I used to show The Day the Universe Changed to my students. I LOVE that series, but also the others you mention.
Not quite in the same philosophical class, but I recommend The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. If humans were suddenly gone, what would happen in this world? Backed by careful research he details how various environments would change. (New York subways would flood in a day, the forests would all come back in a century, and the nuclear waste from reactors would poison much of the earth for longer than we want to believe.)
I saw something like that--maybe had a different title. They showed what things would look like after various intervals of years. Spooky. But eventually the last molecules of the Great Wall would be broken down and all trace of us would be gone. No more Bach, no more Shakespeare.
What you describe is something different. Weisman's is a book, not a television series and concerned not with leaving a trace but of how damage would be repaired. He begins with the most optimistic result of humans vanishing. We know the forests would recover because that's what happened in the NE once European settlers understood that the sequence of reforestation was not what they assumed + the climate and soil were not optimal for farming. Forests were allowed to restore themselves and they did. ... some aspects of human development are not so easily repaired.
I used to show The Day the Universe Changed to my students. I LOVE that series, but also the others you mention.
Not quite in the same philosophical class, but I recommend The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. If humans were suddenly gone, what would happen in this world? Backed by careful research he details how various environments would change. (New York subways would flood in a day, the forests would all come back in a century, and the nuclear waste from reactors would poison much of the earth for longer than we want to believe.)
I saw something like that--maybe had a different title. They showed what things would look like after various intervals of years. Spooky. But eventually the last molecules of the Great Wall would be broken down and all trace of us would be gone. No more Bach, no more Shakespeare.
Thanks for responding to the posts!
What you describe is something different. Weisman's is a book, not a television series and concerned not with leaving a trace but of how damage would be repaired. He begins with the most optimistic result of humans vanishing. We know the forests would recover because that's what happened in the NE once European settlers understood that the sequence of reforestation was not what they assumed + the climate and soil were not optimal for farming. Forests were allowed to restore themselves and they did. ... some aspects of human development are not so easily repaired.