The WORLD MUST BE PEOPLED … MUSTN’T IT?

On Monday night, Channel 4 showed a programme, laughingly called a documentary, entitled Life After People. Though it pulled down a good deal of opinion, most of it seemingly of scientific repute, it was more like an apocalyptic Hollywood vision without any actors. There couldn't be actors. As the title indicates, the programme posited a world beyond humanity.

The narration offered no rationale for a people-less world and so the entire exercise was built upon sand. The first concern of the story, chronologically, was the fate of animals. The survival of domestic pets was understandably – if unrealistically gently – addressed. Most mysteriously, the cities of the world appeared to be overrun by escaped zoo animals too. How did they escape? We were not told, any more than we learned how so many dogs got out to roam when you know that, in the endless absence of its owner, almost every dog would starve to death shut in a building. The exotic animals in city settings allowed for interesting computer-generated juxtapositions and these heralded the primary concern of the programme, which was to get to the computer simulations of great landmarks degenerating and eventually toppling. If we saw Brooklyn Bridge collapse once, we saw it six times. It wasn’t so much a science-based documentary, more a video game.

Now what kind of Armageddon will it be that wipes out humans and only humans and leaves all the buildings standing? Not a nuclear war, obviously. Not a global biological incident. Not even a viral epidemic: after all, it’s hard to imagine a virus that only affected humans yet could not be contained either medically or physically. The reason that bubonic plague took hold is the same reason that avian flu was so scary: it’s spread by uncontrollable creatures and it can jump species. A virus that jumps species will mutate sufficiently to infect at least all mammals, if not cockroaches, the most likely survivors of any catastrophe.

The day after the Channel 4 programme, BBC News reported the extent of the global threat to animals. “A third of the world's animal species have become extinct in the last three decades, figures show” the BBC website announced, a claim also made by Roger Harrabin in the report. I’m as pessimistic as anybody about the future prospects for those creatures with which we share the planet but this estimate seems way over the top. What “figures” are these that show such a thing? Harrabin cited only one creature “thought to have become extinct this year”, the Yangtze River dolphin, a rather specialized, limited example, you would think. If a third of species have gone since 1978, wouldn’t some of them be familiar, wouldn’t we have heard about them? The lion, the emu, the bullfrog, the haddock?

Of course, all life on earth, all evidence that there was ever life on earth will eventually be swept away when the sun explodes or fizzles out or the planet gets hit by a rogue meteor. Shakespeare knew this, long before all but some old tortoise somewhere was alive and he had Prospero describe it:

"Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep" [The Tempest Act IV, Scene 1]

The makers of Life After People, Americans who allowed Channel 4 to part-anglicize their work, might pay a little more attention to the giants of literature and a little less to CGI geeks.