Earth Without Humans: What Happens Hour by Hour, Year by Year

What would happen to Earth if all 8.2 billion people vanished overnight? We follow the timeline step by step: the lights go out within hours, New York's subway floods within days, the stars return, corn and bananas fade, wolves and wild horses move into empty towns, houses collapse, bridges fall, and only a few things last for millions of years: stone monuments, plastic, a strange layer in the rocks, footprints on the Moon and a golden record drifting between the stars. Plus why most of the world's dogs would be fine, why lice would not, and the record-breaking sheep named Chris. CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro 0:49 Chapter 1 – The first hours 2:12 Chapter 2 – The first days 3:26 Chapter 3 – The first months 4:33 Chapter 4 – The first years 7:07 Chapter 5 – Decades later 8:33 Chapter 6 – Centuries 9:51 Chapter 7 – Deep time 12:06 Chapter 8 – What it tells us 12:54 Wrap-Up – Recap KEY FACTS • NYC's subway pumps out about 13 million gallons of water on a typical day • More than 80% of people live under light-polluted skies (Falchi et al. 2016) • About 33 billion chickens are alive at any time (FAO) • Most of the world's ~700 million dogs already live outdoors and roam freely • A May 2026 camera-trap study found wolves, lynx, moose, bears and Przewalski's horses thriving in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone • Mount Rushmore erodes about 1 inch every 10,000 years • Everything humans have built weighs about as much as all living things on Earth (Elhacham et al., Nature 2020) • Voyager 1 becomes the first human-made object one light-day from Earth in November 2026 This is a thought experiment. Some details, like exactly how fast bridges or dams would fail, are expert estimates, and we say so in the video. SOURCES US Census Bureau (world population, July 2026); MTA via 6sqft (subway pumping); Falchi et al. 2016, Science Advances (light pollution); FAO via The Humane League (chickens); Animals 2023, MDPI (free-roaming dogs); Frontiers for Young Minds 2017 (corn and teosinte); Wikipedia (German cockroach); CDC (head lice); Guinness World Records (Chris the sheep, 2015); Kudrenko et al. 2026, Proceedings of the Royal Society B (via ABC News); Space.com (ISS deorbit); CNN / National Park Service (Mount Rushmore); The Royal Society (climate after emissions stop); Geyer, Jambeck & Law 2017, Science Advances (plastic production); Elhacham et al. 2020, Nature (human-made mass); IUGS (Anthropocene vote, March 2024); NASA via EarthSky (Voyager 1); Alan Weisman, The World Without Us (2007). #WhatIf #Earth #Science #Nature #StickFigures #Explained