Last night I had the pleasure of watching a documentary on the extinction of mankind. After watching the latest episode of The Apprentice, I must say it came as something of a blessed relief.The gravel-voiced narrator postulated that one day humans will disappear into the ether, like a spaceman's fart into the troposphere. Could be 3 billion years, could be a week next Thursday if the pigs keep sneezing.
Once we're gone, the planet will be empty. Quiet. Clean. An Eden without even an Adam and / or Eve to fuck it all up. The world will shake off mankind like a dose of pubic lice and in the immediate hangover period begin to heal itself.
Buildings will crumble. Holy shit, will they crumble. A good 78% of the documentary was dedicated to computer simulations of national landmarks flaking and disintegrating like a chalky dog turd on a hot pavement.And not just the recognised landmarks that are destroyed in Hollywood action films on a yearly basis, oh no. Everything. Within 1000 years there would be little evidence that mankind ever infested the planet. From your house to my house to Noel Edmonds's garden gazebo. Every last remnant dissolved.
It's around this time that all other life on the planet would breathe a sigh of relief so deep that Mars will be able to smell what each one of them had for lunch.
Life in the oceans will return to its once plentiful levels, hunted species will once again flourish and household pets will...well, that's where it gets interesting. Their fates will be decided based on a readily quantifiable variable - i.e. how awesome they are.
Pets lacking in awesome...I'm thinking goldfish and budgies for a start....will be fucked. Give them a week at most. Fish in particular are so stupid that they can't even figure out how to breathe air. A fortnight of swimming around in their own shit without a kindly sentient being to sprinkle nutritional flakes into their immediate line of sight and they'll go belly-up.
Budgies are possibly resourceful enough to at least think about escaping, but they are notoriously disorganised and the whole affair would most likely fall apart in the planning stages.
Dogs...well, dogs are a mixed bag. I love them to bits but they are fucking cretins. To my mind, keeping a dog as a pet is like having a friend with severe learning difficulties. One minute they're good as gold, the next they're wiping their arse on the curtains, making indescribable noises and dribbling in your crotch. Leave them in a locked room and they'll be stumped. They'll pace up and down, slowly lose any semblance of sentience that they might have once had, lay down and die. Trust me. I've tried it.
On top of this, a high proportion of dogs are genetic freaks. Bred to buggery over the centuries, they've been engineered to have very silly short legs...or squished up noses which make them look oh-so-cute but are about as much use in hunting as a blunderbuss made out of Mechanically Reclaimed Meat.
In a darkly enjoyable case of Survival of the Least Stupid-Looking, most of the dogs you'd see wowing the Crufts crowds or shivering in one of Paris Hilton's handbags would be dead as shit.
The mongrels would last a bit longer, but it'd be an ugly life. Scavenging the dead, drinking from sewers, they would be little better than the Argos Saturday staff.
Pussycats on the other hand would treat these cataclysmic global changes with utter indifference. If the documentary is to be believed (and how could you not believe a documentary on the distant future that has been produced by the History Channel?) they would hang around for a few hours to see if we were coming back, before packing their bags and nonchalantly pissing off to pastures new.
Skyscrapers now overgrown with flora and infested with mice would become their playgrounds-cum-larders in the sky. Like Tom and Jerry infused with the spirit of Mad Max, it would be quite a sight to behold. Legions of cats romping, hunting, possibly even skipping through hectares of office space reclaimed by jungle. They wouldn't even think about us. Not for a second would they get all misty-eyed at memories of those weird bald monkeys who knew how to use tin openers.
And that's why they're brilliant...because they're our friends, our companions...yet deep in those eyes, deep deep down in those glassy animal eyes burns a healthy indifference to our destruction. Which means that they can only ever land on their feet.
Once we all die out, won't there be massive fires raging all over the world? That's what I heard...because there would be nobody to regulate the Nuclear power stations etc and they'd just burn up....then again it was a Tanya Gold article, so it could have just been shit.
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