
The World Without Us - jmonegro
http://www.worldwithoutus.com/did_you_know.html
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diN0bot
i don't know how true it is, but i loved the story.

at first the statements seem random, or rather i didn't find any emotional
meaning to them.

then i felt warmth and comfort. the trees and forests grow back. maybe humans
haven't damaged the earth beyond repair.

finally, the timeline expands beyond human significance. that's beautiful.

nicely done with the mouseovers, too.

~~~
tomjen2
No matter what how much damage we do to this planet, we are still the only
species who have a chance of making it off the planet before it smashes into
the sun.

You can say what you want about us and how beautiful nature is, but in the end
there are thousand of species that can fly but only one that can play the
guitar, thousands of species that can walk, but only one that invented the
car, a million species that breath but only one that build a ship to sail
under the waters...

The point of all this is that the human species really is something special.

~~~
gort
"we are still the only species who have a chance of making it off the planet"

For now. Personally, I hope that, if (and only if) we humans do destroy
ourselves, enough life remains for something else to evolve and have a shot.

~~~
jerf
It will be much harder if it's not us. We've taken a lot of the easy
resources, and many of them won't come back before the sun eats the Earth.
(Some will, many won't.) Hard to build a technological civilization with no
copper deposits left. It can (probably) be done, but it will be orders of
magnitude slower.

------
m_eiman
Neat, apart from all the factual errors. Barn roofs being long gone after ten
years? Garden vegetables "reverting to wild strains" after twenty years?
Unlikely.

------
lionhearted
He left out:

"Immediately: None of these events would be judged positively or negatively
based on human ethics."

~~~
notauser
There's also a rather large amount of anti-nuclear hysteria in there.

All plants would have 'burned or melted down'? Sure, apart from the 100% of
plants that weren't in the middle of a dangerous test with all the safety
systems turned off at the exact moment that the operators disappeared.

The rest would just go cold and sit there (pretty safely, baring an
earthquake) until erosion broke down the concrete containment building.

------
johnnybgoode
I know this is supposed to be beautiful and poetic, and I do see a bit of
that. But then I also remember two things:

1) The thinking behind this is essentially religious in nature.

2) While growing up, many of us were bombarded with similar messages in school
starting from a very young age. Very little, if any, attention was given to
the idea that humans on Earth might be more than a corrupting influence on
nature.

Who knows, maybe they could even be right. But the manner in which the message
is disseminated makes me very suspicious.

------
falsestprophet
On the surface, this is a sobering reflection on our impermanence. But, I
think this evokes the more beautiful idea that, in all likelihood, the world
will not be without us.

Humans will be able to carry on through whatever epic tragedies we organize or
in whatever nightmarish environments we concoct.

Our defining characteristic is adaptability. We are like massively clever
cockroaches.

The world may be too much with us, but it'll have to make do.

------
icefox
Using flash was so overkill for this. It could have easily been just an image
or html.

~~~
nopassrecover
Maybe, he did fit a lot of information into a more compact space by using
Flash.

~~~
icefox
The sad thing is that I have seen this all in the past as a single image that
shows up on reddit every once in a while. Turning into a flash pos just wastes
my bandwidth.

------
ilkhd2
Very beautiful, touching and poetic.

