Life After People/Tear Jerker

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Tear Jerkers in Life After People include:

  • At the end of the original documentary, it's speculated that while apes may one day achieve a human-like mastery over the environment, the ability to look outside one's self and contemplate your place in the cosmos was an evolutionary accident that will likely never be repeated. Ultimately, it doesn't matter whether anything from the time of humans survives...because even if it does, there will be no one to talk about it.

Narrator: And so, like an abandoned village on a global scale, the Earth will move on without us. There was life before us, and there will be life...after people.

  • Then there's the closing perspective on humankind's "reign" over planet Earth: if the Earth's 4.5 billion year existence were condensed into a 24 hour period, man's time on the planet would be half a minute long. And the 10,000 years it would take the earth to wipe out nearly all traces of our existence? A fraction of a second. We Are as Mayflies, indeed.
  • The Inferred Holocaust of millions of domestic animals that won't be able to make it outside.
    • The seeing-eye dog that continues to follow its daily routine as if its master was still there by its side. The poor thing continues to adhere to its training, ignoring the instinct to raid the cupboards in hunger while it waits for a feeding that will never come. Well-trained dogs will do this almost to the point of starvation.
  • The destruction of mankind's greatest works of art. It's not easy to watch the Mona Lisa rot away and the dome of the Sistine Chapel crumble to dust.
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Life_After_People/Tear_Jerker?oldid=1995181"