" Fundamentally, we are not as important as we think we are".
"We are nothing more than a dot in the history of the world".
Review: http://www.daemonstv.com/2008/01/20/life-after-people-review-history-channel/
bkmark for later
Let’s make the world a better place folks...
Kool-aide anyone?
I watched it front to back. I thought is was the best History Channel documentary I have ever seen. Although I’m pretty interested in that particular subject, so that might have biased my ranking of it.
If the majority of people take these statements to be true then I'd think man-made climate change would be a harder sell.
Sunday night they ran the show with the top 7 threats to humanity. Climate Change number 1 of course, with ample quotes from Owlgored.
Some of the plot
Intelligence never arose again
Rodent carnivores started farming primates as prey species.
500 million years later all mammals were extinct
It's a depressing read actually.
Well, except for young earth creationists, those are about as true statements as you can get.
The Earth got along quite well before we showed up and it will get along just fine after we leave. Unless we somehow throw the earth into the sun - but anything else, the Earth will get along fine.
Would we care since we, as humans, would be gone forever?
I actually watched some of it ... and I got the opposite impression.
The impression I got was — the Earth will survive anything, and thus that current “environmental” movements are entirely unnecessary. It showed that, no matter how self-aggrandizing humanity can be ... we haven’t the wherewithall to destroy the environment. The environment is an adaptive equilibrium.
For instance — they showed an abandoned city near Chernobyl where life is abundant.
It strikes me as very arrogant to believe that we have the capability of destroying the environment with a mere 100 years of carbon emissions. This documentary is simply another way of showing that.
H
I actually found it interesting, you want to say its anti-human, then thats your problem not mine.
I haven’t seen it yet but want to. I don’t particularly disagree with those two quotes you listed. Without us, the world would indeed keep on spinning. As of right now, a “dot” may still be an over-exaggeration as to what we are in reference to the history of the world.
Like mysterio, this is quite interesting to me so I too may be a bit biased.
History Channel started out as the “Hitler Channel”. Now its morphed into the “Mega-Disaster Channel” with a little “Crypto-Zoology Channel” thrown in.
I told SirKit about this show, our youngest son and I had watched a bit of it the other day. Hubby’s comment was, “What does that have to do with history?”. I told him it was history based on the environmentalists’ ideal future. ;o)
It is amazing how people can find an ulterior motive and hidden message in programs that they don’t bother to watch. It was a ‘what if?”. There was no cause given for why man disappeared, at least none that I saw. No preaching on global warming or against biological warfare. Just a ‘suppose man disappeared tomorrow, what would happen?’ And to echo an earlier poster, it was very interesting.
At least we would be rid of the Klintoons. Well, maybe not. They are both lawyers and we know how hard it is get rid of cockroaches.
For example, after 200 - 300 years without people, buildings and skyscrapers would collapse because the steel frame would have rusted beyond the ability to keep the structure upright. The fires in the west that we fight every year would no longer have people around to stop them, so they’d ravage everything. And so on.
The ‘We’re not as important as we think we are’ was referring to the fact that everything we’ve built would be destroyed by nature very quickly if we’re not around to maintain it.
The ‘Dot in the history of the world’ comment remarks on human’s time on earth compared with the the entire history of the planet.
If man were to completely die off what would stop primates from evolving into humans again?
It is the year 4022; all of the ancient country of Usa has been buried under many feet of detritus from a catastrophe that occurred back in 1985. Imagine, then, the excitement that Howard Carson, an amateur archeologist at best, experienced when in crossing the perimeter of an abandoned excavation site he felt the ground give way beneath him and found himself at the bottom of a shaft, which, judging from the DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from an archaic doorknob, was clearly the entrance to a still-sealed burial chamber. Carson's incredible discoveries, including the remains of two bodies, one of then on a ceremonial bed facing an altar that appeared to be a means of communicating with the Gods and the other lying in a porcelain sarcophagus in the Inner Chamber, permitted him to piece together the whole fabric of that extraordinary civilization....Carson's interpretation of the hotel bathroom as the inner sanctum of a religious structure and the subsequent depiction of his assistant -- ala Heinrich Schliemann with the Trojan treasure and Leonard Wooley with the Ur III treasure -- wearing those paper seals from the toilet seat as religious paraphernalia...