"1. Environmental Guilt."

this is right on. Someone posed the question to me once "what would the last man on earth do?"

my answer was "turn out the lights."

there would be something almost comforting about an earth left behind to heal on its own. sure there would still be extinctions and natural disasters, but no other species would fall on our account.

I think it's also to do with misanthropy--we are inundated by so many stupid people doing so many stupid things that we (or I?) want to see a world without them.

oh, and everyone in New Orleans was afraid of Katrina--it was only a question of when, not if, the levees would fail.

"3. Fear of Extinction" is the one that came to my mind before the Jump.

There is something reassuring about the idea that even if we fuck it all up for every single one of us, time will go on.

Although I think it is easily linked into 1. Environmental Guilt.

I think it's because 90% of the people I meet irritate the living hell out of me and other people feel the same and want movies without all those annoying people.

To make less of a joke out of it, look at reality TV, there you have the exact opposite. Stacked to the rafters with plotting, annoying, creepy, arrogant, schemeing "humans", so maybe these films are a response to that sort of behavior.

I like all those reasons, and would add one more.

I think there's also a sense of, and bear with the cutesiness of this, armageddon blueballs.

Y2k didn't come of anything. 9/11 was the only terror attack in the US, unless you count the anthrax weirdness. Even the wars are distant things to many people. In some ways people have a yearning to be part of some huge and terrible event. Or at very least responding to said event. The boomers had Vietnam, their parents had WWII, their parents WWI. This generation can go to war, but it's not about getting Osama, it's about multi-national interconnections and oil policies.

So the notion of being part of something big and terrible, or just playing in the rubble, is darkly appealing.

Maybe I'm naive but I think humans are going to be alright. We've had civilation for what 10,000 to 12,000 years? We're relatively young when it comes to our cultural evolution. There's reason for hope.

theres also reason to think we are woefully under prepared if we want the species to outlive the current ecosystem.

we've had several cases where a large asteroid passed between us and the moon and we only had a few weeks notice. its a big sky and its kind of scary to think the entire human story could end pretty suddenly.

"Interstellar" can't get here soon enough!

@Garrison Dean: That's it. Less whining noise and clutter (I'm speaking as an American). And the schadenfreude of seeing just how fragile all our precious constructs are.

Imagining the either "Carnivale" or "The Stand" might clean up the mess a bit.

@lebaneseblond: I like your attitude. The fact that I don't share it makes me like it even more!

I think its because most people are too stupid to look beyond their own lives. So all this earth without us is them not being here, but being able to look ahead to what might have been. In this case its more that since most people are also inherently selfish if they aren't here, no one should be.

Three words; Too Much Stress

Well, it also has to do with death. People are afraid of death, which is often signified with the loss of worldliness. These "post-human" films and shows could be cathartic in that it provides a peaceful outlook on the end of the world.

@capntim: There hasn't been an asteroid close enough to worry about. They're out there, certainly. But these "surprise" asteroids are so far out there, they're hardly a credible threat, or an indicator of one.

This isn't to discredit the danger of large near-earth objects. Certainly, we need to be more aggressive of our mapping to better evaluate the particulars of the threat. But the odds of a strike happening during the life of anyone currently walking the Earth is vanishingly small. Not absent, just small.

@io9: back to the topic at hand, I think there's definitely a confluence of factors. The root cause, I think, is the strange assertion that humans are intelligent life (a tautological definition- we use ourselves as the metric of intelligence!). This drives all the others- the idea that we should feel guilt because we damage the environment (another odd concept- we alter the environment; to call it damage shows a distinct bias towards humans). The idea that we have the power to direct our actions. The idea that our extinction is to be feared (mind you, I'm pretty attached to my personal frame of reference, but I at least assert that as a bias).

Your final guess, of course, ties into the idea that humans can make mistakes. Mistake implies volitional action, something I feel humans are incapable of. There is, at least, no evidence to support the hypothesis.

All of these factors play into the human extinction meme, But I think a bit of the good old "Fall of the new Rome" is what is really letting this idea resonate. No wonder this is freaking many Americans out right now.

However, if 1.6 million years of archaeological evidence is worth a damn, I would not bet against humans. When push comes to shove, we are the nastiest, meanest, and most ruthless species to date. To paraphrase King Missile, "Until God or the Space Aliens come to kick our ass."

"There hasn't been an asteroid close enough to worry about. They're out there, certainly. But these "surprise" asteroids are so far out there, they're hardly a credible threat, or an indicator of one."

Just some random examples:

"the 300 meter (1,000-foot) diameter Apollo asteroid 4581 Asclepius (1989 FC) missed the Earth by 700,000 kilometers (400,000 miles) passing through the exact position where the Earth was only 6 hours before. If the asteroid had impacted it would have created the largest explosion in recorded history, thousands of times more powerful than the Tsar Bomba. It attracted widespread attention as early calculations had its passage being as close as 40,000 miles from the Earth, with large uncertainties that allowed for the possibility of it striking the Earth"

"On June 6, 2002 an object with an estimated diameter of 10 meters collided with Earth. The collision occurred over the Mediterranean Sea, between Greece and Libya, at approximately 34°N 21°E and the object exploded in mid-air. The energy released was estimated (from infrasound measurements) to be equivalent to 26 kilotons of TNT, comparable to a small nuclear weapon.
Had it burst on a populated area, the consequences would have been catastrophic."

another that passed close to us, that i can't find the article for apparently approached from a "blind spot" and we didn't know we had been missed till after it happened. the rock hadn't apparently even been on the books.

math is still on our side, as you said, i'm just saying that this kind of thing, no matter the odds, can happen at any time. and saying the odds are small is a pretty poor way to prepare for something.

I think it's all wishful thinking. Humans are the cockroaches of mammals. We'll be around for a long time.

@lebaneseblond: I think when you factor in technology throughout the ages, there is a big difference. We have all kinds of nuclear weapons on hand now to destroy the world how many times over? I read not too long ago that the Navy has been testing Railguns and plan to get a fully capable battleship in service by 2018. Other nations will respond by trying to outdo the Navy with another kind of new weapon and it'll be an endless cycle. We'll keep creating weapons that can bring about our own destruction and it'll be too late when that time comes.
Technology combined with War will be mankind's ultimate demise if natural occurrences don't get to us first.

wall-e isnt out yet right? i really hope he builds himself from friends...am i the only one who find the picture of him above really saddening?

@Slothrop: funny, but i feel like it's just the opposite thats driving this trend. That whole "Bowling Alone" sense of already being disconnected from social contacts is just being played out in a larger scale.

Hmmm...

How about "Life Without the Moon?"...

[www.damninteresting.com]

This is an interesting change of pace to all these other No People stories...

Humans are too darned tough and resourceful. Anything that actually succeeds in taking us out is likely to take out the vast majority, if not the entirity, of other life on the planet. So there wouldn't be a whole lot left to 'heal' anyway.

Not that the universe has any meaning without sapient life in it, so the state of an Earth without Humans is absolutely irrelevant. Better anything than no sapient life. Better the Affront, better the Third Reich, better IngSoc.

Nevertheless, misplaced guilt and notions that we are anything other than masters of the environment are probably at the core of this.

I think it's just plain ol' curiosity. It's seeing (or rather wanting to see) how our creations endure without our input, how we make our mark on history even when not present.
It's seeing WALL-E working steadfast in his job of cleaning up, 700 years after we've all left him alone, thus a tesament to our engineering skills. It's extrapolating his "warranty period" to hilarious limits.

I think Future Ennui is a big part of it. We've got all this stuff, some it's great fun, but most of it you don't need and it makes you think. Or it makes me think, what is the point of all this economic growth? We distract ourselves from searching for meaning by taking to heart the romantic notion of exploration. We've got the planet pretty well mapped now (except for the ocean floor of course), and I can't help but feel like, so what? In the end we have to turn to each other for meaning, not stuff. Which is really tough considering how our society functions on making stuff amazingly desirable but real one to one connections probably don't get the credit they deserve.

@Huxleyhobbes: "Not that the universe has any meaning without sapient life in it"
How do you figure that? As t3knomanser very thoughtfully said, we use ourselves as the measure of intelligence, which I will assert is because that is all we know. It is quite likely that there exist other carbon-forms in the universe that likely match or surpass our "intelligence"; better yet, forms of "life" that are beyond our comprehension. Just because we disappear doesn't mean the vastness of space isn't important to some thing.

@Huxleyhobbes:

That's a very comforting thought, but there are some serious problems with this. Sooner or later, our sun is gonna burn out. Sooner or later, we're gonna spin out of orbit, and that's if some rock doesn't come hurtling into outer space and turn this little blue ball into a giant pile of space dust. We already some things--say, any speed faster than the speed of light are impossible. We also know that there isn't anything even remotely habitable to us a considerable distance. We've barely even begun to scratch the surface of space travel--Mars is effectively insurmountable to us. Read and article about Robert Park talking about all the obstacles ahead of us just to go that far. And even when we get there, we have no real idea how to terraform, and even than, there's no guarantee that it will be sustainable without outside resources. Really, the list goes on and on. That's saying nothing of a random supernova somewhere relatively near us that literally will kill us faster than we knew what hit us.

I know it's frightening to contemplate, but it's a big bad universe out there, and there may be a time where we're just... gone.

It's being able to wonder what happens after it all that makes us... us, I guess.

Anyway, I pretty much agree with some of these thoughts. Personally, it was the pictures of Cherynobyl I've been seeing lately. There's something just so... engrossing about it. I mean seriously, I suggest someone take a look at them. There's something unsettling and touching about the pictures.

Humans are boring.

I'm gonna go with #4 on this one. Most people have so many regrets, whether big or small, and the idea that there's a world in which they could start all over on the same playing ground as everyone else is tempting. Imagine knowing what you know now, and then realizing that there might have been some better choices you could have made - that's what people feel they would experience in this situation.

On the other hand, history does repeat itself...so I guess we'll be invading Neo-Iraq at some point...

*goes to pack his mess kit*

It's typical PC guilt-tripping for a lot of tree-hugging cry babies. "We just don't deserve to be here...look what we've done!" The future is for the strong; all the others can check out any time they please.

Eff the Earth.

We need to get off this rock or we're all doomed.

5. Because we are planning to get the hell out of here, one way or another.

What about Cars? Where are the people? Jebus Christ, where are all the goddamn people?

*hides in a corner

*ding* Wrong, but thanks for playing.
The answer to what's causing all these Earth without us movies is a great big snowball of un-creativity. Studio exec one: "Hey, I saw Chuck Heston's Omega Man on cable last night. Let's remake it with say, Will Smith, ok?" Exec at another studio "Hey, those guys down the block are making an end of the world pic with Will Smith. Quick, we need to make our own world with out people pic!" Exec at Discovery Channel "Hey, there seems to be alot of world with out us blockbusters coming out this year, quick we need our own TV special!" And so on and so on and so on...

To para-phrase Carl Sagan, there are billions and billions of great scifi stories out there. Why do they keep giving us the same recycled crap?

It's time we stopped crapping where we eat and moved off of this mudball.

@Yatta!: Oh, it doesn't matter what form that sapient life takes, you're quite right. It's just that we're the only ones we know for sure exist. Whether the universe is teeming with intelligence or whether it had just one single dull-witted self-aware creature in its entire span, wouldn't matter, as long as SOMEONE is there to appreciate it. In my eyes, the universe is divided into three parts: Sapient beings, sentient beings, and inanimate stuff. Even if something else better 'better' comes along, I know what rights I believe each of these three should have. Of course, only sapient and higher can actually conceive of and protect rights.

@Evdor: There are no stellar masses close enough to render our species extinct of they go supernova. As for the rest, I agree that risks exist, but Human technological development is measured in decades and, increasingly, years - whereas these disasters are either billions of years away or events that occur once every several million years. Seeing as I believe we're on the cusp of the technological singularity, in my eyes we only really need to survive a couple more decades before we're able to develop far better technologies for far greater purposes.

Here's an interesting article from the NYTimes from 2006. :
[www.nytimes.com]
The article is about Zombies, but as a lngtime Apocalypse fan, Zombies these days are a sub-genre of the world without us craze.

I really believe that there is an underlying distrust and/or loss of belief in government to protect us. On the one hand they're doing everything to make us afraid, and on the other hand, not proving that they are doing much to protect us. B the time this gets into our lizard brains and comes back out again, this "our society is falling apart feeling is taken to the Nth level to apocalypse town.

@capntim:

We're just behaving like every successful species does. We aren't even the critter that's caused the greatest environmental change around here. Humanity is, after all, part of nature.

Don't worry, we'll be gone someday - everything dies.
-Kle.

@GoodEmployee:

There's a fair bit of historical evidence that every generation has thought is was living in the End Times. Seems to be a basic feature of human pscychology.
-Kle.

Honestly? I don't care what happens afterward since the most interesting and precious cargo the Earth has, Mankind, would be gone.
And of those categories above, the people who fall into category #1 scare me the most.... There is way too much self-loathing in that belief structure.

I think that my favorite " after the humans are gone"
episonde of the Twilight Zone was the one starring Burgess Merideth. He starred as the Bank Teller who just wanted to READ, and no one would leave him alone. BOOM, Atomic War and He survives, now he has all the time in the world to read..only thing is he breaks his glasses..irony works in a Post Apocalyptic world also..

@Jeff-Minor: Gee, let me guess who YOU are gonna vote for for president??