Anybody catch "Life After People" on the History Channel?

http://www.history.com/shows.do?action=detail&episodeId=262869

Explore the tantalizing question of whether all the remnants of mankind will eventually disappear from our planet. What would happen to the earth if humans ceased to exist? Would ocean life flourish, the buffalo return to the Great Plains and our skyscrapers yield to the wear and tear of time. Visit the ghostly villages surrounding Chernobyl, which were abandoned by humans after the nuclear disaster in 1986 and then travel to the remote islands off the coast of Maine to search for traces of abandoned towns that have vanished from view in only a few decades. Learn from experts in the fields of engineering, botany, ecology, biology, geology, climatology and archeology as they provide answers for many thought provoking questions.

I've only seen the beginning so far, but I thought it was an interesting concept - if humans vanished tomorrow, how would the world change over time? Dogs, they say, would not fair well, but cats probably would. Said smaller predators like coyotes & bobcats would quickly return to formerly inhabited areas...

Lights would go out rather quickly - most within 24-36 hours. Said that the last power source running might be Hoover Dam. Most nuke plants would shut down automatically.

Bridges would quickly deteriorate and eventually collapse (I didn't know that the Golden Gate bridge has a full time crew of 17 engineers and 38 painters whose sole job is maintaining the bridge...)

amazing!!

but haven't watched it.

Too chicken.

:scared:

and other vegetation, both native and non-native (kudzu and privet being the most common invasive non-native plants.)

Absolutely no discussion of the dead bodies; it was like they just imagined that every human was "raptured" upward leaving no mortal remains to rot. No discussion of what led up to all humans disappearing and the destruction that chaos would create. The further away from the event they got, the easier it was to watch for me, but I couldn't get over the inaccurate initial premise.

They'd just form packs, the way strays often do.

Not to mention some types interbreeding with wolves.

I loved the whole cat "society" living in the abandoned skyscrapers.

that a lot of "specialty" bred dogs and small dogs would likely not last more than a week. They said the mid-sized mixed breed ones would do okay and that dogs overall would survive, but in much lower numbers than their current world population of around 400 million.

Of course they would have shorter lifespans, since nobody would be around to doctor them up. But the same would hold true for cats, particularly with Feline Leukemia and AIDS out there.

NYT maybe? I forget. Pretty interesting idea. I think dogs in general would do ok - they're pretty good scroungers even if many have 'forgotten' how to hunt.

Did they say what would happen to all the Republicans if there were no humans left?

Frankly, I think the History Channel was not great to begin with and went downhill from there. Seems like all they talk about now is pseudoscience rapture crap.

that's kinda popular with this premise in it. TDS had the author on recently.

He was really exploring the whole global warming/human tragedy angle: what happens afterwords if we finally do something that kills us? How does the earth and everything else survive?

Our vegetation only stays alive because of all the watering done here so instead of being overgrown Phoenix would probably dry up and blow away.