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How long do you think it would take the Earth to recover from humans.

Ystranc

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This pandemic has made me start to consider some "what if" kind of questions. To put it in context the last major pandemic (Spanish flu) caused a paradigm shift in the way society worked, the demand for labour outstripped supply meaning that workers could choose who to work for and demand higher wages. It was the end of many of the great country estates as the workers had either died of the flu, died in the trenches or seen had more of the world and had expanded their horizons.
I believe that this pandemic is more of a warning of what could have been than a full blown mass killer. It is thought to kill in the region of 2% of people that it infects, it could have been so much worse if such an easily transmitted virus had a higher percentage death toll. Two percent is bad enough but what if it had been 60% (maybe governments might have taken it more seriously)
 
for this go-round one of the lasting legacies is going to be the long term recovery issues for a fair percentage of the people that get it. it's not something that's talked about in the press much but the lingering effects of having had the virus can be pretty scary: internal organ damage, even brain damage, waves of micro clots in the blood, long term respiratory ailments, etc. not pretty, and those folks are going to need care, possibly for the rest of their lives.

on the up side i loved watching nature recover and resurge as we went through the first lock-down. as soon as vehicles were off the roads and air traffic went to zero the wildlife took on a whole new level of activity. more birdsong, birds and mammals moving out of their retreats and down closer into the towns, quite a bit more seabirds staying longer along the coastal flats. i think we'd be surprised how much wildlife there actually is if -- for whatever reason -- we quit making so much damn noise and things got a lot more peaceful.
 
In answer to the title of the post......not very long at all......with our total demise/extinction.........Mother Nature would do her thing and start the healing and cleaning process reclaim what was hers in the beginning.
But then......who would know.....who would see the end results.....not us..........we would all be long gone :rofl:
 
I may have been a bit maudlin when I made the original post but looking around this morning I'm feeling much more positive.... it has been a mast year for oaks, the ground around my home is carpeted with acorns. Without the people (and the sheep) I'm sure Wales would revert to being oak forest within a generation or two.
I doubt that the roads or bridges would last more than a few years without maintenance. Land slips, blocked drainage and fallen trees would make them impassable for ordinary vehicles long before that. Without the constant maintenance (or at least patching up) I believe our infrastructure would soon revert to wild.
Ocean floors have also shown surprising resilience but I can't see any way past the long term effects of plastic waste pollution on sea life.
Rainforests are often described as the lungs of the world but we seem to ignore the massive contribution of the oceans and sea life to our weather and our atmosphere. We need to start respecting them a lot more as a species.
 
Once Nature gets a start on reclaiming what Humans have seemingly destroyed the reclaiming accelerates. I understand that areas close Chernobyl are now a developing as areas of notable increases in wildlife and plant/tree regeneration. I read somewhere that there are estimated to be 7 times more Wolf Packs than when the Nuclear Plant was operating.
But, the Boffins estimate that 30.000 years must pass before the inner or Red Zone will be safe for humans..
 
Once Nature gets a start on reclaiming what Humans have seemingly destroyed the reclaiming accelerates. I understand that areas close Chernobyl are now a developing as areas of notable increases in wildlife and plant/tree regeneration. I read somewhere that there are estimated to be 7 times more Wolf Packs than when the Nuclear Plant was operating.
But, the Boffins estimate that 30.000 years must pass before the inner or Red Zone will be safe for humans..
Yet people are already moving back to the area, families that have been disenfranchised by conflict in other parts of Ukraine have moved there in small numbers to restart their lives. Many old people never really left.
 
Yes it’s a good read but a bit disturbing when they have to plant platinum disks with pictograms about the danger of contaminated areas just in case the English language changes so radically that warning signs can’t be read in the lifetime of the nuclear waste!
 
Interesting idea, a pictogram or ideogram that conveys a universal warning. The waste isolation pilot plant in the US is a deep burial site for nuclear waste. They have been looking at exactly this problem and not yet found a solution.
 
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