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00:00Imagine our planet without its people.
00:07Imagine that every single human being has simply disappeared.
00:12This isn't the story of how that might happen.
00:16It's the story of what happens to the world we leave behind.
00:23Now, in life after people, man's most precious metals.
00:29How will gold prove its worth in a future without humans?
00:34Can the properties of steel protect it from its enemies?
00:39And what does a mysterious gold mineral have to do with bringing down the dinosaurs?
00:46Structures from an age of steel will be changed forever.
00:52Welcome to Earth. Population zero.
00:57The great cities of mankind were built on metal, financed by gold and constructed from steel.
01:18In the absence of man, these metals seem well armored in the battle for survival.
01:26But what properties will allow some to crumble and others to survive?
01:32One day after people.
01:42In the heart of Manhattan, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York still guards the vast wealth of depositors who will never return to claim it.
01:53It holds more than half a million gold bars worth roughly $200 billion, the accumulated wealth of some 60 foreign governments and central banks.
02:10There is more gold in the basement of the Federal Reserve Bank in Manhattan than has been gathered any other place on Earth and any other time in history.
02:23The gold is stored 80 feet below street level.
02:28The narrow opening to the vault is protected by a rotating 90-ton steel cylinder that forms an air and water-tight seal with the surrounding 140-ton steel and concrete frame.
02:41The gold lasts pretty much forever.
02:44The whole point of having gold is that it doesn't corrode and doesn't tarnish.
02:50And there's nothing in nature that can dissolve gold.
02:54Gold is one of the most non-reactive metals on Earth.
02:57So when it's exposed to air or water, its molecules resist disintegration.
03:06But other metals in New York City won't fare so well.
03:14The steel canyon walls of Times Square are still a glittering urban shrine.
03:19But the streets have turned eerily quiet.
03:29In the time of humans, it was one of the loudest places in a very loud city.
03:38Sustained exposure to sound over 75 decibels was deemed dangerous to human ears.
03:43Yet the ambient noise here measured 80 decibels.
03:48Honking horns peaked at 90 decibels.
03:52And a passing ambulance siren screamed at 120.
03:57Now, these sounds are no more.
04:04Leaving just the 50 decibel hum of thousands of air conditioning units.
04:09A world without people would be strangely silent.
04:12In many places, the dominant sound would be birdsong.
04:16Two days after people, and the New York City power grid is failing.
04:30And so is the trademark glow of hundreds of illuminated signs.
04:42These streets have seen blackouts before.
04:44In 2003, a massive East Coast power cut plunged Times Square into darkness for more than 12 hours.
04:59But this time, the blackout is permanent.
05:07During the day, New York's urban jungle is prowled by creatures unaccustomed to fending for themselves.
05:14The horses that once carried police officers and pulled Central Park carriages must adapt to a life with no humans to care for them.
05:21In a world of concrete and steel, can these horses survive?
05:33875 miles west of New York City, the breaking point of metal is about to be tested.
05:41With a dozen breweries, St. Louis was known as America's brewing capital.
05:46In the city that once quenched the thirst of a nation and the world,
05:543 million kegs worth of beer continue to ferment in several thousand massive steel vats.
06:03This is a 30-barrel fermentation tank.
06:06It holds 60 kegs of beer.
06:08And this is what's inside this tank floating towards the top.
06:11It's made of yeast, hot particles, protein and nitrogen.
06:16Inside these fermentation tanks, yeast is used to turn sugars into alcohol.
06:21Carbon dioxide is given off as a by-product, which creates increasing pressure in the tank.
06:27If people were gone on day one, the fermentations would go about as normal.
06:32As soon as electricity failed and the cooling failed with it, the tanks would begin to rise in temperature.
06:37In a St. Louis summer, temperatures can rise over 100 degrees very easily.
06:41The heat rising the brewery will only aggravate these fermentations and make them more and more violent.
06:50Automatic safety release valves normally prevent pressure from getting too high in the tank.
06:55But fermentation also creates something called kruisen, a meringue-like residue which rises to the top of the tank.
07:03The extra heat triples the amount of kruisen rising to the top, where it clogs the pressure relief valve.
07:10If this were to happen, it could cause a catastrophic failure over the course of 36 hours.
07:18In 2009, a fermenting vat explosion tore a 30-foot hole in the roof of a New Orleans brewery.
07:25In St. Louis, only 36 hours after people, these violent eruptions blast holes in roofs as they unleash their intoxicating contents.
07:44Back in New York City, the problem isn't beer, but water.
08:02Without power, the 700 pumps that once emptied the subway system of an average of 13 million gallons of water a day are no longer operating.
08:11The tunnels are already beginning to flood.
08:14The tunnels are already beginning to flood.
08:27It's six months after people.
08:30New York City is dark, except for a strange glow in Times Square.
08:35Installed in 2009, this illuminated beacon of the human past is a billboard that doesn't rely at all on the municipal power grid.
08:47Ninety percent of the sign's power is generated by 16 wind turbines.
08:52The rest comes from an array of 64 solar panels.
08:58The sign's power plant generates enough electricity to power six houses for a year.
09:03The turbine's blades were designed to resist freezing in winter and to automatically slow in the face of hurricane-force winds to prevent damage.
09:19The sign should keep glowing for years, unless something unexpected happens.
09:24One year after people.
09:36The plaza at the Rockefeller Center in midtown Manhattan is still a gathering place.
09:41Only now, it's animals that congregate here.
09:44One of the changes that would take place in New York, if people were out of the way, is that the native animals would move back in.
09:55There are already a tremendous population of deer in the suburbs of New York.
10:01You may see deer right in the heart of the city.
10:04In the time of humans, this concrete chasm was a plaza which was transformed into an artificial ice rink every Christmas.
10:15This winter, nature provides its own ice.
10:21What would happen is, water would freeze during the winter on the rink area itself and would pile up.
10:28And during the spring, the little iceberg would melt and continue to add to the water underneath the buildings themselves.
10:38And that would begin to deteriorate the foundation.
10:41In the spring, the sunken plaza turns into a giant flower pot.
10:47The ice rink would definitely become a garden early.
10:51It would be wet more of the year, and that's good for growth.
10:54Lording over this urban garden is the statue of Prometheus.
11:00A figure from Greek mythology credited with creating mankind,
11:05he now presides over the destruction of what man has created.
11:09The Prometheus statue itself would survive very, very nicely.
11:15It's bronze.
11:18It's gilded.
11:19And for the first five or ten years, the gold gilding on top of it would continue to shine.
11:28That's what gold does.
11:30But it's a very, very thin layer.
11:33The rain, the hail, the dust that blows around would eventually scour it down to the original bronze.
11:39One year after people, the slow decay progresses in silence.
11:52But soon the sounds of crashing steel and stone from above will turn Manhattan into an island of destruction.
11:59And something in their bones will bring down the dinosaurs.
12:18Three years into a life after people, every street corner in New York City is dark.
12:23Except for one.
12:24But the wind and solar powered billboard in Times Square finally flickers out.
12:32It's not for lack of power.
12:37Just a simple matter of having nobody to change the light bulbs.
12:40Meanwhile, the survivors of the urban horses that once patrolled Times Square and pulled tourists around Central Park have fled the city.
12:58But can they possibly survive for long in a life after people?
13:02The horse is an animal of the plains.
13:07It's largely a grass eater.
13:09And what's more, its escape mechanism from predation is largely to run.
13:14It's also a pretty good fighter if it needs to be.
13:17So the horses here in New York City, they have the potential to go wild again, but they need certain things.
13:23They need grass.
13:25They need open space to run.
13:27Golf courses are going to look great.
13:28All those suburban yards around New York.
13:36But soon the gardens and golf courses will turn into forests which don't provide the grassy grazing environments that horses need.
13:45In order to survive, these horses need to find a suitable habitat in a hurry.
13:51Surprisingly, their best bet is to head for the beach.
13:54The grassy barrier islands of the Atlantic coast have already proved their ability to sustain herds of wild horses.
14:04In the time of humans, several hundred of them made their home on Assateague Island, just off the coast of Virginia and Maryland.
14:11The descendants of horses brought here by man 300 years earlier.
14:14No reason why there shouldn't be wild horses on Long Island as well.
14:23But it's a question of are the horses, if the police horses or other horses that escape, are they going to find those places in time?
14:30Ten years after people.
14:40One of the most unusual steel structures, the Gateway Arch, still stands along the Mississippi River in St. Louis.
14:47Little changed from the day humans last packed its observation deck high above the Mississippi River.
14:57At 63 stories, it is the tallest structure in the city, and it might prove to be its longest lastings.
15:03Although it's said the architect, Eero Saarinen, designed it to stand for a thousand years, its slender form looks vulnerable in a life after people.
15:13Unlike a skyscraper, the arch doesn't have a steel skeleton.
15:18Its strength is derived from double walls of stainless steel plates filled with concrete.
15:23Stainless steel corrodes at a very, very slow rate.
15:32The surface of the stainless steel is covered with a film of chromium oxide that can resist corrosion for decades.
15:42If people suddenly died off, I think it would probably stand for a long time.
15:47There's no water intrusion into the structure at all.
15:52With no water getting inside of it, no rust forming, there would really be no reason why anything would happen to the structure itself.
16:03The arch remains as the gateway to the west, at least for now.
16:07At the Rockefeller Center, the walls of the buildings have undergone a strange transformation.
16:22The seams between the blocks of the limestone that coats all these buildings, those seams would catch a lot of seeds and a lot of dirt.
16:30And even 20 or 30 years out, you would probably see a green grid begin to spread out over these buildings.
16:43Plants have already shown a relentless drive to colonize places in New York where they were never supposed to be.
16:52This is the High Line, an elevated railroad track that runs for 22 blocks along Manhattan's west side.
16:58It was completed in 1934, allowing trains to make pickups and deliveries directly from the warehouses and factories in the meatpacking district to Hell's Kitchen.
17:13But rail traffic declined in the 1950s as more cargo was transported by road.
17:19The last trains rumbled along parts of this line in 1980.
17:22Here you have a structure that's predominantly steel.
17:27It's in Manhattan, but nobody walked on it.
17:31Nobody paid any attention to it, except for the wildlife and the wild plants of the city.
17:39This ribbon of wilderness high above the city streets is proof that the Big Apple will turn green very quickly in the absence of humans.
17:4735 years after people.
17:58The mansion lined beaches along West Hampton, a Long Island getaway for New York's rich and famous, no longer provide an escape from the troubles of the city.
18:10The opulent homes were always perched precariously on the edge of the sea.
18:21Many houses were even built on the barrier islands that separated the mainland from the pounding Atlantic surf.
18:27In the 1990s, a series of Atlantic storms breached the barrier island at West Hampton, destroying many homes.
18:38After that, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers rebuilt the barrier island and ensured it was constantly fortified by dredging sand from the sea bottom to build up and reinforce the beach.
18:50Right now we're on the dredge and we can see the drag head, which is actually very similar to a vacuum cleaner head.
19:00It just vacuums up the sand off the ocean bottom.
19:03A sand slurry is pumped from the dredge onto the beach.
19:08When it gets onto the beach, it is reshaped by earth moving equipment on the beach.
19:12Every four years, the Army Corps pumped up to one million cubic yards of sand onto the beach.
19:23But without the Herculean effort of humans, the mansions of the rich and famous fall victim to the waves.
19:30If there were no humans to do some beach nourishment projects, we expect that tens of thousands of houses would be damaged and the low-lying areas of Long Island would be flooded.
19:4350 years after people.
19:56Dinosaur skeletons remain standing as relics of a time long before humans walked the earth.
20:01Their metal supports have kept them upright for decades, but there's a disease growing in their bones.
20:15It's called pyrite disease, named after the mineral pyrite also known as fool's gold.
20:21It forms during the fossilization process as bacteria trigger a chemical reaction that replaces soft tissue with hard crystals.
20:29Fool's gold is one of the common minerals that forms around decaying organisms and that we find around fossils.
20:38A lot of the fossils I work on are literally golden in color.
20:46If fossils are kept under the right conditions, the pyrite inside remains stable.
20:51But in the presence of humid air, the mineral reacts with oxygen and expands.
20:56These growing crystals crack the bones from within.
21:08In 1999, the Triceratops skeleton, on display at the Smithsonian Institution for almost a hundred years, had to be dismantled and conserved, its bones ravaged by this disease.
21:18Only half a century after people in the world's great natural history museums, the reign of the dinosaurs is coming to an end.
21:30High above New York City, the stainless steel crown of the Chrysler building still shimmers.
21:47In the time of humans, the building's low maintenance steel only had to be cleaned twice in a span of 76 years.
21:53On the 61st floor, the eight stainless steel eagle gargoyles that keep watch over the city are constantly buffeted by high-level winds.
22:03The Chrysler building is particularly exposed to the wind because there's not a lot of tall buildings to the east of it.
22:14The gargoyles are not really fastened super tightly to the structure of the building.
22:20They're an add-on. They're basically bolted into place.
22:23Its connection to the building corroded, one of the wingless eagles takes its first and final flight.
22:42Around the world, the sounds of crashing steel and stone become more frequent as the years go by.
22:47It's a reality that is already tearing apart this once thriving spot in the Nevada desert, whose founders intended it to rival the city of Chicago.
22:58It's soon to be a reality in America's great cities where the modern structures have a surprising floor that can destroy them before their time.
23:07Ninety years after people is enough to ravage even cities that were built to last.
23:27It's a future that has already come to pass here.
23:30While modern cities are built on steel, this one lived and died by gold.
23:43This is Rhyolite, Nevada, a former gold mining town 120 miles from Las Vegas in the unforgiving desert landscape near Death Valley.
23:52When gold fever struck the Nevada mountains in 1904, Rhyolite's population of two miners jumped to 1,200 people in just six months.
24:08Some found great success.
24:11In its first three years, the largest mine in the area produced over $1 million in gold, the equivalent of more than $24 million today.
24:19These riches fueled the construction of a town that the city's founders hoped would rival Chicago.
24:29By 1908, there were as many as 8,000 residents.
24:38This is the Rhyolite Railroad Depot. It was built in 1908.
24:41It's one of the first things that people would see when they would come into the town.
24:44Standing here today, in this quiet ghost town, you can almost hear the sound of that coal-powered steam engine coming up the hill,
24:51the black smoke pouring out the coal stack, and as the people disembark onto the steps of the station,
24:57you could almost hear their excited shouts and cries as they come down to visit what they hope is going to be a golden future.
25:03Despite the early promise of the mines, much of the most valuable ore in the area proved too difficult to extract,
25:15and a nationwide financial crisis dried up the capital needed to sustain the hunt for gold.
25:20By 1910, the boom was over. The town was left to die.
25:30Rhyolite may look like a classic Old West ghost town, but the structures here tell a unique story.
25:37This is the Cook Bank building. Once the crown jewel of Rhyolite, it guarded over $200,000 of hard-earned wealth,
25:46the equivalent of roughly $4 million today. In its prime, the bank boasted marble stairs and stained glass windows.
25:54It was built right at the peak of Rhyolite during the boom time, and this whole valley was covered with houses and cabins and tents.
26:08Had it been built of wood, like most structures of the era, the walls would have collapsed long ago.
26:14But this was one of the earliest multi-storey buildings in the West to be constructed from reinforced concrete,
26:19a technique that had then been in use for only 15 years in the United States.
26:24Built to last, the concrete has stood tall against the ravages of time.
26:29But time is running out.
26:35When you look at these buildings like this, all this massive concrete structure is only 100 years later,
26:41and we're sitting here looking at a shell of a building that's crumbling to the dust.
26:44Another 100 years from now, this building will be nothing but gravel and sand.
26:55The enemy in Death Valley is not moisture.
26:59This is one of the driest places on Earth.
27:02Located in the mountains, Rhyolite still averages only about 6 inches of rain a year.
27:07What there is plenty of is wind and sand.
27:17The abrasive, grinding action of the desert wind is like a sandblasting tool.
27:22The particles erode surfaces and penetrate into cracks.
27:26The concrete delaminates, causing layers to separate from within, and the structure crumbles.
27:33As you can tell, it's a dangerous place.
27:36The building has been standing here for 100 years.
27:39And if you look up, you'll see that the building is almost ready to topple under its own weight.
27:46Man helped nature along in its destruction of Rhyolite.
27:52People began scavenging wood supports and other useful materials that were scarce in the remote desert.
27:57The floor joists were sawed off and removed from the building soon after the building was abandoned.
28:05And once the floor joist disappeared, the building surfaces are free to deflect outwards.
28:12And with that process in place, the building's integrity is at stake.
28:17At the town's general store, where miners once came to buy the tools of their trade,
28:27the disappearance of its internal wooden structure has hastened the destruction.
28:34Even glass, a substance made from sand, is a primary building block in one surviving home.
28:40The bottle house was made from 30,000 empty whiskey bottles.
28:48Although the house has been restored several times, including in 1925 for use in a silent film,
28:55the glass itself is biologically inactive and does not corrode.
29:00Rhyolite's ambitious founders hoped to build a metropolis in the desert.
29:10Instead, after 90 years, it is on the verge of vanishing off the map.
29:17This shows that you can set up a city and it will crumble down and go away within a couple hundred years.
29:24One hundred years after people, the sound of snapping steel reverberates down the corroded canyons of New York City.
29:44The cables of the suspension bridges connecting Manhattan to Brooklyn and Queens are disintegrating.
29:54The roadway of the Brooklyn Bridge is held up by just over a thousand vertical suspender or hanger cables,
30:07each about the thickness of a human wrist.
30:12Each cable is made up of seven strands of steel twisted around each other,
30:17a total of one hundred miles of steel in every cable.
30:19The cables are galvanized, covered in a protective coating of zinc,
30:24which corrodes much more slowly than the underlying steel.
30:30This is a wire from an existing cable from an existing bridge, a hanger cable.
30:34And you look at the condition of the cable.
30:37You can see the paint is peeling off, and you can see that there are places where there's red rust.
30:41That means that the coating on these wires, which are mostly galvanized coating, the galvanizing is failing.
30:48And so now you have a wire that's going to rust, and you may have failures by fracture of individual wires.
30:56Once you've broken enough of the wires, then you begin to break wires as kind of a cascade.
31:01And you'll see them fray, and then the rope will fail.
31:05A wire from the Brooklyn Bridge, the city's most adventurous commuters once relied upon another steel cable structure
31:08to get them into management.
31:12This is a wire from the Brooklyn Bridge.
31:13Upriver from the Brooklyn Bridge, the city's most adventurous commuters once relied upon another steel cable structure to get them into Manhattan.
31:43The only thing holding up the Roosevelt Tramway is a pair of two-inch diameter wire ropes.
31:52The weak point is the spot where the cables cross over the steel support towers.
32:01Especially where the cable goes across over the saddles and at the terminals, the cable is bent back and forth as the tram goes across it.
32:14So you tend to get some fatigue loading in the cables and that is what actually uses up the life of the cable.
32:28In the time of humans, the cables were shifted roughly a hundred feet every five years to keep any one point from being in contact with the towers for too long.
32:44Even though the tram hasn't moved along the cable for one hundred years, wind has continued to buffet the tramway, causing stress on the wires near the towers.
32:54They snap.
32:55And the tram car plunges two hundred and fifty feet into the East River.
33:00One hundred and fifty years after people.
33:16At the Rockefeller Center, where once a tree had to be brought in by road to celebrate the holiday season, the greenery is now on permanent display.
33:25The skyscrapers that made New York famous have transformed into vertical ecosystems.
33:34Towards the bottoms of the building, you'll begin to get rubble and soil accumulating.
33:39Then you'll get things that like those sort of dry environments, things like oak and hickory and a wide variety of grasses.
33:46The higher up you go, the more wind you're going to have and the drier it's going to be.
33:52So those are places where the plants that colonize the outside of the building are going to be cliff dwellers.
34:01One hundred and fifty years after people seize the beginning of the era of the great building collapses in New York City.
34:07Surprisingly, it's the newer buildings that are crumbling the fastest.
34:14While the walls of older buildings had to be strong, integral parts of the structure,
34:19new types of steel developed in the mid-twentieth century allowed most of a building's weight to be carried by the inner columns.
34:25So most of New York City's post-war skyscrapers were built using a glass and steel curtain wall technique,
34:32in which the outer walls just form a lightweight protective skin of steel and glass.
34:39One of the big complaints New Yorkers have of newer buildings is that they all leak.
34:44Well, if they all leak while we're maintaining them, they're all going to leak a lot when we're not maintaining them.
34:59And so the most modern buildings would actually go first.
35:04It's the buildings that were built up through the 1940s that would last the longest.
35:14Two hundred years after people.
35:23With the collapse of the modern skyscrapers, New York's silhouette is a throwback to the Great Depression.
35:34Completed in the early 1930s, the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building once vied to be the tallest buildings in the world.
35:40The Chrysler held that crown for less than a year before the Empire State surpassed it.
35:49Now, the rivalry is over.
35:54The Empire State Building slips from the skyline.
35:57The Chrysler Building, the first of manned skyscrapers to stand taller than 1,000 feet, is once again the tallest building in the city.
36:15But its reign won't last for long.
36:19The deteriorating columns can no longer support the floors.
36:25That's the critical point when a skyscraper becomes on the verge of total collapse.
36:31Several columns buckling in a single floor, allowing one floor to descend rapidly to another level below, would be sufficient to trigger a cascading collapse.
36:45The skyline of New York is now unrecognisable.
37:02In fact, very few tall structures remain standing in the cities of the world.
37:08One of the exceptions is the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.
37:12But a small part, added to the structure at the last minute, holds the key to its destruction.
37:18For 250 years after people, St. Louis's Gateway Arch has worn its stainless steel skin as armour against the dragon's breath of corrosion.
37:40But stainless steel isn't invincible.
37:43It doesn't last forever.
37:45The mechanism for final failure will probably be around the centre of the arch at the top.
37:53That's its thinnest point.
37:55The thinnest points are the two sections that form the keystone.
37:59Steel triangles 17 feet long by 18 feet high, the last pieces to be installed.
38:04The keystone is so critical to the structure's stability that until it was inserted, a temporary stabilising truss had to be used to keep the two legs from collapsing.
38:22Before the pieces were lifted into place on the 28th of October 1965, a Roman Catholic priest and a rabbi blessed the keystone.
38:36But now the prayers of man are of little help.
38:43The keystone buckles and plummets from the structure.
38:46The two legs of the arch would not be able to stand on their own and they would fall down to the ground.
38:53The first 250 years after people have seen the skylines of our cities crumble.
39:13Now the ruins will be swallowed up by water, soil and plants.
39:201,000 years after people, New York's skyscraper canyons are now just canyons.
39:36Rivers flow where taxis once patrolled.
39:40Their course is going to follow what used to be the streets and are now these sort of pseudo-canyons at the bottom of these strangely shaped hills that are the rubble left of the skyscrapers.
39:5010,000 years after people.
40:03On the new shoreline of the expanding sea wanders a pack of wild horses, the descendants of the urban equines that thousands of years ago protected and entertained the humans of New York City.
40:14The high salt content in their seaside food supply means that they have to drink twice as much water as their domesticated ancestors once did.
40:24And the grasses here are so deficient in nutrients that the horses have evolved a shorter stature in response to the poor quality of their diet.
40:31Still, they have survived.
40:40Buried in the ground beneath their feet, a corroding steel crypt holds tight to its precious contents.
40:46Once 80 feet below street level, the Federal Reserve gold vault is now hundreds of feet underground and inundated with water from rising sea levels.
40:59Inside, the largest stockpile of gold ever assembled on earth remains well preserved.
41:05The underground. They're encased in steel. Now, steel will be much less happy underground. If you look at archaeological iron steel implements, on the surface they rust. Underground they tend to pit and corrode.
41:24Although the steel will eventually corrode, the gold bars themselves should last not just for thousands of years, but even millions.
41:37When the future archaeologists find it, they're going to wonder about the culture that built such an amazing temple and sanctuary.
41:47The 24-karat gold will live on as a precious metal. Once mined, moulded and guarded by humans, it has now returned to the earth in a life after people.
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