Welcome To Planet Earth: Population 0
“REVEALED: what the world will look like when we’ve gone,” says the Mail.
“Welcome to Planet Earth: Population 0. This is what our world would look like without people.”
Look like to whom? Perhaps the images should be pixelated and curved to see what the world without humans would look like through the eyes of a rat, a cockroach or Keith Richards?
“The images were created to illustrate what would happen if human life ceased tomorrow, if, for whatever reason, mankind was obliterated. The question it raises is: how long would the remnants of our civilisation remain?”
The correct answer is, of course, 17 years, three months, five days and 3.123 seconds.
“The prophetic forecast for the longevity of our 21st-century civilisation is contained in research for a TV documentary, Life After People. And it’s not guesswork. The two-hour special uses scientific expertise and understanding of history in order to predict the future.”
Readers learn that the principal advisor on the TV programme is a 53-year-old Scot, Gordon Masterton, former president of the Royal Institution of Civil Engineers.
Says Masteson: “The lights will start going out around the world almost immediately. The last power will be produced by wind turbines but, after a few weeks, the planet will be plunged into a deep darkness it has not experienced since primitive Man huddled around camp fires.”
You might liker a second opinion, not easy when all humanity is dead. But the Mail finds astrophysicist and author David Brinn. Says he: “Every civilisation has its tales of Armageddon or apocalypse, but we are the first generation that could, by deliberate action, cause its own doom.”
As Brinn’s website promises: “Tomorrow happens.”
Or not…
Posted: 15th, March 2008 | In: Tabloids Comment (1) | TrackBack | Permalink
