If humans went extinct, what would the Earth look like one year later? | Hacker News Reader

If humans went extinct, what would the Earth look like one year later?

theconversation.com

15 pointsgmays17 comments

There's a non-fiction book "The World Without Us" based on a similar premise, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Without_Us.

Vestiges of our road system would would be around for hundreds or thousands of years. Not necessarily the surface of the road itself, but the physical changes we’ve made to the land to enable roads.

"And you would realize how much noise people make."

Confirmed! It's not even an "it depends.." imho. Humans are noisy, period.

As an excercise: find a place outside, where for a full day you won't encounter, see or even hear another human. Maaany bonus points if not even encountering signs of human presence like traffic noise, litter, an airplane flying overhead, pipelines / power grid, marked trails, a radio tower in the distance, or whatever.

FYI: in the Netherlands, you basically can't.

Strangely this piece doesn't mention nuclear power plants: with 400 or so operational nuclear power plants worldwide, that's a lot of core meltdowns.

Similarly I would imagine there would be a lot of oil in the sea, if suddenly all the oil rigs and refineries were instantly abandoned.

If demand were to slowly drop to zero over a year as electrical devices shut down or fail, will a nuclear plant reduce power production without human input?

These two are in my main real disaster scenarios in the case I happen to by some magic survive the extinction level event. Yes, not very encouraging.

Why? If you live right next door to one, sure maybe it'd be a concern, but the Chernobyl exclusion zone, which is larger than the effect Chernobyl caused, only has a 20 mile radius. There's only ~400 plants in the world, each of which if they went completely full Chernobyl would only affect a 20 mile radius.

Didn't the contamination extend way beyond the exclusion zone, reaching, e.g., Sweden?

Yes, and it was actively "extinguished" and covered with large amount of concrete - something we for sure can't expect happening.

Wouldn’t nuclear power plants simply automatically shut down with all the safety measures they have? Maybe not all of them but probably not enough to cause a global catastrophe.

In reports of the recent Earth Quakes in Japan, the news noted how their Reactors had extensive safety protocols in place.

So hopefully they would shut down safely, at least in Japan anyway!

I'm certain all the reactors will SCRAM (shut down the nuclear chain reaction), but then every large (i.e. all) power reactors need active cooling to remove the decay heat and prevent a core meltdown. (This is what happened at Fukushima - even with all the staff on site, they couldn't cope with a station 'blackout' (no external power grid) event.)

The experience with Chernobyl is interesting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_exclusion_zone

> that's a lot of core meltdowns.

In (journalistic) theory. In practice, the safety systems will kick in.

And some will fail.

I got a "Donate" full page blocker popup in my first second of ever visiting this website- really turned me off, why would I donate to a website I barely got a glimpse of ? Immediately hit the back button...

It's a project of some of the most well endowed educational institutions on Earth begging for donations. Begging for donations is their raison d'être.

FWIW no pop up for me and generally I find the articles good.

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