TITLE: 50 Years After
NAME: Dave Merchant
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: kosh@nesys.com
WEBPAGE: www.nesys.com
TOPIC: Nature
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: 50years.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    povray 3.01

TOOLS USED: 
    Photoshop for JPEG conversion + Height Field development

RENDER TIME: 
    2 hours 41 mins

HARDWARE USED: 
    P120, 40 mb RAM, W95

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 



ABSTRACT

The results of initial Time Probe studies of the Human epoch are presented
herein, with full presentation of the limited imaging obtained to date.

The authors present material to support the conclusion that the decline
and extinction of the humans was due to misguided and hurried attempts to
subdue nature, without a complete understanding of the underlying
interactions involved.


INTRODUCTION

For centuries, scientists have speculated about our predecessors, the
creatures known by us as the "hairless apes", and by them as "people"
"humans" and "man", although the last term is open to interpretation,
as it seems to specifically denote an adult male, rather than the species
as a whole.

It is known that humans went extinct about 5 million years ago, at the
end of a period of mass extinctions which removed 3/4 of the species
then present. It seems clear that the extinctions were caused by the
actions of the humans, as the animal and plant populations stabilized
almost immediately after the extinction of the humans.

The fossil record of these creatures is slim, as the majority of human
remains found have been buried underground, in hermetically sealed boxes,
aligned in regular rows in large fields, with few artifacts except carved
stone markers located at the original grade level. It appears that most
of these individuals were dead prior to beng sealed in the boxes, although
evidence of an attempt to escape is occasionally seen.

While it is clear that these creatures were in some way related to us,
no suitable DNA material has yet been found for definitive identification.

The development of long range Time Probes has been heralded as a means
to discover more about these humans, but to date the results have been
disappointing.

A series of Time Probes were dispatched with a time spread of 2000 years,
covering the computed era of the humans' extinction, but it appears that
the rise and fall of this strange species took place in a shorter time
than this. The returned data from the earlier probes show a dreary
succession of mud huts, then probes 6 and 7 show evidence of some large
construction in stone, using hand labor.

The very next probe, number 8, appears to have arrived shortly after the
humans departed, as it shows the artifacts of a very complex civilization
in the process of returning to nature. Judged by the size of the growing
vegetation, it appears that the probe missed the key events by only 50 to
100 years.

By the time of the next probe, 2000 years later, evidence of this entire
civilization is nearly eradicated.

Launching of follow-up probes to investigate further will need to await
the development of more precise time targeting logic.


ANALYSIS OF PROBE 8 DATA

Very limited data was obtained by Probe 8 before the probe was
accidentally lost in the water seen here. It appears that the water was
not intended, but is the result of the storm sewers becoming blocked.
The water contains many hazardous chemicals, but evidence of a declining
chemical concentration was detected prior to loss of signal.

The vegetation seen here consists of typical hardwoods, slightly mutated
by the environmental contamination or pollution. However, it can be seen
that it is flourishing, pushing up through the petroleum-based paving
material. Note that vegetation and frost have combined to break up the
paving material, hastening its ultimate disintegration.

The animals seen are remarkably similar to species seen today, including
white tailed deer, ring neck geese (which the humans called Canada Geese),
and a type of pigeon. All of these animals apparently flourished in close
association with humans prior to the extinction event.

The structures visible are quite remarkable, representing a significant
consumption of minerals and energy far beyond anything we have required.

It is theorized that the humans needed to develop such complexity due
to their nearly hairless bodies, which required artificial means to keep
warm. This required the wearing of "clothes" made of "cloth", and the
creation of artificial caves for shelter. Large amounts of fuel were
consumed to heat and light these pseudo-caves.

However, competing theories exist, that the humans were simply misled by
their prodigious intelligence to a belief that technology made anything
possible.

The majority of the artifacts seen in this image appear to be means of
ground transportation, although details remain unclear.

The degree of gloss remaining on the transportation devices and artificial
caves after perhaps 50 years is remarkable. The most probable explanation
for this is the prior existence of highly concentrated acid rain, caused
by large-scale hydrocarbon/sulfur fuel combustion during the late human era.
This led to the development of very effective protective surface finishes.
With the end of acid rain, occurring almost immediately after the humans
went extinct, the highly durable surfaces remained largely intact for many
years.

It appears that the humans had massive quantities of liquid and solid
hydrocarbon fuels available, but apparently consumed or wasted most of them,
leading to our current fuel scarcity.

The large blue icon group seen at the left contains the individual icons
"ULTR A VID" or "DIV A RTLU", but the meaning of this icon group is not yet
known.

In the center can be seen one of the meeting places where the alpha males
of the region defined the rules and customs to control all individuals
in the region. To date, nearly 50 such meeting places have been identified
on the northern waste continent alone, and a much larger one is found at
the eastern end of the continent.

THE EMERGING PICTURE OF THE HAIRLESS APES

It has become clear that although the humans, like us, developed over a
time span of several million years, the majority of their technological
progress took place in the last 200 years or so before their extinction.

This contrasts to our much slower technological pace. It appears that
the humans were much more intelligent than us, but suffered from the
tendency to apply new developments without realizing their impact on
nature. Ultimately, nature took it all back.

The humans were ultimately felled by an antibiotic-resistant bacterium or
virus, enabled by indiscriminate utilization of antibiotics.


The common phrase about the dinosaurs:

        "Their brains were too small, and they died"

can apparently be reversed for the humans:

        "Their brains were too big, and they died".




DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


This is all CSG, in standard POV-Ray 3.01.

I examined and photographed a variety of abandoned asphalt and concrete
pavement, including a section of concrete highway that was abandoned
35 years ago, and has remained untouched since then. The yellow painted
centerline is still clearly visible.

These observations revealed that the pattern of plant colonization and
pavement destruction is not as anticipated.

The first colonists are grasses and weeds, primarily Chicory (blue flowers),
Dandelions (yellow) and Queen Anne's Lace. However, these grasses and plants
do not have the ability to break up pavement, and in fact, the turf formed
in the cracks tends to protect against frost heaving. Thus, once
established, these plants reach a steady state, not growing over about
2 feet tall. Following this, woody bushes and trees become established.
These have the power to break pavement, and would be the primary means of
destruction.


I decided to not use any image maps, and do everything with textures.
This avoids many antialiasing issues.

The grass is a height field, from a targa created with the bumps pattern
scaled very small. The targa was modified in Photoshop to reduce it to
just the bands of grass growing in the pavement cracks. To get the
spreading effect, the height field was used twice, skewed to the right
and left by a matrix operation.

The height fields were tiled several times, and rotated in some cases to
vary the pattern. The cracked pavement is several layers of Crackle.
To make the grass more irregular, I scaled it to be 10 feet tall,
then only used the top 1 foot of it.

I wrote a C program to make the trees, as this allowed use of a recursive
algorithm to create the branches, The algorithm is essentially the same
as would be used to traverse a tree data structure. This program writes a
very large (800 kb) POV .INC file in less than a second. Since this is a
"flat" file, consisting only of cones and discs, with no symbols created,
POV parse time is very fast. The tree trunks were done with SPATCH.

The scene contains 7983 objects.

The deer are a combination of blobs and SPATCH, although it probably would
have been easier to use blobs exclusively.

The buildings, vehicles, birds, and bees are all CSG.

I intended the buildings to be excessive and upscale, an architect's concept
gone terribly wrong. Hence the gold and chrome. But the bonding of the
wall panels to the frame is a weak point, so I showed several missing
window panels, including one that has fallen into the street. I cracked
this glass with a crackle pattern, but this is barely visible.

The "hall of mirrors" effect lightens the scene considerably.

I have seen enough shiny cars in junk yards to conclude that modern
finishes would remain glossy for many years in the absence of pollution.
Similarly, modern tires retain air for many years.

As I was developing this scene, I started to get depressed about the idea
that the world would get along just fine without us.

As a result of this, I decided to also do the "bees" picture to lighten
up a bit.

Note that the color of the grass is different in the two scenes. This shows
the difference between wild grasses and domestic grass of the "bluegrass"
family.


