10 apocalypses that human kind survived
10- The black death:
The black death is probably the most famous plague ever to hit humanity but most people don't realize it’s taken a huge chunk out of the world’s popula
tion on more than one occasion , “yersinia pestis “ ;the bacterium responsible for the bubonic plague had its first break out appearance in 541CE known as the plague of Justinian ; the disease swept through the byzantine empire , killing 5,000 people a day for over a year ,eventually around 50 million people died , 25% of the world’s population at the time .
Then in 1346, the plague re-emerged as the Black Death. Giant swellings appeared on victim’s bodies ,as they fell into fevers and started throwing up blood .oh, and they died ,Anywhere from 75 million to 200 million people were killed by the black death , roughly 60% from Europe ‘s population disappeared ,and the world population didn’t reach pre-plague levels until 250 years later.
There was even a third plague outbreak in china 1855, taking another 10 million people out.
Yet humanity survived all of it , or at least we have so far , Technically the plague still exists.
9- The ice age:
Nowadays it only has to dip below temperature to send most us reaching a snuggie .
So it’s pretty incredible that humans managed to survive through the ice age. Yet that’s exactly what scientists now know happened , At least according to research from a journal so scientifically science –y they called it ‘science’. The paper dates recently discovered human fossils as 37,000 years old meaning mankind managed to though its way through the ice age. Which is pretty impressive considering that the ice Age was basically 30,000 years of Mother Nature trying to freeze us off the Earth. With temperatures dipping around the world, and plants dying life suddenly became much harder .Every sub-species of human except homo sapiens, that’s us and Neanderthals , a dumber version of us , died out.
Some scientists think that we only made it through the freezing era because a few hundred of us happened to find a small warm region 200 odd miles east of modern –day Cape Town. Those lucky few are thought to be the only humans who survived the ice age .Yeah ,ice literally whittled our entire species down to a few hundred people .Fortunately , our ancestors did just about manage to survive sitting through the Ice Age .Although, to this day there is no proof that any human has ever survived sitting all the way through Ice Age 2 to 5.
8- 2012 SOLAR FLARE
In 1859 the Earth was struck with a massive solar storm .While everyone was messing about doing Victorian –y things like trying on corsets and growing amazing mustaches , a bizarre white light appeared over Australia .Although two astronomers ,Richard Carrington and Richard Hodgson ,spotted the event , there was no effect to society as a whole .But that wouldn’t have been the case had it happened today. You see ,the solar flare that struck the Earth would have interfered with our modern power grid,crippiling it and forcing us to live without power.That means no artificial light , no internet for information , no communication .The scary thing is , this is almost happened in 2012 , in that year , there was a massive solar storm that just missed the Earth . And I mean JUST. If the sorm had started 6 minutes earlier, our planet would have been hit and , according to NASA ,”we’d still be picking up the pieces “.
- TUNGUSKA EVENT:
When not trying to kill us with solar flares, space has a simpler , if less elegant, solution: chucking giant rocks at us . We all know an meteorite wiped out the dinosaurs .But the event that turned the T-Rex from King Lizard to Smithsonian exhibit was far from a one off. In 1908 a meteorite rocketed into our atmosphere and started plummeting to the ground. It landed at Tunguska in the middle of Siberia. Which is just another way of saying the middle of nowhere. It’s lucky the meteorite landed where it did . The impact was 1,000 times more powerful than the A-Bomb and 80 million trees were uprooted by the blast .People hundreds of kilometers away claimed to have heard the explosion and there are reports of windows breaking in nearby towns.
Considering the damange one A-bomb did to Hiroshima or Nagasaki , something with 1,000 times the power would have wiped out even the largest city .Had the meteorite’s path differed slightly , the comet could have hit Moscow turning the city to dust and dramatically changing the course of history. - POPULATION COLLAPSE:
Amillion years ago, humanity came to the brink of extinction .And the scariest thing ? We don’t even know how it happened .
Scientists researching Neolithic man have found that our population suddenly , and mysteriously , bottlenecked .In other words , the number of humans plummeted , some think to as low as a 18,000.Thats low enough to make human beings an endangered species.
There are a number of theories as to how this happened , but the two most prominent are these .
Either A).we suffered from some mass extinction event like a giant earthquake or volcanic eruption .ORB) .we became over-populated in one region and killed off our food supply there.
Whatever happened ,it was enough to have a long-term impact on the population .Fossil evidence suggests that the number of humans stayed around 18,000 for tens of thousands of years .
With a headcount so low, humans were extremely vulnerable ,and another cataclysmic event could easily put an end to our species . Permanently .
5.SHAANXI EARTHQUAKE :
If you woke up to find 60% of China had died , it’s probably feel something like an apocalypse .Especially if all those people had just been wiped out by a single event .
Well ,that happened once .In 1556 Shaanxi province in northern China was hit with an earthquake so powerful it reached 7.9 on the Richter scale .For the non-earthquake experts among you that’s 10 times as powerful as the earthquake devastated Haiti in 2010.
The impact of this China-shaking event was massive, 830,000 people died .That may not sound like a lot compared with the Black Death or the Ice Age, but Actually it was a whopping 60% of the population of central China. That’s the equivalent of an earthquake killing 780 people nowadays.The cost of damage is impossible to measure, but it almost caused the Chinese government and economy to collapse. A similar collapse today would bring the world economy to its knees , sparking chaos and destruction around the world . - PERMIAN-TRIASSIC EXTINCTION:
By now, you’ve probably got the idea that mankind has survived some pretty intense things . We’ve been hit with diseases, natural disasters, and giant rocks from space. Yet we’ve clung on and out-lived it all. But humans almost didn’t get the chance to plucky little survives. In fact, we were almost wiped out long before we even existed. Way back in 250 million BCF, when we were still handsome little rats things, there was a mass extinction event that almost ended life on Earth. Though there’s disagreement as to what exactly happened, many experts agree that the formation of the massive continent Pangaea blocked the oceans around it from flowing properly. This led to the water becoming stagnated and deadly bad news if you’re a little rat thing. The stagnant water poisoned almost everything in it, killing 96% of ALL marine life .But it didn’t stop there. Not having a reliable source of clean water also proved fatal to 70% of land based species .
The Permian-Triassic extinction was so devastating to the Earth that NASA refers to it as “The Great Dying “.Fortunately, our ancestors managed to struggle through . - SPANISH FLU:
We’ve already seen what the bubonic plague could do when let loose on medieval Europe. But in those days the most advanced medical science got was saying “just throw some leeches at it and try not to upset any witches”. For a plague to be as deadly in the twentieth century, when we had a decent grounding in disease prevention, seems almost impossible . Yet that’s exactly what Spanish Flu achieved. In 1918 Spanish Flu spread rapidly around the world, infecting 250 million people.The disease turned having a strong immune system into a deadly weakness ,causing bodies to over-reat to the pathogen by sending countless T-cells to the infected area.
These cells were often sent in such high concentrations that they blocked the airways to the lungs , causing people to drown in their own fluids. Basically the disease tricked your body into doing the equivalent of trying to remove facial acne with a shotgun .
The disease disappeared by the end of the year , probably mutating into less deadly strain of flu .But in that short time it had killed 50 million people.
A re-emergence of the Spanish Flu remains Bill Gates’ biggest fear for the future. Infact he rates the odds of it happening within his lifetime as 50/50. - WORLD WAR TWO:
You don’t need us to tell you that World War two was a pretty big deal .Over 25 million soldiers perished in the conflict ,and 50 million cinvilians were murdered .Add in the victims of the holocaust and that brings the total to a staggering 25 million deaths.But the war was almost even more deadly than that. We now know that Hitler had his Nazi scientists working around the clock to develop a nuclear weapon .From 1939 onwards ,the German nuclear program grew ever closer to successfully splitting the atom .Some even claim they were on the verge of completing an atomic bomb, and that he already had plans drawn up to nuke London and New York . In a gratifying display of karma , the fact the Nazis were never quite able to rain nuclear hell down on us, was in large part due to their own bigotry .All the prominent Jewish physicists in the country had been killed off on fired, leaving the Nazis without many of the leading experts they could have relied on. - TOBA SOPERVOLCANO:
When you the term “Supervolcano” , you know things are about to get real .And the Toba Supervolcano is no exception .As devastating as all other events on this list have been , this was the closest mankind ever came to extinction .In 70,000 BCE, while humans were still learning which end of the spear to use, the Toba Supervolcano suddenly exploded .And we mean EXPLODED. Experts at the real, and epically named .Volcanic Explosivity Index describe the eruption as ‘mega-colossal’.
Yeah, this thing was so big it caused scientists to make up a word just to convey its awesomeness. The heat and power of the eruption vaporized 2,800 kilometers of surrounding rock , sending it all into atmosphere.For comparison ,the Mount St Helens eruption in 1980 only managed to destroy 1 kilometer of rock .As you might imagine ,2,800 kilometers of rock dust being blasted into the sky ,isn’t great for the environment .The dust blacked out most of sun’s light for SIX YEARS. With little plant life ,and increasingly spars prey .most people starved.The global population dropped to around 3,000,and the number of breeding adults left may have fallen as low as 80.Yeah ,if 80 people hadn’t screwed ,we wouldn’t be here today .That’s pretty scary ,but the is good news .The fact only the smartest and most resourceful humans managed to survive ,probably made us a better species in the long run.