Life After People

Something there is that does not love a wall.
- Robert Frost

I recently saw a History Channel special called Life After People which dealt with what would happen if every person on the planet vanished - after a day, a year, five years, ten years and so on. This is the "what if" aspect of science fiction at its purest form, unhampered by plot or characters - rather like a science fiction story from the 1930's* - and it beautifully illustrated the impermanent nature of our civilization.

I was impressed by the fact that the show never attempted to come up with any sort of reason why humanity would vanish, because really, that's not what they wanted to talk about. Instead, it was simply treated as a given: no more people.

It was astonishing to see just how temporary our society is, and to how great an extent our current technology contains the seeds of its own destruction. Fuel runs out, and power stops flowing; pumps fail, and subways become underground rivers; iron falls prey to the slow fire of rust, and cities collapse; concrete cracks, and bridges and dams crumble.

Interestingly, our technology is actually more fragile than that of two thousand years ago. For example, Roman concrete from before the birth of Christ is more durable than the modern equivalent, which is less solid, and constructed around a grid of iron rebar, which expands as it rusts and will eventually break apart even the largest structure.

And what would be left of modern civilization ten thousand years after people? Almost nothing - science fiction author David Brin speculates that the only remnant would be Mount Rushmore, carved from solid stone.

The show was originally broadcast in early 2008, and I suspect that the rerun that I saw was intended as an introduction to the new ten episode series of the same name that has just started. If it's as good as the original program, it will make for good viewing - if you spot it while you're channel hopping, give it a look for a few minutes, you may find that you keep watching it.

- Sid

* The non-fans in the crowd will have to trust me - this is a funny joke. And if you don't believe that it has a basis in reality, I can recommend a few things for really dedicated readers.

"Have you tried NOT being a mutant?"

"Over 20 years after the Chernobyl accident, and am I the only one that’s disappointed? Still no superheroes."

British comedian Jimmy Carr

In fact, today marks the 23rd year since the faulty reactor at Chernobyl dumped 400 times the fallout from Hiroshima into the environment. And, as Mr. Carr quite accurately points out, that should be lots of time for a mutant or two to have been born, grown up, ostracized by the rest of humanity, and forced to take refuge at some sort of "school" for gifted youngsters run by a bald guy in a wheelchair. And yet, here we are without even a single mutant superhero, let alone dueling armies of heroes and villains. What went wrong?

Let's start with mutation. A little research reveals that mutation is a "base-pair sequence change" in DNA that results in a new characteristic or trait. (Base pairs are all those combinations of the four nucleotides represented by the letters G, A, T and C which provided the source material for the movie title GATTACA.) A change in certain base pairs might result in a butterfly that's a different colour than its siblings, for example. The human genome contains 3 billion base pairs, and I'm willing to accept that the laws of chance allow for all kinds of things to happen when you're dealing with numbers on that scale. After all, if you were flipping 3 billion quarters, it's not impossible for all of them to come up heads.

To extend the analogy, even if they do all come up heads, we're still flipping only quarters, not pennies or nickels. Some of the X-men have abilities that make no sense in terms of mutation* - how in the world would the necessary genetic information for wings get into someone's DNA? It's one thing to get a butterfly that's a funny colour (or even a person with blue skin), but it seems pretty unlikely that you could get a butterfly with lobster claws or porcupine quills.

But I'm not entirely against the concept of the mutant superhero. How could we possibly predict whether or not some combination of genes might allow for telepathy, telekinesis, or any of the other unproven psionic abilities? And I'm happy to give Wolverine the full seal of mutant approval. There's a tendency to forget that his actual mutant abilities are rapid healing and animal-like senses - sensitive smell, hearing and so on - which although a bit extreme are logical extensions of existing human capabilities. People tend to focus more on the adamantium skeleton and claws, which after all are custom add-ons rather than factory stock.


However, the adamantium skeleton implanted by Stryker's Weapon X programme must lead to problems. The human skeleton isn't just a support system for the muscles. Bone marrow produces blood cells, a crucial part of the body's ability to transfer oxygen and fight disease. Logically, if Logan's skeleton is made out of metal, his rapid healing factor must be in a constant battle to prevent something very much like a combination of anemia and leukemia. I wonder if they're going to talk about that in the new movie?

- Sid

*And even less in terms of physics. The ability to shoot intense powerful beams of energy from your eyes? You've got to think that it would take Mother Nature thousands of generations to build the necessary structures for that. (And I can't imagine that you'd be able to see with the same organs that were able to blast a hole through concrete.) How do you fuel something like that? What possible natural energy source could the human body contain that would allow for that kind of power? For that matter, what are the back of Cyclops' eye sockets made out of in order to make sure that the energy doesn't blast out through the back of his head when his eyes are closed? My god, on that basis what are his eyelids made out of?

And why do Bruce Banner's pants never rip the same way the rest of his clothing does when he turns into the Hulk? I know, I know, they're just comic books.

And of course a movie is being planned.

Scenes dealing with, or instruments associated with walking dead, torture, vampires and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism, and werewolfism are prohibited.

Comics Code Authority, 1954

Recently my friend Laurie was complaining about being cursed by her own success at work. She's currently booking fitness training sessions at about twice her quota, and has been forced to request that her overtime limit be raised so that she can do all of her administrative tasks as well.

The impressive part is that she's not even trying to sell her services. As she commented, "It's like I can't escape these people, they seem to come out of nowhere!"

My reply was that I could easily imagine what it must be like: closing time at the gym, and she's just turned out the lights (as demanded by dramatic tradition in this area). Then, out of the shadows come the shambling, decaying figures of gym zombies, draped in tattered Lululemon outfits, with the moaning cry of "Traaaainnnnnn.....traaaaaainnn...."*

How is it that zombies have become part of the cultural landscape?

Zombies would seem to be a particularly 20th century conceit. The concept of the revenant, someone who has returned from the dead, exists as far back as the Middle Ages, but unlike the vampire or the werewolf, the current version of the zombie seems to owe very little to its historical antecedents.

EC Comics planted the seed for the modern zombie in its 1950's titles such as Vault of Horror and Tales from the Crypt, which featured the vengeful return from the grave by murder victims as a staple of its content. The whys and hows of such a return were secondary: the important part was the visual impact of these rotting horrors from the graveyard as they lurched into the homes of their killers to exact a grisly revenge.

Sadly, it was exactly this sort of over-the-top approach to storytelling which led to the downfall of EC Comics and their brethren. A psychiatrist named Fredric Wertham undertook a crusade against the adverse effects of EC's horrific tales and their negative impact on the children who read them, publishing his results in his infamous book The Seduction of the Innocent. In 1954, Congress undertook an investigation of juvenile delinquency, with Wertham as a prominent witness. The congressional committee concluded that comics were not directly responsible for delinquency among youth, but strongly recommended that some sort of control be instituted over the content of comics.

In response, the comics industry created the Comics Code Authority and its list of forbidden content. Since the list was more or less derived directly from the EC Comics material, EC soon found itself out of business.

However, EC left its mark by inserting the whole idea of zombies into the psyche of a generation of comic readers - and eventual movie makers. (The principals of EC also went on to develop MAD Magazine, which left a completely different mark, but I digress.)

The real front man for zombie promotion is of course George Romero, whose 1968 movie Night of the Living Dead might be considered the crop from the seeds planted by EC. In the years since Romero's black and white magnum opus, there have been innumerable zombie movies that have firmly established walking cannibal corpses as part of the horror canon. Interestingly, there's a common thread in these films that blames government experiments gone wrong for the rise of zombies, rather than any sort of supernatural process.

And now, the shelves of bookstores are graced by another attempt by zombies to earn acceptance in the mainstream: Seth Grahame-Smith's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which is actually credited to Jane Austen and Mr. Grahame-Smith. This dual credit strikes me as a marketing ploy - obviously the publishers are hoping that Ms. Austen will rise from the grave to avenge herself. (Perhaps some cameras should be set up near her gravesite in preparation.)

But really, when you think about it, Wertham and the Comics Code Authority people should have known better. After all, everyone knows that zombies eventually find a way in, no matter what.

- Sid

* Sadly, Laurie didn't get the "braaains" reference, but I thought it was funny.