June 19, 2007

• Interesting, but an element of exaggeration, perhaps? Without street cleaners and road crews, our grand boulevards and superhighways would start to crack and buckle in a matter of months. I've seen lots of roads which haven't been repaired for many years, and they're still fine. ...And we’re bound to have some more hurricanes hitting the East Coast as climate change gives us more extreme weather... Oh, come on, you're cheating now!
• One thing that screws up roads very quickly is frost heaves during the winter. Water and traffic in general are bad for roads. So, if you live in a warm, dry, unpopulated place, your road will last a lot longer than if you live in a cold, wet, populous place.
• Very cool, thanks!
• Heaves, maybe, but populousness is not going to be a problem, I feel.
• A world without people? You mean, like this? The aftermath of Chernobyl is a very good study in the effects of human absence. I have no doubt things would crumble quickly. "Decay is inherent in all things." (Last words of the Buddha.)
• But when we're talking about what would happen after we're gone, so much depends on how we left -- global warming, nuclear winter, giant asteroid or alien attack... It's easy to say that why we disappeared doesn't matter, but it is what causes our disappearance which will largely dictate what happens post-us. This instant disappearance of humans, with no corresponding climate impact, is only one of many possibilities. Probably the '28 Days Later' scenario. (Even then, there'd be all these piles of undisposed meat rotting in the streets and giving vultures and maggots a head start on nature reestablishing herself.)
• This instant disappearance of humans, with no corresponding climate impact, is only one of many possibilities. But unless he's going to study every single one, which I doubt he could get the grant money to do, this vanilla "everybody just vanishes" scenario seems like the logical place for him to start. Oh, and if a skyscraper falls in Manhattan and nobody's there to hear it, does it make a noise?
• Well, if a skyscraper fell in Newark, nobody would notice...
• be all these piles of undisposed meat rotting in the streets assuming a nice round average of 140 pounds for every person on earth, that'd be about 924 billion pounds of rotting meat.
• Oh, and if a skyscraper falls in Manhattan and nobody's there to hear it, does it make a noise? (^_^)
• Wouldn’t it be a sad loss if humanity was extirpated from the planet? What about our greatest acts of art and expression? Our most beautiful sculpture? Our finest architecture? Great losses, yes. But put into the balance a few of the lowest acts humanity has enacted upon itself, let alone on the environment, and even a few cracked, beautiful ruins could be a nice enough memento. I thought about this over the time capsule fiasco with the car that ended up a rusted mess. What will remain of our current civilization, a few thousand years down the road? Most metal will rust; paper, fibers, crystal shatter, rot away. The big monuments made of stone, maybe... and plastic. Like those rubber duckies that made it over the seas, plastic will end up in unearthed by some year 10,000 archeologist.
• Don't think of it as 924 billion pounds of rotting meat. Think of it as 924 billion pounds of organic matter that shall fossilize into petroleum in a few million years.
• 1. Global disaster wipes out mankind. 2. Street meat decomposes into oil. 3. [...] 4. Profit!
• 5. Repeat.
• Shorter term, though, this would have to be bad for the stock market.
• The big monuments made of stone, maybe... and plastic. But also those made of ordinary dirt. Like the earthworks of the Ohio Valley, mounds of dirt are self-regenerating, since organic material just adds up on top, and maintains the structure. So just as the Octogon survived so long, despite being seemingly fragile, so are archeologists of the future going to find a lot of golf courses and not much around them.
• a nice round average of 140 pounds for every person So, like did you average the weight of the US and Nigeria to get this? Remember, we've got to calculate the total poundage per American city to get an accurate picture. Oh, and unmaintained roads that have light traffic won't decompose as quickly as roads that have none. Vegetation can begin to grow in small cracks, but gets run over occasionally can't take hold. Vegetation that is allowed to go unchecked can really tear up a road fast. So the whole US is soon going to look like Detroit?