Original subtitles

What would happen

if every human being on earth disappeared?

No matter how we might vanish,

this is the story of what could happen

to the haunting world we leave behind.

Now on "Life After People,"

After we're gone, the flood gates open.

It's not a matter

of if water can destroy everything we've ever built,

it's just a matter of how.

Mother nature drowns The Big Easy.

The devastation would be unimaginable.

Instead of all those bars being full of tourists,

they'd just be full of human waste.

The Nile River threatens

to rewrite the history of Egypt.

The city of Luxor, gone, Cairo, Egypt, also gone.

It would just be utter devastation

among the most iconic cities and landmarks in Egypt.

And the ghosts of the legendary River Thames

come back to haunt the city of London.

The biggest concentration of unexploded ordnance

from World War II is at the bottom of the Thames.

If that were to explode,

that would be the biggest non-nuclear explosion

on earth in history.

From monuments to waterways,

dams to skyscrapers, without people,

the planet will be radically transformed.

Welcome to Earth, population, zero.

Across the globe, major cities are silent,

no families, no traffic, not a single pedestrian.

In New Orleans where the air once buzzed with jazz

and the laughter of rowdy tourists,

a new sound is about to take its place, rain.

In some places, New Orleans

is as much as 12 feet below sea level,

and it's surrounded by three bodies of water,

the Mississippi River, Lake Pontchartrain

and the Gulf of Mexico.

If heavy rains or some storm surge come,

the city is gonna be completely flooded.

It used to take hundreds of workers

to keep New Orleans from flooding during storms.

Now there is no one keeping watch.

All that remains is the machinery they left behind.

There's this astonishing network of engineered systems

that all have to work to keep New Orleans from flooding

every single time it rains.

There are more than 68,000 storm drains across the city,

funneling rainwater through enough pipe

that if you stretched it out to its fullest distance,

it would go from Manhattan in New York

all the way to Key West, Florida.

Over a hundred pumps were designed

to move all the water from the city into Lake Pontchartrain.

Those pumps can move half the volume

of an Olympic swimming pool every second.

The biggest of those pumps have the pumping power

of 700 fire trucks.

The system was built more than 100 years ago,

a patchwork maintained by vigilant human oversight.

After people, the pumps are abandoned, overtaxed,

and struggling to keep up.

It wouldn't even take a powerful storm

to overwhelm the pumps

without the people there to maintain it.

The regular rainfall would be enough to over run the city.

All of the sewage underneath the city

would flow into the streets

and into the lower floors of the building.

So instead of all those bars being full of tourists,

they'd just be full of human waste.

The city is already mutating,

but all around it,

there's a web of relics left behind by mankind,

built to keep disaster at bay.

To protect New Orleans from the surrounding waters,

in the 20th century, the Army Corps of Engineers

built hundreds of miles of levees.

Not only that, after Hurricane Katrina,

they spent $14 billion upgrading the network.

If you don't maintain a structure like a levee,

it is going to fall apart.

And for a city like New Orleans, that is bad news

because New Orleans is just subject

to so many hurricanes coming in, to floods coming in.

The levees are holding for now,

but water is a constant menace

and a powerful storm hits New Orleans once every 10 years,

so it's only a matter of time before the city is drowning.

Across the Atlantic on the banks

of the storied Thames River, what was once one

of the most significant cities on the planet

is now a ghost town,

no more guards outside London's Buckingham Palace,

not a soul in Trafalgar Square.

But high above the empty streets,

Big Ben still rings for now.

It's sort of romantic to imagine a life after people

where Big Ben is calling out,

ringing day after day after day,

and there's no one there to hear it,

but the truth is it would stop ringing

after just a couple days.

And the reason behind that is that it's a mechanical clock.

Is not powered by electricity.

Big Ben is powered by gravity.

So at the top of the tower there was this giant weight

that's about as heavy as a fully loaded pickup truck.

So over the course of a few days,

that weight slowly descends,

which triggers a set of pulleys and gears

which keep the clock turning on time.

Even though there's no one to hear them,

the automated system drives hammers that still ring the bell

just as they have for more than a century.

But a human has to go into that tower

and turn that crank to lift the weight up.

So without any person to turn that crank,

the weight's just gonna descend to the bottom of its system

and everything goes silent.

For nearly 200 years,

even through the German Blitz during World War II,

the bell continued to toll.

Today, three days after people, Big Ben has stopped.

Out on the oceans,

the world's congested shipping lanes

were once a carefully controlled dance,

but just one week after people,

the choreography is unraveling

and the seas are descending into chaos.

Ships use less than 1% of the vast ocean

as shipping lanes.

In those lanes, every day there are 100,000 ships.

Things are gonna get very crowded very fast.

Oceans cover nearly three quarters

of the earth,

but ships only travel along a few narrow highways,

the safest and most direct paths.

Now they're teaming not with trade, but with ghost ships,

and among them is the largest cruise ship in history.

This ship is a monster,

it is five times the size of the Titanic.

It's got three dozen restaurants

and it's got seven full-sized pools,

including an entire waterpark.

The food and fresh water it contains

weigh almost twice as much as the Statue of Liberty.

The ship itself weighs half a billion pounds.

That is more than double the weight

of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier.

Modern cruise ships have systems

that help prevent collisions.

The lights still flash, the alarms still wail,

they shatter the lonely silence on the bridge,

but now, there's no one to react.

Just to put this in perspective,

this thing is about two thirds the size

of the Empire State Building.

So imagine, 70 floors of a skyscraper barreling towards you

at 30 miles an hour.

It's gonna cut through small boats

like a hot knife through butter.

For the next two weeks until her fuel runs dry,

this metal giant will batter everything in front of her,

but out here in the vast and unforgiving ocean,

there are plenty of things

that can bring a journey to an end.

Two weeks after people

and the biggest cruise ship in the world has no passengers,

no captain, no crew.

The collision alarms wail on the empty bridge,

but without anyone to hear them, she's still a holy terror.

Smaller boats are no match for this thing.

It's about the size of three football fields.

In shipping lanes clogged with thousands of boats,

this ship will leave a path of destruction in its wake.

She's merciless,

cutting through smaller vessels like driftwood,

but out here, even the smallest flaw can be fatal.

This ship burns 80,000 gallons of fuel every single day.

That's how much water a typical household runs through

in about eight to nine months.

And after two weeks, just two weeks, it's running on fumes.

With one last gasp,

the great ship's engine sputter and die.

She's still a float but utterly adrift

on the unforgiving ocean.

They have these sensors onboard

so that if the ship starts rolling side to side too much,

these stabilizers reduce the magnitude of the roll.

There are these retractable fins below the waterline

and they act like flaps on airplane wings

controlling the angles of the ship.

These fins have enough control authority

to counteract about 90% of the ship's roll.

Problem is that fuel doesn't

just make the world's biggest cruise ship go.

It generates all of the electricity on board,

and it's that electricity that powers the stabilizers.

Without people, without power,

the ship is drifting away from shipping lanes

and into the vast, lonely seas.

Now the sky is churning, a storm is brewing

and it has its sights set on her.

You have this huge ship,

it's just been plowing through these shipping lanes

that has been just unsinkable until finally,

it kind of isn't unsinkable anymore.

It's a sitting duck

and those automatic stabilizers don't do anything.

This cruise ship has swimming pools on its upper deck,

and these pools are quite big,

the same weight as a blue whale.

Imagine a blue whale throwing itself

from side to side on top of ship's deck,

it's definitely gonna rock that boat for sure.

Even without any of those active stabilization systems,

a ship this big is hard to capsize.

That said, a rogue wave, 70, maybe 90 feet tall,

hitting that ship from the side,

that could be enough to capsize it.

She was once the crown jewel of the ocean,

a monument to human ambition.

Now, with no one to mourn her,

she slips beneath the waves forever.

On the other side of the globe,

the Nile has been the lifeblood

of the lush Nile River Valley for millennia.

But 10 weeks after people, this artery,

vital to the cradle of life, is already on its deathbed.

It's hard to conceive that after a millennia

of flowing through the most important cities of Egypt,

just 10 weeks without people,

the Nile would slow to a trickle.

Almost immediately, all that salt water

is gonna come in from the Mediterranean,

it's gonna completely transform that entire ecosystem.

The root of the problem

lies 450 miles to the south.

The Aswan High Dam is a vestige of human engineering.

Built in 1970, it tamed the mighty Nile

and created the Lake Nasser reservoir.

Now it stands guard over land

that will never be farmed again.

For thousands of years,

the Nile was totally unpredictable.

Sometimes it would flood and that would destroy farmland,

other times there would be droughts

and there wouldn't be enough water for irrigation.

The dam allowed flood water to be collected,

protecting the river valley below.

The water could then be released year round,

allowing farmers to irrigate their crops.

After people, the dam still stands resolute,

but it's no longer a sentinel,

it's an executioner, bringing death to the Nile Valley.

There would be almost no water coming from the dam,

and there would be no one there to adjust it

when a dry spell hit.

At the same time, rain continues to come in

and that's gonna fill it up over time.

Just 10 weeks after people,

Lake Nasser is rising unchecked,

straining against its walls,

there's no one left to hold it back.

And if it breaks free,

it will swallow everything from the tombs of kings

to the streets of modern Cairo.

In London, one year after people,

wildlife roams the abandoned streets of a once great empire.

The mighty Thames quietly rises inch by inch.

For now, it whispers, but soon, it will roar.

The Thames has a long and terrible history of flooding

going back centuries.

According to legend, the bronze lion-head sculptures

that lined the embankment of the Thames

served as an old time flood warning system.

There's even a rhyme,

"When the lions drink, London will sink.

When it's up to their manes, we'll go down the drains.

When it's all sucked, then we're all," you know how it goes.

The last line of defense for the city

is the Thames Barrier.

Completed in 1974, it has stood guard for over 50 years,

but can it still do its duty now?

The Thames Barrier is a series of 10 steel gates

that can reach five stories above the water.

Each of them is 36 feet wide.

They're built out of high strength steel,

and each weighs about the same

as a massive construction crane.

It's like a temporary dam,

and then they can be dropped once the flood subsides

to allow the natural flow of the river to resume.

A lot of what that barrier does is indeed automatic.

There are systems in place to monitor rainfall,

to assess flood risk.

A human operator gets all the information from the system,

then decides whether to open the gates and when.

The barrier is down,

and now it'll stay that way forever.

The Thames is biding its time, waiting for the right moment

to bring London to its knees.

But there's an even bigger threat

lurking beneath its surface.

During the Blitz of London,

the Germans dropped more than 26 million pounds

of bombs on London, and many of those never exploded.

A lot of them landed in the River Thames

and unexploded bombs are quite dangerous.

So in January, 2017,

a German bomb was found at the bottom of the Thames River.

Because of this, all river traffic had to cease.

Buses, subway systems were shut down,

all of this until they could safely tow the bomb away

and have it detonated elsewhere.

The Nazis weren't the only ones

to leave their mark beneath the Thames.

Somewhere in the murky depths, a US naval ship slumbers,

its cargo deadlier than any bomb dropped from the skies.

The biggest concentration of unexploded ordnance

from World War II is at the bottom of the Thames,

in the SS Richard Montgomery.

It was a US naval destroyer

that was carrying 1,400 tons of munitions

when it ran aground at the mouth of the Thames.

They attempted to unload the cargo from the SS Montgomery,

but the hull cracked and the ship just sank way too fast.

That includes 286 giant blockbuster bombs

and more than 2,500 cluster bombs.

Now, those cluster bombs may not be the biggest,

but in a lot of ways, they're the scariest.

Cluster bombs are transported with their fuses in place,

so they are far more likely than other kinds of bombs

to spontaneously explode.

If that were to explode,

that would be the biggest non-nuclear explosion

on Earth in history.

Once there was a system of precautions

to safeguard the sleeping danger, but without people,

it's only a matter of time before it's awakened.

There's an exclusion zone.

It goes 1,500 feet in every direction.

It's on every navigational chart,

there are warning buoys in the water.

You've got coast guard ships, you've got drones.

All of this, this elaborate system

is to make sure no one ever gets close enough

to trigger an explosion.

You know, life after people, there's no exclusion zone.

You've just got a bunch of ships

that are drifting around randomly.

So it's not a question

of whether or not something's gonna bump into that ship,

it's just a question of when.

The entire area is shaped like a funnel

that leads from the North Sea towards London.

If it's left undisturbed, there's a very small chance

that Montgomery would ever explode,

but it wouldn't take much.

All it would need is a very small bump

or even a big vibration to set that thing off.

A lonely fishing boat

slips past the exclusion zone and into the SS Montgomery.

Welcome to London one year after people.

On the River Thames, a lonely derelict vessel drifts

toward the mast of the SS Montgomery.

And in one thunderous instant,

1,400 tons of sunken munitions detonate.

A massive fireball shoots up into the sky.

There is a powerful shockwave

which can shatter windows from miles around.

That massive explosion

is gonna displace a lot of water,

creating essentially a river tsunami

that's gonna sweep through the city.

The devastation would be unimaginable,

would buckle steel-reinforced buildings

and just smash through concrete walls.

Water is a very powerful thing.

It can exert an enormous amount of force.

Just one foot of water can float a car down the street.

A 30 foot tidal wave tosses cars around like toys.

It's like being hit by a dump truck full of TNT.

With the Thames Barrier down,

there would be nothing to reduce the impact.

Water would smash through the doors of Parliament,

the Tower of London and Big Ben,

and the lower floors would be completely flooded.

The London Underground would be inundated.

I mean, it would become this pitch black, watery hell.

And then the water begins to eat at the sides of the tunnel.

And slowly but surely,

the foundations of London begin to crumble.

St. Paul's Cathedral still stands,

so would The Shard and Westminster Abbey.

But water is working its way into the city's foundations.

How long can it survive while decay spreads from within?

Across the pond, five years after people,

Mother Nature is creeping

through the streets of New Orleans, swallowing at whole.

The air is thick with humidity and rain,

the wooden structures are rotting,

and the city's abandoned web of defenses against storms

is crumbling as well.

Just like buildings, the levees would erode.

You'd start to see them crack and get substantially weaker.

Levees themselves can be quite fragile

and require careful inspection and maintenance.

Those levees, they're in big trouble.

Water is eroding the levees' foundations,

but there's another destructive force at work,

nutria or swamp rats,

monstrous rodents the size of small dogs.

This isn't erosion, it's invasion.

Nutria are an invasive species.

They were brought to New Orleans

in the 1930s for fur farming.

Originally, the nutria were confined to farms.

But then a hurricane came through, they escaped,

and today, it's estimated

there are 20 million of them running wild.

They'd burrow into those levees and they compromise them,

and over time, those levees are going to fail

because of that nutria activity,

and that means the city is gonna be completely flooded.

Nutria are spreading like a plague,

gnawing through earth and stone,

hollowing out The Big Easy's last line of defense.

The city is fragile and exposed,

and storms are gathering on the horizon.

Five years later, deep in the Sahara Desert,

the Lake Nasser reservoir has come alive.

Hunters stalk their prey

and the deadliest one of all is silent, patient, ancient,

far older than civilization itself.

Crocodiles were around 235 million years ago.

They survived the extinction event

that wiped out the dinosaurs,

and then they thrived another 65 million years.

Vegetation will move in quickly

all around the reservoir,

and rapidly the area will become completely overgrown.

So it's essentially gonna turn into marshland

and what's gonna move in there?

Nile crocodiles.

Even though there are more crocs,

there's in fact less food.

Usually crocodiles often feed off of the livestock

or the fish stock, or just simple trash that we throw away.

But without humans around,

they're just gonna have to rely on natural prey.

Crocs would end up

fighting over the fish and the birds,

then jackals and hyenas would come

to the water's edge and compete.

I mean, you might think of Lake Nasser

as this kind of crocodile paradise without humanity,

but actually it would be more like a gladiator pit.

Lake Nasser churns with ancient violence

as Nile crocodiles wage their prehistoric wars,

unaware that right beside them,

the Aswan Dam is battling the ravages of time.

The dam is made of rock and clay,

and the water is present, always trying to destroy it.

So without regular maintenance, the water is going to win.

People also maintain the dam

by removing sediment from the gates and tunnels.

So without people there, the sediment would build up,

that would clog them,

and that would lead to greater pressures on the dam.

The waters behind the Aswan Dam

grow higher and higher season after season,

and the concrete groans under the weight.

But up river, there's an even bigger danger lurking.

The Nile flows from south to north,

and there's an even more massive dam in Ethiopia

that could spell doom for the whole valley.

The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam,

also known as Gerd,

is the largest dam in Africa.

It can hold back enough water

to fill roughly three million Olympic sized swimming pools.

The Gerd is built on a very seismically active area

of Eastern Africa.

This is where two tectonic plates are being torn apart

in what's called a rift,

it's actually called the Great African Rift Valley

running through there.

The more water that's stored in the reservoir,

well, that's more weight

pressing down on those fault line,

and that can absolutely trigger an earthquake.

Minor earthquakes shake this land

almost every year,

like tiny warnings beneath the sand and stone.

A bigger jolt could break the Nile free,

sending it surging toward the weakening Aswan Dam,

and the question isn't if, it's when.

For 50 years, mankind has been a mere memory.

Wooden homes were the first to go, rotting away into ruins.

Now, even concrete and steel are starting to crumble,

bringing the most modern buildings to their knees.

The moment water finds its way into a crack or crevice,

it's the beginning of the end.

Water's gonna work its way through cracks,

and eventually it's gonna get to rebar inside the concrete.

Now, that steel rebar is gonna rust and rust expands,

letting more water in,

and the whole process is gonna repeat over and over

until eventually everything falls apart.

The levee system that protects the city

has also been ravaged by the elements,

and its foundations have been undermined

by giant swamp rats.

Louisiana averages a Category 4 storm every few decades,

and now, when one prowling just offshore,

New Orleans isn't bracing for impact,

it's awaiting its demise.

There is a world of difference

between a Category 1 hurricane and a Category 4.

A Category 1, we're talking wind speeds

of 75 to 95 miles an hour.

We're bending trees, we're doing some damage to buildings,

there's flooding, but a Category 4 hurricane

is like a different planet.

Those wind speeds are way higher,

130 to 156 miles an hour.

We are ripping trees out of the ground,

we are destroying entire buildings.

The storm slams into New Orleans

with savage force,

tearing through what time had already weakened.

It's not a natural disaster, it's a reckoning.

The levees have been eroding,

nutria have been burrowing into their foundations.

It's actually remarkable how long the system has lasted,

but without humans around to make repairs,

the levees are no match for a Category 4 hurricane.

Wooden buildings that have been rotting for years

would be gone in an instant.

Steel and concrete structures

that have been eroding for decades,

last minutes longer than that.

In only 50 years,

so much of the New Orleans we know, is gone.

In the French Quarter,

the storm leaves Jackson Square

and Preservation Hall in ruins.

Just beyond the wreckage, one titan still stands,

battered, weathered, but unbroken, the Superdome.

The Superdome is the largest fixed dome structure

in the world.

It can hold 83,000 people, which to give you an idea,

is about the size of the population of Flint, Michigan,

and from the ground to the top of the dome

is as tall as a Statue of Liberty.

The foundations of the Superdome

were built on these pilings,

these concrete pillars that go down

through the ground 165 feet.

That distance is like two, three times longer than it

is for a lot of skyscrapers in other places.

It was also built with pressure treated concrete

reinforced with steel and designed

to withstand corrosion from moisture and flooding,

basically tailor made to survive New Orleans

even without people.

The Superdome was built

to outlast nature's foul-tempered fury,

including winds up to 200 miles per hour.

The design of the dome is very deliberate.

The curved shape is to allow the wind to glide over it

and not slam into it.

It's held down by these strong steel cables,

which are attached to a circular tension ring.

The whole idea of this dome

is to give the wind nothing to grab onto.

When hurricane Katrina struck in 2005,

the building was pummeled by wind and rain.

Now part of the exterior

of the building actually peeled off, but the Superdome held,

protecting the over 25,000 people inside.

The fact that that dome held is really saying something.

In 2024, Hurricane Milton hit the Tampa area

and it ripped the dome right off of Tropicana Field,

and that caused $60 million of damage.

Surrounded by decay, choked by flood waters

and swallowed in silence, the Superdome is still holding on,

not unharmed, just unyielding for now.

In the Nile Valley,

50 years after people, there are no storms on the horizon.

Here, the danger lurks below the ground.

An earthquake is long overdue.

After decades of neglect,

the Aswan Dam can't take any more water pressure.

Its systems are full of sediment,

its foundation is full of tiny little cracks.

It's like death by a thousand paper cuts.

In Ethiopia, the Gerd Dam is also holding,

but the reservoir is completely full.

It holds enough water

to meet all of New York City's water needs for 55 years.

Along the East African Rift, the earth shifts.

If the quake breaks down the Gerd dam,

a tidal wave will tear through the desert

from Western Africa to the Middle East,

sweeping away towns, temples,

and the history of mankind itself.

50 years after people,

the East African Rift rumbles beneath the Gerd Dam.

It holds, but Mother Nature has other plans.

The trap shakes loose a rock slide

that crashes into the reservoir below.

When there's a rock slide,

you put a lot of solid material inside that reservoir.

And that water has to go somewhere.

It's like dropping a bunch of ice cubes

into a very full drink.

The water's gonna splash up and then splash over the sides.

When that happens to a dam, it's called over topping,

and it's actually one of the leading causes of dam flood.

The Gerd's designers build two emergency spillways

to divert water around the dam in case of over topping,

but one of them has to be opened manually.

Dams simply aren't built to withstand this kind of event.

Water over topping the dam falls hundreds of feet,

slams into the earth,

basically hitting it like a jackhammer,

undermining the foundations.

It will ultimately fail

and unleash a wall of water that's 400 feet high,

covering almost an area of 700 square miles.

The dam gives way,

releasing mankind's last grip on the mighty Nile.

Water tears through the valley.

What's left of Sudan's capital Khartoum is swallowed whole.

A wave this big would be roughly the equivalent

of a 600 mile an hour wind.

That's faster and more powerful than any wind on Earth.

For two days, the flood rampages north,

leaving a 450 miles scar carved through deserts and cities.

At the end of its path sits the Aswan Dam,

cracked and weary.

Even if the Aswan Dam was operating at its peak,

it could not possibly handle that much water.

After those decades of neglect and decay,

the dam would just crumble instantaneously.

Now you've got the water

from Lake Nasser added to the mix,

and it's barreling toward a stretch of the Nile River Valley

that's been transformed into a barren wasteland.

City of Luxor, gone, Cairo, also gone.

It would just be utter devastation

among the most iconic cities and landmarks in Egypt.

Pretty much every one of Egypt's major cities

and archeological sites are just lined up along that river.

So the water would just plow through those

like a freight train.

The Egyptian Museum would be destroyed,

along with King Tut's Tomb and the Valley of the Kings,

Queen Nefertiti's tomb, finished,

all those beautiful wall paintings.

The temples of Luxor, of Edfu,

along with the Colossi of Memnon, everything is gone.

The list is endless, it is so tragic to consider this.

Remarkably, there are a few Egyptian icons

that will survive, the Great Pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx

because they exist on a limestone plateau

about 200 feet above the water.

So even though the desert is inundated,

these most famous Egyptian archeological icons

will end up surviving.

The waters recede

and nothing remains but destruction.

In the silence that follows,

the Nile River flows freely again.

Half a world away, hurricane after hurricane

have carved New Orleans down to its bones.

The streets are gone, neighborhoods swallowed.

All that remains is the Superdome.

Just because it's still standing

doesn't mean it looks like anything we're used to seeing.

I mean, the Superdome is a shadow of its former self.

It is rundown and filthy, it is covered by mold.

Even mushrooms are growing inside.

That same humidity

that would help plants grow all over the stadium

would then take its toll on the metal,

which makes up the bones of the building.

For a century, the Superdome

has stood amidst the decay,

a defiant relic in a city reclaimed by the swamp.

Now a Category 5 hurricane

is churning toward it from the Gulf.

Category 5 storms pack maximum sustained winds

of 157 miles per hour.

That is enough to create massive storm surges

and completely inundate the city of New Orleans.

There's not much left at this point

to stop the wind or hold back the waters.

Hurricane Patricia in 2015 was a Category 5 storm.

It had winds up to 215 miles per hour.

So think about the fact

that the dome was actually only meant to withstand winds

of 200 miles per hour, and yet it survived.

A hundred years after people,

a violent hurricane slams

what little is left of New Orleans.

At its center stands the Superdome,

cracked, hollow and alone.

Eventually, all the brilliant engineering

that went into building the Superdome would fail.

The steel cables holding the dome would snap,

and then the wind would start to lift it.

The roof is gonna be ripped off the top of the building,

and once that happens, the environment

is going to attack it from the inside and the outside,

and that's gonna lead to its ultimate destruction.

At last, Mother Nature has clawed her way

through the Superdome's armor.

The unbreakable is broken,

and the city is almost completely transformed.

Most of New Orleans is gonna be underwater.

It's gonna be reclaimed by the swamp.

In fact, it's possible that the only sign

that there ever was anything there

will be the top of that Superdome.

Trees, vines, ivys will reclaim all the highways,

all the city.

But the Superdome is enormous,

and because the Superdome is enormous,

it'll be identifiable through the jungle.

So when I imagine in a life after people,

we may see a new version of the Superdome,

one that actually might look like a mechanical skeleton

showing much of the bones that hold up that impressive dome,

but that white covering has now peeled away over time,

exposing its beautiful engineering

for the world to see.

Gone are the jazz clubs and bars,

and even their ghosts now lie beneath the water.

Once New Orleans is fully submerged,

it's gonna get an entirely new set of residents,

the kind with fins.

And one of the most dangerous is bull sharks

from the Gulf of Mexico.

They're gonna swim right up Bourbon Street,

and they're gonna become the dominant predator.

Bull sharks can be up to 11 feet long

and weigh up to 700 pounds,

and they prefer low salinity areas,

just like the local alligators do.

Alligators would've been the dominant species

for some time with plenty to eat,

all that nutria to feast on.

They'd just be cruising around,

having a time of it with all that water.

I mean, the Superdome

would just be a giant open-air swimming pool.

So here come the bull sharks

and they're really the only thing that are gonna be able

to challenge these alligators for a meal.

Instead of hosting a Saints game,

you've got a matchup of the gators versus the sharks.

What remains of London is also crumbling.

Brick by brick, stone by stone,

it's sliding into the Thames.

After centuries, the flooding of the Thames

would completely inundate the foundations of the city.

The London Underground would cave in.

Eventually, most of London is just gonna collapse or sink.

It's gonna disappear.

If there are any archeologists in the distant future,

they're gonna have to look really hard to find evidence

that humans were ever there.

It's kind of like we didn't understand

that dinosaurs were there until the 17th century.

In Egypt, the Nile feeds of landscape reborn.

What was once barren is now lush

and teaming with life again.

You get hippos back in Egypt after being extinct,

and lions roaming up and down the Nile Valley.

After a few hundred years without people,

indigenous species have returned,

not knowing that they're walking

upon what was one of civilization's original cradles.

Human history

has been tied up to water.

All early human civilizations

started on the banks of something,

Tigress and Euphrates,

the Nile, the Yellow River.

In many ways, the story of humanity has been about water,

either protecting ourselves from it

or learning to harness its power.

But once we're gone, that story is just washed away.