Would you Adam and Eve it?

'The professor is probably thinking the same thing as I am. Would the world not be a better place without man? Or at least better wooded?'

"When the balloon goes up and mankind either blows itself to bits, or is eradicated by disease, what then? What happens next?"

The speaker is Professor Ivor Gorleston. Professor Gorleston is possibly the man in the world who most cares about what will happen when humanity vanishes. That's because Professor Gorleston is in charge of the Post-Holocaust Research Centre, at Golden Fork in Wyoming. And his job is to forecast the future of the world in a non- human situation.

"People have often speculated idly which species would take over if humans no longer ruled the planet," says Professor Gorleston. "If we were not here, who would be boss? The favourite contenders have been rats, and cockroaches, and ants, and even bacteria, but nobody has ever known for sure. Spiders? Maybe. It has all been idle speculation. And yet it would be so simple to find out! All you would have to do is create a non-human environment and see which species took over. And that is what we are doing."

In a boarded-off, fenced-off, screened-off, totally quarantined stretch of Wyoming, Professor Gorleston and his team have created a world without men and women, a Garden of Eden with no Adam or Eve, nor even an apple tree, a patch of nature in which all the favoured species have been installed and now have a chance to rule the roost. Now the Professor's staff merely have to sit back and wait and see who comes out on top in the struggle for dominance. It's a bit like Celebrity Species Big Brother. It also seems to me to have overtones of Jurassic Park...

"Jurassic Park?" snaps Professor Gorleston. "It is nothing like that at all! Jurassic Park was bad science and not very good showbiz. Post-Hol is good science, and no showbiz at all."

Post-Hol, short for Post-Holocaust, has no human presence at all. It cannot afford to have any. After all, if you simulate the absence of humans, you must really keep all humans absent. The most you can do is have some tiny remote cameras around, so that you can watch the struggle for survival in man's absence.

"Of course, it may well be that no one species emerges dominant like man. It may be that only man is programmed to WANT to be top. And yet nature, we know, is a struggle, so there must be a power struggle of some kind. Somewhere along the line, the ant and the cockroach must do battle... The spider and the bee must meet in mortal combat?"

But why? In the jungle, before man came, was there a titanic struggle to be number one? Was there not, rather a state of balance?

"In most places that man has discovered," muses Professor Gorleston, "man existed already. Man was there in Australia. There in America. I think the only big place that we discovered that was uninhabited was Madeira. Africa never knew about Madeira. When Europe discovered it, it was virgin, one of the very few virgin territories untainted by man."

And which species had come out on top, before man arrived?

"As far as we can make out, the dominant species was trees. The whole island was virgin forest."

And what did humanity do?

"Started a forest fire which it took three years to put out."

The professor falls silent. He is probably thinking the same thing as I am. Would the world not be a better place without man? Or at least better wooded?

But there is an even more pressing question I would like the professor to answer. What is the POINT? What is the point of discovering which species will take charge after we have gone? If we are not here, what does it matter what happens after we have gone?

"I think there are two answers to that. One is that we have an intellectual curiosity about the question. We have always been fascinated by prehistory, by what happened before man evolved. Can we not also be fascinated by what happens AFTER man vanishes? We scientists always want to know the unknowable, and the unimportant. After all, it does not matter to us what happens in the furthest stars but we still wish to know. And many of us are consumed with inquisitiveness about a man-free future."

And the other answer?

"The other answer is that we want to get there before the Russians do."

Pardon ?

"We have learnt that the Russians are doing a parallel experiment on the post-holocaust future. We are afraid that they may develop a post-holocaust rat before we have perfected the American post-holocaust cockroach."

More of this sensational development tomorrow.