Will Smith was not the star of I Am Legend, the blockbuster about a virus wiping out New York. It was the special effects: that gorgeous CGI Fifth Avenue full of trees, the lush Central Park overrun by lions. Alan Weisman has written a scientific version of that morbid fantasy. Houses won't take more than a century to crumble, he tells us. Nuclear waste will hang about a bit longer, but humans' most enduring legacy may turn out to be saucepans. Weisman fast-forwards 100,000 years, and imagines some new life form digging one up, "kicked abruptly to a higher evolutionary plane by the discovery of ready made tools", perhaps, or so foxed they fall to their knees in supplication.
