What If Everyone Slept for 1000 Years And Then Woke Up

The world sleeps for a thousand years leaving behind millions of robots to monitor the condition of the planet. After just one day of sleep, power plants shut down, and the lights go out. Only Las Vegas remains lit, but it's empty.

A week later, raccoons started to appear in people's homes. There's no one to scare them off, so they climb into your trash can and help themselves to your fridge. Now they run your house. A domestic animal would have struggled to keep going without people for even one week, but fortunately, everyone took their pets down underground to snooze with them. Who wouldn't want to sleep for a thousand years with a cat curled up in their lap?

Without electricity, refrigerators, supermarkets, and restaurants will stop working, and food and groceries will soon start to spoil. The bad smell will attract lots of different scavengers and pests. A month has passed since the great snooze started, and nature is already beginning to break into large cities, and I don't just mean the plants. The lions who live in the city zoos have realized that their enclosures are no longer electrified. They now rule our towns, walking the streets in search of prey.

A year later, without any people around, the world's ports are in chaos. Ropes have begun to tear, and huge cargo ships are drifting free from their docks. Some of them collide with each other or smash into bridges and sink. The rats who live on the cruise ships will finish off the leftover supplies, and they'll start fighting with the seagulls for scraps.

Five years of sleep, and it's impossible to recognize our cities anymore. Vines and ivy have covered buildings, and other plants have turned concrete streets into gardens. You can't hear the endless honk of car horns or the music from all the ads on Times Square anymore. All that's left is the bird song and the wind, oh and Las Vegas has long stopped lighting up as well.

Normally, astronauts control and correct the orbit of the International Space Station, but now they're asleep back on Earth, along with everyone else. The ISS soon enters Earth's atmosphere and falls to the ground.

Ten years and everyone's already had an incredible amount of dreams, but the real world is changing rapidly. The dams and hydroelectric power plants near big cities are starting to collapse. Without humans there to maintain them, the water breaks through and floods people's homes. Water levels are rising, and new inhabitants, fish, are appearing in our cities. Within 30 years, we'll lose London and Amsterdam. They were built on marshes that were kept dry by drainage systems, but now nature has got the upper hand, and the streets slowly started to sink.

From time to time, our vacant world sees big fireworks displays. Now, nobody's celebrating anything. The problem is that forest fires get out of control, and sometimes they reach old warehouses full of these things. The results are quite impressive, but there's no audience to watch them.

If you look up in the night sky, you might see a meteor shower, but this time it's not caused by rocks from outer space but by artificial satellites that have begun to fall to earth. Without humans to guide them, there's a lot of them burning up in the atmosphere.

Surprisingly, 50 years after everyone in the world went to sleep, you can still hear human speech. That's thanks to the parrots that are old enough to remember us. Plenty of the ones we used to own are still alive, and they repeat some of the phrases we used.

One hundred years of sleep and humanity is still only 10 percent of the way there, but the world already looks as if we all disappeared centuries ago. Corrosion, along with earthquakes, is destroying some of our greatest achievements. The Golden Gate Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge have collapsed. Big Ben, Burj Al Arab, and other iconic buildings will be left ruined after a century. Even incredible works of art like the Mona Lisa will begin to disappear. Right about now, microscopic bacteria begin to eat the timeless painting, and then they're joined by insects that find a way into her protective glass box.

One hundred and fifty years and almost a third of all the world's skyscrapers will be destroyed. The roads that pass over subway tunnels will collapse. Washington will gradually disappear, and Los Angeles will become a real savannah, with lots of elephants walking around.

Three hundred years of sleep and all the storage devices that people used to store their memories have now become obsolete. No one knows what's on them anymore.