What Phoenix would look like without people


It's April 3rd 2020, I'm doing my part for social distancing, and a good friend of mine has been delivering a to-go coffee from McDonalds to me in the morning for the past few days. Then we hang out in my garage and talk. Just the two of us, six feet apart.

When my friend asked "what if they don't come up with a vaccine for the corona virus?", I glibly said, "Well, then that would be the end of our species". Of course, it wouldn't, because humans have survived things like this before, and besides, the vaccine will be ready before we know it, and everything will be just fine. In the meantime, well, you know me, I'm letting my imagination wander, and as I looked around my suburban Phoenix neighborhood yesterday I got to wondering what it would look like if people went extinct.

It's actually pretty easy to see what it would look like - just go out into the desert. The Phoenix metro area is pretty big, but the Sonoran Desert is enormous. Once people were gone, the desert would just go back to business as usual.

There would still be as much water flowing through the valley, which has been happening since the last Ice Age, 10,000 years ago, with snowmelt flowing downhill from the Flagstaff area to the Phoenix area, and beyond, but without people it wouldn't stop in the Salt River Valley, it would just go back to flowing on down to the Gulf of California, via the Gila River. Run your finger on a map going southwest and you'll see how the water flows - Arizona tilts slightly in that direction. The dams will eventually fail and the water will seek its level again.

Of course, just about everything planted in my neighborhood would die without additional water. Native plants would take over, and the weeds would nursery saguaros, just like they do out in the desert. It would take time, but it would happen. Established desert trees, like mesquite, will live for a while, but unless they're in a riparian area, they also will disappear.

My wiener dogs will miss me, I'm sure, but they're hunters, and scavengers, and there will be enough food around for them to live out their lives. They will probably fall in with a pack, which is what dogs, and wolves, do.

And it will be soooo quiet. There won't be the sound of air conditioners running, or cars, or even the distant moaning of a train. It will be the kind of quiet that you hear when you're out hiking in the desert, where you can hear the buzz of a distant insect as the loudest sound, or maybe the wind in your ears.

But hey, it ain't gonna happen. At least not anytime soon. We'll all be fine, and life will go back to running in greased grooves again. Hang in there, we're all in this together!
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