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!
If you liked this article, and would like to see more in the future, along with a LOT of cool old photos of Phoenix, please consider becoming a patron of History Adventuring on Patreon. If you're already a patron, thank you! Your pledge makes this happen!

 Click here to become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me...
Read more