After people have gone

[Wicket]

There's an interesting series being shown on UK TV about what would happen if people disappeared from the planet.

It's shown that most of London would flood as the Thames barrier would fail without maintenance.

What's interesting is how quickly things would decay and there would be not many signs of us having inhabited the planet after only 100 years had passed. They've got scientists and experts testing structures etc to see what would last and what wouldn't.

The monuments of ancient civilisations would last longest, e.g. pyramids, etc.

I remember when I was in school we examined the possibilities (remote) of a pre historic nuclear war. There has been some evidence however, green glass found in Nevada which is sand heated to a high temperature usually seen where bombs have been exploded.

There was also a footprint found that was millions of years old or something which showed evidence of a shoe that looked as if the leather upper had been machine stitched.

There are some interesting links on the subject. Someone has even claimed that dinosaurs are mutations of existing creatures after a nuclear armageddon!

So my question is could it be possible for us the world to keep developing as it has through evolution etc until civilisation ultimately destroys itself & then the cycle begins again?

[finding agent]

Put aside homo sapiens for a moment, and think whether after the birds, like the dodo, have gone how long they will take to re-evolve.

If re-evolution is possible, we may have to wait from anywhere between 6 thousand years(ultra conservative religious view) to 4.5 billion years(scientific view) or even 153 trillion years(liberal religious view) for the answers.

[Wicket]

Won't the sun have ceased to exist in a billion years or so?

Isn't it feasible that we (man) destroy ourselves eventually and then we re-evolve to repeat the process again and again? (We might evolve in a slightly different way/form each time)?

If we'd existed before many billions/trillions of years before in a similar form there would nothing really left to show for it, would there?

[Lili Von Shtupp]

I would hope then that it is like civilization reincarnation, where we improve a little bit each time and evolve a bit further before destroying ourselves only to start again.

[Wicket]

I would hope then that it is like civilization reincarnation, where we improve a little bit each time and evolve a bit further before destroying ourselves only to start again.

That's a nice thought. On a slight tangent has anyone read Issac Asimov's 'The Question' which develops this idea a bit. We build a super computer and we learn to harness the power from the sun, this computer in effect starts life and the evolutionary process begins again.