| Current music: | Bad Religion - Pessimistic Lines |
The world without people...even Will Smith
I'm not sure what it is lately with all of the end of the world stories out there, but I finally got around to watching The History Channel's Life After People over the past couple of days. I have to say that I wasn't that impressed overall. The interviews with the various experts in biology, structural engineering and the like were well done, but the computer animation and overly dramatic narration really took away from what could have been a neat show. Also, you can really tell which animated scenes they spent their money on (hint: it wasn't the scenes involving animals roaming through deserted cities).
That said, it did certainly dovetail nicely with my current reading, Alan Weisman's The World Without Us. I've found it to be far more depressing than anything in the History Channel's show. For me it's not so much an issue of "how sad, all humans are dead" or anything involving the abandoned planet, but rather the implications parts of the book have on the world right now. Reading about the sea of plastic debris and how long it will take to degrade (nobody really knows at this point) as well as all the various metals that are now cover the Earth is kind of a downer.
Speaking of metals in the atmosphere and soil, the book did remind me of one of my favorite Wikipedia finds. It turns out that one man, Thomas Midgley, Jr., was primarily responsible for developments that would lead to both the addition of tetra-ethyl lead to gasoline and the widespread use of CFCs. The Wikipedia article contains this quote regarding his contribution: "(Midgley) had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth history." That's quite a legacy.
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dmg) wrote,
