What would the world be like without humans?

A world without Humans? That would leave only Lawyers and Politicans. KAAAZIINNG!

Seriously, the article is quite an interesting read to those amazed by the science of probability.

This related accompanying photo I found certainly puts things in perspective. 

What would the world be like without humans?

Updated Sat. Aug. 18 2007 7:00 AM ET

Mary Nersessian, CTV.ca News

If humans were to suddenly disappear off the face of the planet, wonders the author of a new book, is it possible the surviving world would feel our absence?

Science writer Alan Weisman uses that premise as a launching pad for "The World Without Us" (HarperCollins). He looks decades, centuries, and tens of thousands of years into the crystal ball.

The book evolved from an article Weisman once wrote for Harper's magazine, outlining how nature rushed into fill the void when humans fled Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986.

In his new book, Weisman says major cogs in our infrastructure would begin to fall apart almost immediately.

He spoke to CTV.ca in a telephone interview from the Berkshires, Massachussetts, outlining what might happen if a virus or some other catastrophe knocked humans out of the picture.

"Engines would stop running very quickly and chimneys would stop sending forth smoke and carbon," says Weisman, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Arizona.

Within two days, millions of gallons of water under New York City, unchecked by pumps, would flood the subways.

Seven days after the abrupt disappearance of our species, the emergency fuel supply to diesel generators, which circulate cooling water to nuclear reactor cores, would run out.

A year after the world becomes a people-free zone, animals would begin to return to the sites of nuclear reactors and lice would grow extinct.

Three years after the climactic moment, cockroaches in temperate cities would have already begun to die out.

Some 500 years after humans disappeared, their homes would see near complete destruction as water began to seep in through wood and shattered windows. Floors would corrode, animals such as squirrels and lizards would have chomped away at the drywall while vinyl siding would begin to crack. Steel gas pipes would begin to rust while PVS pipes would yellow and thin.

But a few ordinary items may resist decay for much longer. While forests would have replaced suburbs by then, some surviving aluminum dishwater parts and stainless steel pots are likely to be concealed amid the bushes.

Some common plastics may also survive for hundreds of thousands of years, until microbes evolved the capability to eat at them.

And thousands of years post-humanity, the only structures that will have survived will be deep underground, such as the Chunnel, which connects the United Kingdom to France.

One hundred thousand years later, carbon dioxide may be back to pre-human levels.

Without humans...

* Bird populations would soar. Annually, a billion doomed birds worldwide would live when radio and communication tower warning lights ceased blinking and high tension wires grew cold. Also, millions of birds that end up smashing against radiator grids and windshields of cars would survive.

* Without humans to spray pesticide, insects would thrive, as would the creatures that feed on them.

* In Canada, streams would start to resemble strings of pearls with the return of beavers and their dams.

* Skylines in major cities would be transformed as high winds from increasingly more powerful hurricanes swayed and brought down skyscrapers.

* Bridges would give way as their joints cracked and expanding ice would break apart pavements.

Weisman has long grappled with how to disarm the public's fears over environmental destruction.

"Since what everybody is worried about is 'Are we all going to die?' I figured I'll just kill them off in the first couple of pages," he said.

"It's not because I'm a people hater -- far from it. I've seen some of the biggest environmental disasters all over the world, ranging from the ozone hole in Antarctica, to Chernobyl, to the melting permafrost that's draining the lakes of the Northwest Territories," he said.

As his own level of awareness rose, he felt an increasing sense of urgency to call the public to action.

Weisman believes that even if everyone adopted a environmentally conscious lifestyle, it would not be enough.

"Even if all of us had the good will to reduce our footprints on nature, recycled like crazy, used compact fluorescents, and did everything we possibly could, there would still be too many of us doing it," he says.

Humans are eating themselves out of house, home, and planet, he says, adding that more than one-third of the world's surface is dedicated to cultivating or grazing food.

The population problem

The bottom line, Weisman says, is that every species that has gone beyond its resource limit ultimately suffers a population crash.

He offers a contentious solution, one that would shrink the population to 1.6 billion by 2100, back to the level it was at in the 19th century.

"Limit every human female on Earth capable of bearing children to one," he writes. And what a fortunate bunch they would be, he says, filled with "the growing joy of watching the world daily becoming more wonderful."

He proposes population control knowing full well that it is not an idea that will be easily digested.

"The simplest, most effective thing to do is engineer population control. Is it socially acceptable? No," he says.

It's a hard solution, he says, "and it's not one that I'm comfortable with."

But he stresses that his book is not a compendium of doom and gloom. Rather, he sees it as a treatise of hope.

"Life is incredibly resilient, incredibly indomitable, and it will grow out of the most inhospitable crack. It has come back from extinctions, far worse than the ones humans are perpetrating. I come away feeling quite comfortable that the earth is going to do just fine, I am not that worried about that anymore," he said.

"Life will go on, no question in my mind."

url="http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20070816/world_withoutus_070816/20070818?hub=SciTech"]