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 world we leave behind.

Now on "Life After People,"

commerce is the backbone of human civilization,

but when we vanish, it goes to the dogs.

Every kind of predator you can think of shows up.

Grocery stores become part of a new food chain.

When it comes to claiming territory,

it's a life or death battle every time.

The biggest mall in the world

is pounded by the elements.

One wing of it was a raging inferno

while the other wing is completely untouched.

And the busiest port

on the planet faces annihilation.

You have acid melting through structures,

live rounds going off, shipping containers exploding.

Steel and cargo,

like a freight train on water, unstoppable.

From the global supply chain

to our food and clothing,

life after people will drastically alter the planet.

Welcome to Earth, population: zero.

From coast to coast, shopping centers are abandoned.

No sales clerks, no window shoppers,

just aisle upon aisle of goods that'll never be bought.

There are more than 300,000 grocery stores

in the United States, containing enough chips, cheese,

and chocolate to cover an area the size of Rhode Island.

This deserted grocery store was once filled

with hungry families.

Now, it's about to be bursting

with a much different clientele.

Keeping scavengers like rodents and insects

out of a grocery store is a full time job,

and you do not get any days off.

You've gotta be taking out the trash.

You've gotta be setting out traps.

You've gotta put out pesticides.

In a world without people,

it would probably be less than an hour

before that invasion began.

Mice are these crazy little food finding machines.

They can detect food smells as far away as 50 feet,

even if it's contained inside sealed plastic.

Mice can actually compress their bodies

so their bones collapse, especially their ribs.

If their nose fits, so will the rest of them,

even in holes as small as a dime.

Mice are like walking biohazards.

They pee constantly.

Even when they're running, they poop like 75 times a day,

and in that poop is all kind of disease and nasty.

In the time of people,

grocery chains spent millions

to keep an endless stream of filthy creatures at bay.

Now, there's no one to set the traps or cover the holes,

and the vermin aren't just eating, they're multiplying.

A single female mouse

can produce up to 50 offspring a year,

and her offspring can start reproducing

just nine weeks later.

One family of mice can balloon up to 100,000 individuals

in just a year.

Back in 2021, Eastern Australia had what's known

as a mouse plague,

where basically they had a bumper crop,

there was tons of food,

and the mouse populations absolutely exploded.

They were everywhere and they ate everything.

Farmers describe carpets of mice.

They devoured everything from crops to toilet paper.

In the span of just 72 hours,

this store, once a monument to human plenty,

is completely overrun.

Rodents have claimed the aisles,

feasting on the crumbs of a vanished civilization.

The refrigerators and freezers are safe and untouched,

but for how long?

After people, there are no crews to fix downed lines,

no technicians at the power plant, the grid fails,

and the bright aisles are plunged into ghostly darkness,

not just for the night, but forever.

Once that refrigeration fails, the meat, the milk,

they're all gonna spoil and they'll give off rotting,

very, very strong scent

that's gonna be detectable from miles away

by various scavengers.

Where mankind once held sway, mice now rule,

but in a world without people,

they won't stay on top of the food chain for long.

In Bloomington, Minnesota lies the Mall of America.

Once teeming with voices and footsteps, the hallways,

stores, and kiosks are now still as a crypt.

The largest shopping mall on the planet

has become a mausoleum for the age of excess.

The Mall of America is a retail colossus.

It's bigger than Vatican City.

If there was ever one place where you could shop

until you drop, this is it.

You've got over 500 stores, a roller coaster,

high fashion, fine dining, fast food,

an aquarium, designer jewelry,

not to mention 30,000 plants growing inside the mall.

After people, the mall seems unchanged,

but a threat has been lurking in the shadows the whole time,

quiet and patient,

waiting for the right moment to unleash hell.

The Mall of America is so big that it has not one,

but two food courts

in addition to 50 standalone restaurants.

What happens if one gas burner is left on?

You've got pots and pans sitting on top of those stoves.

Some of them are gonna have cooking grease in them,

and the thing about cooking grease is, unlike gasoline,

it doesn't need a spark to ignite,

it just has to get hot enough.

So, as those flames go,

eventually they're gonna heat it up to 450

to 700 degrees Fahrenheit, and that thing is gonna go boom.

Flames suddenly erupt

and quickly consume everything in their path.

The food court is eating itself alive,

but the mall has a secret hidden deep within its bones,

a fully automated fire suppression system

that's long been dormant.

The system isn't triggered by smoke,

it reacts to intense heat.

So heat-sensitive liquid inside

of the small glass bulb gets hotter and hotter,

then the bulb shatters

and it releases a torrent of pressurized water.

The system now wakes

to wage one final battle against the blaze.

The brilliant thing about this system

is that it doesn't rely on electricity.

It works on gravity-powered water pressure

from the building's main supply.

So, if the power goes out and there is a fire,

you still have a way to extinguish the fire

because the gravity pressure is always there

and ready to go.

Here's the problem, when a fire sprinkler is activated,

it will run until it gets shut off manually.

But in a world where everyone's disappeared,

no one is there to shut it off manually.

It takes more than a week for the tanks to run dry,

a week of constantly drenching

and soaking everything underneath that sprinkler head.

Just a few hundred yards away

in the heart of the mall, there are no flames, no water.

It's kind of like a building on fire across town.

It's not happening in your neighborhood,

you probably wouldn't even notice it.

But even after people,

the mall isn't completely abandoned.

The security guards still keep watch.

The Mall of America has this team of highly trained dogs,

and they have a few different jobs,

one of which is to guard the mall itself,

but the other one is to sniff out things like drugs

and explosives and firearms.

Dogs have an exceptional sense of smell.

They can smell fear in the different chemicals given off

by the sweat and saliva of anxious people.

Guard dogs can tell you who is nervous, who is angry,

or who is afraid.

Their human handlers may be gone,

but even in the loneliness and silence,

the dog's instinct to survive remains.

There would be a lot of food sources in the mall.

I mean, all those standalone restaurants,

and there's another food court and another one.

And dogs are omnivores.

I mean, for a while, there would be plenty for them to eat.

The members of the K-9 unit

are on their own.

But even here in the echoes

and memories of a dead civilization,

some warmth still lingers.

Even without electricity,

the mall is still going to trap the heat inside,

and it's designed that way

so that it releases the heat when needed.

This is a clever bit of engineering.

The Mall of America has passive heating.

It doesn't really have a furnace system,

which might surprise you given where it's located,

and that's because it uses skylights

to allow solar heating.

Sunlight streams in through more than 1,300 skylights.

It hits concrete, it hits walls,

it basically hits everything

and warms them up during the day.

But then at night, when it gets cold outside,

all that heat that's been trapped indoors

gets released into the air.

So, what ends up happening is the mall stays a nice,

constant temperature despite the fluctuations outside.

The K-9 unit is safe for now,

but a silent danger is lurking

in the polished hallways of the mall.

There's an electric vehicle on display with a powerful

and dangerous lithium-ion battery under the hood.

After people, it isn't just a car,

it's an explosive waiting for ignition.

Three days after people, and the beating heart

of the global supply chain has flatlined.

China is the crucial player

behind almost all the shopping we do.

China alone produces over 30%

of the world's global manufacturing output.

Millions of tons of fuel, chemicals,

and consumer goods once passed through the Port of Shanghai,

the biggest and busiest port on Earth.

Now it's abandoned,

a ghost town at the mouth of the Yangtze River.

Normally, over 13,000 people keep the port running.

It's 125 docks spanning over 12 miles,

and there're these towering ship-to-shore cranes.

Some are over 400 feet tall,

loading over 200 cargo ships daily.

Every year, the Port of Shanghai handles

50 million containers, nearly 750 million tons of cargo,

and fully half of that is retail,

clothing, food, electronics, you name it.

The Port of Shanghai ships out enough retail goods

to stock the entire Mall of America a thousand times.

Now, there is no one to man the controls,

no one to watch over the docks,

no one to guide ships to shore.

It isn't just deserted,

it's a disaster playing out minute by minute.

Best case, a ship will run aground.

Worst case, it will slam right into the docks.

Laden with cargo,

a ship weighing over 100,000 tons

blindly caroms into the dock,

with a force of almost 35,000 cars crashing

into it at once.

In the harbor, you've got dozens of ships

that are out of control,

smashing into the docks and knocking down cranes.

The shriek of twisting metal

isn't a death knell, it's a warning.

An even greater danger is sealed in thousands

of shipping containers stacked high on turbulent decks,

waiting to open like Pandora's Box.

It's not just sneakers and smartphones

that are making their way through our ports,

it's objects for medical research, live viruses,

corrosive chemicals, crude oil,

even military supplies like ammunition

or nuclear fuel rods.

You'd have the normal chemical and electrical fire,

but you'd also have acid melting through structures,

live rounds going off,

shipping containers full of fireworks exploding.

The port wouldn't just be destroyed,

it would go out with quite a bang.

The carnage doesn't end at the docks,

it spills out into the water

where ghost ships list and burn,

cargo plunges into the harbor by the ton,

never to arrive at its original destination.

Far from the broken, burning port, one giant escaped.

She sails the open ocean alone with no one at the helm.

One of the largest container ships ever built, the Oslo.

It's known as a ultra large container vessel,

with emphasis on "ultra large."

It's as long as four city blocks,

as wide as a eight-lane highway,

and it has an engine the size of a three-story house.

It's a hundred feet shorter than the Sears Tower,

the most famous skyscraper in Chicago,

if it were laid on its side.

It's hard to imagine

that it can hold almost 24,000 shipping containers.

Think of it carrying nothing but sneakers.

It would be enough for every single person in California,

Texas, and New York.

The Oslo is bound for Los Angeles,

an unmanned specter on a three-week voyage from Shanghai.

Her fuel tanks are still full, her engines still humming,

but not every vessel is lucky enough

to share the Oslo's fate.

Loss of power on a large ship can be extremely dangerous.

Even when a container ship has full crew

and full power,

it still takes 29 minutes for it to go from full speed

to a complete stop,

and it covers four miles while it's trying to slow down.

A derelict tanker, lifeless but deadly,

is drifting straight into the Oslo's path.

She carries no crew, only cargo sealed in her belly.

Three million gallons of jet fuel.

Far from the Pacific Ocean, deep in America's heartland,

a different kind of disaster is unfolding.

Inside the Mall of America,

the sprinklers have been inundating the mall

for nearly a week.

There's no one to turn them off,

and the charred food court is drowning.

Many large commercial buildings,

especially food courts, have built in drains, you know,

to handle spills and regular cleaning,

but they'd struggle to keep up

with an active sprinkler system running nonstop

for more than a week.

The system has finally run out of water,

and the sprinklers have stopped flowing, but it's too late.

Deep inside the structure's skeleton,

decay is taking root and spreading like a virus.

The extreme heat from the fire has weakened

the steel support beams, then comes the water,

tons of it seeping into every crack, soaking the walls,

and pooling on weakened floors.

Fire turns solid materials brittle

and vulnerable to collapse.

Weeks pass,

and the flood waters start to subside,

but now the temperature is falling.

The explosion and the fire would've knocked out some

of the eight acres of skylights in the mall,

and where it's located,

well, winters can be especially brutal.

Now, if an arctic cold front rolls in,

well, temperatures can drop by as much as 40 degrees

in a single day.

The coldest temperature ever recorded in Minnesota

is more than 60 degrees below zero.

All that pooling water would quickly freeze,

stopping up the drains.

Bloomington gets an average of 50 inches of snow per year.

In a couple of weeks, worst case scenario,

up to 2,000 tons of snow when ice could accumulate.

That's about the weight of four Boeing 747s,

and all that weight is piled on top of floors

and supports that have already suffered

a great deal of water damage.

An unearthly groan breaks the eerie silence

inside the mall, and the floor, swollen with water

and splintered by ice, finally succumbs.

That collapse would be devastating,

and the floor beneath would be smashed by ice

and concrete weighing thousands of tons.

One wing of the mall

is a tangled mass of metal,

glass, and stone, but on the other side,

sun still pours through the skylights

and the deserted shops and stalls remain intact.

Where humanity once shopped, the K-9 unit now prowls,

scavenging to survive.

K-9 units typically keep about a month's worth

of kibble on hand,

but even after the fresh food starts to rot,

the dogs are gonna be okay,

because dogs are not picky eaters.

Things like chips, crackers, packaged ramen noodles,

cured and dried meats, like pepperoni, hot dogs, jerky,

the dogs will be having a feast,

that is if they're the only ones eating it.

The 14,000 acre Minnesota Valley Wildlife Refuge

is less than two miles away.

Once a sanctuary, now it's a launching ground for invasion.

Two weeks after people,

mice have infested every corner of the grocery store,

feasting, nesting, and gnawing

through everything on shelf after shelf.

Now the smell of decay is rising, rotting meat,

rancid milk, a scent thick as smoke curling

through broken doors and shattered glass.

It's like an invitation to hungry creatures,

and something bigger is coming.

Rats have a sense of smell

that's even more sensitive than mice.

Rats can smell through walls and underground.

Rats have been trained to smell for unexploded landmines

in war zones.

They can smell tuberculosis on patients.

Rats swarm into the store,

ravenous and ruthless, drawn by the promise of food,

and they're not leaving until they get it.

Rats and mice really do compete for resources,

but frankly, it's not much of a competition.

Mice weigh about one ounce,

whereas rats, 16 times that, a full pound.

It's like a toddler

trying to fight a high school linebacker.

It's not a fair fight.

Rats are way bigger than mice.

There are occasions where mice and rats

can coexist peacefully,

but it's only when food is in plentiful supply.

The rodents feast side by side,

an unspoken and uncomfortable truce.

But each day, the flesh spoils a little more.

The scent thickens, the color turns,

the meat is rotting into poison.

Mice will eat spoiled meat, but only up to a point.

Rats have stronger stomach acid

so they can eat more spoiled meat,

but even rats have a breaking point.

And when it comes to things like botulism,

that is just as bad for rats as it is for us.

When they get foodborne illnesses,

pretty much the same symptoms.

Vomiting, diarrhea, nausea.

You can try to imagine what it's like

when thousands of rodents get diarrhea all at once,

but we'll let that pass.

Even after the mice and the rats are done with it,

that meat will not go to waste.

It will start to rot, and the flies will descend on it,

and they will begin laying their eggs

in every moist crevice.

And then within days, that rotting meat

will be effectively reanimated with wriggling maggots.

Rats and mice both eat insects and their larvae.

To us, maggots are disgusting nightmare fuel.

But to them, it's just a good source of protein.

As the maggots eat the meat

and the rodents eat the maggots,

the food source is gonna dwindle away altogether.

And at that point, we're looking at a very

intense competition between rats and mice.

Two weeks after people,

the scraps are fewer and fewer.

The rats, bigger, faster, hungrier,

do what survival demands, no hesitation.

Just one species clawing its way to dominance.

Rats are extremely aggressive and territorial.

And if they're desperate enough for food,

they'll kill and eat mice,

which seems a little bit too close to cannibalism.

Sometimes a rat just wants to show his dominance

and teach the mice a lesson about, "This is my territory."

It's like they kill the mice for sport.

The rats have conquered the rivals,

and settled into nest.

In here, they're hidden and warm.

But outside, Mother Nature is alive with silent menace,

and the rats will soon be exposed to a new nightmare.

Far out in the Pacific, with only autopilot to guide her,

the Oslo has outrun storms and skirted ruin.

The ocean may be vast, but fate is fickle.

And now, a tanker carrying a million gallons of jet fuel

is drifting right into the Oslo's path.

The tanker's dead in the water,

but the Oslo still has power,

and a collision between them could be catastrophic,

because even if it just starts a small fire,

that's like dropping a match

onto 3 million gallons of jet fuel.

On the empty bridge of the Oslo,

a shrill collision alarm pierces the quiet,

but there's no one to hear it.

No hands on the helm, no one watching the horizon,

and the ghost ship sails toward its own demise.

It's very likely that the tanker's hull

will be breached if there is a spark.

And if that spark hit the fuel side of the tanker,

watch out.

It's gonna be a massive explosion.

Any other ship within a three mile radius

would be almost completely destroyed.

Windows would be blown out, the decks would buckle,

and smaller ships would capsize instantly.

The blast is sudden and catastrophic.

The Oslo is tossed like an unwanted toy

in the hands of an angry sea.

Her cargo ratchets snap one after another

until 24,000 shipping containers tumble

into the ocean like steel dominoes.

When containers fall off a ship,

some of them may stay intact when they hit the water.

But they're not made to be airtight,

they're made to be water resistant.

So they may float for a little while,

but then it's gonna sink.

Many of them are basically just gonna like, pop open

when they hit the water,

spilling all of their contents into the water.

It wouldn't be the first time.

There are many weird stories of strange objects

washing ashore due to shipping containers falling overboard.

For decades, there's this one beach in France

where Garfield phones have been washing up every year.

And it turns out it's because in the '80s,

there was a shipping container full of them

that sank nearby.

Random Lego pieces still wash up on European beaches

all the time because a shipping container full of those

sank way back in the '90s.

The Oslo makes its final delivery

not to the port of Los Angeles as scheduled,

but to the murky depths of the vast Pacific.

Then she disappears into the far reaches of the ocean,

left to her fate.

One year after people,

the once bright and sterile grocery stores

that fed humanity are now dark, rotting,

choked with dust and decay.

Shelves that were once home to fresh foods

and packaged goods are now home to rats,

mice, and their nests.

High above the vermin,

barn owls perch in the rafters, watchful and hungry.

Where once there was cleanliness in order,

there's about to be something else, carnage.

Two years after people,

grocery stores are overrun with prey

and the predators that feast on them.

Here, the air is thick with rot,

the floor rides with desperate rodents,

and the rafters team with deadly hunters.

This environment is tailor-made for barn owls.

They get their name, barn owls, because they like to live

in human-built structures like barns,

and farmers actually encourage them to be there,

because they're like natural pest control.

Barn owls have some of the most

sensitive ears on the planet,

helping them triangulate and pinpoint sounds

as soft as the heartbeat of a mouse.

The average barn owl can consume

about three animals a night.

So with all of these rats around, it would be a feast.

And the owls would end up consuming

up to 1,000 rats a year.

The food being devoured

inside this grocery store bears little resemblance

to what once filled shopping carts.

But the building itself,

though cracked and sagging, still stands.

But for how long?

In the Mall of America where eager crowds

once gathered to buy the latest trends,

all that's left is silence and darkness.

Now, wolves from the nearby wildlife refuge

prowl through the shadows, lured by the scent of food,

and the K-9 unit watches, ready to protect what's theirs.

Dogs can be very territorial

when it comes to protecting their resources.

The K-9 unit would've made them all its home,

and become protective of that territory.

Now remember, these dogs haven't been raised in the wild,

so they wouldn't be particularly good hunters.

They would be very interested

in protecting their territory and their food supply.

Unfortunately for the dogs,

the wolves are not just bigger and stronger.

They've been living like this for their entire lives.

While the dogs are trained to do things

that humans want them to do,

these wolves have been surviving in the wild

and up against competition,

so chances are, they're gonna win.

The wolves hunt as a pack,

moving as one to corner one of the K-9s.

Slowly, step by step, they isolate their prey.

Like a bolt of lightning, a wolf attacks.

And the dogs have no choice but to flee.

Now the wolves rule,

but the building itself is already turning against them.

After five years without people,

the mall is going through several

of the freeze-thaw cycles of the Minnesota winter.

When it gets cold, water freezes, it expands,

and when it thaws, and it contracts again.

So that causes cracks

to appear in the structure all over the place,

and it will eventually deteriorate.

Some threats lie in plain sight,

but others hide, biding their time.

There's an electric vehicle kiosk in the mall.

This sleek car on display may look innocent enough,

but there's a danger lurking under the hood,

a 100 kilowatt lithium ion battery.

Lithium ion batteries are volatile.

That's why you can't check them in your luggage on an airplane.

If damaged, they can explode or catch fire.

There was one incident in a Manhattan apartment building

caused by a lithium ion battery in a bicycle

where 38 people were injured.

An electric vehicle has a battery

more than 100 times that strength.

It's been five years since any human hands

have swept the dust or patched the walls.

With a shudder of neglect,

a slab of ceiling breaks free,

smashing into the display car below,

and something begins to stir.

If the battery's damaged,

the lithium and the cobalt mix together,

creating a short circuit, this can overheat things,

causing a fire or even an explosion.

This triggers a chain reaction known as a thermal runway.

Meaning, it just gets hotter and hotter,

and burns ever more vigorously.

So this leads to a firestorm that doesn't stop

until there's no more fuel left.

That means everything has been burned.

There can be thousands of cells

in an electric car battery,

so a fire could foreseeably burn for days and days on end

with nothing to stop it.

What began as a spark

takes on a life of its own,

moving through the mall with purpose,

devouring anything it can find for fuel.

Without human intervention,

a fire like this could definitely gut

an entire section of the mall,

and it's definitely gonna scare away

all the animals living here.

The Mall of America,

once hailed as a cathedral of commerce,

now stands hollowed by flame.

Its corridors blackened.

Though some parts of the mall still stand,

they're about to undergo a remodel

no human being could ever have planned.

Years ago, fire left the biggest mall

in the world warped and charred.

Even the beasts who prowled

the once pristine hallways are gone now,

leaving only silence and ruin.

But in the dust and ashes, something new is stirring.

Fires actually often make conditions better

for plants to grow.

When things like wood, plants,

and seeds are burned into mineral-rich ash,

those nutrients are recycled back into the soil,

creating ideal growing conditions for new life to grow.

The question becomes, where is this fertile soil?

What I expect is the natural gardens

that are in many of these malls,

the water features, the little tree, and planted areas,

those actually become the point

from which small jungles start to flourish.

Seeds, pollen, and mushroom spores

can be brought by the wind or the birds.

Local birds might bring local plant species,

but migratory birds can bring seeds

from hundreds or even thousands of miles away.

From every crack in the concrete,

roots rise like fingers, clawing for a second chance.

They're silent and relentless, and they're spreading.

They'll expand the cracks and crevices.

That lets in more soil, more seeds, and more water.

And then the whole cycle just continues.

While the natural world withers, rots,

and blooms again, 30 years after people,

grocery stores all over the world are sagging

under their own weight, bending, cracking,

and coming apart at the seams.

Retail companies focus on profit, not permanence.

These stores are built with cheap materials,

and frankly, they're easier to replace than to repair.

So these stores are designed to last for about 50 years.

And without maintenance,

they'd fall apart a lot sooner than that.

Once a beacon of abundance,

this grocery store is now a hollow shell.

All it will take is one bolt of lightning,

one burst of wind, and a humble thunderstorm

will bring it all crashing down.

A big box store is highly vulnerable.

It has a large, flat roof and a nice, sharp edge.

So as wind comes over that sharp edge,

it separates the flow, creating a vortex,

or a whirlpool that's spinning in the air.

You can't see it, but it's there.

As it's spinning, it is creating suction

that is pulling up on the edge of the roof.

When that suction gets high enough,

it will literally start to peel the roof back

just like the lid on a tin of sardines.

Eventually, it'll take the whole thing off.

Amid the shattered glass and collapsing beams,

a few relics are scattered in the rubble,

untouched by time or rot,

and one of them is still safe to eat.

Honey is nature's ultimate preservative.

It basically lasts forever because it's acidic,

and it contains almost no water.

Bacteria and mold need that water to grow.

So if you can keep your honey sealed

without letting water get in there,

it'll basically never spoil.

Unspoiled jars of honey have been found

in 19th century shipwrecks.

And archeologists have found sealed jars of honey

in ancient Egyptian tombs that are perfectly edible

even thousands of years later.

Decades slip by,

and the store that once helped feed humanity

is swallowed up by Mother Nature instead.

100 years after people,

the Oslo has long since sunk to the darkest depths,

but some of its cargo is still afloat.

Let's say a single shipping container

is carrying nothing but flip-flops.

It could hold about 130,000 pairs.

But a lot of flip-flops are made of EVA foam,

which is a closed-cell foam,

which means that water can't get inside of it.

This means that it can both float very well

and doesn't biodegrade.

Ocean currents could carry

some of those floating flip-flops

all the way around the Pacific Ocean

and deliver them at the Port of Shanghai,

like it's some elaborate return-to-sender package

from the Pacific Ocean.

By the time this lost cargo arrives,

the port where it started its journey

is little more than a memory.

The ghost of human commerce.

A century later, whatever's left

of the Port of Shanghai has been completely overgrown.

Over the decades, plant life has creeped into the area,

or else been washed up by the Yangtze River.

Whatever the case, it now looks like there's a forest

covering what used to be that port.

As Mother Nature reclaims the land,

an ancient resident returns, the South China tiger.

These cats were once considered

functionally extinct in the wild.

In fact, none have been spotted outside of zoos

since the 1980s.

The Chinese government created controlled breeding programs

to boost the Tiger's population at the Shanghai Zoo.

Now, a century after their ancestors

escape these facilities,

the South China tiger is king of the jungle once more.

In a life after people,

the populations of these extraordinary cats

would rebound and flourish.

On the other side of the globe,

all that's left of what was once the Mall of America

is a plant-choked, overgrown ruin.

The descendants of the K-9 unit

that once patrolled its halls have returned.

But like the mall, they're also transformed.

There will still be dogs in a life after people,

but they won't look like most of the family pets

wer'e accustomed to.

In the absence of controlled breeding,

all of the specialty varieties will disappear.

In other words, mutts will rule.

Natural selection would mean that this surviving dogs

adapt to become more effective hunters,

like working together as a pack to take down prey.

Dogs shed their domesticated past,

reshaping into the image of their wild cousins,

wolves, coyotes, and dingoes.

Their coats grow thicker, their bodies harden,

lean, powerful, built for a life in the wild.

These once disciplined guard dogs

bred to obey our commands,

now revert to their more animalistic nature.

They become hunters, survivalists.

And so like the mall itself,

these dogs have returned to nature.

Mother Nature has erased almost every sign

that this was once a bustling mall.

But there's one thing that can never be erased.

Unlike silver or copper, gold never corrodes.

It doesn't react to water,

and it's basically impervious to almost every kind of acid.

That's why ancient coins, crowns,

jewelry from thousands of years ago still shine today.

It's like time just forgets about gold.

These remnants, faded treasures,

buried in dust, are all that endure,

the final fragile clues

to humanity's long dance with commerce.

I think it's really easy to underestimate

how much we consume, how much we shop.

It's a huge part of our lives.

Shopping and commerce have long been

the lifeblood of civilization,

driving economies and shaping the way we live.

They bring us necessities and luxuries,

and also fuel innovation.

But without people, none of it happens.

There are no shoppers to buy anything,

and the global gears of commerce grind to a halt.

So all of the intricate web of business

that we have created, it dissolves into nothingness.