"And then he said..."

I've often wondered what the effect would be on the Earth if the human race winked out of existance overnight: I always figured the nuclear power stations would be where the trouble lay. Turns out, in this fascinating New Scientist piece, that multiple worldwide meltdowns wouldn't be such a big deal after all.

In fact, apart from long-term traps like groundwater and the ocean beds, it'd only take a few decades before the worst of the damage we're doing to the environment would have repaired itself.

Imagine that all the people on Earth - all 6.5 billion of us and counting - could be spirited away tomorrow, transported to a re-education camp in a far-off galaxy. (Let's not invoke the mother of all plagues to wipe us out, if only to avoid complications from all the corpses). Left once more to its own devices, Nature would begin to reclaim the planet, as fields and pastures reverted to prairies and forest, the air and water cleansed themselves of pollutants, and roads and cities crumbled back to dust.

“The sad truth is, once the humans get out of the picture, the outlook starts to get a lot better,” says John Orrock, a conservation biologist at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, California. But would the footprint of humanity ever fade away completely, or have we so altered the Earth that even a million years from now a visitor would know that an industrial society once ruled the planet?

A lot of its conclusions on how long it will takes cities and the more obvious tell-tale signs of humanity to disappear are based on what happened around Chernobyl in the years following the disaster - buildings are crumbling thanks to invasive plants, but wildlife (after a few years dominated by rats and feral dogs) is booming:

“I really expected to see a nuclear desert there,” says [environmental biologist Ronald] Chesser. “I was quite surprised. When you enter into the exclusion zone, it's a very thriving ecosystem.” [snip] Wild boar are 10 to 15 times as common within the Chernobyl exclusion zone as outside it, and big predators are making a spectacular comeback. “I've never seen a wolf in the Ukraine outside the exclusion zone. I've seen many of them inside,” says Chesser.

It's not all rosy - some species are past the point of no return already, some damaged ecosystems have already struck a new balance that squeezes out native wildlife, and nothing's stopping global warming for a while yet - but for the most part things just keep on getting better.

All things considered, it will only take a few tens of thousands of years at most before almost every trace of our present dominance has vanished completely. Alien visitors coming to Earth 100,000 years hence will find no obvious signs that an advanced civilisation ever lived here.

[snip]

Ocean sediment cores will show a brief period during which massive amounts of heavy metals such as mercury were deposited, a relic of our fleeting industrial society. The same sediment band will also show a concentration of radioactive isotopes left by reactor meltdowns after our disappearance. The atmosphere will bear traces of a few gases that don't occur in nature, especially perfluorocarbons such as CF4, which have a half-life of tens of thousands of years. Finally a brief, century-long pulse of radio waves will forever radiate out across the galaxy and beyond, proof - for anything that cares and is able to listen - that we once had something to say and a way to say it.

But these will be flimsy souvenirs, almost pathetic reminders of a civilisation that once thought itself the pinnacle of achievement. Within a few million years, erosion and possibly another ice age or two will have obliterated most of even these faint traces. If another intelligent species ever evolves on the Earth - and that is by no means certain, given how long life flourished before we came along - it may well have no inkling that we were ever here save for a few peculiar fossils and ossified relics. The humbling - and perversely comforting - reality is that the Earth will forget us remarkably quickly.

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I have a feeling there's more to this story from the BBC than meets the eye at the moment:

World Cup official shot himself

Berlin's top World Cup official shot himself in the head just hours after the tournament ended and is now fighting for his life, police say.

Juergen Kiessling, 65, was rushed to hospital from his house in Reinickendorf, a suburb of Berlin, after a neighbour heard the shot.

I did hear that Frank Lampard, Jamie Carragher and Steven Gerrard tried something similar but were left completely unharmed.

The curse of the Formula One commentator strikes again - the British Grand Prix is running at the moment and Jenson Button, the Tim Henman of F1, was steaming his way up through the field following a poor qualifying performance.

One of the commentators announced “Jenson's on fire here” as he cruised up to the back of David Coulthard and began to look for a way past. Wise to the ways of F1, Beloved Other Half and I looked at each other and said “he shouldn't have said that…”

No more than three laps later a great gout of flame blew out of the back of Button's Honda and that was the end of his race.

Classic.

I am in the grip of a glorious and magnificent obsession, and I'm not ashamed to admit it.

We live in a rented, furnished flat, so handy household good such as the microwave, the kettle and the toaster came with it. Not unreasonably, many of them are pretty much at the bottom end of the sliding scale of consumer goods that starts with a caravan park on the Welsh coast in the rain and ends with Donald Trump's gold-plated apartment.

Not so very long ago, the toaster decided to ambush us. The widget that controls the timer whatsit and the springing doohicky device quietly died - so quietly that there were no outward signs of its demise. We put in bread and pottered off, ears tuned to the sound of popping toast as a signal to return. But there was no sound, because there was no pop. Instead, eventually, there was the distinctive - and not quickly forgotten - smell of a toaster on fire.

Since then we have been toasterless. Regular readers will remember that the grill recently erupted in a shower of blue sparks, so we have been sadly lacking altogether in the article of toasted bread products.

Two days ago, though, I bought a new toaster. And what a toaster it is too. It's the Dodge Viper of the toaster world, a toaster that plays middle linebacker and sneers at punters, a toaster that knows the meaning of the word 'hardcore' and isn't afraid to use it. It boasts multiple slots, seductively shiny sides with dark, mysterious panels, and an array of glittering buttons and levers marked with incomprehensible icons that play the toast like the bread equivalent of the 1812 Overture at its climax. It bears more than a passing resemblance to a mortar and, like a mortar, when the weather's clear it's capable of bombarding Belgium.

I am hooked. I can't stop toasting things. Muffins. Bagels. Crumpets. Irish potato bread. Sainsbury's own-brand medium sliced white. They've all disappeared into its gaping maw. I'd toast my fingers if I thought they'd work lightly browned and slathered in cream cheese.

Now, I know what you're saying - “boys and their toys, show then an inch of chrome and a bit of brute power and they start frothing at the mouth”. Well, I'm sorry. You just have to be there when the automatic throcking device kicks in. Then you'd get it…

Anyway, must go - I think there's some left-over French bread I can slice up.

This post was sponsored by the Toast Marketing Board - for all your toast needs, all the time.

Funny how the end of the working week doesn't seem such a big deal when you work in more than one place for more than one client… spread your time around a bit and the five days before don't drag as much.

Nothing to read on the train home though - lent Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to someone I work with… a blonde :o)