November 3, 2006
Science Department
Earth Without Us
Over at NewScientist.com, someone named Bob Holmes imagines all the wonderful things that would happen to the Earth if all the people disappeared:
By some estimates, we now commandeer 40 per cent of all its productivity. And we're leaving quite a mess behind: ploughed-up prairies, razed forests, drained aquifers, nuclear waste, chemical pollution, invasive species, mass extinctions and now the looming spectre of climate change. If they could, the other species we share Earth with would surely vote us off the planet.
Now just suppose they got their wish. Imagine that all the people on Earth - all 6.5 billion of us and counting - could be spirited away tomorrow, transported to a re-education camp in a far-off galaxy.
Re-education camp. There's a lovely idea for you. I suspect it says something about Holmes's view of humanity that his ecological fantasy doesn't begin with humans suddenly discovering cheap space flight and deciding to convert the Earth into a nature preserve.
On the one hand, it's a fascinating bit of speculative science, but on the other hand, the whole thing has an unpleasant "teaching humanity a lesson" vibe to it, in which Holmes imagines that humanity would be wiped away completely and the Earth would return to some mythical unmolested state.
He wishes away problems like still-running nuclear power plants melting down, and he sort of ignores the mass die-off that would occur when there's nobody to feed the billions of animals we keep as livestock. He seems to regard even our domesticated animals as some sort of pest that will eventually be wiped out.
Toward the end, he imagines aliens visiting the Earth and finding few clues that a civilisation once flourished:
The humbling - and perversely comforting - reality is that the Earth will forget us remarkably quickly.
Well, most of us will be forgotten. Except for Richard Nixon. As President during our brief flirtation with space exploration, his name is engraved in gold on a plaque on the airless surface of the moon.
(Hat tip: Instapundit.)
See also: The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. No, I can't tell if they're serious either.
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