Science Podcast | The end of civilization (episode 1)

There are a series of studies that ask who would dominate the Earth if man completely disappeared from the planet. We do not know what new species will evolve in that time; What we are sure of is that there will continue to be, just as there always have been, bacteria. And bacteria continue to be, today, the most successful and dominant creatures on the planet. We continue today to live in the era of bacteria, which have been present in the world since the very origin of life, almost 4 billion years ago. So in, say, another 250 million years they will still be exactly the same.

But what about the animals? Do you know which are the most numerous, those who will probably inherit the Earth if we disappear? You will think of rats, or ants, or jellyfish… Well no, it would be nematodes. Some simple cylindrical worms. It turns out that four out of five animals, bacteria aside, are nematodes. So, imagine what it will be like when all of us are gone, unless we take it all with us, because if there is one thing we do extremely well, it is cause global destruction of enormous proportions. If we simply disappeared, few things would happen, very few things. The Earth would continue without us. No problem.

All episodes of “Dark Materials” can be found on the main audio platforms, such as Spotify, Ivoox, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Musicand We could. They are also available in YouTube.