7. 2 Million Years From Now: Grand Canyon, Arizona Crater Eroded
We feel like we're getting a little bogged down in what all this means for people. We're narcissistic like that. We don't like to think about a planet without us on it, even though we've been around for merely a fraction of the Earth's lifespan so far. In terms of the grand scheme of things, we're barely a footnote. We're one of those footnotes off of footnotes that only important papers and David Foster Wallace essays use. We're a tiny indented letter, rather than a number. As such, there'll still be plenty going on with the globe long after we've been wiped off the face of it, and it's still just as sad. Whilst the idea of an empty Earth, untouched by life and existing as a sort of natural wonder, a planet-sized diorama of nice forests, mountains, and landscapes is kinda nice, it's not gonna happen. Assuming that they weren't near the impact site of those meteors, or the supervolcano, and didn't somehow collapse during the new ice age, then two million years from now they would have all just eroded anyway. That's the equivalent of passing away from natural causes after having every kind of cancer concurrently. For example, the Grand Canyon was pretty much created by the erosive action of water flowing down into the Colorado River, so rising snow and ice levels will have broken it down completely. The same fate will have befallen the Arizona meteor crater, the rocky Badlands of the South Dakota desert will have been smoothed off, and why don't we throw in another supervolcanic eruption in there to get rid of any natural beauty of life that may still exist? That's better.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
