{"id":1649,"date":"2017-05-02T00:06:33","date_gmt":"2017-05-02T04:06:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/?p=1649"},"modified":"2017-05-02T00:06:33","modified_gmt":"2017-05-02T04:06:33","slug":"a-post-human-earth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/2017\/05\/02\/a-post-human-earth\/","title":{"rendered":"A Post-Human Earth"},"content":{"rendered":"

This topic would probably be more fitting for a sightings post, but it tied really well to a passage from today\u2019s Station Eleven<\/em> reading. In Chapter 30, Mandel writes, \u201cOn silent afternoons in his brother\u2019s apartment, Jeevan found himself thinking about how human the city is, how human everything is. We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all. There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operations grinds to a halt. No one delivers fuel to the gas stations or the airports. Cars are stranded. Airplanes cannot fly. Trucks remain at their points of origin. Food never reaches the cities; grocery stores close. Businesses are locked and then looted. No one comes home to work at the power plants or the sub-stations, no one removes fallen trees from electrical lines\u201d (178).<\/p>\n

Last class discussion, Dr. Sample mentioned what would hypothetically happen to the world, specifically to the New York City subways, if humans disappeared from the earth. Having taken a Posthumanism English class this semester, which turned out to complement this class in a really interesting way, I\u2019ve thought a lot about the post-human world and the intersections between humanity and technology. I found this video on what would happen if all humans suddenly disappeared from the planet:<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Wy7Q6wazD_E<\/a><\/p>\n

What Would Happen If Humans Disappeared?<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Although humans haven\u2019t gone completely extinct in Station Eleven<\/em>, we still see the devastating effects of the absence of humans in a post-apocalyptic world. I find it interesting that this video, as well as most similar content on the topic, does not address what would happen to the Internet without humans. As we\u2019ve discussed in our blog posts and class discussions, in many ways, technology continues to live as people die. But like other complex technological systems, the Internet still\u00a0requires human maintenance. I wonder how the Internet would fare independent of people. If new intelligent life occupies the earth after humans have left or gone extinct, would they be able to retrieve the technology saved in \u201cthe cloud\u201d when all other traces of humanity have dwindled away?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This topic would probably be more fitting for a sightings post, but it tied really well to a passage from today\u2019s Station Eleven reading. In Chapter 30, Mandel writes, \u201cOn silent afternoons in his brother\u2019s apartment, Jeevan found himself thinking about how human the city is, how human everything is. We bemoaned the impersonality of … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “A Post-Human Earth”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":125,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-group-b"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/125"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1649"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1649\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1650,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1649\/revisions\/1650"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}