The idea of extinction, of some calamity erasing humans from the face of the Earth is an old trope in Science Fiction - and one that's edging more and more into possible reality every day. It's not an easy thing to wrap your head around, the idea that noisy, crowded... living spaces filled by ordinary people could suddenly be abandoned to nature.
And yet we have examples: ancient civilizations abandoned in place, mute monumental mysteries silent as to their makers fates, or just the random debris that seems detached from all sense.
Maybe the weather changed, and the rains no longer came. Maybe the economic rationale broke down when a critical resource was finally exhausted. Maybe the soil was worked to death. Or maybe it was just the relentless tide of 'progress' subsuming civilizations into the abyss the way of 8 track tapes and betamax. Maybe it was a desperate form of triage that failed to save the patient. But there's one recent example where the critical event can be nailed down, where there is very little mystery.
It was just 27 years ago yesterday that a major industrial complex in an advanced nation suffered a catastrophic failure. Yeah. Chernobyl. It's a story with so many human elements: arrogance, heroism, stupidity, random chance, sacrifice, some small triumphs, and megatons of tragedy.
And at the end of it all, the only answer has been to walk away, seal things off, and hope that it won't become a continuing disaster somewhere farther along the river of time and history. The best efforts of humankind are no match for the consequences of human error combined with the implacable forces of radioactive decay, at least no match for any price we are currently willing to pay.
If you want a look at what happens when humans get it wrong, when authority fails, when all the comfortable assumptions fail to withstand reality, a look at Pripyat in the Exclusion Zone (Now there's a sci-fi meme) is food for thought. Humble pie perhaps. In 2010 photographer Ric Wright started exploring and photographing the town of Pripyat, the community that grew up around the reactors. The BBC has a selection of some of the more haunting images here. Go take a look. It's only a handful of pictures and well worth your time. (If you want more, see Dark Pripyat.)
To look at the images of city blocks slowly being reclaimed by forests, heroic murals fading and peeling, abandoned school rooms, a ruined swimming pool that has become iconic in video games, machinery rusting in the weather, the absence of people... It's a sobering exercise in just how fragile this thing we call civilization really is. So much has to go right all of the time, so little margin for error - and so many fools who put their faith in false gods like market forces or exceptionalism of one kind of another. Whistling in the dark while tap-dancing through a mine field.
One of the more plausible answers to the Fermi Paradox is simply that any civilization capable of making its presence known across the stars is also more than capable of wiping itself out utterly. The dust of failed human civilizations swirls round our feet as we look to the stars and we wonder why we haven't heard from anyone? You listen to these guys, and you really have to wonder how we've made it as far as we have.
Failure IS an option - but not one we can afford.