THE WORLD AFTER MAN ... TV coming up soon

Or it's called something like that, How the world would become if man went extinct etc. How fast the skyscrapers would become hunting grounds for evolved wolfpacks of mutant rats or somesuch. How soon super highways become jungles.

Interestng future stuff for sci-fi writers, maybe. It's on History Channel or Discover Channel or maybe A&E, in a day or so, 20th or 21st maybe?

Worth looking up in the TV schedules, if you care to?

I enjoyed it, though yes they sort of padded it. Still ... cool show. And disheartening to know how quickly even the huge bridges and skyscrapers would fall into dust. I always imagined the cities would be like the ancient Mayan ruins looming up out of the jungles for five thousand years ...

And I felt like crying when they mentioned all the house pets dying, trapped in houses without food to eat. I'm one of those people who can watch a 2 hour show about the extinction of the human race and then feel heartbroken when I think of the puppies and kitties starving, waiting to be fed, trying to be good doggies and not make a mess on the rugs but ... but no one lets them out.

And then our little Yorkie standing in the middle of the room holding his toys, wondering why no one came out to play with him today.

I watched the skyscrapers fall ... and I wanted to warn the cats and the mice to get out before it's too late.

They tell me about the seas returning to life and a part of me thinks "Well, that's beautiful" ...

I was hoping it would end with a shot of a few surviving humans walking back out into the edenic Earth, beautiful and naked and free to start over again (well, assuming the Grizzley Bears that migrated across the Golden State Bridge didn't eat them) ...

People I'd miss. Civilization ... I'm not sure the world wouldn't be better off without.

And that was a strange thought that it left me with: PEOPLE need not disappear totally for all that "End Of The World" stuff to happen anyway, right?

I mean, turn off the electricity and no one's going to be out there upkeeping the bridges or the roads or the dams. Those suckers are going to fall just like we weren't here. People may be a lot tougher than the show suggests ... but Civilization as we know it might go down like dominoes with just a few minor hits.

Oil crisis goes bad and we're back to towns where most people don't travel farther than they can walk or a horse can carry them. There's not that much space to freefall between 2008 A.D. and 1800 A.D. and 1000 A.D.

Anyway: when the world ends, leave the door cracked for your pets. They didn't screw the world up, and they deserve a chance to inherit the Brave New World after we're gone.

Here's one tidbit of info that certainly made me re-imagine a lot of the SF I've read for years: their comment that -- despite the trope of Earth's TV and radio signals traveling out across space to alien worlds -- our broadcast signals scramble into meaningless static after only a few light years.

So much for the easy explanation by the aliens "We learned about the tiny nuances of your civilization by listening to radio 100 light years away."