Human apocalypse
I’m perhaps being influenced by having written about Ghostbusters recently, but we can’t rule this one out.Īnd if supernatural forces and/or far future technology were involved, it’s also not impossible that the cars of Cars might actually be the missing humans. Or if we’re willing to look a little further left-field, some kind of supernatural apocalypse could even be the cause. And if so, that would add several thick lashings of deliciously dark irony to the Earth’s subsequent takeover by exhaust-belching automatons. Pollution could have done it, unbreathable air or an entirely shattered ozone layer combining with global warming to make the planet uninhabitable to humans. Not that a viral death is the only explanation for mankind’s fall. It’s more likely something akin to The Matrix, Destiny, or even Planet of the Apes. We’re not talking about a Terminator-style, near future apocalypse here. But the bones themselves can then take between another decade and several millennia to decompose, depending on the environmental conditions. It takes up to a year for an exposed, unburied corpse to be reduced to the state of a skeleton, which on its own isn’t entirely useful for dating Cars. It’s unlikely Cars’ vehicles would have been able to clear up and presumably bury/cremate an entire planet’s worth of bodies, so taking human decomposition rates into account, we can estimate a little more accurately. Because the sudden death of the entire human race would leave a heck of a lot of them lying about, stinking up the place something rotten. As fast as tech development tends to work, the evolution of true AI has been relatively slow. So while the route is plausible, we’re probably looking at quite a long stretch of time before we reach that destination. There’s a clear developmental line between Tesla Autopilot and a thinking, feeling, talking species of autonomous automobiles, albeit a line with a rather unpredictable length. Because having established that Cars plays out on our Earth, rather than some cartoon parallel universe where humans somehow never happened (but their vehicles did), technological advancement is the most immediately plausible explanation for this fuel-injected uber-race.īecause with self-driving cars now an actual reality, the path to fully-AI vehicles is already paved. That established, how far into the future is Cars set? Well the first clue to that matter comes with the cars themselves.
![human apocalypse human apocalypse](https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/post-apocalyptic-human-threatening-cane-knife-aggressive-evil-humanoid-monster-creature-post-apocalyptic-poisoned-122588580.jpg)
Something that could wipe out an entire species in pretty short order, while causing minimal immediate collateral damage. It doesn’t feel like this was a violent mass-extinction. Because, wear and tear aside, the world in Cars looks pretty undestroyed. For starters, why is everyone dead? In most movies, the answer would be ‘they nuked each other, the dumb monkeys’, but that’s not the case here.
![human apocalypse human apocalypse](https://img.itch.zone/aW1hZ2UvMTk2NzkvNzY0MDAucG5n/original/EHDySf.png)
That’s the easiest way to rationalise all of this away, but it does leave us with a few extra questions which, if answered keenly, can help us pinpoint more exactly what went down. The most basic version, of course, is that the humans are dead.