MovieChat Forums > On the Beach (2000) Discussion > Switching the power off, the end of huma...

Switching the power off, the end of human life.

posted 14 years ago by richard_bray
9 replies | jump to latest

We watched the film again last night in Tokyo, sitting in the not-so-distant shadow of the Fukushima reactors' potential melt down. As we watched the scene of the Australian naval officer getting ready to commit suicide with his family, walking around the house, switching the main power off in the outside fuse box, we suddenly paraphrased the oft-repeated joke, "Would the last person to leave the earth, kindly switch off the light...."

All human life ended. We started thinking...

If in the distant future, say 1,000 years or even 1,000,000 years in the future, someone or something was to ever visit this 3rd stone from the sun, what would they find? Would there be any evidence of life left? If there was, what would they make of it?

Thoughts?

[–] DBSAABER 14 years ago

Hello,

I just saw the film for the first time. With all the special effect madness these days , this was a refreshingly good film. Yes there was soap opera melodrama, but that is nearer to real life than bad cgi scenes of world capitals going up in smoke.

Realistically, within 1000 years only massive stone structures like the pyramids, bits of the great wall and mount Rushmore will remain, everything else will be gone, or be unrecognizable.

Alien visitors could detect man made chemicals, compounds and other substances if they knew what to look for, though they may be unaware that they are not naturally occurring, it all depends on their technology.

The problem is that anything still around by then, beyond the microscopic, will be covered by nature... city ruins will appear as natural mountain ranges, the great stone structures will be totally hidden by sand and dirt.

Without outside confirmed knowledge that intelligent life existed here, they could search for years and find nothing specific about us. Even today much of the earth is ocean, and much of the land has nothing permanent enough to survive 1000 years, it would really be the proverbial search for a needle in a haystack.

Depending if other animals survive, they could guess as to our appearance, structure and function if natural selection is also the process of evolution on their home world. If our extinction takes out our primate cousins too, then there would be little chance of them knowing what to base a guess on.

----
Our hearts, minds and prayers go out to those in Japan, we hope that the aid and supplies arrive for those in need and that the Fukushima situation is resolved before things get worse.

db

[–] janewaysman 12 years ago

actually, Mt Rushmore woulnt be still in exsistance, it would probably crumble in less then 100 years, as today with great care and maintance its kept in top shape, but too many factors would doom it without people to take care of it.

[–] greg-233 14 years ago

"If in the distant future, say 1,000 years or even 1,000,000 years in the future, someone or something was to ever visit this 3rd stone from the sun, what would they find? Would there be any evidence of life left? If there was, what would they make of it?"

There was a documentary made a while back called Life After People. I think there are clips of it on YouTube. Even if there was no evidence of human life left on Earth a million years in the future, there would still be those probes drifting through space. The SF writer Stephen Baxter speculated that the last human artifact, Voyager I, would crumble into aluminium dust twenty billion years from now.

[–] clacton0 14 years ago

Yes watch the show Life After People its really quite good.
Our houses will not be round long after us maybe 250 years to 300 years at most.

Some buildings like sky scrappers will last about 500 years before they fell down.
The Grand Canyon Dam will be one of the last things left maybe a few thousand years.

Plants will soon take over everything in just a few years.
The only things left will be the stuff in Space by then.
But not satellites.

MY Forum < http://www.hostingphpbb.com/forum/ >

[–] IfOnlyItWereTrue 13 years ago

Someone forgot to mention pyramids ... already been here for 1000's of years and likely to be here for much longer.

The geographical effect that cities have had upon the earth will be very noticeable. It will take alot longer than a 1000 years to remove all obvious trace of human existance from the planet.

Geologically not much happens in a 1000 year period, you'd need something like a new iceage with glaciers covering the majority of the northern hemisphere to cover and clear the majority of the obvious evidence of human existence. Even if this also happened to the southern hemisphere you'd still have the equatorial region.

Granted everything maybe covered in greenery, or enveloped by the sand, but this in no way means that the evidence wouldn't be blindingly obvious to an inteligent observer.

[–] greg-233 13 years ago

There was a documentary similar to Life After People called Aftermath: Population Zero:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkMXhKj0D4w

[–] tomtac 13 years ago

My take on the Life After People program's answer to this question ...

First, lots and lots of stuff would be just gone in one thousand years. Most houses would have crumbled to ruin in a century, rubble in among the trees. A ship could fly directly over Manhattan and not notice that those hills and trees and brooks there seem to have a regular pattern; that is, the last skyscraper would fall after only about 250 years, and nature would have covered it all soon after.

.... A huge factor is that all the stuff we've been building from concrete is -steel- -reinforced- concrete. While concrete can last thousands of years, the steel expands and contracts a lot, and so steel reinforced concrete goes to rubble pretty fast.

Second, then ... is that old stuff like the pyramids and the Colosseum and other structures that aren't steel reinforced, well the Life After People show stated that they might still be there in 30,000 years. So yes, aliens that visited the Earth could find structures, but they'd have to look.

Third, and what I thought was the most surprising, is that biological artifacts might last the longest. The show made sure that it mentioned some species of sheep dog that they thought would be still herding sheep thousands of years from now. They NEED the sheep, and the sheep need the dogs. The dogs supposedly would breed true for a long time, because if another breed of dog, or wolf, or coyote would show up, the sheep dog would not say 'hey, lets make puppies!' to the strangers ... instead, their reaction to any strange dogs is always 'Just what are you trying to do, get at my sheep?'

So, none of the stuff that we think is really great will be obvious in a thousand years. But if an alien race came and took a good look, they could tell we were here. But not find out that much about us unless they find something like a time capsule.

[–] janewaysman 12 years ago

we would still have all the moon artifacts, the plaques, remainders of the LEMS, and since there is no attmospere, they wont rust....RIP and God's Speed, Neil Armstrong!!

[–] tomtac 13 years ago

> We watched the film again last night in Tokyo, sitting
> in the not-so-distant shadow of the Fukushima reactors'
> potential melt down. As we watched the scene of the
> Australian naval officer getting ready to commit suicide
> with his family, walking around the house, switching
> the main power off in the outside fuse box, we suddenly
> paraphrased the oft-repeated joke, "Would the last person
> to leave the earth, kindly switch off the light...."

[snip]

> Thoughts?

I recently read the novel. Apparently, he switched off the power because his wife insisted. She thought that if he left it on, a spark or short circuit could set the house on fire, and she wanted to think the house would last a long, long time after them.