"After Earth" - what would the world look like?

[t0p]

I haven't seen the movie "After Earth" yet. But I was watching an advertisment for it on TV last night and it got me thinking: if the entire human race left earth right now (to live on another planet or whatever), what would the earth look like to our descendants if they decided to come have a look around in a thousand years time? What mark have we made that would still be distinguishable? And a back-up question: how long would it take for all marks of our civilisation(s) to be erased?

[Cheesemill]

If we wait until the Long Now Foundation finish their clock before we leave then that will still be around in 10,000 years

http://longnow.org/clock/

[SantaFe]

History Channel had a TV show based on that: http://www.history.com/shows/life-after-people

Was pretty good.

[deadflowr]

I too have only seen the ads, but I wonder if sabertooth tigers will really make a comeback.

[t0p]

My (and your) Friend Google showed me this.

Poor doggies.

[TNFrank]

We saw the movie last weekend, pretty decent I though. I really don't think animals would change much in 1K years, there may be more of them or many less of them(man has done alot to bring the Whitetail Deer population back to numbers that are actually greater then it was before Europeans came to America) but I'm sure many momuments and stuff would stil be around. I mean look at Stonehenge or the Great Pyramids, they've been around for a few thousand years if not longer.

[Max Blyss]

I think the rats would take over and evolve into a sentient, warlike species... They'd be like us except with pointier features and worse breath. Oh, and fur.

[Copper Bezel]

Don't forget that we had fur until we became bipeds. The fact that we don't is an adaptation to heat loss for long-distance running, which bipedalism made possible for us, but most biped species do end up as runners, don't they? And you need grasping hands first, before the bipedalism, or the front limbs will just atrophy (T. rex rats!)

Generalist, rodent-like creatures are a good evolutionary starting point. The ancestor of all living mammals was similar, as was the first marsupial that colonized Australia and diversified into the marsupial wildlife we see there today. But that's without other mammals already filling all of those niches. For a mass extinction event, you'd expect the little rodent-like things to be the most likely to survive and also be the most suited to diversify into unoccupied niches, but just removing humans, who aren't in any particular competition with rodents now, wouldn't really change their opportunities all that much.

It's hard to imagine where sapience might evolve again, because it happened more or less by accident the first time - primarily a result of pressure for the parts of the brain involved in handling large social groups and the parts involved in toolmaking, I think. But I think the article's right that the first thing you'd see with the removal of humans would be the return of the large herbivores and their predators - we wiped those species out recently enough that even if we weren't exerting any pressure on those niches today, they still wouldn't have bounced back.

Really, next up for developing sapience might be the dolphins, if they're not there yet. = )

[PJs Ronin]

Cockroaches and ivy will rule. Those two are indestructible.

[QIII]

It used to be said that cockroaches and rats would survive a nuclear war.

The advice, then, was to get under your refrigerator if you saw a mushroom cloud.