AFTERMATH
Exinction Porn comes to television
What would happen if human beings were to disappear
tomorrow? How long would it take for life to recover from
our war on Terra, and how long would our buildings, bridges
and other artificial structures last?
That’s the premise of Aftermath: Population Zero, a
National Geographic documentary that aired recently on The
History Channel. The show examines what happens from the
moment of our disappearance to 25,000 years in the future.
(It’s a thought experiment, so no reason is offered for our
instant exit.)
A previous documentary from the History Channel, Life After
People, had covered similar territory. Both films appear to
have been inspired and informed by The
World Without Us, a
bestselling 2007 nonfiction work by Alan Weismann, which
expanded on an article of the same name for Discover
magazine.
Call it “extinction porn.” In Aftermath, there’s a
voyeuristic appeal in seeing flora and fauna take back the
city streets, as time-lapsed buildings crumble like
sandcastles. According to the film, it would take Earth
only about 200 years to erase humanity’s smudgy
fingerprint. Concrete expands and freezes in buildings,
causing them to fall. Iron rusts, bringing down bridges and
monuments. Only the largest structures are left behind,
such as the Eiffel Tower and Statue of Liberty. (Thanks,
19th
century
France).
These landmarks are next to go; the film shows Liberty
shedding her copper-plate drapery, followed decades later
by her torch-bearing arm. Her head follows, spiraling to
the ground in computer-generated rubble.
All things metal are destined for relatively quick ending,
geologically speaking. Everything but the kitchen sink,
that is; a gleaming fixture shown stranded in a running
stream has thousands of years left. Plastic is even
hardier, especially pieces that aren’t exposed to sunlight.
A child’s stroller and a cell phone casing are shown being
overgrown and buried. Even civilization’s largest efforts
are the playthings of entropy. Aftermath envisions
cascading floodwaters demolishing one immense dam after
another.
It’s all win-win for the furred, feathered and finned, who
go to work fast. Dogs return to hunting packs within a few
weeks after our exit. Pigs turn hirsute in a few
generations, with the domestic selection for hairless, pink
bodies removed. Not that the absence of humans in Aftermath
is a boon to every last living species. For a change, the
cockroaches don’t come out on top; without central heating
of our buildings and homes, the bugs cannot survive the
winters of northern climates. (And why should any critter
with an exoskeleton expect to handle what Keith Richards
couldn’t?)
As for whatever damage we’ve inflicted on the climate,
Aftermath speculates that within a few hundred years our
carbon emissions will be scrubbed from the skies by the
phytoplankton-packed oceans.
After 25,000 years, there’s very little evidence that
humans were ever here. The film argues that our most
lasting legacy won’t be on Earth at all. On the moon, the
remnants of the Apollo missions of the late twentieth
century will sit undisturbed for eons. After all our
technical triumphs, from the flying buttress to YouTube,
all we have to show for ourselves is a US flag, some camera
equipment, and lunar buggy. It’s Shelley’s Ozymandius
updated. ‘Look upon my works, ye mighty, and wonder where
the hell all the rest went.’
In the Talking Heads song, Nothing But Flowers, David Byrne
sang from the point of view of someone in the future, who
misses the billboards, Pizza Huts and 7-11s; all of
civilization’s fast-paced bling, now ‘nothing but flowers.’
In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Galapagos,
a group
of holidaying entertainers are stranded during a nuclear
exchange, and the story tracks their descendents as they
devolve over time into seal like creatures, whose
diminishing intelligence shades into in-the-moment
joyfulness. Similarly, in postapocalyptic films like On the
Beach, The Omega Man and I Am Legend, there’s always been
at least one Homo sap left to battle off irradiated zombies
or his own demons. Extinction porn is different: it assumes
we’re already gone, every last one of us. The buzz we get
is in seeing equilibrium return, and the planet’s other
denizens finally getting their place in the sun.
If there’s anything hopeful in extinction porn, it’s that
this isn’t from the parochial viewpoint of fictional
survivors. It’s the point of view of life itself – a force
as insistent and indomitable, as a song title by the Eels
puts it, “a daisy through the concrete.” If we can maintain
that perspective, than perhaps there’s hope for us yet.
