• Question: What would happen to the earth over time if the human race became extinct ?

    Asked by 748nepk48 to Ed, Kerrianne, Nina, Oli, yoyehudi on 4 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Nina Jordan

      Nina Jordan answered on 4 Nov 2017:

      I love the idea! I think the Earth wouldn’t mind if we disappeared, it would just carry on as it always has. Earth is 4.6 billion years old and humans have only been around for a tiny portion (a few million years at most) so plants would keep growing, animals would keep living, some species would die out and new ones would appear.

    • Photo: Yo Yehudi

      Yo Yehudi answered on 4 Nov 2017:

      This question probably depends on why we became extinct! If it was something like a disease where all humans died very quickly, I suppose our buildings and roads would crumble as plants and animals started to reclaim cities. Eventually dams might burst and power plants would fail. Bridges would eventually topple into the water…
      But if we went extinct for some other reason, the earth could be very different. We might have gone extinct due to war, or perhaps because global warming got so bad crops failed and we had nothing to eat and nowhere to live. Or who knows – maybe one day billions of years in the future we’ll leave Earth because the sun has grown bigger and threatens to engulf Earth, but we’ll actually be living further our on the galaxy so everything will be fine. NASA has a nice factsheet about the sun and what happens when it dies: https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/sun/indepth

    • Photo: Oli Wilson

      Oli Wilson answered on 6 Nov 2017:

      I think the others are absolutely right – in some ways the planet and much of the rest of life would carry on just fine. Life probably wouldn’t end up looking the same as when we arose, though because we’ve changed so much of the planet – there may not be any places on Earth that we haven’t affected. Probably no other species has had the same impact as humans: some scientists think we’re in a new geological age called the Anthropocene (‘the age of humans’), and evidence of our short reign will be noticeable for millions of years – plastics in our soils and oceans, and radioactive material in the atmosphere from nuclear weapons. What a sad legacy of our species that would be.

    • Photo: Ed Bracey

      Ed Bracey answered on 6 Nov 2017:

      Good question! If we just disappeared, say overnight, I think the place would be a lot better for the other species on the planet. We do an awful lot of damage. We dump plastic, put chemicals into water, pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, cut down rainforests. We’ve made lots of species extinct.

      Not sure what would happen to our nuclear powerplants if we weren’t there to run them, hopefully they have failsafes and won’t explode.

      So we’re not very important to the natural world of our planet at all, in fact we’re probably quite bad for it. It would be far more of a problem if all the bacteria or all the insects disappeared!

Comments