Did anyone see "Earth without people"?

if you actually believed in the whole god thing, i think he might help the situation a bit, duh

When I started looking at the show, I didn't have any idea to "compare" it to j.w.'s. It wasn't even on my mind. However, after a while, I saw that this scenario doesn't seem to fit well with the j.w. doctrine, in my opinion.

By the way, I never was a j.w., but just from researching it, I can't help but connect this show with them.

Hubert

Hubert,
History Channel had done just a single one-hour show about a year ago and are now starting the series. I didn't see it this week, but I assume its the same scenario...

cameo-d,
The scenario they build upon is that ALL humans have died. They don't explain how EVERY human perished, it's more about providing stunning visuals of what would happen after all humans were gone but everything else continued as usual... Bridges and buildings collapsing. Domestic dogs would likely die off if they didn't interbreed with coyotes or wolves. Most cats would be able to survive if they rediscover their feral instincts. Stuff like that. Remember, it's just a TV show. The prospect of everyone dying or "disappearing" all at once is extremely unlikely, but thats the premise they had used in the program I saw. It would be much more likely that there would be many survivors of any disease or disaster, but much of what they describe would even then still apply.

I thought it was interesting from the JW perpective since only 6 million survivors, even if quickly joined by some resurrected, would still be trapped in the decaying remnants of the previous civilization. And the show didn't include pictures of all the mangled, rotting human bodies that the dubs get to incorporate as garden fertilizer, either.

B the X

Billy the ex Bethelite: Several hundred thousand survivors can resurrect civilization by concentrating their numbers in a few towns or small cities while scavenging the rest. Stephen Kings The Stand, its silly mysticism notwithstanding, is a good example of how a handful of survivors can bring a city back to life.

If I were in such a post apocalyptic scenario I would do the same while letting most cities rot. Building a new civilization, not maintaining the old one, would be the goal of the survivors.

Think of it this way: The show is a thought experiment. Einstein came up with thought experiments to tease out the physics involved in situations that are very unlikely to happen in real life. A twin travelling at 99% the speed of light and then returning home to his brother is not something we could reasonably expect to ever happen, but such a scenario instructs us about the processes involved. Same thing with the History Channel program. It is all about natural processes of decay and how nature reclaims the constructed environment that humans have created. It happens all the time around us in small ways without any extinction of the human species (such as the town near Chernobyl that was evacuated and never resettled because of radiation). But the scenario explored in the program is a pedagogical tool that allows one to consider in the fullest form how these processes would operate in the absence of humans.

"The show is a thought experiment"

That's true about the show Leo but hubert turned it into a post apocalyptic analogy involving the witnesses. While the witness take on this is absurd it would make an interesting thought experiment of its own to imagine the earth with 99.99% of humanity gone as opposed to 100%.

That bridge in the opening of the show is about 2 miles away from me over the San Luis Rey river. I ride my bike down there and go over it. It was built in 1925 and a replacement bridge was built around 1990. It is narrow with a sharp turn leading to it, on a major highway, so both ends of the bridge saw lots of auto crashes over the years. Parts of the side rail were recast after being knocked off, and debris from the crashes can be found in the river bed below.

http://bridgehunter.com/ca/san-diego/san-luis-rey-river/