Just To Be Human

[trinary]

The three books I've recently read are not three I would have picked out for their thematic similarities. The Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest known epic poem that chronicles the adventures of the heroic king of Uruk, The World Without Us, an alternatingly hopeful and heart-breaking thought experiment which illustrates the impact of our species by

Comments

[alicroc]

There was a show on the History Channel recently that sonuds a lot like the World book you read. It was all about how long nature would take to reclaim human civilization and they showed chronolically from 1 day to 1000 years from now how long it would take to go back to "natural state".

However...as i later discussed with my dad who had also seen it. They basically started the show off by saying..."Day 1: All human life gone" but apparently...the animals were all still alive.

No one ever explained why the animals were so much more resilient and didn't die either. If something is so strong that its going to kill ALL of human life....please...a house cat isn't going to survive it either!!!!

[trinary]

since it's just a thought experiment, it doesn't have to be entirely accurate. but some things could conceivably wipe out most humans, while leaving the rest of the flora and fauna intact. for example, diseases are generally species-specific. Also, humans can't eat just anything, and our crops require a fair bit of pampering and water. so if global warming changes rainfalll patterns enough to create huge crop shortages, starvation may kill a lot of humans, but not necissarily other animals.
The other biggie is war. Even if it's nuclear war, it generally directed at cities, where there aren't a huge number of wild animals anyway. We tend to forget that for all we mangle the world around us, the wilderness we haven't conquered yet still takes up the most space.