I went to see a movie this weekend and was disgusted and amazed by a pre-movie advertisement for an apparently new series on the History Channel called, "Aftermath: The World After Humans." It was disgusting.

The clip showed a bunch of world-famous structures (Golden Gate Bridge, Eifel Tower, etc.) crumbling into dust. Then someone being interviewed said something to the effect of, "Within a thousand years it would be like we were never here" as the visual shows a time-elapse of a highway cracking apart and weeds/grass slowly replacing the highway with a carpet of greenness as the highway disappears.

Read the description of the series on the History Channel website:

What would happen if, tomorrow, every single person on Earth simply disappeared? Poof! Gone. Not dead, just gone. A world without people, where city streets are still populated by cars, but without drivers. How long would our skyscrapers and homes last if we abandoned them? How would our animals and pets fare without us? How would the weather and the seas, the trees and the wildlife react if we stopped hunting, fishing and farming? Aftermath will explore this world no human will ever see, one where carbon dioxide brings down skyscrapers, dogs become wolves, and the Statue of Liberty outlasts the Eiffel Tower as the longest-lived large buildings on Earth.

I suppose the question itself is not unreasonable. How long would our buildings last without maintenance, etc.? But to build an entire TV program around it seems either morbid or almost human-hating.

The impression I got watching the clip at the movie theater was the second: That quote where they said "After a thousand years you wouldn't even know we were ever here" as a highway breaks up and turns into grassland just struck me as if it was wishful thinking on the part of the producers. The combined graphic and audio track seemed to convey the idea that "Look, within a thousand years it'd be so much better because we'd have beautiful grasslands rather than this ugly highway."

Doing some Googling, one observer that apparently actually watched the show said his conclusion was: "Basically, we've really f*cked up this world just over the last 100 yrs but nature would reclaim the world soon after." So it seems like I pretty much guessed the spin of the program correctly.

It's like there are some people in the environmental movement that think we'd be doing us all a favor if we'd just die and let the planet recover so the snakes, cows, spotted owls, and unicorns could just live in peace. Luckily, the latest Rasmussen poll indicates that only one out of three people now believe that humans are to blame for global warming. That despite the barrage of propaganda in the mainstream media--and programs like this one--that constantly convey the message that humans are doing evil things to the environment.

Of course, the irony of the fact that speculative psuedo-science about the future is being broadcast on a channel ostensibly about our past has to be mentioned.

There was a time when the History Channel was actually an educational channel about, well, history. It started going down hill when, at some point, they started broadcasting psuedo-science analysis of the Bible, trying to use science to either confirm or reject passages in the Bible. Of course they could never conclusively confirm or reject anything, but it was clear they were trying to use psuedo-science to try to undermine the Bible. I guess that particular method of trolling for ratings ran its course and now there's just not enough history and psuedo-history to fill a channel... so they're going to adopt the "humans are bad for the planet" spin and engage in speculative psuedo-science about the future.

The History Channel is now running programming about the future.

Of course, that's not entirely surprising when "The Learning Channel" (which used to be about learning) is now called "TLC" and I believe their primary source of income is from shows about tattoo shops.

These channels should just consolidate into a single channel called WFR: Whoring for Ratings.