if the human race were wiped out in one awesome virus, over a short period of time.
just humans, not animals.
would the world repair itself and thrive?

Look at places like Chernobyl and you’ll see it thriving without us even after we messed it up a lot.

Yes, at least until the next species comes along and messes it up again.

Yup, reckon so.  Wonder how long it’d take the next bunch of apes to evolve into human like creatures…or would something else become a dominant species…hmmm

Yeah, I think it would flourish without us lot.

I reckon it would be mighty grateful too…

Shall we start the process of elimination?

Ohh.. seems like we already have 🤷‍♂️

No, the penguins will move back and take over the world.

Most definitely

You should read The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. Great read, ficks between what the world would be like if humans never existed and if they disappeared overnight.

Isn’t there something on Netflix touching on this?
Or was it how humanity’s structures would be consumed by nature with zero human presence?

would the world repair itself and thrive?

It wouldn’t repair itself but it would stop getting any further damage. And of course it would thrive, just as it is now even with humans trying to screw it all up.

Of course, why wouldn’t it?

I kind of agree, yes it would get back to ‘normal’ ie. pretty much what it was like 200,000 years ago pretty quick. Not the same though, there are invasive species everywhere which we took to various places and these could be somewhat rampant, would the red squirells survive without us controlling the greys for example? But in general it will be just fine.
I can only think of one thing which might cause a problem which is a much worse version of what Nickjb said, yes, everything did very well around Chernobyl once we left it alone but what happens to stockpiles of a couple of thousand nuclear weapons if left unattended for long periods of time? Could they be dormant forever or could something set them all off? Anything from a future volcano superheating the storage facility to a mouse nibbling it’s way through some wires in the control centre. Anyone know? Would one going off set off a load more?

Having spent a couple of hours this morning doing a volunteer litter pick I’m inclined to think wiping out humans couldn’t do the world much harm

I’ve said it before, but Man and all his terrible works will be a thin toxic plasticky, mildly radioactive seam in the geological record.

My theory:

I suspect most wildlife in general would recover very quickly, most domesticated animals would revert to feral within a few generations after die outs of the initial populations.  Certain areas around chemical plants and waste tips may suffer long term genetic damage but that’s only small area’s of the planet.  Worryingly the large sea mammals and fish may suffer the worst as PCB’s and heavy metals like mercury will persist for many years so we may succeed in killing them off after our Ton initiated demise.

In answer to Andrew H, nukes are designed to be hard to go off by accident (though worryingly a few got dropped by accident in the 50’s and two were very close to going pop properly).  So even when the casing cracks open the radioactivity will be confined to a local area, no mushroom clouds, not even a fizzle.

Power stations should safe themselves without human intervention but even if a few do go bang and China syndrome it’ll only be a relatively small area that is poisoned lethally (compared global surface area).

This article stuck with me

From Discover Magazine

Absolutely it would sort itself out nature takes over very quickly. Plus there was a documentary a few years ago about climate change the planet resets its self with 3 huge hurricanes.

Thanks Ming. Does that still apply with zero maintenance over hundreds, maybe thousands of years? No idea how long it would take the uranium/plutonium to decay to a safe amount. I guess they must have been designed to withstanfd a plane crash or similar when on routine patrol. Does anyone still have any airborne ones or are they all submarines and ICBMs nowadays?

what happens to stockpiles of a couple of thousand nuclear weapons if left unattended for long periods of time? Could they be dormant forever or could something set them all off?

A few years ago there was an article about all the redundant nuclear weapons in America from all previous decades of development, how they are stored and what kind of condition they are kept in. Some of these storage facilities had deteriorated that much they looked like old abandoned rusty shipping containers, and the money required just to keep them at that condition was frightening. The gist of the article was that if they didn’t do something soon, we’d be facing that exact question.

There were a couple of drama-documentaries on this back in early/mid 2000’s. At least one of them is on YouTube if you search for “what if humans disappeared”.

Short term it’d be pretty disastrous – a whole load of domestic animals suddenly turning feral, lots of short-term pollution from waste, fires and so on and probably a lot of wildfires that rage unchecked for a few years but give it 30 years or so and things would be pretty much back to nature.

There’ll always be a geological layer of plastic and probably heavy toxic waste (mercury, uranium/plutonium and so on) and there’ll be a few geological timebombs like this one:
https://www.latimes.com/projects/marshall-islands-nuclear-testing-sea-level-rise/

and nuclear waste disposal, nuclear/biological weapons storage.

200,000 years and the plastic should have mostly worked it’s way through the food chains, radioactivity will have dropped to not far off normal background and whatever new species have evolved to fill in the cracks will be on their way.

Who knows what will have happened to the CO2 levels though – it’s possible that without human pollution it’d drop dramtically but equally if you take into account massive widespread fires it could stay as it is or rise even further for another decade.

Nature finds its equilibrium. We upset and destroy that equilibrium.

It’s not if, it’s when, only unfortunately we’ll take many innocent species with us.

would the world repair itself and thrive?

Even if we take our time wiping ourselves out and do more damage to the world doing so the likelihood is it would repair itself. End up being something completely different to what we have now. Even a full blown nuclear winter would, in geological time probably be recoverable from. I dont think there is any obvious mechanism for us to cause a complete runaway scenario which makes the world entirely uninhabitable.

Insects like in the ‘sound of drums’ by Ray Bradbury(?)

Of course it would. 65million years ago the planet was struck by an asteroid which wiped out much of the dominant species and plunged the world into a nuclear winter for 10’s of thousands of years and look how frikkin beautiful it is now.

The planet has a few billion years left before our local star burns up so our influence will be lost in the mists of time.

Humans? We ain’t that important.

There have been at least 5 mass extinction events in earth’s history, there is plenty of evidence to suggest we’re in the middle of the 6th right now.

There will be more. Whether humans are around is largely irrelevant to those events

I dont think there is any obvious mechanism for us to cause a complete runaway scenario which makes the world entirely uninhabitable.

Think again. You only need to look at venus for a direct parallel.

In all likelihood earth would reach a new equilibrium.

But we ain’t going anywhere – so we’re ****. Lookup the Fermi Paradox…

Yes AndrewH too make a nuke go bang you need a very very precise sequence of explosives to go off to light the nuclear bit.  Should the nuclear “pit” come together without the explosive squish it’ll be a horrific nuclear accident with a blue flash and a local painful death over a few days (see tickling the devils/dragons tail) so even if the weapons corroded and the nuclear bits came together at most you’d have an unpleasant accident rather than an explosion.  Also the tritium spark plug of fusion nukes (h bombs) needs a periodic top up due to decay, same goes for the fission starters, some bit of the initiator will need a “top up” periodically, so over time the weapons become at best accidents rather than a mushroom cloud.    This is one of the problems all nuclear states have as the last crop of weapons engineers are dying/retired and a fresh crop need to learn the techniques without repeating the mistakes of the past.  Hence the US are refurbishing/ building fresh warheads and the Russians are building their terror weapon nuclear torpedo and the dirty nuclear dirty engine cruise missile that exploded near Murmansk earlier this year

Yes. It wouldn’t necessarily thrive in a way that’d be suitable for us, or any of the other big animals currently on it, but it’d get on. Maybe the giant talking sandlice or whatever would do better

We definitely do have the capability to wreck the planet in a way that makes it unlikely for another bunch of overambitious monkeys or similar to arise in the next few hundred thousand years though. And wrecking it in such a way that our current mode of civilisation can’t function, that’s easy. At this point, it’s easier than not doing it.

In 10 million years time, humanity will barely register as a thin line in the geological strata. Probably.

If you somehow had a choice to stay in the here and now and see out rest of days as normal, or time travel into any point in the future of your choosing to see what it was like, and be safe, but the price would be you couldn’t come back. Would you, and if so how far into future would you go?

I think I would and I’d go long – at least 100,000 years.

Isn’t there something on Netflix touching on this?

Yeah I watched it, the incredible thing was how quick nature moves in and claims everything back

Think again. You only need to look at venus for a direct parallel.

In all likelihood earth would reach a new equilibrium.

But we ain’t going anywhere – so we’re ****. Lookup the Fermi Paradox…

We’re not ****, we are first. We have beaten the Great Filter and will go on to write our name across the stars.

Never mind the Pacific, our children will be lashing plastic into the oceans of Alpha Centauri.