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 garyt903
 |  | UER Book Review: "The World Without Us"
< on 1/19/2008 5:00 AM >
|  | | | Alan Weisman's new book "The World Without Us" was an amazing read with many UER tie-in's. After seeing Weisman on The Daily Show, I bought the book. The premise is this: if through some act of God or natural disaster, we all died tomorrow (air-borne strain of HIV, giant comet, the Rapture, etc.) if we all just died off... how long would the Golden Gate and Brooklyn Bridges last? What giant structure in NYC would self destruct in less than 24 hours? (Hint: think subway systems flooding/collapsing)
What would happen to our great cities? With no one to "mind the store", what exactly would occur at our nuclear power plants, our oil refineries? How long would their skeletons last before they became a part of the fossil record? Solid zinc has a self life of 3,500 years, cadnium 7,500 years. Chromiun will last 75,000 years. Lead never deteriorates. It just recycles through an endless organic-to-mineral loop. Aluminum, once buried (no oxygen) stops corroding. Stainless steel never rusts or corrodes. Stainless steel frying pans, millions of years from now, may be found in sedementary rock - itself locked in a frying pan fossil.
City Park bronze statues will last a very long time. Bronze lasts. But so will fire hydrants - they are cast iron (silica based). In fact, anything glass will probably be absorbed into the fossil record.
The steel matrix inside the Statue of Liberty, at least parts of it, may last a short thousand years before rust collapses it. The Statue will then fall crashing into New York Harbor. But once in salt water, the copper will begin electroplating nickel and calcium carbonate - that will actually preserve it forever.
Weisman visited the North coast of Cypress where the Club Med strip of hotels were abandeoned and walled off 25 years ago during the islands civil war. Left unattended, the exotic hotel plants and landscaping have escaped and merged and mingled to create a whole new ecosystem unto it's own. What you expect to last, often doesn't. What you think is fragile, often lasts.
And what about our pets? Your miniature poodle, sadly, will become coyote hors d' ourves. Domestic dogs won't make it, but our cats will become ferrel and probably survive to do quite well. Hogs and horses will return to the praries and forests. But all other domesticated animals will perish without us. Cows are so stupid and slow, they'll be the first to be wiped out.
And what about our oceans and air? How long will it take to return to a pre-industrial atmosphere? 50,000 years is nothing.. just tick on the Earth's geologic timepiece.
It's an interesting approach to our impact on the Earth as a species. The book's website is also unusual because it has a "time-line" of how long humanly engineered products last. That plastic bottle you drink your mineral water out of? Microbes will eventually evolve that will break down the polymers, but it's a very slow process. The microbes that evolved that learned to break down cellulose took over a million years. And cellulose has far simpler molecular bonds than polycarbonates. Human impact as a species... we'll be our own end.
And Earth will recover quicker than you think. Give 100,000 years or so...
Gary Thomas
The-Close-Cover-Before-Striking Academy of Fancy Talking (Think Tank)
Denison, Texas
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