What If You're the Last Man on Earth?

What If You're the Last Man on Earth? One morning you wake up and every other person on Earth is gone. Every car, every house and every shop is suddenly yours. Then the lights go out, the fuel goes stale, and you find out what real silence sounds like. The disappearance is fiction, but what happens next in this story is based on real science: how long the power grid, food and fuel would last, what happens to cities without us, and what being alone does to a human mind. Chapters: 0:00 Day 412 0:19 What if everyone was gone? 0:24 Day one 1:21 Everything is yours 2:00 The lights go out 2:41 How long everything lasts 3:23 Biscuit 4:01 What silence does to you 4:54 A voice on the radio 5:28 Nineteen days 5:50 The last voicemail 6:41 The world without us 7:14 Still saying hello 7:45 Back to the rooftop Sources: World population of about 8.3 billion in 2026: United Nations, World Population Prospects 2024 New York's subway pumps about 13 million gallons of water on a dry day, and would start to flood within about two days without power: Alan Weisman interview, An Earth Without People, Scientific American, 2007 Roads cracking within months, buildings falling over the following decades: Alan Weisman, The World Without Us, 2007 Cell sites running a few hours to a few days on batteries and generators: Federal Communications Commission backup power rules, 2007, and carrier statements Reactors shut down on loss of power, and used fuel pools rely on cooling and makeup water: U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Information Notice 84-42 and order on spent fuel pool instrumentation, 2012 Spent fuel pool accidents usually unfold over several days or weeks: Kerntechnik, 2023 Canned food stays safe indefinitely if the can is undamaged, and dates mark quality: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food Safety and Inspection Service Gasoline storage life of about one to six months: ExxonMobil guidance Loneliness compared to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day: U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory on Loneliness and Isolation, 2023 Hallucinations reported in solitary confinement: Sharon Shalev, A Sourcebook on Solitary Confinement, 2008 Alexander Selkirk, marooned for four years and four months, sang psalms and read his Bible: World History Encyclopedia Christopher Knight, about 27 years alone in the Maine woods with one reported brief exchange with a hiker: Michael Finkel, The Stranger in the Woods, 2017 The 1994 Los Angeles blackout and calls to Griffith Observatory about the strange sky: U.S. National Park Service, Night Skies program Wolf numbers in the Chernobyl zone about seven times higher than in comparable reserves: Deryabina and colleagues, Current Biology, 2015 Voyager 1 reaches one light-day from Earth in November 2026 and its instruments are being shut down to save power: NASA Voyager Golden Record, greetings in 55 languages, including a six-year-old's English greeting: NASA Solar panels often keep working past their 20 to 25 year warranties, at reduced output: National Renewable Energy Laboratory The characters and the disappearance are fiction. Real timelines for a world without people are expert estimates and would vary from place to place #whatif #animation #science #lastmanonearth