I don’t manage to watch a lot of TV on a regular basis. When I am home and watching I am often in and out of any program doing other things. Sometimes I am interested enough to stay put between commercials. I like to watch a verity of things, but one channel I often check is the History Channel. There is a program on the History channel that has me a bit riled at the moment. Its title is “Life After People.
This program is one of a new breed of animation productions that bring us the most realistic views of things we could not have even imagined before. One such program aired on the National Geographic Channel called “Draining the Ocean.”
This program uses GCI animation to reveal the landscape beneath the water of the earth’s oceans. CGI is short for Computer-generated Imagery.
The “Life After People” program raises my hackles a bit however.
There is more ridiculous programming on TV than ever before. The situational comedy that used to be the main staple of evening programming has gone to the dogs. None of it is fit to watch. The language and innuendos are guttural. Talk shows are sewage to indecent. Reality shows are below stupid. The people who create them and the people who watch them are brain dead.
And thrown into this mix is a program about what will happen to the earth after humans no longer exist.
I won’t even get into the theological point of view on the impossibility of this happening. But even if the earth could outlast the human era, the question has to be paramount in any sensible human’s thought process of “Who cares?”
What kind of thought pattern does one have to create a program to try to imagine and present what the world will become after man is gone? As a person who is very convinced that the earth was inhabited for a very long time prior to humans appearing and knowing the earth did pretty well without human intervention I believe man’s disappearance would not greatly impact much of anything.
I had a geology professor in college who was adamant that within a very few thousand years of man’s demise the world would show absolutely no evidence that man ever existed, except perhaps in very small instances of fossil records.
He briefly discussed some of the major works of man, like the Great Wall of China, one of the only architectural structures that can be seen from space, major dams with large lakes, and enormous metropolitan areas. Because the earth continues to shift due to plate tectonic activity, the Great Rift through the middle of Africa and the sea floor spreading in the mid Atlantic as well as the subduction zones for example, the surface of the earth as we know it will soon be gone and replaced by a new surface that never knew the presence of humans.
So I want to call up the producers and ask them if anyone has ever called them to say they might be worried about the earth when humans are gone. Does it matter what we think? Does it matter what happens. If not, then what is the point?
