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Life After People (2009) Season 3 Episode 5- Home on the Strange
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00:00What would happen if every human being on Earth disappeared?
00:14No matter how we might vanish, this is the story of what could happen to the world we leave behind.
00:23Now, life after people hits home.
00:32The buildings we live in are our castles, and they say home is where the heart is.
00:38But when we're gone, what comes knocking?
00:43In vast suburbs, modern houses are under assault from the outside and from the inside out.
00:52It looks like the entire city was put in the microwave on high.
00:57This house has turned to Swiss cheese.
01:05Condominiums everywhere get new residents by the thousands.
01:11Cockroaches will eat literally anything.
01:14It's the home invasion of your worst fears.
01:18No matter how well built, every home would be swallowed by decay.
01:23It shows you how delicate paradise really is.
01:27And in the heartland, farmsteads that were once the cornerstone of the American dream become beastly nightmares.
01:37It's pretty incredible how quickly domesticated pigs go feral.
01:42They'd look almost unrecognizable.
01:46In a world without people, the places we lived are taken over, taken down, and our most precious memories are erased.
01:56Welcome to Earth, population zero.
02:05All around the globe, homes are abandoned, from major cities like Paris and Chicago, to the suburbs and rural areas that surround them.
02:24In Mesa, Arizona, the biggest suburb in the United States, no children play in backyards.
02:33No parents stroll the sidewalks.
02:36The houses sit empty.
02:39Every room is silent.
02:43Every hallway, eerily still.
02:45But one sound remains.
02:48The low hum of what once made life in these homes possible.
02:54Even in the brutal heat of the Sonoran Desert.
02:58Air conditioning.
03:00These deserts shouldn't be fit for human life, but somehow people call them home.
03:05Air conditioning is absolutely crucial in places as hot as Mesa.
03:10Lifeless and scorched by the sun, humans rolled the dice on the desert and forced it to bend to our will.
03:16Most of these large houses are built with black shingle roofs and giant picture windows.
03:21They look great from the outside.
03:23Without air conditioning, those roofs suck up heat from the sun and turn those upper floors into a heat sink.
03:30Then those picture windows act like panes in a greenhouse, letting in sunlight and trapping the heat inside.
03:35In the time of people, air conditioning was the lifeblood of every home.
03:42Now, there's no one left to adjust the temperature.
03:46No one to enjoy the cool.
03:49But 70 miles away, the electric heart of the biggest nuclear power plant in the country still beats, powering the surrounding suburbs.
04:00The Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station.
04:03Palo Verde is the only desert nuclear plant in the Western Hemisphere and the only one in the country that's not located next to a natural body of water.
04:12Most plants are built near rivers, lakes or oceans so they can use that water to cool their reactors.
04:20In the parched and sweltering Arizona desert, humanity found another way to cool Palo Verde's fuel rods.
04:28One that flows not through a river bend or along a coastline, but through the sewers.
04:35Instead of a natural water source, Palo Verde has an automated system that pulls treated sewage water from cities like Phoenix, Mesa and Tempe and pumps it into reservoirs and cooling towers.
04:47Going to the bathroom in Mesa is almost like performing a civic duty because every time you flush your toilet, you're helping to cool a nuclear reactor.
04:57The reactors still hum with power, not because of human hands, but because of the systems they left behind.
05:07A web of automated fail safes designed to keep the unimaginable at bay.
05:13We all know the names Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukushima, because they were unbelievable disasters with far reaching and long lasting consequences.
05:25Palo Verde nuclear plant was designed to prevent exactly that kind of disaster.
05:30The Chernobyl disaster caused nearly 200,000 homes to be evacuated, many of them eventually destroyed.
05:43Two days after people, there's no one in Palo Verde's control room, no technicians keeping watch, and the plant's automated systems rely on human oversight.
05:54The system is constantly monitored by operators who can make adjustments and respond to alerts.
06:02If the system senses that nobody is responding to it, it immediately triggers a shutdown.
06:09Before a meltdown happens, a mechanism is triggered.
06:12That drops a control rod into the core, halting or at least dramatically slowing the nuclear reaction.
06:20As it was designed to do, the system shuts the reactors down.
06:25But even then, the danger doesn't die.
06:29Spent fuel rods still radiated unholy heat, powerful enough to melt through steel, concrete, and anything that stands in its way.
06:42Used up fuel rods stay dangerously hot and radioactive for years.
06:47That's why they're stored underwater in cooling pools to prevent them from overheating or catching fire.
06:54The cooling pools are the plant's last line of defense.
06:58But to keep the simmering rods from overheating, pumps have to constantly move cold water in and hot water out.
07:06The cooling pump system would still be working because there are backup generators that work on diesel fuel.
07:12In a world without people, there's no one to maintain the generators.
07:17No one to refill their tanks.
07:19What will happen when the power eventually grinds to a halt?
07:23Far from the sprawling desert suburbs lies one of the condominium capitals of the country, Miami.
07:26Once, more than half a million units were alive with laughter, the sound of shared meals and music.
07:44Now, all that remains are empty tables, echoes of people who will never come home again.
07:54Almost one third of Miami's housing stock is condominiums.
07:58That's the highest percentage of any major city in the United States.
08:01Which goes to show that the ideal of the white picket fence in the suburbs isn't always what the American dream looks like.
08:09One week after people, something has been hiding in plain sight, lingering in the air, and already hard at work.
08:24Miami has what's called a tropical monsoon climate.
08:30Basically, because of the surrounding warm ocean, Biscayne Bay, and regular afternoon rain, it's humid all day, every day.
08:39Most of the older condos in Miami Beach were built out of porous materials.
08:45Not only would humidity and moisture get into the buildings quickly, they would start to do damage almost immediately.
08:52Miami's power grid has been down for days, and every condo in the city is sizzling in the heat.
09:01Without ventilation and air conditioning, the temperature could spike up to 100 degrees.
09:06Within a few days, food would rot.
09:10Condensation would form on counters and walls, and all that heat and humidity would start to warp the wood.
09:16The scent of rot fills the air.
09:19Decay spreads like fog through condos across the city.
09:23It's an unspoken invitation to nature's perfect pest.
09:27Cockroaches would waste no time finding all the little cracks and crevices to get inside.
09:37Roaches would love to eat exactly the kind of trash that would be festering in the heat and humidity.
09:43Moldy cheese, spoiled meat, they even like to drink the garbage juice as it decomposes.
09:51Once they've gotten through all the trash and the rotten food left behind, they'll move on to other things like book bindings, old mail, the carcasses of dead house pets, even things like old skin cells, hair and nail clippings.
10:06Americans actually used to spend millions of dollars on exterminators trying to keep cockroaches in check, but those defense systems are gone.
10:17After people, there's no one to lay down traps, no one to spray pesticide, and cockroaches aren't just devouring everything in sight, they're multiplying.
10:29Cockroaches love the heat and humidity, especially the American and Asian species that you find in Miami.
10:38Cockroaches are cold-blooded. Warmer temperatures give them more energy. That means they fly more, eat more, and make more roaches more.
10:51Cockroaches are disgusting nightmare fuel.
10:54A single pair can produce up to 400,000 descendants in a single year, and it only takes babies about 35 days to mature.
11:04Without pest control, just a few cockroaches can become a full-on infestation in no time at all.
11:11Inside abandoned homes, the cockroaches are sheltered from natural predators, and they're spreading.
11:19Cockroaches have no problem traveling between units with shared walls.
11:23That's because they can compress their flexible exoskeletons down to at least half their normal size, and they splay their legs out, making them able to go through even the tiniest of cracks without slowing down.
11:35Once home to a family of four, this condo is now a kingdom of cockroaches.
11:42They're burrowed beneath the floorboards, pulsing behind the walls.
11:46With the power off, they writhe and feast in the dark.
11:51But one thing still glows.
11:55Small, forgotten.
11:57A pilot-like burns, waiting to turn infestation into ignition.
12:02The Arizona suburbs were once home to millions of people.
12:13Now the streets are silent, every house abandoned, and just weeks after people at the nuclear power plant that used to power these neighborhoods.
12:22Backup generators are now the only thing keeping emergency pumps pumping and spent fuel rods from melting down.
12:31There's enough diesel on hand to keep the pumps running, but only if there's someone there to refill them.
12:37With no one to refuel their tanks, the generators choke on the last fumes of diesel.
12:45The pumps sputter and die.
12:47Slumbering fuel rods begin to stir.
12:50Not to supply power to the surrounding suburbs, but to bring annihilation.
13:01The water would start to evaporate slowly at first and then faster.
13:05The water in the cooling pools boils off, exposing the fuel rods to air.
13:12To put it mildly, this is bad.
13:15The fuel rods are coated in zirconium, which is stable underwater, but is dangerous when it's exposed to the air.
13:22Because once zirconium is out of the water, it can react chemically with steam, releasing hydrogen gas.
13:28Hydrogen gas.
13:29And hydrogen gas is explosive.
13:32Like, hydrogen gas is what caused the Hindenburg to explode.
13:36Hydrogen gas hangs in the air, growing thick until it meets a spark.
13:42And all at once, it explodes.
13:45This isn't a nuclear explosion, it's a chemical one.
13:53But the damage is catastrophic.
13:58Once a fire takes hold in a spent fuel pool, it's nearly impossible to stop.
14:02The smoke can carry radioactive material hundreds of miles.
14:09The power plant is being consumed from within.
14:13Radiation spilling out of every new breach of its walls.
14:16The toxic clouds spit out by the fire rises on the wind, moving toward the nearby suburbs, killing anything living.
14:26Blanketing block after block of houses in corrosive isotopes and gamma radiation.
14:32How long before the homes of Mesa, Arizona, are nothing but dust?
14:37In rural Pennsylvania, there are no pickup trucks traveling the dirt roads, no shoppers at the general store.
14:49On a small farm, there's a homestead that stood for nearly 200 years.
14:54But now, no one calls it home.
14:58The key to making these homes long-lasting is using old-growth lumber,
15:02which comes from trees grown naturally for hundreds or even thousands of years.
15:07The natural-growth process makes old-growth wood sturdy and resistant to rot.
15:13Not only were the houses meant to last, but the homesteads themselves were meant to be self-sustaining.
15:19You'll find pens for livestock, wells to access fresh water, and root cellars to store vegetables.
15:26And in the right conditions, foods like potatoes, squash, and pears can last for months.
15:33This homestead has housed and fed families since decades before the Civil War.
15:39But just one week after people, some crops are withering, others are growing unchecked.
15:46And in pens and paddocks, livestock is neglected and hungry.
15:57A pig eats about 4% of its body weight a day, and they can weigh as much as 800 pounds.
16:03So basically, a pig would need to eat a large bag of dog food enough to last a big dog about a month every single day.
16:11Pigs aren't picky eaters. They'll eat just about anything. Roots, bugs, other animals.
16:19They've even been known to eat an entire human corpse, bones and all, in less than eight hours.
16:25The pigs have devoured everything in their pen, including the wooden fences themselves. Relics of farmers now gone forever.
16:38Pigs are among the top five smartest animals around. Some studies suggest that they're about as smart as a three-year-old human.
16:47Between their size and their smarts, it wouldn't take much for them to find a way out of their pens.
16:51They can dig up fencing and break down just about anything in their way.
16:54Two weeks after people, the pigs have eaten through crops like a disease, but their hunger is insatiable.
17:04And now they have a craving for fresh meat.
17:07Chickens have been domesticated for more than 10,000 years. So one would think that without people around, they'd be helpless.
17:20But remarkably, without people, they'd do quite well.
17:24With no one to feed them, they're going to revert to their primitive instincts, pecking for ants and grubs and any seeds they can find.
17:34Even without human hands to care for them, the chickens are plump and healthy.
17:40They're also locked in their coop, a perfect target for pigs, ravenous and on the prowl.
17:46Over a thousand miles to the south, months after people, Miami's abandoned condominiums are being remodeled with new carpets and wallpaper made of wriggling cockroaches.
18:05Gnawing through everything they touch, burrowing into every crack and crevice.
18:09And here's where it gets ugly. Cockroaches, they leave their droppings, molten shells and even their bodies.
18:17The power's out, but some old gas stoves still have a flickering flame.
18:22That's the pilot light, which doesn't need electricity to burn.
18:26It's fed by a tiny steady stream of gas designed to keep flowing for months or even years.
18:33The mess builds up around a pilot assembly jamming the valve that controls the gas flow.
18:39The result is a stuck open gas line.
18:42Now you've got gas spreading throughout a condo unit.
18:45It's going under the doors, out into the hallway, into other units.
18:51In the time of people, simple maintenance and routine inspection would eliminate the threat.
18:58Now, gas is seeping through condo units like poison through veins.
19:02What will happen when it finally touches the pilot light flickering in the dark?
19:16Two months after people, Miami is a ghost town.
19:20A fire caused by a gas leak and a flickering pilot light has engulfed a condo, threatening all the units people once called home.
19:31Remember, in a high rise like this, everything's connected.
19:35That means shared walls, shared ventilation, shared gas lines.
19:40So now that initial explosion cracks open even more lines, releasing even more gas.
19:46It's a chain reaction.
19:48Boom, boom, boom.
19:49Boom.
19:53Hallways become fire tunnels.
19:55In minutes, a big part of the building is in flames.
19:59And just like that, it's a throwing inferno.
20:01Just as the flames threaten to leap across blocks and engulf the city, something shifts in the air.
20:10And the very humidity that helped cause the fire gives rise to the only thing that can stop it.
20:22In the summer, Miami often gets heavy rain, often in the form of brief but intense thunderstorms.
20:28A single storm can unleash two to three inches of rain in mere minutes.
20:33The heavens rain down what looks like salvation, but it's a wolf hidden in sheep's clothing, eager to infiltrate and attack.
20:45Now imagine that kind of downpour slamming into a building already cracked open and crumbling.
20:52Torrents of rain crash through broken windows, soaking the carpet walls and wiring.
20:58The rain pours through every crack, soaking drywall, pooling on floors.
21:04The rain puts out the fire, but brings its own kind of destruction.
21:10Just months after people, condo buildings all over Florida are cracking, leaking, bending and buckling.
21:20But there's one building that towers above the rest, resolute and unbowed.
21:28Its 84 luxury condos, indoor infinity pool and private helipad were once home to the richest elites.
21:36Now it lies as silent as a tomb, a monument to the wealthiest members of a dead civilization.
21:461,000 Museum was designed more like a yacht than a condo, using marine grade wood, stone, glass and minimal carpet.
21:58Plus, the triple sealed hurricane windows and thermal insulation will prevent it from getting too hot in there.
22:03It might get a little uncomfortable, but its materials were handpicked to deal with those conditions.
22:10While most of Miami festers, this residential tower refuses to rot.
22:16But Father Time is patient.
22:18How long before this tower succumbs as well?
22:30Six months after people, at a farm that was once home to a hard-working family,
22:37the ravenous grunting of pigs fills the air outside the chicken coop.
22:41The chicken coop, no longer fed by humans, the pigs are starving and aggressive.
22:48And fresh poultry is on the menu.
22:53Chicken coops are designed to keep out coyotes, raccoons and other birds.
22:57Your garden variety, lightweight predator.
23:00Pigs love to root, and they can easily get their snouts two to three feet deep under the soil.
23:06And chicken coop foundations are typically only a foot to a foot and a half deep.
23:09So pigs would have no trouble working their way inside.
23:13Once they're under the foundations, there is nothing to stop these pigs from entering the coop and wreaking havoc.
23:20They would eat what's left of the chicken feed, they would eat any eggs in the coop, and then they would eat the chickens.
23:29The most accessible food has now been gobbled up.
23:33And the once docile pigs turn their attention to the farmhouse itself.
23:37But while the home has barely changed in hundreds of years, the pigs are quickly transforming, shedding domestication like a snake sloughs off its skin.
23:50It's pretty incredible how quickly domesticated pigs go feral and start to resemble the wild boars that they descend from.
23:57This can start to happen within weeks, and by the time a year has gone by, they become almost unrecognizable.
24:04Their hair starts to grow coarser and darker in color. The males start to grow prominent tusks. They get leaner and more muscular with increased foraging and rooting. Their behavior starts to change as well.
24:18As they get wilder, the pigs' snouts elongate a bit, and their sense of smell gets even better. Which is saying something. Because even domesticated pigs can smell food buried 25 feet underground.
24:32As they go feral, pigs start to become nocturnal. And feral pigs are known to become highly aggressive.
24:39This is no longer a sounder of swine. It's a beastly wrecking crew. Food inside the old farmhouse is beckoning to them like a siren song.
24:54Can this sturdy home keep the hogs at bay? Or will they bring it all crashing down?
25:09Six months after people, this small family farmstead is in disarray.
25:16Once neat rows of crops have been ripped from the soil and devoured by ravenous feral pigs.
25:22The farmhouse has been home to generations, standing strong through 40 presidents, countless blizzards, and two world wars.
25:32Now, hooves scrape the doors, snouts root at foundations. The hungry hogs are desperate to get inside.
25:43The pigs would be lured by the smells coming from inside the farmhouse.
25:47If they get hungry and desperate enough, they will try anything to get inside.
25:54They may look like lumbering wrecking balls, but pigs are surprisingly fast.
26:00They can run up to 11 miles per hour. So if one takes aim at the front door of a house, it's like launching a bowling ball at it.
26:09The pigs break in like thieves, but they don't bother with stealth.
26:17They're brazen, remorseless, and destructive.
26:20Pigs bite with enough force to break some human bones. So it'd be easy work to tear off cupboard or closet doors to get at what's stored inside.
26:29These pigs would devour any dried goods left behind. Flour, oats, cereals, you name it. And if they were able to crack open that fridge door, I'm sure they would be happy to eat whatever year old biohazard they would find inside.
26:45If anything kept in jars fell off the shelves, they'd eat it. Probably sucking up some broken glass at the same time. And I don't know if they could bite open canned food, but they would sure as hell try.
26:55And let's just be clear about one thing. Pigs are not polite. They're pigs. Even the trace smell of old food is going to drive them into a frenzy. They will destroy furniture. They will tear up floorboards. They will smash holes in the wall.
27:11If they find any possible weak spot, like water damage or rotten siding, they're just going to plow right through that.
27:20Once home to the family who fed and kept them, the feral pigs had turned this farmhouse into a splintered husk. Now, they leave it behind to maraud through the countryside.
27:33In Mesa, Arizona, the biggest suburb in the country is quiet, but looks almost unchanged. Cars are still parked in driveways. Water ripples in backyard pools.
27:52But just like in the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters, an invisible, toxic wind from the Palo Verde nuclear meltdown has blown over 100 miles from the plant.
28:06It's touched every surface, found every crack and open window, sparing nothing in this once peaceful suburb.
28:15These homes may look picture-perfect from the curb, but they're actually saturated with a poison that you can't see, smell, or escape.
28:24Gamma radiation rains down on everything alongside hot isotopes like cesium-137 and strontium-90, coating the landscape and every house in sight.
28:35To give you a sense of scale, just one-thirtieth of an ounce of cesium-137, that's a single sunflower seed, can make a whole square mile uninhabitable.
28:51Now imagine several pounds of this stuff.
28:54The fallout seeps into lungs, wrecking organs almost immediately. Within hours, the smallest animals like squirrels and rabbits start to drop.
29:07Faster metabolisms mean they soak up the most the quickest. By day two, bigger animals like deer and coyotes follow.
29:13Over time, radiation eats away at these big suburban homes, corroding metals, breaking down plastics, and the air inside becomes dangerously radioactive.
29:28The radiation gnaws at these homes from the outside, but deep beneath the suburban concrete, something else lurks, hidden from the poison.
29:38They're tiny, resilient, and hungry.
29:48The biggest suburb in the world is being consumed by toxic dust.
29:53But there's something else crawling and burrowing beneath the homes that line these streets.
29:59Something that survived the initial wave of fallout.
30:03Not a cockroach, but its much smaller cousin.
30:06Termites are extremely common in Mesa, and there's a good chance they would have survived the radiation from the Palo Verde plant.
30:14A lot of termites live in nests several feet underground, which would provide protection from that initial blast of toxicity.
30:21Insects like cockroaches and termites are famously resistant to radiation, much more so than humans or other mammals.
30:29Now, organic cells are most susceptible to radiation when they're dividing.
30:34And in the human body, we've got millions of cells dividing every single day.
30:39But a termite, it only divides its cells when it's molten.
30:44Couple that with their extremely rapid reproductive cycles, and termites could very well adapt to a post-meltdown environment, just like scientists have witnessed in the area around Chernobyl.
30:55The termites bide their time, then they creep from their nests like a plague, swarming toward the wooden foundations of Mesa's suburban homes.
31:05Their diets consist mainly of decaying plant materials and wood.
31:09One particular species, a subterranean termite, is so ubiquitous, it's better known as the Arizona termite.
31:16It also happens to be the species of termite that is most destructive to homes.
31:20All it takes is a tiny, tiny crack in the foundations, less than a sixteenth of an inch, and they're in.
31:29The termites feast on support beams, frames, and foundations.
31:33And without human exterminators to keep them in check, their population skyrockets.
31:39A termite queen lays approximately 40,000 eggs per day and has a life expectancy of nearly 20 years.
31:50The colony never sleeps and never stops eating.
31:54The biggest suburb in the world is decaying from the outside and being consumed from within.
32:00How long before there's nothing left but dust?
32:1120 years after people.
32:14In Miami, 1,000 Museum is now dirty, aging, worn down.
32:19But the building itself still stands proud.
32:23A minor hurricane is roiling the skies offshore.
32:27But this tower, once home to the ultra-rich, has a secret weapon humanity left behind to defend it.
32:38The building is tailor-made for Miami's harsh environment.
32:41There are 5,000 pieces of glass-fiber-reinforced concrete that form kind of an exoskeleton around the building,
32:50like a giant brace that can resist the force of wind during major storms.
32:551,000 Museum's aerodynamic shape breaks up wind pressure,
33:01the kind of turbulence that can shake and rattle a tall building.
33:04And every unit has special impact-resistant windows that can withstand something like a 2x4 hurled at it at up to 100 miles an hour.
33:14Other condo buildings aren't so lucky.
33:18They're cracked and sagging, bones already weakened.
33:23Now there's no seawall, no flood control, no first responders.
33:27Just a 12-story building, weakened by fire, teetering on soggy ground as the storm slams into it.
33:36There would be a sickening crack from below.
33:40The foundations, already stressed from rising groundwater, start to literally sheer off.
33:46Concrete snaps, rebar buckles, one floor pancakes onto the next,
33:50and dust and debris shoot out like a volcanic blast.
33:53Twelve stories crumple like a tower of wet playing cards, each floor crushing the next.
34:01As the condo crashes into the sea, there are no people left to mourn its demise,
34:08no crews to rebuild it, only a twisted metal and concrete corpse reclaimed by the sea.
34:16In Arizona, decades of radioactive fallout and the hungry termites who survived it have turned the suburb into the lifeless ruins of a lost civilization.
34:31They don't devour large chunks of wood, instead they burrow tunnels into the wood, which weakens its overall structure, compromising the structural integrity of the entire home.
34:42One by one, the once sprawling homes, prized symbols of a safe middle-class life, have been reduced to piles of rubble.
34:52This house has been made brittle by nuclear fallout, it's turned to Swiss cheese by ravenous termites, and now it's just too fragile to hold its own weight.
35:02So gravity deals the final blow.
35:05One hundred years after people, the houses that were once home to hundreds of thousands of people in the biggest suburb in America have crumbled into dust, leaving behind a barren wasteland.
35:31But even here, in the parched silence and toxic soil, new life emerges.
35:40Nuclear radiation once made this place a dead zone, but now the worst isotopes are gone.
35:46Even cesium-137 has lost most of its bite, so if you look carefully, you might see cracks in the pavement blooming with weeds.
35:53You might see lizards scurrying through the ruins.
35:56The streets are buried under sand, but mesquite and scrub are growing again.
36:01Tumbleweeds roll down the highways like a scene out of a forgotten western, except this one's set in a weird post-apocalyptic suburbia.
36:09In place of manicured lawns, towering saguaros now rise like desert kings, staking their claim where once porch swings and garden gnomes used to sit.
36:22After a century without people, under that unforgiving Arizona sun, it would almost feel like humans never existed at all.
36:35150 years after people, the Pennsylvania farmhouse that saw generation after generation thrive and grow beneath its roof is now broken, its bones laid bare.
36:50These old field stone foundations can be very strong, but time is taking its toll.
36:55For years, the foundations of the farmhouse have been sitting wide open to the elements.
37:01The house is dismantled bit by bit.
37:04Most of the home is gone, but its foundation remains, anchored in the earth like the roots of a great tree.
37:13A monument to the farmers that once worked this land.
37:18In Miami, what was once the condo capital of the country has been lashed by wind, inundated by rain, and pounded by waves.
37:28What's left in the city is nearly unrecognizable.
37:32But above the curling, gripping vines of new growth, 1000 Museum still stands.
37:391000 Museum has weathered decades of storm, heat, and rising seas, thanks to its reinforced concrete exoskeleton and cutting edge design.
37:49It was built to last, and so far it has.
37:52But even this, the crown jewel of beachfront homes, can't escape the slow march of father time.
38:00The glass panels are cracked, salt is crusting the facade.
38:05The rain is seeping into seams that were never meant to go unmaintained.
38:10The rooftop pool would be a murky swamp, by now likely covered in vegetation.
38:18But the futuristic exoskeleton did exactly what it was built to do.
38:23Absorb stress, flex with the wind, hold its ground.
38:27The outer shell's scarred, yes, there's cracked glass, there's twisted metal panels, there's salt-stained concrete, but the core structure is sound.
38:36It looks battered, but it's not broken.
38:39Eventually, perhaps centuries from now, the salt water will finally eat away at the building's mighty cement foundations and corrode the steel reinforcements.
38:51Five hundred years after people, with a massive crack nobody hears, the last survivor of Miami's skyline gives up the fight and surrenders to her fate.
39:06For millennia, the homes we built kept us safe, sustained us, and kept the elements at bay.
39:21Without us, nature finds a way to reclaim everything we once built.
39:26No matter how well built, every home, whether it's nestled in the suburbs, built of the strongest stone, or rising above the sea, they were built to exist in a world with us.
39:40And without us, even the strongest will, in time, return to the Earth.
39:47If alien archaeologists come digging someday, they might find a few clues.
39:52A warped metal patio chair, maybe? Sun bleached, but still intact?
39:57Just like the tools found in Egyptian tombs.
40:00Bronze chisels, copper blades, buried for thousands of years, untouched by moisture, still recognizable.
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