History Channel to show Chicago "After People"

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: That's the way Chicago crumbles : TELEVISION | After the people are gone, the river will overflow and ivy will choke Wrigley, "Life After People" series predicts : April 28, 2009 : BY PAIGE WISER | Chicago Sun-Times Television Critic : "Welcome to Earth: population zero," announces "Life After People," a History Channel series with one mission: to freak you out. Tonight's episode focuses on what would happen to London, Atlanta and Chicago if humankind were to suddenly disappear. : (Hint: cannibal pigs.) : The Chicago portion of the 9 p.m. show is eerily realistic, maybe because producers had such a conveniently close case study. They looked to a once-thriving, now-abandoned section of Gary as what could happen to another lakeside city in a short amount of time. The narrator sternly calls Gary "the Pompeii of the Midwest." : The question "Well, what happened to the people?" is never addressed, and it's probably best that way. It's humbling enough to realize that the world will go on without us. We don't really need to be contemplating which horrific plague/war/comet will do us in. : "Life After People" has a primal appeal, says Matthew Kubik, one of the experts featured. "People love to watch things fall apart," says the onetime architect for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in Chicago who is now a professor at the combined Indiana University/Purdue University campus in Fort Wayne. : "If you have a look around us, we recognize that things are rotting," Kubik says. "We have potholes in the street." There's a fancy name for that: the second law of thermodynamics. The idea is that the order we try to impose on nature will inevitably revert to disorder. "It's the natural and inevitable flow of the universe," Kubik says. "Why do we go to the racetrack and watch these cars smash into the wall? That's order to disorder -- rapidly." : This could be the future of Chicago: : The Chicago River : Within a matter of days, the river would have its revenge. Back in 1900, engineers reversed the flow of the river to reduce pollution in our drinking water. But without humans manipulating the water levels, the river would fill up like a bathtub. First downtown Chicago would flood, and then entire Midwestern towns would be wiped out. Buh-bye, Joliet. : Wrigley Field : Expect the confines to become much less friendly. Its ultimate opponent is already embedded in the outfield wall: the ivy, which is regularly maintained by the grounds crew. Soon the ivy would blanket the entire stadium, with the infield dense with the scourge of the suburbs: buckthorn. : Sears Tower : Sure, it'd be OK for a couple of centuries. But eventually Chicago's extreme weather would rust away the steel cables supporting its complicated elevator system. When the highest elevator finally loosens, it would come shooting down its shaft like a bullet out of a gun. With its foundation devastated, the Sears Tower would fall apart. : John Hancock Center : Its sturdy crisscross design should keep it standing longer than the Sears Tower, but not forever. "My supposition is that eventually it would crumple as if you were pushing down on a box of Wheaties," Kubik says. : "We're very arrogant as humans," he says. "We built these buildings and we think they are emblems of our human power over nature and they're going to last forever. But the truth of the matter is that buildings have about a 40-year life-span." : Kubik will be closing out the NeoCon show at the Merchandise Mart on June 17, giving a presentation on energy detailing for interior design. The lesson he takes from the "Life After People" series is that it's a vision we can avoid -- if we change the way we do pretty much everything. : "We feel like we have this sort of divine right that's been biblically handed onto us to subdue the world," Kubik says. "But where we are right now is a point in history where we are so exploitative of the natural resources on this planet. We have to develop a different attitude." : The History Channel, at least, has things in perspective. "We're not really masters of the universe," Kubik says.

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