The Ruins of the Present

predatory technology right. It is well deserved ressed. I think he has been working his little heart out out there. But anyway, today we're joined by a special guest co host, our friend and co worker, Christian. Christian introduce yourself. Hey guys, I'm Christian Sager. I'm a writer and host here at How Stuff Works. I started out working on Stuff of Genius, one of our shows, and I'm currently a writer with these guys on both Brain Stuff and What the Stuff.

Those are two of our video shows video shows. It is a distinct pleasure to have you with us today. Christian. Thanks, I'm happy to be here, especially since we're going to be talking about various features of destruction and decay, and that's actually what we think about when we think of you. It's what I associate mostly with your face. It makes sense. No, not in plock marks and the age. No no, no, no no no, not not your face as a decaying thing. But like um, next to those concepts sort of in

the dictionary, there's the idea of Christian Sager. That's accurate. You are pretty metal, so I'm probably I mean, I don't want to put myself on the back, but I'm probably the most metal person at out stuff works. Well, we are glad that we could have you here to to talk about ruins and the future of ruins, right, ruins. I mean, usually we don't get to talk about ruins on a podcast about the future because ruins are something

we associate with the past. But since we are talking about ruins, I thought it would be the only occasion I ever get to read Percy Biss Shelley on the Forward Thinking podcast. So we will begin with a short reading of Ozzymandias by P. B. Shelly. Do it. I met a traveler from an antique land who said, two vast and trunkless legs of stones stand in the desert near them on the sand, half sunk, A shattered visage lies who's frown and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command?

Tell that it's sculptor. Well dos passions read? Which yet survives? Stamped on these lifeless things, the hand that mocked them, in the heart that fed on the pedestal, these words appear. My name is Ozzymandias, King of kings. Look on my works, he mighty and despair. Nothing beside remains round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bear the loan and level sands stretched far away. He's nicely done. Thank you

for that won the poetry slam. And I also that if Shelley was alive today, he would totally be the singer in a black metal band. I know it is very black metal. It's like it's very serious and death and destruction and time watches everything away. But it's also got a kind of great, cheesy dust in the wind quality to it. Yeah, so yes, part black metal, part Kansas. Yeah. Yeah, well, and I like the schadenfreud to it too, like it's it's very much like like let's suck a look at

that guy. Well, I like how the line look on my works you mighty, and despair takes on an ironic double meaning, I believe in the way the king. I think he's referring to the Egyptian King Ramsey's the second, also known as Ozzy Mandius. Uh. He's sang at the other kings like, look at this stuff I've built you stuff. Yeah, you can't build anything like this. You should despair. But really, to the reader, it starts to take on the idea

of time. We're all going to look on his works in despair because this happens to all of us, everybody in the Yeah, the loan and level sands where we get brought down by time. Now, this may sound like kind of a bleak place to begin a podcast about the future, and so it's not going to be all death and destruction. We wanted to look at the physical features of civilization and imagine what they're going to look

like in the future. What what will the cities of today look like in five hundred years, a thousand years, two thousand years from the present. What will future humans see if they visit the ruins that are to them, What the ruins of ancient Rome are to us? Yeah, and so how would you like to start with that, Joe. First, let's limit the scope a little bit of what we're

talking about here, Like, let's let's put out some definitions. Okay, So if we're going to try to imagine the future ruins of modern civilization, we should sort of define our terms. And one of the first things I want to get out of the way is the definition of civilization, because sometimes the word civilization can take on a value judgment connotation, like a thing that is civilized is good. A thing that's uncivilized is like impolite or improper. You know, you'd say, Oh,

my friend Johnny, he's always urinating in public. That's uncivilized behavior. Or oh she doesn't serve that kind of tea in her home, how uncivilized, right right? Or as Henry Rollins has been known to say, you're so civilized, do you get brutalized? Yes, that is not at all the way

we mean the word here. We mean civilization more in the historical or archaeological sense, which has a lot of connotations, but overall denotes a settled lifestyle in densely populated urban areas, or in word cities city life, and in fact, the English words city and civilization. I think both have their root in the same Latin terms like civitatum or civitas, which, from what I can tell it has kind of an abstract and complex definition. But it has to do with

being a citizen or the citizen ry. And what does that have to do with ruins? Well, most, though certainly not all, ruins as we experience them today, come from these larger civilizations as opposed to the less populous and less civilized in this sense, cultures, cultures that don't build large monuments or large buildings, you know, right, certainly functional

or artistic either one. Um and you know by which we what we really mean is that it's easier for people to kind of trip across a four fifty foot tall pyramid UM than even very complex systems of roads or eerie aation that might be buried under a few layers of sediment in a dessert somewhere. UM. And we are getting better at the ladder, by the way, And there's some really interesting research going into that through like new satellite imaging techniques and other technologies. But that is

a subject for an entirely different podcast. Yeah, that's interesting that it brings up the issue of that there's sort of a differential survival rate for different physical remnants of society. So you have some things that we build in our cities that are still easily visible hundreds of years in the future, and other things that you might be able to find evidence of if you're really looking for, but

the average person wouldn't necessarily notice it. Yeah, depending on the maintenance of those artifacts, on maintenance, and also on just the climate and other other surroundings. But we will get into those in a minute. Let's define what ruins are the same way we define what civilization is. Yeah, there are actually a lot of interesting theories of ruins of you know, ruination theory. That'd be a wonderful like sub specialization that you could study. I wish I could

say I was an expert on ruination. I'm not, though, if I could go back and start my education over, I might go down that path. But anyway, in the general sense, ruins are sort of what's left behind when human made structures are partially destroyed or they just fall

out of the cycle of use and maintenance. So if if a building is very old but you're still using it daily and living and working and shopping in it, and you're making repairs, fixing cracks, maybe replacing parts of it, You probably wouldn't call that an example of ruins, even if it's very old. Yeah, the other hand, ruins tend to be things that people might visit, but they don't

remain in use and kept up through maintenance. So there's this piece that I came across when we were doing our research, which was in National Geographic and they did a trio blog posts called a Dialogue of Civilizations conference. It was in Guatemala, and so apparently it was like their notes based on the conference, and they talked. They had a whole section that was all about the ancient past as a window to the future, looking at ruins

and thinking about this very concept. And one of the things that they came up within that was that they think of ruins as being emblems of our vanity. They are basically, uh, but not just that, but that they are also signs of whatever civilization they represent, part of their identity or their ideology. So I think it's important to keep in mind as we're talking about ruins today, like or the ruins of the future in particular, how are the emblematic of our vanity as a culture or

our particular ideologies. Right, you can you can feel almost the desire to be worshiped emanating from many of the monuments and ruins of old you see, like the Pyramids of Giza. At least for me, when I look at something like that, it radiates this sense of somebody wanting to be seen as powerful. It's the idea of immortality through uh through an artifact longer than you will, or even your legacy. Yeah, and so whatever it is that's so important to you that you want to make it

big enough to last. So if you think about the modern day equivalent of something like a pyramid or the Arc de Triumph, for something that shows off the power, the splendor, the glory of the civilization, what is that today? Well, I mean, just off the top of my head. We we are in Atlanta right now, and looking out the window, what I see are skyscrapers and malls and public transportation hubs, a lot of cars, a lot of highways. These are

the things that we seem to venerate nowadays. They're not necessarily built to last in the way that the pyramids were. Um maybe like for Atlanta in particular, one of the things I always think about is the stuff that they've built downtown when the Olympics were here in the nineties. So there's stuff like that that is probably meant to last. But what else, what do you guys think? You know, what I think of is I think of uh, public use areas like sports stadiums, yeah, yea, and things like that.

Those to me shout a kind of and and I don't know if the way in which they're physically constructed means they'll actually last longer than any other type of building. They might or not, but they at least speak to me like this is a it seems to embody values and to scream power projection of the Colosseum of our time. Yeah yeah, I mean also also very lart, like we've got a six Flags just outside of Atlantic there. Uh yeah.

Roller coasters, they're they're beautiful. I don't know if you've ever seen any of the images from Coney Island, but I have been to Coney Island and Countists. So the Cyclone is the world's maybe the world. It might just be the United States most oldest roller coaster and uh most oldest you know, yeah yeah, yeah, uh, And it's terrifying. I've written on it. It's just wood and nails. Well, how do you ride on it? Now? They just put you in a paper bag and push you down the

top hill. Yeah, well they just draped whales to your arms and legs. It's but yeah, no, it's it's really scary. Yeah. Um. Another thing that seems to be suggested by the idea of ruins is something about decline. Because with lots of the structures we have, I mean, on their own, they could fall into disrepair and become ruins, but we keep them up. So what leads to people not being able

to keep up their structures? Well, it assumes I think, like one of two things probably that we can boil it down to that there is either the civil zation has either gotten to a point where it's mismanaging it's structures so much that it's neglecting them, or there's some kind of external force that has come in and it has done damage to it, like in war for instance. And perhaps there's been some kind of event that has forced the population to move to a new area, something

climate related perhaps. Sure. Yeah, that's the other thing that sort of touches on what I wanted to add to complicate this. I don't think it's necessarily always mismanagement, though that can be part of it, because there can also be just the fact that people don't care about certain

things up and leaving the stuff. Yeah yeah. Or perhaps for example, when coal production fell to oil production, a lot of a lot of places were kind of abandoned because those factories were not or there's mining towns were not necessary. And we're going to jump ahead because one of these places that we're going to talk about is exactly that. Now we'll save it fort well, we'll save it, yeah, we can. We can reference back in a second spoilers.

We're gonna talk about Cole. Just one more distinction that might be interesting is the difference between what we would often call ruins and then something more like monuments, and they can sort of leed together. But I just wanted to think about the fact that you wouldn't always look at something like the Pyramids of Giza and call that ruins,

right because nobody lived there, right. Well, I mean people might have camped out there, I don't know, but generally meant is like a thing to behold about some of these other ones that like we think of as wonders of the world, so the pyramid is one of them, right, What about like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Well, as far the funny thing about that is, I think it's disputed whether the Hanging Gardens of Babylon actually existed from

whatever call. But yeah, there are plenty of monuments and things like you could look at, like Mount Rushmore or things like that. If if after a long time Mount Rushmore becomes sort of eroded and it's not maintained, would you call that a ruin? I don't really, but you'd call Machu Picchu a ruin, right, certainly? Sure? Or um if for some reason everyone had to flee Paris and and um Notre Dame was still standing, you could call

that a ruin. Yeah. So I don't know exactly what the dividing line is there, but I think today we want to talk about both. I mean, we want to talk about monuments and the things you'd more traditionally call ruins, the structures we build that without maintenance can fall into disrepair. Although it is certainly anthropologically interesting that these days some of our largest and most impressive structures are not something of religious and cultural significance, like the pyramids, but rather

something of practical cultural significance, like the Hoover Dam. Yeah, that's true, right, Like also like the Golden Gate Bridge. That's probably one of the things that will although we'll talk about this later how long bridges will last after humans are stopped taking care of them, But that's probably something that people would look back on as being a

ruin or relic of humanity. Yeah. And then there are there are, of course structures that are not really lived in spaces, but they're also not really monuments of symbolic significance, or at least not entirely that they have some kind of practical use, like say the Roman aqueducts or the Great Wall of China. I think, Christian, you've actually been to the Great Wall of China, haven't. Yeah, it was a long time ago, over twenty years ago, but yeah,

I spent some time in Beijing when I was younger. Uh, And the Great Walls fascinating because it was essentially designed as like a defense mechanism against different invaders. Heard it didn't work very well, right, well, and then you know it was multiple walls that, over the course of various empires were redesigned and linked up together, etcetera. Etcetera. But uh, you know, it's been neglected for over three hundred years

now and a lot of it's in disrepair. However, at the same time, because it is I don't know, necessarily that's a ruin, but because it's a monument, it's one of those things that is a tour attraction as well, and the tourism industry that comes to the Great Wall of China helps in the deterioration of it. I myself, twenty years ago, uh, when I was but a boy, carved my initials in the Great Wall of China. It's not the kind of decision I would make today. That's

good to hear. I probably would have done something like that when I was a kid. I was there. What's wrong with us? We all want to leave our market, which is really what all of this podcast is about.

U though, though I would argue that that stuff like tourism um, although it does degrade these structures at a certain point just through normal wear and tear, in addition to things like vandalism, you also wind up having governments um looking at these structures as being a useful monetary agent and therefore having you know, making the decision to

to restore and repair them to at least protect them. Yes, yes, crime do you do what A and the funds from the tourism industry would probably go into their restoration, whereas if people weren't visiting it, there wouldn't there wouldn't be that fun. Yeah, okay, Well, let's transition from thinking about these ancient to modern ruins to thinking about modern ruins

that got their ruinations started really recently. Yeah, because there are a few places on this planet, as populated as it tends to be, that that we can call ruins like right now today that we're created less than a century ago. Okay, And I want to start with one that if you've never looked at pictures of Prepriot Ukraine, go pause this and go google it right now that that's that's the Chernobyl site. Yes, okay, are you back? So?

Prepriot Ukraine was a city that was evacuated due to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster in nineteen six when they had a major melt down and lots of dangerous radiation. Was least. They had to abandon the area and it has been uninhabited by humans ever since. So that's been like twenty nine years now, almost thirty years. Yeah, and

we're closing in on the thirty year mark. So what happens in a place like that where there's been nobody to keep up the repair, the maintenance, the weeding, the all the things we need to do to keep a city functioning like it normally. Does I think what happened? The things that's fascinating about that from what I read in the research is that despite the nuclear incident, that there is still uh pervasive plant life there that is

growing through the structures and and and breaking them apart. Yeah, I think it's very interesting. So we should think about this place as a complete dead zone. It's been tainted by nuclear radiation. You know, this should be just a poisoned place that's become like the moon, at least we would imagine that, But then when you actually look at it,

it's almost like a nature preserve out Yeah. The report that lots of species have bounced back there, right, Like one of the things that I was reading was that you wouldn't normally see like particular species of wolves in the civilized still populated areas around there, but that they're very prevalent within the ruins of this town. That's funny. It's like our presence is more poisonous than a radiation leak.

Also certainly to to lots of parts of nature. Um, but but humans are certainly not going to go back in there any time, particularly soon. You can contrast that with the kind of conditions that you see in other places, like for example, Hashima Island a k A good Kanjima, which is an island off of Japan that was kind of famously used as a set piece for the most recent James Bond movie, Skyfall. It was that creepy abandoned

city where the bad guys hanging out. Yeah, however your bard m gets all up on Daniel Craig and one of the buildings. Yeah, and what's fascinating about it in real world, not in the film is that spoilers Here we go. It was a coal mining production facility. So this island was populated largely by Korean forced laborers, Korean and Chinese forced laborers. And this was going on largely,

I believe, in the nineteen twenties through the fifties. I think it was shut down circ of nineteen Yeah, I think that the last people left the island in the early seventies, I read, because petroleum had based basically taken over the industry from coal and there was no longer need for them to run the island the way they were. So what do the structures actually look like now? Well, all the all the glasses gone, the concrete is kind

of starting to erode. All of the wooden bits that were outsides of the structures forming um, and any kind of like like lattice work or porches or things like that have all fallen to the ground. Um. It's it's desolate. It's also super dangerous from what I was reading, because, like sky Fall, they actually only used exterior shots for the stuff that they shot there because the production crew deemed it too dangerous to shoot on the island. Yeah,

certainly with principal actors. Yeah, they recreated look to the extras. Um, No, they they recreated one of the courtyards on on the Pinewood Studio sets out in the UK in order to to film the scenes that you see of them standing there. So, um,

Hollywood magic, y'all back to this island. Yeah, well that's There's this really cool thing I want to mention about the island is that there's a stairway within the ruins that goes up to the highest point on the island, which is like a rooftop shrine, and you can see all of the ruined structures from there. The stairway is

called the Stairwood Hill. Yeah, and it requires like special permits, Like they basically only let a very few people go out to the island at all because it's so dangerous and you have to have a second special permit to climb the stairway to hell. All right, So before we get into our our third example here, let's pause for a second. How stoked would you guys be to go to that island? So stoked? Like the most stoked I would be would have your barden be there when they're there.

I mean, he'll drive the boat, but you don't, he's not there with you. But also Chernobyl, I'm kind of fascinated by, Like I would totally. I mean, if I could go there, yeah, yeah, if I could go there relatively safely, then then it would be well. I mean, I mean, Hashima Island is is a little bit of a weird situation because it was it was a death camp. I mean, it was absolutely a very very terrible place

for very many people. Um, but there's something What I'm getting at here is there's something inherently compelling about these ruined structures that seemed to fascinate us as human beings. Yeah. People have been into the idea of ruins for a long time. I mean you could see that. It's not recent. It's something that you know, Medieval and Renaissance people were obsessed with the ruins of the Roman Empire, and you

could see it in the Romantic period. I think that was a big thing, like the Romantic writers were really into the ruins of castles and Gothic ruins. And also when um, when Egyptology became really popular in the Victorian era or so, it became so posh too. I mean it has always been in certain circuits of the world very posh to go into old ruins of places and

take stuff and put it in your house. Um. That's yeah, yeah, But that maybe that offends our sensibilities today because we've got our own feelings about what should be done with ruins, Like we have this current sensibility that no, no, no, ruins need to be preserved. As if there was like a certain point where it's like, well, now they are in their natural state, and we can't alter them from this point on when tons of stuff has happened to

them already. You know. In fact, some people have even been so obsessed with the idea of ruins and this kind of romantic notion of ruins that they've planned what's known as ruined value into the initial construction of buildings, Like when they're making new buildings, they say, you should think about how this will look when it falls into

disuse in hundreds or thousands of years. Unfortunately, one of the main names that gets associated with this idea of ruined value is Albert Spear, who was a German architect who is a Nazi in Hitler's government. Who. I mean, you could argue to what extent this idea of ruined

value is inherently associated with fascism or Nazism. But but I think one of the things that's fascinating about him, that you and I were talking about earlier, is that apparently none of the structures that he had planned around this philosophy of ruined value really lasted or or because

of the war. Yeah, well, I mean it is interesting to think about he He in his tells this story of how you know, he was seeing a building demolished, because one building was being demolished to make room for this, I believe Zeppelin landing field that he wanted to build. And as he saw sort of the guts of the building being torn out, he saw these steel girders and it was just like, that is hideous. I mean, that

is just awful. We should build buildings with stone so that when they fall apart, it will be this beautiful organic falling apart, rather than this ugly mangold falling aplo. Once again, we're going back to emblems of vanity and legacies of men who want to be remembered forever. It's also a cultural value judgment on the particular beauty of

of different objects. And and I would argue that if he had existed in a postmodern artistic culture that perhaps he would have felt differently about about the beauty of steel rebar. Sure. Sure, And it might be what some people would accuse this of being sort of the the inherent Nazism of this idea of ruined value, because it's this idea that you're going to have this huge, you know, reich that lasts forever and it must be remembered as Gloria,

and it must have a certain esthetic value. Yeah. Absolutely, Yeah, But let's let's not talk about Nazis too much, shall we. Let's instead talk about North Korea. Yeah, they're far better. So the third example that we have to talk about as being a sort of modern day quote unquote ruin is the Korean d m Z, the demilitarized zone between North Korea and South Korea. Um so, so real quick and facts. It's a hundred and fifty five miles long,

it's two point five miles wide. It's basically mountainous area. And before it was the d m Z, it was populated by rice farmers who had their patty fields out there and who were basically living there and working the land, I mean for like five thousand years. Like this was a civilization for a very long time. Yeah, So I wonder what of that kind of settled area remains after

you've removed human life from it. Well, So it's interesting. Um. One of the guys that we were researching, who's done a lot of homework on this stuff, Alan Wiseman, actually went there and was checking out out as part of his research into what happens to civilized areas after human beings are removed from them. And uh, the interesting thing is that it's basically gone back to being this strip of land that you can barely discern is having been

populated by human beings. And that's just in like sixty years, right, yeah, something like that. Uh, it's just marshland now, and that there's just been these uh a large push of cranes have come back into the area and repopulated the area. Oh you mean the birds the white I think they were both both would probably have major problems with actual crane like mechanical cranes driving through I like, how to us the mechanical cranes are the actual crane birds? Neither

of you grew up in Florida, stupid birds. Well, okay, well, let's look at what a couple of people have actually said about how the civilizations of today are going to decay in the future. First, I think we can just run through a quick list of all the different things you have to consider about what's going to happen to structures, Because it doesn't have to be just a bomb, say, or a tornado that takes down a building. You've got

things like the freezing and thawing cycle. This is something Alan Weissman we just mentioned a second ago, and we're going to mention again in a minute something he talks about. That's that's when um, due to the heating and cooling over the course of a year season, uh, water will for ease and then thaw. And as we all know, one of those spectacular properties of water is that it

expands when it freezes. So if it happens to be in a crack in wood or cement or anything else porous like that, it will expand, pushing the material outward, and then when it thaws and leaves the material, it leaves a crack. It's like when you get frost heaves on the highway before yeah. Uh yeah. And of course that's not the only weathering you have. You have wind erosion, you have water erosion. You could have water damage from

flooding and from rain. You could have fires. I mean, fires aren't something that's just set by a kid playing with matches. Even if an area is uninhabited, it can have fires affecting it because lightning can strike. Whiteman's whole thing is that after a couple of years, there will be so much build up of vegetation and dead leaves from the continual cycles that one lightning strike could set an entire city on fire. Yeah, there's plant growth. That

was something that we read about affecting pretty Ukraine. Actually is you might not think about this often, but over time, the growth of say roots through the ground can displace a building, break it apart. Yeah. I mean you've probably seen this on a small scale on sidewalks when the trees roots have grown up under a sidewalk and caused it to go all wonky. Yeah, and it's a scientific term. Of course. You can have animal invasions, human damage of

all kinds. You know, it doesn't It's not just when we leave it alone. It's also sometimes when we mess with it that things go wrong. Well sure, sure you either from right, I mean, human damage can can be from bombings, or from from chemical decomposition due to various stuff that we've put into the atmosphere, or or due to intentional vandalism. Yeah. Well, let's let's go straight to Weisman now. So this guy named Alan Weissman wrote a book called The World Without Us. I think it came

out in two thousand and seven. That sounds about right, And he did Uh. Interview with I believe it was Scientific American, where you knows it was like a press tour basically promoting the book, where he talked about the basic tenants of the what he was proposing in the book. And then also he wrote a piece himself for Discover magazine that was essentially like a long abstract of the book. And so his basic premise for the book is if all the humans on Earth just were to immediately disappeared,

poof and vanish, what would happen to the earth. And a lot of what he talks about is environmental, but we wanted to focus on what he said about the structures we've created and the kind of ruins that would be left behind, because he really delves into those causes that you just mentioned of damage. Um. One of the first one he really looked at Manhattan very closely as

a as like a case study. And and one of the first things that he noted, which I would have not known this at all, and I've been to New York a lot, is that there would immediately be water damage because there's so much water are being pumped away from Manhattan because of rainfall and groundwater and local streams that if humanity was gone within like days, it would lead to flooding and underground corrosion. I had no idea about the scene, talking about how much water is constantly

pumped out of the subway system. It was just unbelievable. And then his second example is the fires we were talking about earlier, So he sees that I think his his number is like five years. Within five years of humanity leaving, like an urban area like Manhattan, there would be enough build up of leaves and tall grass that if lightning hit and just the right way, it could set all the roofs of all the buildings on fire. And the next thing he talks about is the plant growth.

So he's talking about the flora that's going to grow up in around in and around Manhattan that will ultimately take over. And like we were talking about before break Apart, the buildings got really specific about that day. Yeah, I was curious about exactly, like how strong can that plant invasion be? Very strong? Yeah? Yeah, I mean, according to him, here's a direct quote, I like this, sweet carrots would quickly devolve to their wild form, and there would be

unpalatable queens and lace. The horrors white broccoli, no wild broccoli, cabbage, cab broccoli, cabbage, brussels sprouse, and cauliflower would regress to their unrecognizable broccoli ancestor. And so basically it's like wild broccoli that would just be tearing the links apart. I feel like this should be an attack of the Killer Tomatoes sequel like that. That's amazing. Uh so, so what about what about wildlife coming in? Yeah? Set all these

unmentionable carrots? He was, Yeah, right, he's speculating about the the feral animals that would eventually show up. And if I remembering correctly, because I can't see it in my notes right now, I think it was that rats would be the first that would like immediately overpopulate and just cover the city, and then you would get feral dogs

from the leftover pets that were left behind. That this is assuming like humans just like disappear rapture style, I guess, but that all other animals were hanging out, Yeah, exactly, that they would all stick around, and so feral dogs would also dominate the city. He didn't mention feral cats, and I was kind of wondering about that. I wonder, why do you guys have any ideas um, cats hate Manhattan, Okay, Okay, so they would all go to the they would all

go to cat have An Island in Brooklyn. Yeah, yeah, I think they're they're Connecticut animals really okay. Uh. And and his other thing was was wolves. Obviously the wolves would start to close in and that there would eventually be like fights between these feral dogs and wolves. And I'm sure that the interaction I think that's him of what he was talking about here was was it the interaction of all of these things, the free cycle and

the animals and the plant life. I mean, because animals are going to eat plants and deposit seeds, and also like we need to consider as well that like these what we what we would consider from our perspective now, they would be invasive species, right, that they would be coming in and destroying these structures, just doing their daily things, just making homes out of them, or like leaving waste behind.

And I can bring some knowledge from one of the episodes that I've previously written for our show brain Stuff about raccoons. How raccoons do this in Japan? Uh, They've been destroying temples throughout Japan for the last like I think thirty years because there was an invade. Invasion isn't really the right word. They were imported to Japan and there's so many raccoons there now and they can't control the poem and pets, right. I think they were imported

as pets and then people realize that they're terrible creepy pets. Well, yeah, and they imported them as pets because there was a cartoon about a raccoon that made everybody want to have a pet raccoon. Uh, don't have a pet raccoon, kids, don't do it. Go to brand stuff show dot com and you can watch me talk on video about why you shouldn't have a pet raccoon. But anyways, in the same way, all these other animals would do the same thing.

They would destroy these structures over time. You know, I'm curious. So we've talked about the different things that will be destroying the structures, and I wanted to add one more thing. If you don't believe that plant roots can destroy stone buildings, just go google pictures of the interior of the Angkor Watt Temple in Cambodia, where there are these tree roots

that are moving these huge stones. But anyway, I wanted to think about what structures would remain in Manhattan, Like, so you've got all these forces acting to destroy the things humans have built. What's going to be there the longest? Well, we talked earlier about how bridges seem to have like a bit more longevity to them than like houses and stuff houses and and even buildings made out of metal

and glass. Um that bridges would probably last for a couple of hundred years, that their bolts would stay together, and they they for the most part, hold up. Although that that arch based bridges would last a lot longer than, for example, suspension bridges because of the way that the I mean the same way that arches and have held up in old Roman ruins for thousands of years. It sounds generally kind of like we're saying that stone lasts

longer than metal. It does. Indeed, that's because stone doesn't oxidize the way that metal does. Basically, I mean, there's there's a lot of factors involved there, but chemical decomposition of one kind or another. Our chemical wearing, I think decomposition is the wrong word, has a lot to do with it. He also did talk about about stone materials specifically, right, Yeah, he mentions like examples of building is that he thinks would outlast all of the our traditional metal and glass.

He calls them glass boxes, which are essentially the kind of skyscrapery buildings like the one we're recording in right now. It's a metal frame with a bunch of windows. Yeah yeah, that um old stone buildings would last much longer. So his examples were Grand Central Station and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Obviously, Uh yeah, I could totally see that,

having been to Grand Central a lot of times. That actually sounds like a great ruin to visit in the so you go on your adventure tourism trip package to to ancient Manhattan and everything else is leveled, but there you've got the met Grand Central Station that sounds great, with trees everywhere. I'm sure after a couple of hundred years, the food court under Grand Central would be even better

than it is now. I think that's a science fact, Yes, yes, one thing though that makes me wonder even about rocks, because I mean, obviously physical forces can wear down anything over time. The rocks are pretty resilient. You know, Weathering can over a long long time knock them down, wear them down, grind them away. But what about chemical reactions? Yeah, so this was one of the things he briefly talks about.

Um is that, like we've invented chemical combinations like for instance, pollutants or pesticides or industrial chemicals that we use for cleaning or whatever. We don't really know how long they're gonna last, but they'll probably last a long time, like maybe longer than those bridges. Yeah, and we don't necessarily know what they're going to do if if if they got out into the environment on I mean, if they were through the water cycle or whatever, washed into modern

buildings plastic two. That's another one. And his point is that like most of these things didn't even exist before World War Two, we invented them all after that, so fun exciting things to discover. Maybe those are the ruined legacies that will have in the future, is like milk bottles. Uh. Well, so Weissman had a had had a timeline. We've already mentioned quite a few things in it where he sort of predicted after X number of years this would happen. But there were a few things I think we didn't

get to yet. What are they? Well, we talked about how the subway system would flood. He says that would happen within two days, and then after a year, all the street pavement would split and buckle because of the freeze effect that we talked about, the thawing two. Within two to four years, all those streets would be filled with weeds because there would be plant life growing up out of them, which was subsequently turned into trees, which would upheave the sidewalks in the streets even more and

damage the sewers. Yeah, and it's after four years that that thing we mentioned earlier, the freeze thaw cycle. He predicts after four years that would really cause build things to begin to crumble. Because we don't often think about heat as benefiting the building itself. It just benefits us. But it actually can benefit the building. It can help protect the building from the freeze thawing cycle it would naturally undergo. Well. Also, certainly anything like like like water pipes.

This is a thing that all of us probably have a little bit of experience within the winter if you let water freeze in a pipe and then it will first time. Yep. Oh, that reminds me I should have probably from the tap on today. Oh well, well, we'll see what happens when I get home. For those of you out there, this is one of the few days of the years in Atlanta where we get pullout freezing.

So also then five years, So there's a little bit of dispute here between these, like these are arbitrary dates. And I don't think that Wiseman has like a crystal ball that he's looking into and he knows exactly what they are. Well, I wouldn't call him arbitrary, but their speculation, yeah, they're they're clever speculation. He's done his research, but there's

dispute among other people of research educated. So for instance, he says within five years there would be enough growth that a lightning strike could set the city on fire. Other people say, like fifty years. I don't know, five years sounds reasonable to me. Actually, yeah, I don't know. Depends it's I mean, it all depends on the location

of the strike, right right, Yeah. Well, and also I mean, you know, you have to take into consideration that Manhattan is not like Tampa, and so there's a relative small amount of thunderstorms there. But but still, yeah, absolutely, after about a hundred years, he says that the roofs of nearly all houses are going to be caved in. Yeah, and of course that makes it worse for the frame of the house itself. Then at three hundred that's when we start losing suspension bridges. The arch bridges last a

little bit longer, and then he jumps. He goes from three hundred thousand plus years, that's when the stone buildings, like what we were talking about with Grand Central, those buildings would start to fall because advancing glaciers would close in on New York. At that's a good thing to point out because one of the things we haven't thought all that much about is climate change, so not just the effects of weather temporarily, but as the climate, the

long term climate of the area actually shifts. And if you've got New York turning into a more you know, ice age Arctic kind of environment and you've got glaciers pushing things down, obviously that's going to destroy a bunch of ruins. I mean, it might leave nothing left. And now we've talked about how the theory is that traditional metal and glass buildings reinforced with concrete or not necessarily

going to last very long. But he speculates that there is one kind of metal that's going to be around for almost ten million years, and that's bronze, particularly bronze sculptures. It surprised me, but it made me want to look up. Well, okay, if bronze is going to be around for ten million years and and actually retain its shape, as he says, what are some of the coolest and biggest bronze statues in the world that we will still have that far

in the future. What I found is the African Renaissance Monument. This looked interesting to me. It's one hundred and sixty ft or forty nine bronze statue in Dokar, Senegal, and the monument was inaugurated in two thousand ten and designed by a North Korean firm called the men Suday Art Studio. And if you look at it, it looks kind of

like that Soviet Realism sculpture. It's got this very like strong, powerful looking man peering ahead into the future and holding a baby up in the air and holding a woman on his other arm, and like they're pointing up into the future and and the woman is pointing back into the past. And it's sort of this thing suggesting a change in in eras I think, So, what kind too

beautiful and and also kind of propagandistic at the same time. Yeah, So what we're kind of saying here is, if you want your legacy to last for at least ten million years, uh that you know, have a bronze statue built of you. I'm sure that's probably not that expensive. So it makes me think we may have ten million years yet for the bronze Horseman of St. Petersburg, Russia. Right, Yeah, that was on. It's for a couple of reasons. Actually, it's basis the thunderstone, which as far as I know is

still the biggest stone that humans have ever moved. Wow. And then of course on top it's got a bronze horse and a rider. Also, we're gonna have the bronze fawns for a long time. Y'all ever seen the bronze fawns? No, look this up. It's in Milwaukee. It's the fawns. A it's bronze, it's a it's a monument to culture. Okay, note to self, I either have to have enough money to build a bronze statue of myself or be as famous as Henry Winkler. Yeah, okay, okay, one or the

other can work. To work on it yet, you know, I'm already starting here. I'm kind of sad that. So we have a bronze fawns, but we don't have bronze statues to the characters Henry Winkler plays in Arrested Development or in Scream You remember that. Yeah, yeah, I mean I like to think of the bronze fawns is encapsulating all of them. That's probably how they meant it. Well.

In addition to Alan Weissman's speculation, there was some more well researched speculation from somebody named Bob Holmes, who wrote an article for New Scientists in two six about what would happen if humans disappeared from Earth. Now, of course we're not imagining humans are going to disappear from Earth, but that's just a good scenario in which to say, what would happen to these buildings if that fell into disuse.

We are imagining it, we're not predicting it. So the interesting thing about holmes research is that a lot of it overlaps with Wiseman's. But there is a couple of things in this article that he adds that I think provides some details that weren't necessarily in Wiseman's for instance, I didn't know this, but he says that modern buildings such as the one that we're in right now are typically engineered to only last for sixty years. That is

not much time. Bridges are only designed to last for a hundred and twenty years nowadays, and dams for two d and fifty. And is that assuming that people are taking care of these structures for that entire time, but after that they'll just kind of like shiver and fall apart. No, I should. I should make the distinction here that he's not talking about buildings that are receiving constant Okay, well,

that's more comforting. Think about how many modern buildings just in metropolitan Atlanta that are around that have been abandoned for one reason or another, that are probably closing in on sixty years old. Yeah they're dangerous, Yeah, but of course that is talking about these modern buildings. He also points out, likewise men, that the ones that are made of stone or concrete are going to be around a

lot longer, like they could last thousands of years. And so I think that we're beginning to form a good picture for the kind of thing we would see in

the future. I'd imagine that the future Ruins tourists would see lots of strangely punctuated sites because the way cities are laid out now, you might have an area that has a lot of solid stone buildings, and then the next block might have, you know, these modern buildings, and the next block might have houses, you know, for which there's just no trace left at all, their wood or brick houses where the roofs will cave in and the frame will eventually collapse, like we've read about here, I'm

trying to picture it, and I'm imagining like Manhattan, for example, the one we've been talking about, kind of a flat landscape where many of these buildings are just gone and there's nothing, and then suddenly there are these huge, huge tall stone monuments left right. There is research being done into the the long time survivability of the kind of things that we're building with today and how those structures are going to be impacted by by whether disuse or

any other number number of things. And it kind of comes down to the quality of the building, which I mean, it sounds obvious when you say it out loud, but uh, but for example, we put steel bones basically in our concrete buildings because it's a kind of quick and easy way, relatively an expensive way to to prop up all of this concrete. Okay, Um, the problem with that is that

if you don't measure and pour and seal everything extremely precisely. Uh. When carbon steel is in contact with with air, and particularly humid air, which is basically air, it oxidizes. It will begin to rust and begin to warp and bend.

It's also more more susceptible to heat and cold. Um. And by susceptible, I mean that that it shrinks and and and expands more than the concrete surrounding it, which can lead to cracks in the concrete and uh spawling, which is an industry term for like flaking of that kind of spawling. I know right right, your face is Spallen's harsh as a second old joke you guys have made at me. I'm just my first time on the show. It wasn't at you, that was that was at the

room in general. That's but that's that's up there with nano Rod, I think for me, in terms of great insults that we've come up with here on forward thinking, you nano Rod, you never heard to say that. I mean, I haven't heard you say it, but it sounds bad, sounds sounds well, we'll talk about nano rods later. Sounds

kind of sure, frankly. The other question that arises when we're thinking about the effects of our human processes on on what would be modern ruins is the question of pollution, because, especially back in the eighties, we heard so much about acid rain and uh and and and we still worry on a sort of civilization scale about what the pollution that we're creating is is going to do to all of these structures now and into the future. And the

thing is that we don't really know. Yeah, um, I mean because because there's a lot of natural chemical weathering that happens. You know. The thing is is that atoms and compounds do not usually stay the way that we leave them. Um, All kinds of things happen. Water reacts chemically with basically everything. It's called the universal solvent for a reason. Um. And it's it's also a really good physical carrier of stuff. And what stuff am I talking about?

Both natural and manmade dust in the atmosphere, made of all kinds of chemicals, uh, bacteria and other microfauna, and flora, seeds, um and and anything it runs across on the ground, you know, from from natural deposits of salt, which is a very cursive material, um to whatever minerals or bits and pieces of weird trash that we've left around. So, uh,

it depends, is basically the answer. Yeah, And I would assume to based on that this is a complete assumption, not based on research whatsoever, but that cities that are built by the ocean and the sea are going to be more likely to corrode faster because the amount of salt content. That's yeah, I think, yeah, that's interesting. There's definitely you can um see on the outer walls of Hashima the salt erosion that has happened to the buildings

versus the interior walls. Yeah. So this makes me wonder, now that we've sort of imagined this future city as it lies in ruins, how long will it take for even those ruins to disappear? Like, have any of these writers speculated on at what point we will see pretty much nothing left? So Holmes thing is he says that it would take a few tens of thousands of years, So that's pretty vague at most, before every trace of

human existence is wiped out. Um, and his thing is that if visitors came here in a hundred thousand years, they would have no obvious signs that we had ever been here. Now, I imagine though, that would be talking about on the surface, right, like they could still dig and excavate there. There were parts of it where he talked about the of course, yet like, for instance, the pesticides that we're mentioning earlier, that may in fact last forever, that they would be able to dig that stuff up.

And so I find a trace of culture and civilism, maybe a bronze statue in a milk bottle or something, right, Well, yeah, the bronze statue is gonna last for ten million years, but it would probably be buried exactly. Well, I want to talk about one last thing, and it's uh, is that thing in Planet of the Ape is going to happen to the statue of Liberty? Well, you know, I don't know. It's it's highly unlikely given the beach topography that we saw in the first Planet of the End

that exactly what would happen to it. I was like, what is this that does not look like the New York Harbor unless maybe the statue of Liberty floated somewhere, maybe the apes dragged it as a trophy to a

different area. Yeah. No, I do actually want to have one final thought here at the end, which is the question of can cities of the past disappear into the cities of the present or the future, because we we've been talking about ruins a lot of times in the context of cities and areas being left behind, people either move away or even in these hypothetical scenarios, we just imagine if people disappeared. More realistically, people you know, just migrate to a different area, but a lot of times

people continuously inhabit the same areas. You can actually look up there's a Wikipedia page that's a list of oldest continually inhabited cities. So it's just this huge list of settlements that have had people in them for thousands of years continuously, and like human beings, they're just shedding flakes

basically and re regenerating over the years. But by constantly inhabiting a single location for hundreds or thousands of years, and you're always making repairs, refurbishing, updating, maintaining buildings, and often tearing down old buildings to make space for nuance?

Are you effectively erasing the static remnants of older versions of the city, Like, the better we get at maintaining civic infrastructure, the better we get at keeping our cities nice and clean and well repaired and up to date. Are we actually really keeping less remains of the older versions of the civilization? I mean, apart from whatever you

intentionally preserve in an archaic state? Sure, right, yeah, I mean And obviously this taps into the idea of urban renewal, which I think is like a totally different topic that we can't tackle right now. But but the city of Atlanta, where we're at right now, is a fascinating example of what you're talking and that there is constant, uh, not only restructuring of neighborhoods, but also of just the buildings themselves.

Think of, for instance, our our new home for how Stuff Works is going to be in a building called Pont City Market, which is was once an old Sears and Roebuck building distribution center. Yeah, and then for a number of years it was a branch of city Hall, right, and then it's at dormant for a bit a long time, and often office space. One of the coolest things about this city I think is like that, that renewal, the

restoration of old properties. A lot of my favorite restaurants are are built with like the original brick, uh you know, and they used to be auto garages or whatever. Yeah, but of course when that building needs repairs because it's still got a restaurant in it, you might have to replace this wall or this pillar, or at some point maybe even knock it down. It's just in too bad a state. And of course it's good property. You know, there's there were businesses there, so somebody's going to build

something on top of it. It's sort of I imagined it like this. It's the difference between doing multiple drafts of a document on a typewriter, where you've got saved

copies at each stage. You could think of that as equivalent to, you know, building a civilization and then moving away, versus keeping a document updated in a digital format, Like you've got a word document and every time you revise it, you make changes, you edit, and then you save over what you had before, sort of erasing the evidence of

the pre vi a straft. Yeah, I think your metaphor would would work perfectly with paper and pencil, right if you had written a document on a single sheet of paper, and then you wanted to change something about that document. You're raced over it, and then you you wrote over that part that you were raised, but there would still be slight remnants of the original writing. Yeah, And it makes me wonder which physical civilization disappears faster and more completely.

Is it the one that's been abandoned to the elements of the earth, into weathering and all those things we talked about earlier, or is it the one that's constantly being saved over, like which city is maintained farther into the future, the one we keep living in, or the

one that we leave behind to nature. For from what we've seen, of the three examples we talked about, the island off the coast of Japan, the Chernobyl area, and then the d m Z Zone, I mean, I guess I would say that it's those areas that are abandoned because those have only been Let's see which one of those is the oldest, since there's been human population there, and the d m Z is the one that, as far as you know, Wiseman says, you can barely tell

that human beings lived and worked there. It was also less structured. I mean that's something the didn't have, like metal tall buildings the way that the island did. Yeah right, hash Hashima was actually the site of some of the first concrete skyscrapers that were ever built. So so maybe a better thing to look at would be the difference between ancient cities with stone buildings that were abandoned versus ancient cities with stone buildings that have been continuously inhabited.

I don't know which the answer is, But if you're listening and you have an opinion on this, why don't you write in and let us know. Yeah, there's a few way that a few ways that you can get in touch with us. Um. You can email us at f W thinking at how Stuff Works dot com. You can find us on Facebook and Twitter and Google Plus, where our handle is FW thinking. UM. You can go to our website, which is FW thinking dot com in order to find many podcasts and videos of your potential interest.

And but before we sign off here, let's give one big, last warm thank you to Christian for joining us on this adventure. Oh, thank you, thank you for having me. I loved having me on the show that I can live up to Jonathan Strickland's uh gravitas. I think you have at at the very least, you've brought the baritone

voice that we needed into the podcast room. Um, where can Where can Everyone find your work mainly on brain Stuff show dot com, although I'm more recently writing for our house Stuff Works YouTube channel for the show What the Stuff that We Do that Lauren performs on, and both Lauren and Joe help write with as well. Cool. Thank you, thanks again for joining us, and thanks again for listening. We will talk to you all again really soon.

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