Life After Man

From asteroid strike to climate change to nuclear war, humanity faces all kinds of existential threats. But if our species disappeared tomorrow, what would actually happen – and what kind of planet would we be leaving behind?

- Duncan Geere

We are living through the dawn of a new epoch in our planet’s history – the Anthropocene. Humans have always shaped aspects of their environment, from fire to farming. But the influence of Homo sapiens on Earth has reached such a level that it now defines current geological time.

From air pollution in the upper atmosphere to fragments of plastic at the bottom of the ocean, it’s almost impossible to find a place on our planet that humankind has not touched in some way. But there’s a dark cloud on the horizon. Well over 99 per cent of the species that have ever existed on Earth have died out, most during cataclysms of the sort that killed off the dinosaurs.

Humanity has never faced an event of that magnitude, but sooner or later we will.

THE END IS NIGH!

Human extinction, many experts believe, is not a matter of ‘if’, but ‘when’. And some think it will come sooner rather than later. In 2010, eminent Australian virologist Frank Fenner claimed that humans will probably be extinct in the next century thanks to overpopulation, environmental destruction and climate change.

Of course, Earth can and will survive just fine without us. Life will persist, and the marks we’ve left on the planet will fade faster than you might think. Our cities will crumble, our fields will overgrow and our bridges will fall. “Nature will break down everything eventually,” says Alan Weisman, author of the 2007 book The World Without Us, which examines what would happen if humans vanished from the planet. “If it can’t break stuff down, it eventually buries it.”