Question: If a nuclear war was started and humans were almost totally eradicated, what would the world look like 200 years from then?

Keith Franklin answered on 16 Nov 2015:

We don’t have any “experiments” to test what it would be like, but this happens quite a lot in science.

We can’t do an experiment to answer this question, because I don’t fancy starting a nuclear war! But we can look at similar situations and see what we can learn from them.

If you look at areas of the world where people have had to move away from whatever reason, then what seems to happen is that wildlife returns, and many different plants and animals do very well. If you look at the area around the Chernobyl Power Station where people moved away from in 1985, then there are lots of plants and animals which have taken over.

I think you would find that plants would slowly take over the towns and cities, and they would become like forests.