it would have run out of fuel. And the same would happen with the water supply. Because water doesn’t magically reach the pipes. There is a complex system and professionals who take care of making sure that you can have running water and that it flows from your taps at home. Without them, there would be no water.
Also, if a year has passed, it would mean that the winter cold could have frozen the water left in the pipes and that would have led to them bursting. So there’s no way you could get the water to come out of the faucets. The plants do not need the water supply from the pipes, so surely they would have spread and grown in an unstoppable way. The buildings would have begun to fill with vegetation on their walls, windows and any of their corners. The gardens would be a reasonable height, because no one would have mowed them, and you would also see many plants that you probably hadn’t seen in a long time.
Plant growth would be proportional to the appearance of many more insects than you can imagine. The number of mosquitoes found in the world is reduced by pollution, so imagine a world where all the damage humans do to Earth has ended. Along with the insects, there would also be other living beings that would be reproducing and filling everything, as if they were recovering what once was theirs.
The fires would be unstoppable
Not everything humans do is bad. Think about what would happen when a storm caused a fire. Who was going to turn it off? Absolutely nobody. Everything would continue burning until it ended up extinguishing in a natural way. Some cities might end up burned by the effect of fires and, really, it would be the only change you would see in the structures. The cracks and the destruction of infrastructure would be a long time coming.
Over time, it is true that the bridges would rust, that the roads would crack and that, little by little, the world would lose everything that humanity provided it. In the end, only the remains would remain, bits of structure, perhaps some intact, but all as a reminder of what the planet was like when human society occupied it. If another civilization were to establish itself on Earth thousands of years later, because it would not be unusual for an alien colony to see the planet as habitable and want to take advantage of it, surely it would not take long to start unearthing remains of human cities. Can you imagine them visiting the remains of a shopping center as if it were a monument? But, for the moment, it will not happen, because unless the Sun kills us, our desire to survive should help us not to become extinct.
