History Series / LifeAfterPeople

* TheEiffelTowerEffect: The final fate of every major landmark is more or less complete erasure by the elements, except possibly the simpler and sturdier monuments that have already survived the ravages of time, such as the Pyramids, or similar structures made of granite, limestone, and such. It's discussed that Mt. Rushmore's faces might be just partially recognizable after 10 thousand years.

* CatastrophicCountdown: Inverted. The great disaster '''has''' happened already. The time reminder is instead on how much ago it happened: forty seconds, a minute, an hour, six hours, a day, three days, weeks, months, years...

* DwindlingParty: An unusual example where buildings are used in place of actual characters. The formula remains mostly the same: early on, a bunch of monuments is introduced, and by the end of the episode most if not all of them collapse, on-screen or not.

* InspiredBy: Inspired by the book ''The World Without Us'' which, due to its success and also perhaps because it was named one of ''[[Magazine/TimeMagazine Time]]'' Magazine's Books of the Year for 2007, suddenly made this subject very popular. The Magazine/NationalGeographic Channel also had a [[DuelingShows very similar show]] at the same time called ''Aftermath: Population Zero''.

A television special SpeculativeDocumentary film that premiered on January 21, 2008 on Creator/TheHistoryChannel. A spin-off television series, ''Life After People: The Series'', premiered on the same channel on April 21, 2009; the series touched on many aspects of life on post-human planet Earth that were excluded from the film.

The answer: not as long as you think, and it often has real-life examples of places abandoned by people going "to hell in a handbasket" as the environment proceeds to revert things back into wilderness, sometimes in only a few years.

Despite being entirely about a purely hypothetical and arguably unlikely future rather than being about history (making it more of a nature/ecology program than a history program), the original ''Life After People'' special became History Channel's [[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/07/AR2008030703256.html?hpid=artslot highest rated program]] ''ever''. Although, of course, one could argue that most of the predicted results are accompanied by historical records of what happened - for example at 20-25 years after people, they showed the ruins of Pripyat, which was abandoned in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster 20-25 years before the show aired. Other accounts of shorter periods also quoted records of pets eating their owners' corpses for survival if they were locked inside and could not get out to find food. However, this is only a small portion of the show, and most of it is still speculative.

* AbandonedHospital: A number of abandoned properties, including a former mental hospital on an island off UsefulNotes/NewYorkCity, are shown to demonstrate how fast the environment will begin to retake buildings which are left unmaintained.

%%* AfterTheEnd

* ApocalypseHow: Class 3b, though the show intentionally [[RiddleForTheAges goes out of its way to never explain]] how humans might disappear. To quote one of the opening lines of [[OnceAnEpisode every episode]], "This isn't about ''how'' we might vanish. This is about what happens to the world we leave behind." In general, though, it's assumed that our buildings and infrastructure are intact, and in the case of hydroelectric plants, left running for as long as it can. The only thing we know in the show is that the disappearance was sudden and unexpected, as pets are left to starve in their homes, cars and airplanes crash, and power plants are left unattended.

* CatastrophicCountdown: Inverted. The great disaster '''has''' happened already. The time reminder is instead on how much ago did it happen: forty seconds, a minute, an hour, six hours, a day, three days, weeks, months, years...
* CreatorProvincialism: They might throw in something about Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower or the Pyramids at Giza once or twice, but other than that it's all about post-human America. They do pay tribute to the series' popularity in Latin America ([[GermansLoveDavidHasselhoff despite Latin America being entirely absent from it]]) by doing a two-hour special entirely about Latin American countries, though.
* CripplingOverspecialization: This is played straight in some episodes, where they show that this hurts the chances of several dog breeds, but it is averted with others, such as the Anatolian sheepdogs in the Season 2 episode "Wrath of God", who, thanks to millennia of breeding, have ensuring the survival of their flock in their genes, making sure they will keep protecting their flocks for centuries to come.

* DwindlingParty: An unusual example where buildings are used in place of actual characters. Though the formula remains mostly the same: early on, a bunch of monuments are introduced, and by the end of the episode most if not all of them collapse, on-screen or not.

* ElevatorFailure: The Sears Tower (renamed the Willis Tower in late 2009 after the show was made) in Chicago has 104 elevators in various shafts. Eventually the steel cables will rot and the elevators will fall, activating the emergency brakes. Eventually those will fail, and the elevators will crash into the bottom of their shafts. Two of the elevators run all the way to the observation center at the top of the building, when one of them fails, it will fall at a speed of more than 200 miles per hour, crashing into the bottom of the shaft with a force of 1.2 million pounds.

** In an accidental example, escaped pet parrots continue to mimic human sounds in the absence of their owners, and their offspring copying their parents' calls keeps up this habit for (perhaps) a few generations. Eventually, natural selection weeds out such vocalizations as useless.

** Rags soaked in linseed-oil would spontaneously combust, burning down the San Remo Apartments.

** Water damage plays a crucial role in the collapse of several buildings such as the Sears Tower, the Empire State Building and the Oriental Pearl Tower.

* MisplacedWildlife: The possibility of zoo animals such as lions, elephants and chimpanzees escaping and forming populations in the United States is explored.

* PetTheDog: During the segments about the first weeks, the show explains that most pets locked in homes would die due to starvation and thirst. These segments show a dog who finds that its owners have disappeared and struggles to survive with food lying around and water seeping from the fridge. Ultimately, however, the show is kind enough to show the dog managing to find a way out, saving the audience from experiencing the dog's horrible fate if it hadn't escaped. Then again, they also say that [[AMillionIsAStatistic millions of other pets do suffer that fate]], at least partly due to traits that [[NiceJobBreakingItHero we've bred into them]] like stubby noses. The animals that manage to escape ''and'' have traits that allow them to thrive in the wild live on for millions of years, though after a few centuries of free breeding most defined pedigree breeds are gone, replaced with a wide variety of naturally selected landraces of animals bearing similarities to ''every'' one of their ancestral types that came before them.

** Military dogs on the other hand are shown to apply their training to be extraordinarily effective hunters during the generation in which they survive. Unfortunately since female military dogs are fixed, there aren't any successive purebred generations of these dogs. The series does not explore the possibility that crossbreeds might learn these skills from their parents, as well as the fact that beneficial ''physical'' characteristics that the male military dogs have would be carried on to the next generation, and so on and so forth.
** Furthermore, several dog breeds are shown in the series to survive and thrive. Anatolian sheepdogs retain the instincts bred into them for millennia to protect their flocks, and regard any other canine as a threat, potentially allowing them to protect their sheep for millennia to come. Lacy hounds also are fit to survive and form packs due to their hog-herding instincts, letting them easily dominate over wild hogs.
** On one hand, you have this moment with the Longhorn cattle, who can easily breach their confines to roam free once more, and defend themselves with their namesake horns. On the other, the dairy cows are not going to survive as easily, with their calves separated from them, a lack of any feeding or milking mechanisms to keep them healthy, and no way of reproducing without any males around. A few might break free, but most will die out... or be food for predatory megafauna breaking out of zoos across the planet.

* RegionalRedecoration: Without people diverting the water from the Niagara River, the erosion rate of Niagara falls increases from 1 foot per year to 6 feet. After 1,500 years, this increased erosion pushes the Canadian side of the falls so far back that the American side has completely dried out.

** A weird example occurs in the "Waves of Devastation" episode, where the Sydney Harbour Bridge collapsing after a century after people. However, while this happens, the Sydney Opera House, which has caved in twenty-five years prior ''in the same episode'', can be seen intact not so far from the bridge.
* SceneryGorn: The cities are constantly seen in a state of decay that gets worse as the time goes on.

* StrictlyFormula: Every episode follows the same basic structure. About two or three prominent cities / buildings and a selection of animals (usually household pets, farm animals and / or pests) around a certain theme are selected. Every episode then jumps forward one day, several days, a week, a month, a year, a century and so forth to show how they cope without human care ([[ForegoneConclusion spoiler:]] the buildings eventually collapse or crumble away, the animals usually thrive) until a point several centuries or millennia in the future where there's very little (if anything) left. Each episode also features a brief look into a real-life location (or two) which has been abandoned by people to see what effects nature has had on it.
** Almost every episode contained scenes of water seeping into large buildings and rusting out the rebar in the concrete until the concrete (and the building) crumbled. So much damage is shown being due to water - rotting wood, rusting out metal, undercutting buildings and washing away debris - that the show could almost be called "Water Damage: The Series".
* StuffBlowingUp: Nobody is keeping an eye on nuclear power plants. Also oil refineries are more likely to explode within ''an hour'' of no human monitoring.

* TaxonomicTermConfusion: In one episode, the narrator calls raccoons rodents. However, a later soundbite refers to raccoons as carnivores, which is more accurate as they are in the order Carnivora, but "carnivore" just means meat-eater. "Carnivoran" is the correct term (for example, pandas are in the order Carnivora but eat mostly bamboo). This is especially confusing for the less experienced viewers, since raccoons were noted 30 seconds earlier as ultimate omnivores.

* TitleDrop: OncePerEpisode. Practically every other sentence in some episodes; about once before and after each commercial break in others. Also the final words spoken in the original 2008 documentary (and in some episodes of the weekly series).

* WeAreAsMayflies: Humans truly ''haven't'' been around for that long, and most of the changes that occur on planetary and intergalactic levels take years to millennia longer than the human life span. The series really sends home the message how ''Homo sapiens sapiens''' space on the great timeline of history is actually very small and insignificant compared to the big picture.

* WhatHappenedToTheMouse: Some buildings are not shown collapsing on-screen, such as LAX Theme Building, the Washington Monument and the Jubilee Church among others, though it's implied they too eventually caved in during the span of several more centuries.

* DwindlingParty: An unusual example where buildings are used in place of actual characters. Though formula remains mostly the same: early on, a bunch of monuments is introduced, and by the end of the episode most if not all of them collapse, on-screen or not.

%%* CryonicsFailure: The obvious fate of cryogenically frozen bodies.%%Is?

* AmbiguousTimePeriod: The year the human race vanishes is never specified. The original special was made in 2008 and most series episodes follow the setting that was typical for that year, yet there are buildings whose construction was finished in 2009 and which opened even later in 2010, such as Burj Khalifa and Titanium La Portada.

** The original special makes a huge deal about Hoover Dam's influence on Las Vegas, with the city still capable of being seen from the orbit thanks to its city lights still being on (for the two years it would last, that is), while many other cities will be plunged in the darkness. However, the series' episode "Sin City Meltdown" does not follow on this, and thus the power in the city goes out shortly when the first several days after people pass.

* IndestructibleEdible: Fruitcake, due to being coated with alcohol, could last for years and not rot.

** ''Inverted'' with the LAX Theme Building. Thanks to its unique roof-mounted mass damper system, it becomes the only build at the airport that's left standing.

** Subverted with military hardware, which is surprisingly explosion-free considering that gunpowder destabilizes after about a century. Also, ballistic missiles need constant monitoring to ensure that their own fuel doesn't do them in, and pressure-activated devices like landmines can trigger even during a hard freeze. The series missed lots of opportunities here.

* {{Irony}}: After ten million years, fossilized corpses of humans will be pushed a mile and a half underground, eventually transforming into the very oil they used to run their civilization.

* NatureIsNotNice

* {{Panspermia}}: The Cassini spacecraft, which is thought to carry bacteria in its innards, does this to Saturn's moon Enceladus, which has a sub-surface ocean. After two million years, the bacteria have formed an ecosystem.