Day 1
It's been one day since every human except you disappeared
from the face of the earth. You're not sure what happened; one moment
there you were living your best life in the middle of a crowded city and the
next, poof- everyone simply disappeared.
What followed was complete chaos.
Cars, trucks and vans- tens of thousands of them,
suddenly had no drivers. Catastrophic crashes and pileups worthy of a
Blues Brothers movie have choked the streets of your city with impassable obstacles
of wrecked and mangled steel. You had to duck for safety into the nearest
building though, because the sky was falling- literally. Without pilots,
planes not currently on autopilot simply plummeted out of the sky like
massive missiles, setting off explosions that rocked the city. Massive
blazes immediately sprang up and with no firefighters to fight them; your
only resort was to begin fleeing the city. Other planes, running on
autopilot, simply ran out of gas and began to fall all over the
countryside. Firestorms erupted all over the earth, fed by the leaking
fuel of millions upon millions of wrecked vehicles.
On day one all you can do is try to get to safety and
out of the heart of the city, which is quickly becoming a raging blaze.
You opt against taking a car, the streets are simply too choked with stalled,
abandoned, and wrecked vehicles. So instead you hop on a bicycle and
pedal for your life. The fires grow to massive proportions, feeding
off the many combustible materials that make up modern city life. By the
time you got to safety, dusk was already falling and the city behind
you glowed bright orange from the flames.
As Day One comes to a close, you manage to find
something to eat at a convenience store. You don't bother saving any
for later, you now have literally an entire world of food at your disposal-
but most of it will go bad very quickly. That's because when night comes,
only part of the city lights up with Automatic Street lights- fire
has damaged the power network, and the lack of humans has caused many
power plants around the world to shut down. Refrigeration will soon fail.
Day 2
You need to think about survival, so Day 2 is spent
scouting out a place to stay in the outskirts of the city- one of the
areas that stills has power. That means the plumbing still works, but
not for long. Without human supervision, nuclear power plants begin to
automatically shut themselves down to avoid meltdowns. Coal, oil, and
natural gas plants are also shutting down as they run out of fuel. Your
city manages to hold out for half the day before it too loses power.
But there's other municipalities powered by renewable
energy, and those will last a bit longer, so you pack up your stuff and siphon
gas to make the necessary trip. The highways are also a mess, but large
enough to be traversable. A good 4 wheel drive vehicle lets you hop
off the road when necessary to avoid big trouble spots.
In the rearview mirror, the unattended fire is still
spreading across the city and even into the surrounding wilderness. There
are no fire departments to manage the blaze, and yours isn't the only city
on fire. By the end of the day, most of the world's major cities have
been devastated by massive, fast-burning fires. If you weren't the last
person on earth, you hope that whoever else was left got out of the
cities as quickly as possible.
On your trip you run across a lot of pets running
loose. These animals have had to face a tough choice- break free from
their homes, cages, or enclosures, or starve to death. Natural instincts
kicked in and now former pets roam free across America and the rest of the
world. Millions upon millions more will die though, locked up in houses,
apartments, or cages with their owners having disappeared. Inside zoos all
across the world, animals that are used to being routinely fed aren't
getting their daily meals. This has caused some of the animals to get
extremely agitated and test the limits of their enclosures. Many of
them too will die in their enclosures, but some will manage to escape and
break free. Lions roam freely on the streets of America and beyond.
Day 3
Big Ben rings out for the last time. The massive clock
needs to be wound every three days, and with no one around to do it the
iconic landmark goes silent forever. Eerily silent, wild animals have
begun to probe the borders of human cities- places they had before avoided
like the plague. The first are the predators, always opportunistic
and looking for an easy meal- and there's plenty of food left lying around
and easily accessible for wild animals to get to. But formerly
domesticated pets make for good prey as well, the animals having few of
their formerly wild instincts and in most cases, never having come
face to face with a predator.
Dogs however have begun to form roving packs, reverting
back to their natural instincts to gather into groups. Smaller dogs end up
meals for the larger dogs, but the smaller breeds are being far more
successful at survival than the larger breeds. Originally, dogs such as
terriers were bred for pest control or hunting small game, and in a
world made up of massive abandoned cities, these smaller breeds find
plenty of game in cats, rats, and other small mammals. Larger
dogs require more calories, and without the instinct to seek out large
prey in the wild, big breeds are the first to start to die off.
Many birds are also starting to enter into a dramatic
decline in population numbers. Seagulls and pigeons for example have
heavily relied on human population centers as a source of easy food-
but with no humans generating trash and organic waste, the food supply has
dried up. Some of these have long forgotten natural hunting instincts,
and who even remembers what pigeons used to eat before they were fed bread
crumbs at city parks, or picked through your garbage bags?
Day 10
The fires have finally died down in most of the world’s
cities, leaving behind smoldering ruins and putting massive plumes of
toxic ash into the sky. You have to survive off bottled water, because
the rain is laden with all kinds of heavy metals and nasty chemicals,
making most water sources completely undrinkable. A general lack of
maintenance has finally caused most of the world’s green energy power
generating plants to finally shut down- but you count yourself lucky
because inside nuclear power plants left unattended, disasters are
unfolding.
Nuclear generators can be managed for a time without
human supervision, but not for long. Eventually the pumps providing
cooling water inevitably fail, and massive steam pressure builds up
inside the heart of each reactor. Explosions rock the plants as one by
one the reactors blow their tops and vent thousands of pounds of highly
radioactive steam. The uncooled fuel rods however continue to melt through
the casing of the reactor and drop onto the floor of the facility. Some
will penetrate even the concrete foundation and might end up contaminating
ground water supplies. For now it's best to steer clear of any nuclear
power plants and remain upstream of them as they vent nuclear materials
into the air and water around them.
Wildlife in the surrounding areas begins to die off
over the next few days from the amount of radiation vented into the
countryside, but the damage is limited in scope. Hundreds of miles from
the nearest nuclear power plant you're safe from the effects, but you've
got a bigger problem.
Bottled water is going to last you a long, long time
as long as you keep the plastic bottles out of the sun- but food
won't last as long. There's canned goods galore, as not even the
huge, city-consuming blazes could eliminate all stashes of preserved
foods- but you're going to be dealing with heavy sodium intake if you
live off preserved goods. There are also real concerns on vitamin deficiencies,
so you supplement your canned diet with vitamins you loot from a
pharmacy. While you're at it, you raid one of the few remaining
physical libraries to get your hands on any medical textbooks you can so
you can prepare for the worst. Knowing first aid is no longer a
nicety, it's an absolute survival necessity.
While you were at it you decided to pick up additional
survival skills. The internet is no more, but you can still find plenty of
survival material in libraries and especially military surplus and
other 'prepper' stores. Knowing how to make fires without artificial aid
is a great skill to have- sure, you have billions upon billions of
lighters to loot at your disposal, but the fuel inside of them can go bad.
Butane is especially prone to evaporating, and might do so in a
matter of days if left out in the open. Gasoline will likewise go bad due
to oxidation, and could last anywhere from a few months to a few years
before either breaking down or evaporating.
You take advantage while you have plenty of available
gas that can be siphoned off other vehicles and drive around to gather supplies
for long term survival. This means tools to help you feed yourself, things
such as fishing poles, rifles, lures, snares, and traps. You
could probably live for a decade or more on non-perishables left all
around the world, but once the gas goes bad you'll have a hell of a
time actually getting around and gathering them up.
Year 1
Formerly domesticated pets have reverted back to feral
lifestyles- at least those that survived the adjustment period of the
first few months. Small breeds have done pretty well for themselves thanks to
the plethora of rats and mice inside human cities. Cats likewise have done
well, being very independent already. Large breeds have fared much
worse though, and few of them remain alive.
Winter was especially hard for the populations of
former pets. Many of these dogs and cats have been moved to places they
couldn't naturally survive winter without human help, and in these
places they've largely died off. More temperate locations such as the
ruins of the city you live next to however have allowed many of these
pets to survive through the winter. As more and more wild animals invade
the cities, even some larger packs of dogs have managed to survive by
grouping together- though there's definitely many more smaller breeds left
than big breeds.
The city looks largely as it did when people
disappeared, minus the burn damage. Grass and weeds have managed to
overgrow any green spaces, especially the city parks which were previously kept
nicely manicured and orderly. There are even blades of grass or resilient
weeds popping up in cracks in the pavement here and there.
It's still mostly predatory animals lurking in the
cities, but they don't go very far in. By now surviving pets have learned
how to band together for protection against mountain lions, wolves,
and even bears, or to avoid them altogether. Some places such as New
York with a large central park have seen herbivores like deer migrate into
the city, but nature is yet to retake enough of the human landscape
to invite many of them in.
With the exception of cities along the equator. Here
the fast growing vegetation has already started to overrun human
settlements. Fast growing vines and bushes have invaded cities in
places like Brazil and equatorial Africa.
Unchecked growth has caused formerly harvested fields
to now play host to a variety of plant life. Traditional crops still grow
abundantly thanks to how widely humans cultivated them, but they no
longer grow in neat and orderly rows. There's no fear of crops like wheat, barley,
or rice ever going extinct, but some crops such as almonds, oranges, and
other fruits no longer grow in many areas of the world. That's because
they only grew where planted because of direct human intervention. By and
large, the crops that humanity depended on and successfully cultivated for
millennia have begun to only appear in their native habitats once more.
Year 5
Massive herds of wild cattle, sheep, and even horses
rein free across the American Great Plains. These are amongst some
of the most successful animals on earth thanks to the sheer quantities that
humans grew them in. Chickens are also doing exceptionally well for
themselves, considering humans grew and killed billions of them each
year. Despite being very easy prey, formerly domesticated animals have
such vast populations that even abundant predation isn't enough to
seriously dent their numbers. This has in turn led to an explosion in predator
species across the United States and beyond. Populations of coyotes,
cougars, bears, and wolves have all bounced back to pre-human
settlement levels. In Europe, where wolves have been extinct
in most places for hundreds of years, massive packs now wander
through human cities grown over in thick vegetation.
Nature has turned former human cities into urban ecological
preserves. Greenery has overtaken gray concrete with astonishing speed,
and young forests have begun to encroach on the outskirts of human
civilization. With new trees come all the wild animals that make their
home there, adding to the speed with which animal life is taking over
former human cities.
You can't rely on canned goods and other non-perishables
anymore, as you no longer have access to gasoline with which to drive
vehicles around and gather food. Instead you've learned to hunt and
fish for your survival, along with plenty of wild gathering like your
ancestors used to do.
Year 10
Moss, flowers, grass, and small trees have wormed their
way into the very heart of human civilization, consuming the slowly
crumbling ruins. This is good for you, because you can make easy
shelter inside the ruins of the city, and with greenery returning to the cities,
animal’s follow- which means food.
You've managed to set up a small farm of sorts for
yourself right in the heart of the city. Rounding up chickens, which
have spread from farms to temperate areas across the country, you build a
coop and have a constant supply of eggs. Cattle may have become wild
again, but are still largely complacent after millennia of domestication,
and it was easy to round them up and even breed them. You don't
bother to pen them in and instead let them wander around on their own-
those you butcher for food are a culinary snob's wet dream, real farm-to-table
pure organic and free range beef.
Dogs still remember how to be man's best friend, but
even more importantly, they know that humans equal easy food. Thus it
was easy for you to re-domesticate a pack of them which help guard your
livestock. In exchange, they get your scraps. You’ve re-domesticated
the dog exactly the way our ancestors did when they were wild
wolves. The kinship between human and canine is based on mutual
benefit and food.
The biggest danger in the last ten years was the
collapse of dams all across the country, unleashing billions of gallons of
water in devastating floods that wiped out entire towns from the map.
With no humans to monitor the water levels and operate sluice gates, water
pressure built and built behind the dams until they finally
burst. Also with no humans to drain the water away for their
cities, farms, water parks, and industry, rivers like the Colorado have
returned to their former glory and caused the collapse of the entire
dam network built along its course. Much like other damned rivers around
the world, the Colorado now runs as wild and free as it did two
hundred years ago.
Year 20
The night sky has started having additional falling
stars. After two decades in orbit and with no commands from the ground,
satellites have begun to fall back to earth. Even in the vacuum of
space and high above the earth's atmosphere, satellites still experience a
tiny bit of drag from gas and dust. Even if it's just a few
molecules the satellite is slamming into, all those impacts add up,
leeching speed from the satellite and inevitably causing it to fall
back down to earth. Other manmade objects like the
international space station only took weeks to fall back to earth in
a fiery wreck, and you count yourself lucky you weren't anywhere
underneath the hundreds of tons of burning, molten material
crashing to earth at thousands of miles an hour.
Radiation has begun to clear from areas affected by the
meltdown of nuclear power plants, but it'll still be a while before it's truly
safe to live in those regions. That hasn't stopped nature from
reclaiming the sites however, and there are even populations of wild
animals living there. Their numbers remain low for now, but will grow over
time.
Without flood control measures, erosion has been a real
problem in many man-made settlements. Rivers have carved new
channels through landscapes geoengineering by mankind and his massive earth-moving
machines. The city of Venice, without regular maintenance and upkeep of
its historic buildings and canals, is now more underwater than above it,
and sea levels have risen all around the world.
Despite there being no more human activity to drive
climate change, lingering emissions from billions of cars,
factories, ships, trains, and other polluters are still in huge
quantities in the atmosphere. These will break down over time,
but for now the temperature has increased by half of a degree Fahrenheit-
or .3 of a degree Celsius. Polar and Antarctic ice continues to melt,
albeit at a greatly reduced rate, and sea levels have risen several
inches. Coastal cities like Miami have been largely swamped by
increased sea levels and storms, and all around the world massive man-made container
ships have long been sunk. Now they make for artificial reefs which are
home to rebounding fish populations.
Year 40
Age is catching up with you. In the civilized world
entering your sixties would not be a big deal, but in this new world
without modern medicine or modern conveniences, you’ve been lucky to
make it this far. Most people would have died of injury, disease, or
simple malnutrition by their forties, but you still have some of the
benefits of civilization to keep you hale and healthy. Having
firearms and plenty of ammunition, which lasts for decades if not longer,
helps keep you well fed. If you had to hunt the old way, with spear
or bow and arrow, you probably wouldn’t be as well fed as you are now.
Still, it's becoming very difficult for you to keep
surviving in this world turned wild. The city is barely recognizable
anymore, and places where millions of pedestrians and shoppers used
to flock are now completely overgrown by urban forests. Skyscrapers have
years ago started falling in on themselves as their foundations and
structural cores weaken due to exposure. Their windows were the
first to go within months or a year of two of humans disappearing, and
this exposed their inner core to rot and mildew. After a few decades,
even the mightiest skyscrapers started falling. Now they look like
artificial mountains that resemble broken, jagged teeth.
Global warming has at last been halted, and the earth
has topped out at just over half a degree Celsius, or 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit. Polar
ice loss has likewise been halted, and the seas have stopped rising. Over
the next century the polar ice will return as the earth readjusts to
a pre-industrial age environment.
Fish populations all around the world- formerly on the
very edge of complete collapse- have recovered as well. The ocean is truly
and well wild and now teems with life as it once did. Populations
of tuna, once fished to scarcity, have returned in force, as have vast
quantities of other formerly overfished species. The coral reefs have
also mounted a great comeback despite the ongoing effects of coral
bleaching, and the wrecks of tens of thousands of human ships have helped
endangered corals find small pockets of shelter on which to anchor
themselves and bloom.
Forests are once more reclaiming the American east
coast, and London is slowly but surely reverting back into a swamp. It'll
still take a century or more for nature to completely undo the
dramatic environmental engineering that humans have conducted over
millennia, but eventually even the mightiest concrete buildings will
crumble and break. You won't be around to see it, but within a thousand
years forests will have completely recovered from the effects of humanity
all around the world. Not long after only a few human ruins will
remain identifiable. Plastics however, which we produced in
staggering abundance, will remain for over 25,000 years or even longer,
becoming humanity's tombstone and only sign that we once ruled
the world. Somehow, that seems fitting.
You have no descendants to pass on your experiences or
knowledge of a world before humans disappeared, and your only friends are
the ever growing pack of dogs and livestock that have kept you
company for decades. Without you the dogs will revert back to their wild
instincts and prey on the livestock, but there's so many of them by now
that both populations will thrive and survive.
Life is hard without modern conveniences or the help of
others, and shortly after your sixtieth birthday and forty years being the last
human on earth; you close your eyes for the last time. As you fade away
you wonder who will inherit this new world- will a new primate
species rise up and become sentient? It seems likely, as apes are the best
adapted for advanced intelligence and the tool use required building
a civilization. Perhaps then the entire process will simply repeat itself,
a new great ape civilization built on the ruins of the old one.