What If You Were the LAST Woman on Earth?

Full animated episode, 8:55. Published 2026-11-08.

What if all women disappeared from Earth and you were the last woman left? Humanity would have about 100 years, and one woman alone could never save it without lab-grown eggs and artificial wombs.

Every woman on Earth vanishes at 9:41 PM, except you. Humanity has 100 years. Here's how one woman (and a whole planet) could save it.

0:00 What if all women disappeared from Earth?

0:35 Every family has an empty chair

1:07 Which jobs are mostly done by women?

1:54 Why humanity has 100 years left

2:26 Four billion letters to the last woman

3:37 "Nothing happens without my yes"

4:20 Life in the bubble

4:51 How many eggs does a woman have?

5:41 Lab-grown eggs and the artificial womb

6:49 Women on Earth: 2

7:54 Fifty years later

Last woman or last man: which would YOU rather be? 👇 The last-man story drops Wednesday, Nov 11.

Transcript

At nine forty-one tonight, every woman on Earth disappears. Every single one... except you. And from that second, humanity has about a hundred years left. Let's see if you can save it. Nine forty, Tuesday night. Your sister texts: 'Did you get home okay?' You'll answer in the morning. Nine forty-one. In one second, about four billion people are gone.

Mothers, daughters, grandmothers, sisters. Cars roll to a stop with nobody inside. Every family on Earth has an empty chair. In the morning, you text your sister back. It doesn't deliver. Then your phone buzzes. Dad: 'Stay there. I'm coming.' He drives across a silent city to get you. Then the world finds out who was quietly holding it up.

About nine in ten nurses were women. Hospital wards go silent. About nine in ten preschool teachers. The schools close by lunchtime. Seven in ten of all health and care workers. Grandfathers who have never cooked are feeding toddlers at three in the morning, from video tutorials. Millions of dads learn to braid hair. Badly.

And under the jokes, the world is grieving: billions of men, all missing someone at once. So they do the hardest thing there is. They talk about it. But talking can't fix the biggest problem. A baby needs an egg and a womb, and men have neither. Even the frozen eggs in fertility clinics vanished at nine forty-one.

The youngest boy alive tonight will grow old. And in about a hundred years... there'd be nobody left. Unless someone spots you. A neighbour sees you taking out the bins. Someone posts the photo. By breakfast, it's the most-viewed picture ever taken of a person holding a bin bag, and you're the most famous person in history.

Then the letters start. Every man and boy on Earth writes you one. Four billion letters. Stacked up, at half a millimetre each, that's about two thousand kilometres of mail, five times higher than the Space Station. At twenty grams a letter, it weighs about eighty thousand tonnes. That's almost as much as an aircraft carrier.

The post office gives up and delivers it all to your front lawn. Then the governments start arguing over who gets to keep the last woman. The United Nations holds an emergency vote... and makes you the first person ever added to the World Heritage list. Normally, it's for things like the Pyramids. You're not sure that's a compliment.

A motorcade arrives. The head of the emergency council gets straight to the point. 'The world needs you.' You have one answer. 'Then nothing happens to me without my yes.' By lunchtime, it's law, in two hundred languages. You pick the doctors. Your security team argues over who gets to carry your shopping. And your dad comes with you.

He hasn't let go of your hand since nine forty-one. If you're enjoying this, subscribing is how the next what-if finds you. Life as the most protected person on Earth is strange. Your street is closed to traffic. Three doctors check your groceries. A routine dentist visit makes the evening news. Eighty firefighters sing you happy birthday every year, whether you want it or not.

And every night, before you sleep, you text your sister's number. Just in case. Now, the math. You were born with about a million eggs. By your teens, around three hundred thousand were left. And over your whole life, your body would only release a few hundred. Babies are slower still. Nine months each, and every pregnancy is a risk, so doctors won't rush you.

The most children one mother is recorded to have had is sixty-nine, in eighteenth-century Russia: mostly twins, triplets and quadruplets. Historians still argue about it. Even if you beat that record, sixty-nine kids can't refill a planet of eight billion. Two things are missing. More eggs. And more wombs. So every scientist on Earth gets the same job.

Rockets wait on the launch pad. New phones stop coming out. Nobody even complains. Eggs first. In 2023, a lab in Osaka made eggs from the skin cells of male mice, and seven baby mice were born with two fathers. In 2025, a team in Oregon turned human skin cells into eggs. None of the embryos was healthy.

But it was a start. Then wombs. In 2017, doctors in Philadelphia kept premature lambs growing for four weeks inside a fluid-filled bag. None of this works for humans yet. But a whole planet with only one job moves fast. And the first step is the oldest trick in the lab: IVF, the method behind millions of babies since 1978.

Year one. A baby girl is born. Your daughter. The counter that said 'women on Earth: one' for a whole year finally ticks over to two. You name her after your sister. Year ten. The first girl from an egg grown in a lab, made from your own skin cells. Then a second. Then a thousand.

Year twenty-five. Classrooms are full again. Year fifty: lab-grown eggs, artificial wombs, and a million girls who all, somehow, have your laugh. And here's something wild. Follow your mother's mother's mother far enough back, and everyone alive meets one woman, in Africa, over a hundred and fifty thousand years ago. Scientists call her Mitochondrial Eve.

Now, every child born after nine forty-one carries a little bit of you in every cell. Fifty years later, the world is loud again. Traffic. Arguments. Queues for the bathroom. Your granddaughter asks why you smile at such an old phone. Some nights you still open that last text from your sister. 'Did you get home okay?' And finally, you write back.

'Yes. We all did.' So, could one woman save humanity? Alone, never. With a whole planet behind her... yes. Now flip it. What if you were the last man on Earth? That one's out on Thursday. So which would you rather be? Tell me in the comments.

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