The husband is busy finishing up his MBA before he deploys, so that's why I'm writing about so many TV shows. Anyway, today I watched that National Geographic show Aftermath: Population Zero. I wanted to watch it after Lileks wrote about it, but I guess I remembered him writing more favorably about it. I checked his post again during the show and realized that it wasn't exactly a glowing report. What he said was this: "If the Aftermath show has any message, it’s how useless the world would be without people." I thought he meant that's what the program showed. Nope, that's just what Lileks himself took away from the story.
I can't get past the absurdity of the claim that all humans disappeared from the face of the earth in the blink of an eye, leaving their cars and microwaves running, but no animals were touched. I can't think of any scenario that would make that happen, so some of the animal scenes seemed pretty dumb. Though I did thoroughly enjoy watching a skunk eat Frankenberry cereal.
I did enjoy watching the physics of crumbling buildings. But overall I spent most of the time rolling my eyes at how evil and awful human beings have been for the poor earth. Yep, we ruined everything.
Lileks again:
I’d love to read an interview with Gaia in which she says that her goal all along was to come up with a species that could produce Beethoven and make rockets to send the music deep into space.
Now there's something to mull over...
Posted by Sarah at March 30, 2008 04:13 PM | TrackBack
If you want to see a creepy world with animals but (almost) no people, check out some of the Chernobyl documentary stuff. If you want, I can find you some good Russian sites with videos and/or pics.
Sig
Posted by: Sig at March 31, 2008 02:21 PM