Life After People on The History Channel
Submitted by beatdrum on Thu, 2008-01-24 01:55.
The Soapbox
Did anyone check this show out? http://www.history.com/minisites/life_after_people
Basically it chronicles what would happen if man was to suddenly disappear from the planet. I couldn't help but feel relieved on how much "nature" would reclaim the cities and oceans. It was a good watch.
I watched it too.
Submitted by Amanda on Tue, 2008-02-05 22:48.
I had trouble getting into it, just because of the basic premise that somehow all humans disappeared at the same time and yet left the land, the buildings and the animals intact. How could such a thing occur? If it were a nuclear war, animals and plants would also be affected. If it were a virus, it would not kill all of humanity at once. I think they should have given a plausible explanation in the beginning so that I could have suspended my disbelief and taken the rest of it seriously.
"Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living." - Mary Harris "Mother" Jones
I don't think it was
Submitted by kendrap on Wed, 2008-02-06 06:14.
I don't think it was supposed to be "taken seriously" in that aspect. It wasn't supposed to matter HOW the humans left. Just how quickly things would change once they had.
It wasnt a movie, it was an informational program.
I get that, but...
Submitted by Amanda on Wed, 2008-02-06 17:29.
It was hard for me to accept the information in the "informational program" without being given the initial premise of how and why the humans disappeared.
BTW, although it wasn't technically a movie, it did have a lot of fictional elements in it as well as dramatizations of fictional events and creatures (i.e., flying cats), interspersed with actual footage of Chernobyl.
"Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living." - Mary Harris "Mother" Jones
Plastic
Submitted by Huby7 on Wed, 2008-02-06 11:37.
Hello,
I have just read what people had to say about the show on the internet. A few people were dissapointed they barely talked about plastic. The stuff stays around forever.
Quote from article:
As for the little pellets known as nurdles, 5.5 quadrillion—about 250 billion pounds—were manufactured annually. Not only was Moore finding them everywhere, but he was unmistakably seeing the plastic resin bits trapped inside the transparent bodies of jellyfish and salps, the ocean’s most prolific and widely distributed filter feeders. Like seabirds, they’d mistaken brightly colored pellets for fish eggs, and tan ones for krill. And now God-knows-how-many quadrillion little pieces more, coated in body-scrub chemicals and perfectly bite-sized for the little creatures that bigger creatures eat, were being flushed seaward. What did this mean for the ocean, the ecosystem, the future? All this plastic had appeared in barely more than fifty years. Would its chemical constituents or additives—for instance, colorants such as metallic copper—concentrate as they ascended the food chain, and alter evolution? Would it last long enough to enter the fossil record? Would geologists millions of years hence find Barbie doll parts imbedded in conglomerates formed in seabed depositions? Would they be intact enough to be pieced together like dinosaur bones? Or would they decompose first, expelling hydrocarbons that would seep out of a vast plastic Neptune’s graveyard for eons to come, leaving fossilized imprints of Barbie and Ken hardened in stone for eons beyond?
Curt
The World Without Us
Submitted by LeaverExplorer on Thu, 2008-03-13 12:44.
If you liked this show and would want a much more indepth exploration of these sorts of things, check out The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman. I think the show was based on the book, but the book was much better because it could get into the details on a lot more things. In the book he talks about plastics and the reversion of domestic plant as well as animal species. The television show sort of covered that with the pets, but I don't remembr if they covered that for cows, horses, corn and other species. The book also covers our nuclear footprint on every surface of the planet.
Like the show it doesn't discuss why humans disappeared. It isn't a novel about life after people. It's an exploration of the degradation of human designed systems or how the environment would recover if human influence suddenly stopped.
Doom and gloom
Submitted by AaronD on Thu, 2008-03-20 21:00.
Wow. I checked out the website and there's a whole lot of doom and gloom to be found. All the ways we could go extinct, how things will fall apart, and how long trash (including plastics) will remain.
I'm not a big fan of doom and gloom but I 'was' quite shocked by some of the real images. Images of thousands of people packed into a city, images of building after building in an aerial view of urban hell, images of shorelines coated in our trash waste.
I also enjoyed a few of the other explore-able areas of the website like the ones in "Could you survive alone?" or whatever it's called.
Although dramatic and silly at times, the 7 videos they have are certainly interesting and helpful in some way. Plus, as far as information about our planet and the 'state' we're in goes... the more information that's out there being watched/heard the better chance of change.
Care,
Aaron
yep
I watched it. I was amazed at how quickly it said nature would take over. Puts a lot in to perspective.
I have always been really in to movies/books/stories about the end of civilization with just a few people left over so I really wanted to just walk through those empty streets and explore.
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