What The World Will Look Like When We've Gone

What would the world look like when we've gone? How much would we leave behind? What would an alien visitor learn about us upon landing on our planet a century or more after we had disappeared from it? The answer, astonishingly, is: almost nothing.

Within a hundred years most traces of our modern-day lives would be so destroyed by weather, corrosion, earth tremors, surviving animals, insects and bacteria that the monuments and hieroglyphics of ancient civilisations would be better preserved than our buildings and our billions of books and electronic records.