No wonder you can’t figure out the Fermi Paradox, Malenfant, if you don’t know your own wife’s dress size. - Stephen Baxter

Nothing mankind had done in its short and bloody history had made the slightest bit of difference to this patient geographical realignment.
Meanwhile the Earth, left to its own devices, had deployed a variety of healing mechanisms, physical, chemical, biological, and geological, to recover from the devastating interventions of its human inhabitants. Air pollutants had been broken up by sunlight and dispersed. Bog ore had absorbed much metallic waste. Vegetation had recolonized abandoned landscapes, roots breaking up concrete and asphalt, overgrowing ditches and canals. Erosion by wind and water had caused the final collapse of the last structures, washing it all into sand.
Meanwhile the relentless processes of variation and selection had worked to fill an empty world.

We must consider the possibility that the manifold of universes through which we wonder is in fact infinite.

If you were anywhere near the center of human affairs, even to the extent that she was, your predominant emotion had to be disappointment at the way in which an age when opportunities for humanity had never been greater, old flaws—territorialism, combativeness, reluctance to transcend cultural barriers, a sheer inability simply to see things from the other guy’s point of view—looked set to bring the sky crashing down on all their heads.