Life after people is a ripoff of Alan Weisman "World without us" (first of all by using a title structure in three words, but whatever).The basic thought experiment of Alan Weisman is aimed not so much at looking at how nature would recover after we have left, and how buildings etc deteriorate but in fact analysing to what extent our actions on the environment are permanent.Life after people (the main program) hardly mentions our use of plastics, our pollution of the planet with PCBs, how permanent nuclear waste will be and focuses on the mild, innocent traces of us that will be erased easily: wood, paper, iron, cement. Overall both the program and the series remain a list of crumbling buildings, repeated over and over again, with the same engineering viewpoint.The series (which I lazily address with this comment too) do mention this a bit more, along with our impact on fauna (eg bison population), or the recovery of fish population due to our current overfishing. Too little still.The documentary is reasonably good, padded with special effects that are shown over and over again, and with a shift of focus to American landmarks, which is understandable as it was made for US TV.The content presents a somewhat idealistic and benign-ized vision of our impact on the planet, which really misses the point of actually addressing what are the harmful things we are doing right now and which our descendants will curse us for.

I watched it when it first aired and It was really interesting and fairly awesome. I think the entire thing kind of reinforces my not being religious. I mean 10,000 years after we all die all of our buildings fall down, all of our paper rots away, and the entire place is all grass again. Plus, from the documentary, if you took the entire history of planet Earth and made it into a 24 hour day humans would only make up 30 seconds of that day. Our entire human existence is 30 seconds out of a full 24 hour day yet the world is here for us and made for us? Please.We're just not that special or important. Probably the creatures with the highest intelligence that will ever walk the face of the planet but that's about it. The world wasn't designed for us, we're just here.

Impressive visuals, but this is as much science fiction as science fact - the level of speculation that goes on mars it. It routinely ignores non-degradable garbage and nuclear waste in its prognostication, there are huge leaps in logic - for instance, involving zoo animals. They present the only issue as whether they can get out of the zoos, not if they can actually survive the wild, they will actually mate, if there is enough diversity to even create a gene pool for the species to survive. In essence, this show takes incredibly complicated issues with multiple factors and boils them all down to more simple ones. Plus, they misrepresented an area of Chernobyl in order to make their point! There was something vaguely Republican about the whole thing, the idea that no matter what we do to the Earth, it's okay, because it's going to turn back into a pristine Garden of Eden anyhow! Enjoy this for what it is - a science fiction documentary.

This movie was definitely interesting. I loved imagining what places like New York City would look like without people. The images of zoo animals' establishing an ecosystem in deserted cities really makes you think. The one thing that I didn't quite get was how people are going to disappear and all the wildlife still live on unaffected. I know that was not supposed to go into how people vanished but the entire premise was kind of like if we took off in a spaceship or rapture or something. I think that in reality, whatever causes people end our run on earth will affect most of the wildlife also. Regardless, this was a well thought out film that causes us to think of humanity as a very temporary part of earth's history and not the end-all-be-all of the universe.