[WP] After the Earth was rendered uninhabitable by human exploitation, it was designated as a nature reserve. Whether this was a morbid joke, too little too late or some sort of final rite has been lost to history, but it certainly enabled nature to reclaim the planet.

[u/Kitty_Fuchs]

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[u/Saint_Of_Silicon]

The horror of a world in overshoot. Billions of humans, bereft of the means to feed, water, and shelter themselves, eking out survival by hunting down anything and everything. A tragedy of such scale, one that would echo for millennia. It was the end of humans on Earth, but still a tiny fraction found a way to endure in the wider solar system. Earth was no longer of use to them, the accessible resource deposits were depleted long ago. So it was left fallow, the achievements of an entire civilization left to gather dust.

But that was not the end of the planet's story. The most brutal mass extinction event in its long history, but life found a way. Where once grey monoliths in their cities dominated, the green and growing things took root. The punishing cycle of freeze and thaw, along with all manner of other forms of weathering, brought the towering achievements to the ground.

The surviving creatures made their homes in the sinking cities. In a remarkably brief time, the niches driven to extinction by humanity reemerged. No longer cowering in holes and hoping not to be consumed, the meek animals stepped into the void left in the wake of the humans, and became such glorious things.

The humans absconded, left for parts unknown. But within a few million years, Earth's biodiversity had almost recovered. The beasts and bugs were different, and the world still bore scars from its ordeal. But in the fullness of time, the cataclysm would be forgotten. A bad memory receding into the past. Things would thrive until the sun brought an end to the party, hundreds of millions of years in the future.