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Sources for the video

Innsbruck without people

What if, all of a sudden, there were no people left, nowhere in the world? The video shows Innsbruck after 30, 100 and 300 years, painted after the maps of the Province of Tyrol and after photos of the Goldenes Dachl, the Inn and Wilten Abbey: the forest grows into the city from where it stands today, and the flood water stands where the official map shows water. These are its sources, statement by statement.

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Video · 1:08 · with sound, in German

What the video shows

At first the lights stay on, at the Goldenes Dachl too. In everyday operation the power grid runs without intervention, but in major disturbances people in the control rooms have always stepped in, most recently in January 2021, when the European grid split in two. Nobody has tested how long a grid runs entirely without people, which is why the video gives no number of hours. In the first winter without heating, the first water pipes burst under the roofs.

The air becomes clearer, and yet the earth first gets warmer: the haze from exhaust, which today masks part of the warming, rains out within a few weeks. According to model calculations, the temperature therefore first rises a little more and then slowly falls over decades. The video gives no number of degrees; the curve in the picture is schematic.

Soon the gutters are full of leaves, birches sprout in them, and the rain runs into the walls. The forest is close by: 98 in 100 buildings in Innsbruck stand less than a kilometre from the forest edge, computed for every address point with the province’s forest map. In the pictures, what lies closest to the forest therefore grows over first.

At some point the Inn overflows its banks. The hazard zone plan assumes a flood that comes on average once in 300 years and shows 0.8 to 1 metre of water in front of the Goldenes Dachl, up to 1.5 metres towards the Inn. The map is calculated for a city whose banks and walls are maintained.

What remains standing are mainly thick walls. At Wilten Abbey stood the Roman fort of Veldidena in the 4th century, with walls about 2.5 metres thick. It was not the weather that removed it but people: most of it was destroyed by the construction of the railway, and the last stones probably went into building the monastery. Foundations still lie in the ground today.

The pictures are built from data. From the elevation model of the Province of Tyrol, Innsbruck is computed as seen from the Hafelekar and the Bergisel, with forest, buildings, roads, tracks and rivers where the maps show them; an AI then painted the states after this template. The close-up views are painted after photos by Leonhard Lenz (CC0) and Luftschiffhafen (CC BY-SA 4.0); the view from the Bergisel today is Google’s 3D, unaltered. At the end the video asks which city we should do next.

Sources and image credits

Data

For the film we cropped, converted and redrew the data.

Google 3D

Innsbruck today, the view from the Bergisel over Wilten Abbey to the city and the Nordkette: after the first sentence and at the end beneath the question: Google’s photorealistic 3D. In the film the credit stays in the picture for as long as Google’s image is visible: Heute in 3D: Google Maps · Kartendaten: Airbus, Landsat / Copernicus

Pictures

  1. Leonhard Lenz, Goldenes Dachl Innsbruck 2026-05-07 02 (the Goldenes Dachl at night), 7 May 2026. Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC0 1.0. Change: cropped to portrait format, slow push-in; the three passers-by removed with AI; then the same view painted with AI without any light and in the first winter.
  2. Leonhard Lenz, Goldenes Dachl Innsbruck 2026-05-10 03 (the Herzog-Friedrich-Straße with the Goldenes Dachl), 10 May 2026. Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC0 1.0. Change: cropped to portrait format, a wipe from the photo to a view painted with AI after 30 years; later the same view in the 300-year flood, painted with the water depth of the official map along the street.
  3. Leonhard Lenz, Inn seen from Innbrücke Innsbruck 2026-05-07 03 (the Inn from the Innbrücke, looking upstream), 7 May 2026. Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC0 1.0. Change: cropped to portrait format as the template for two views painted with AI: after 30 years and in the 300-year flood following the depths of the official map at this spot; the photo itself does not appear in the film.
  4. Luftschiffhafen, Stift Wilten von SO (Wilten Abbey from the south-east), 29 July 2022. Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. Change: cropped to portrait format, a wipe from the photo to a view painted after it with AI after 300 years, slow push-in; like the photo, the painted view is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

AI, voice and music

Painted with AI (GPT Image 2.5) are the aerial views from the Hafelekar (today, at night with and without lights, after 30 years, in the flood) and from the Bergisel (after 30, 100 and 300 years), the Goldenes Dachl without lights, in the first winter, after 30 years and in the flood, the Inn after 30 years and in the flood, Wilten Abbey after 300 years, an attic with a burst pipe and a gutter with birches; in the night photo, the passers-by were removed with AI. The aerial views follow a template made from the data of the Province of Tyrol: forest, buildings, roads, tracks and rivers lie where the maps show them, and each picture is then aligned to the computed view. Not animated with AI but computed are the city growing over from the forest edge, the lights going out, the haze, the flood area filling up, the camera moves with the real distance of every pixel and the rewind. Voice, music and sound effects are AI-generated: the voice with Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS (“Charon”), the music with Lyria 3 Pro, the sound effects (wind, rewind, city at night, power failure, ice, rain, flood, wind in the ruin) with ElevenLabs.

Each statement in the film and its sources

  1. This is Innsbruck, three hundred years without people. On screen: “Innsbruck, Jahr 300 · ohne Menschen, nirgends auf der Welt” (Innsbruck, year 300 · without people, nowhere in the world).

    A thought experiment painted from data, not a forecast: the image shows one possible state, and nobody can say to within decades which house falls when. The film takes no time spans from television programmes; they are not measured. “Nowhere in the world” is on screen because otherwise nobody would understand why the grid fails and the Earth gets warmer: the control rooms in Vienna and all power stations are empty too. Only stumps of the towers of the Wilten Basilica stand in the image, because Innsbruck lies in Austria’s highest earthquake zone. The ruins that stand today were also secured by people, Thaur castle since the late 20th century.

  2. And this is what it looks like today. What happens in between? On screen: “Heute · Innsbruck vom Bergisel” (today · Innsbruck from the Bergisel), Google’s 3D.

    “Today” is Google’s photorealistic 3D. Each state after that is painted by an image model (GPT Image 2.5) into our own image, and only into the areas the map from the data allows; roads, railway and river have their own areas so that a road never turns into a river. A gate puts the flood water only into the official area; outside it, the image is the dry one, exact to the pixel. Painted is still painted: for every painted image the source line in the film says “KI-Bild” (AI image).

  3. At first the lights stay on. In major disturbances, so far it was people in the control rooms who stepped in. Without people, the lights go out at some point. In the first winter after that, the first pipes burst under the roofs. On screen: “Tag 1 · die erste Nacht” (day 1 · the first night), “Das Stromnetz · ohne Menschen nie erprobt” (the power grid · never tested without people) and “Der erste Winter · kein Mensch heizt” (the first winter · nobody heats).

    In everyday operation the automatic controls keep the grid running without any intervention, and they absorb the first blow of a major disturbance within seconds; in 2006 and 2021 it was people who brought the grid back to 50 hertz. How long a grid runs entirely without people has never been tested or calculated; we found no study on it. That is why the film says “at some point” and gives no hours. Spain had its own circumstances in 2025; the case shows that switching can come too late even with people. For the pipes the film deliberately says “under the roofs” and “the first”: it is mainly pipes in attics, outer walls and stairwells that freeze, hardly any in the core of thick-walled old buildings. They burst even if no more water flows in, because the water is already standing in them. None of this has been measured for Innsbruck, which is why the film gives no number. In the picture the city’s lights go out island by island; this order is drawn, not measured. In the real night photo of the Goldenes Dachl, the passers-by were removed with AI.

  4. The air becomes clearer, and yet the Earth first gets warmer: the exhaust haze that cools it today rains out. On screen: “Die ersten Jahre · klarere Luft, zuerst wärmer” (the first years · clearer air, warmer at first), then a curve “Temperatur der Erde, wenn alle Abgase enden” (the Earth’s temperature when all exhaust ends): “zuerst wärmer” (warmer at first), “dann langsam kühler” (then slowly cooler), “schematisch, nach Modellrechnungen (Dvorak 2022, IPCC)” (schematic, after model calculations).

    The direction is stated by the IPCC and in the study’s abstract. The figures of Dvorak et al., about two tenths of a degree and almost two decades, we have only read in the preprint, not in the full text of the published version; that is why the film shows a curve without a temperature figure and labels it “schematisch, nach Modellrechnungen” (schematic, after model calculations). The haze that lies over the city at first and then lifts is computed from the distance of every pixel; it illustrates the word “clearer” and is not measured. The study sets CO₂ to zero and all other emissions to the level of 1765, which comes close to a world without people. “The Earth”, not Innsbruck: nobody has calculated a figure for the city, and two tenths of a degree would be lost in Innsbruck in the ups and downs of a single year. “Clearer”, not “clear”: Saharan dust, pollen and natural haze remain, and in the lockdown nitrogen dioxide was a good third below previous years, not gone. The −36 % also includes a decline of about a fifth that occurred in 2020 without the lockdown; the −59 % for emissions is calculated differently, and the two figures cannot be set against each other.

  5. Soon the gutters are full of leaves, birches sprout in them, and the rain runs into the walls. 98 out of 100 houses stand less than a kilometre from the forest edge. On screen: “Nach 30 Jahren · niemand räumt die Rinnen” (after 30 years · nobody clears the gutters) and “98 von 100 Häusern · keinen Kilometer vom Waldrand” (98 out of 100 houses · less than a kilometre from the forest edge).

    The gutters are experience from building practice: they clog after one to three autumns with leaves, moss and windblown dust, faster under street trees, and from then on the water runs over the facade into the wall. We found no measurement of this, which is why the film gives no number of years. Birches as the first woody plants are known from brownfields like Rheinelbe, there on gravel, not on a roof. “Houses” stands for address points of buildings; because these include outbuildings, we cross-checked with main buildings alone, also 98 out of 100. What is measured is the distance to the forest map, not how fast things grow over: riverside thickets, parks and street trees do not count as forest there. Five address points lie outside the grid on the Nordkette ridge.

  6. At some point the Inn overflows its banks. In the three-hundred-year flood, the province’s map shows almost one metre of water in front of the Golden Roof. On screen: “Irgendwann · Hochwasser HQ300: im Schnitt alle 300 Jahre” (at some point · flood HQ300: on average every 300 years) and “Am Goldenen Dachl · 0,8 bis 1 m Wasser” (at the Goldenes Dachl · 0.8 to 1 m of water).

    “The map shows”, not “there is”: the water depth is a model calculation in the hazard zone plan, not a measurement. HQ300 does not mean that it comes exactly every 300 years, but on average once in 300 years; within 100 years it comes with about 28 % probability if the climate stays as it was (our own calculation: 1 − (1 − 1/300)¹⁰⁰). The map assumes today’s riverbed and maintained banks; after centuries without maintenance no present-day map describes exactly where the water goes. That is why, seen from the Hafelekar, the water stands exactly within the official area of the Inn; at the Innbrücke and at the Goldenes Dachl the image model painted after the map’s depths at that spot. For 2005, three official discharge figures are in circulation (1,511, 1,525 and 1,538 m³/s), so about 1,500.

  7. What remains standing are mainly thick walls. Here by Wilten Abbey there was already a Roman fortress. It was not the weather that took it down, but people. On screen: “Nach 300 Jahren · Stift Wilten” (after 300 years · Wilten Abbey) and at the location a sign “Römerkastell Veldidena · 4. Jahrhundert” (Roman fort Veldidena · 4th century).

    “By the abbey”, not by the basilica: the fort lay north of the abbey, and a small piece of wall remains south of Frauenanger 2; the basilica lies about 275 m away, which is why the camera moves towards the abbey. The coordinate in the Wikipedia infobox lies about 1.2 km too far west; the location in the film comes from the address points. “Taken down” means above ground: foundations still lie in the soil. The railway construction is certain; that the last stones went into the monastery is a conjecture (“dürften”, probably). “Mainly thick walls”, because only they stand for so long: the fort had 2.5 m, Thaur castle has 1.5 m. We could only read the 1959 report in Archaeology as an excerpt; the page was not accessible to us.

Literature and sources

How wohnwahn measures