Aftermath: Population Zero (also titled Aftermath: The World After Humans)Aftermath: The World After Humans on History Television is a Canadian special documentary film that premiered on Sunday, March 9, 2008 (at 8:00 PM ET/PT) on the National Geographic Channel. The program was produced by Cream Productions.
Aftermath depicts what scientists (and others) speculate the earth, animal life, and plant life might be like if humanity no longer existed, as well as the effect that humanity's disappearance would have on the artifacts of civilization.Estok, Simon C. “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 16, no. 2, 2009, pp. 203–25. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44733418. Accessed 31 Dec. 2025.Garrard, Greg. “Worlds Without Us: Some Types of Disanthropy.” SubStance, vol. 41, no. 1, 2012, pp. 40–60. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23261102. Accessed 31 Dec. 2025. Both documentaries are inspired by Alan Weisman's The World Without Us.
A four-part follow-up TV series called simply Aftermath was created, following what happens under different scenarios.
Timeline The story begins on Friday, June 13, in an unspecified year. The nature of the show and the appearance of certain vehicles suggest that it takes place in 2008, the year the program was first aired (and when June 13 of that year did indeed fall on a Friday).
A.H. = After Humans
For the sake of simplicity, the story speculates that all of humanity vanished instantly all at once, leaving no trace.
(1 second – 1 minute A.H.) Millions of empty cars spin out of control and crash, while others swerve off roads and highways. Other vehicles crash, including buses in Trafalgar Square. All empty vehicles eventually crash, causing crashes all across the globe. The highways are blocked with smashed and burning vehicles. Stationary cars continue to release exhaust fumes into the air until their fuel supplies run out. Cities have begun to cool down by a fraction of a degree. Small aircraft fall out of the sky without human pilots to control them, while larger ones remain in the air, held aloft by their autopilot systems, until their fuel runs out, and they too tumble to the ground.
(10 minutes A.H.) Computer systems and machines stay operational. Satellites in orbit communicate with super-computers and continue to transmit information around the globe. While the satellites will stay operational for as long as their solar panels are intact, on Earth machines will only keep going as long as the electricity stays on. Coal-fired power plants run out of fuel. As the power plants shut down, power cuts ensue. Billions of buildings that get their energy from them, such as Las Vegas casinos, fall into darkness. Entire suburbs go dark. Homes, schools, hospitals and cafes are now all without power.
(55 minutes A.H.) Certain regions rely on alternative energy sources, like Pennsylvania, which is powered by wind turbines. The turbines are still running, but at the local power station, the controls are unmanned. Computers detect a problem and shut down the system. Pennsylvania is now without electricity.
(85 minutes A.H.) At Niagara Falls, Canada, water from the river is diverted into tunnels to turn massive wheels to create power, but now, the tunnels flood with excessive water and the power station goes offline. Parts of Ontario and New York lose all their power. Televisions, computers, lights and other machines stop running. Mass blackouts sweep across the globe.
(96 minutes A.H.) Within just one day, only nuclear power plants remain operational. The permanent loss of power reaches the nuclear power plants. Computers shut off the reactors and stop the reactions inside, but the nuclear power plants could cause a potential catastrophe.
(6 hours A.H.) The last power plants in Europe fail, and the last houses go dark as lights fail. Chemical plants now have no power. Many stored gases require electricity to be cold enough to stay in liquid form. Gas storage tanks heat up until pressure release valves are activated, sending toxic gases into the surrounding environment. Hundreds of thousands of venting tanks cause many animals in the affected regions to die of suffocation.
(1–2 days A.H.) Houses and apartments are still inhabited by family pets. The domestic animals are getting hungry. Chained dogs try to get free. Indoors, cats and dogs roam houses, raid refrigerators and cupboards for food and drink water from toilets for sustenance while searching for a way to get out. The global power loss reaches the world's zoos and safari parks, and starving animals test the fences. Without electric fencing to contain them, predators escape and explore this new world.
Also, liquefied natural gas plants are venting gases that reach stationary cars. Eventually, sparks ignite petrol in fuel tanks and the fuel catches fire. This causes huge explosions, igniting multiple fires that will rage for days.
(3–5 days A.H.) In London, England, Big Ben rings for the last time. The clock tower needs to be wound every three days to remain ticking, but with no one to wind it, it finally grinds to a halt.
In homes and apartments, domestic pets are starving. Now they must break out of their homes or starve to death. Pet dogs and cats exhaust all the food in their homes and break out to search for more in the streets. Cats are well-suited to life in urban environments, and find success in hunting birds and small animals for food. Sewage treatment facilities fail without electricity, leaving sewage treatment plants useless. Raw sewage begins polluting rivers and lakes. Abandoned dogs struggle to survive.
In farms and pastures all over the world, dairy cows are struggling to survive as their food and water supplies begin to end. In a cruel twist of fate, 90,000 dairy cows are saved from the slaughterhouse, but most of their numbers will die of dehydration. Zoo animals face a similar fate as many will die trapped in their enclosures.
Additional exotic animals break out of their enclosures through disabled electric fences, resulting in unusual scenes as displaced wildlife begins to populate areas many miles away from their natural ranges. Elephants start pruning trees in suburbs in their search for food, while hardier animals like camels browse on all available vegetation. Lions and tigers fan out into the streets to hunt herds of deer and packs of monkeys, but at first find hunting challenging in the city as they are not adapted for life in an urban setting.
Migratory birds find travelling easier now since electric lights from office towers and skyscrapers do not confuse them anymore.
(5–10 days A.H.) As days pass, domestic dogs eat all easily available food and begin to fight among each other for supremacy. The bigger dogs make packs and attack and eat the small ones. Within a week, all toy dogs disappear from Earth. Large packs of dogs also feed on dead penned up cattle.
Security measures in power plants fail. The equipment in the spent fuel buildings adjoining nuclear power plants that maintain the temperature level of the spent nuclear fuel rods will shut down. Spent nuclear fuel for nuclear power plants is generally stored in pools in on-site facilities. Because the fossil fuel powered back up, power generators will run out. At that time, the cooling pools that prevent the spent nuclear fuel from overheating will start to boil since this water is not replenished.
Radioactive steam will vent into the atmosphere due to the water eventually evaporating. The spent fuel will eventually set fire to the building, and the steam pressure will cause the storage facilities to explode, causing a non-nuclear explosion, emitting radiation not only in the immediate area of the plant but around the globe due to winds. The resulting nuclear disasters spread fallout over large areas. This is repeated dozens of times as shutdown nuclear plants and spent fuel houses explode. Radioactive clouds cross the skies and rain carries the radiation to the ground. Most plants and smaller animals within the affected zones die. Larger animals (like deer) flee to unaffected regions, not because they notice the radiation, but because of the lack of food.
(10 days – 1 month A.H.) Hungry dogs from cities flee to the countryside to feast on dead dairy cows. Six days after their water and food supplies began ending, dairy cows have completely finished them and died. Now, their rotting carcasses will do nothing more than sustain hungry dogs. On the other hand, not all cows are dead. Beef cattle survive and form herds that thrive in places like the North American Great Plains and the open pastures in the middle-eastern U.S.
The last domestic chickens are exterminated by predators, while fowl and waterfowl such as wild goose, game, prairie chickens, cranes and ducks are still alive. Mice and rats take over abandoned supermarkets, where their population explodes thanks to the abundance of food. This pattern will continue for the next few months until the reduction of food and the action of predators like cats regulates their populations again. Squirrels, raccoons, coyotes and skunks begin to colonize human buildings.
(3 months A.H.) Radiation disappears from the air. In cities, air quality and visibility is improved. Packs of feral dogs roam the countryside. Desperate for food, they attack anything, even escaped elephants, but they don't have any success. Without humans, elephants have no real predators anymore. Meanwhile, the descendants of pet cats are thriving in supermarkets and grocery stores by feasting on mice and rats. The first and second generations of once-domestic animals begin to propagate and populate.
(6 months A.H.) Winter begins in the Northern Hemisphere. Zoo animals that cannot survive it, such as elephants, must migrate to southern latitudes or die. Meanwhile, without artificial heating, cockroaches die by the billions. Animals from the forests seek refuge in human homes. During their stay, they damage furniture in the buildings while constructing their own temporary homes to shelter from the cold.
(10–12 months A.H.) Spring rains wash away the radioactive particles from the surface and carry it further into the ground, cleaning plants and objects. Meanwhile, new plants and trees remove the artificial CO2 from the atmosphere as the new plants and flowers sprout in ruined cities and clean up greenhouses faster than in the human time. Without hunting seasons, animals breed undisturbed. Some species in areas with no natural predators, like the white tail deer, see population booms and expand their distribution to new areas, including former cities. Moss starts to grow over roads. Large carnivores are human shy, but without the lights or noise made by humans they would penetrate urban areas from the nearby hills or reserves and hunt the domesticated animals. Also the houses may make wonderful dens, which means that animals like pumas and tigers would have population explosions. Depending on the area many common species, such as the White tailed deer would have population decreases due to loss of maintained food supply (e.g. lawns, golf courses, gardens) and increased predation.
(3 to 15 years A.H.) With no maintenance and the ice of multiple winters, roads appear degraded and cracked. Moss covers their surfaces, and grass grows in the cracks. New trees grow in home gardens. Vehicles and other metallic structures begin to succumb to corrosion that strips away paint and protective coatings, resulting in rust that eats through metal. Many of the 1 billion automobiles will soon degrade into hollow husks.
(30 years A.H.)