10 Apocalypses That We Survived

ten apocalypse is that we survived number 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 population on more than one occasion you're sending a pestis the bacterium responsible for the bubonic plague had its first breakout appearance in 541 seee known as the plague of Justinian the disease swept through the Byzantine Empire killing five thousand people a day for over a year eventually around 50 million people died 25 percent of the world's population at the time then in 1346 the plague re-emerged as the Black Death giant swellings appeared on victims 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 but I guess no one was massively worried about keeping exact records when all their friends were busy vomiting up blood roughly 60% of 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 in 1855 taking another ten million people out yet humanity survived all of it or at least we have so far technically the plague still exists number nine the Ice Age nowadays it only has to dip below room temperature to send most of us reaching for 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 sciency they called it science the paper dates recently discovered human fossils at 37,000 years old meaning mankind managed to tough its way through the Ice Age which is pretty impressive considering that the ice age was basically thirty thousand 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 subspecies of human except Homo sapiens that's us and the and earth alls 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 happen 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 yet ice literally whittled our entire species down to a few hundred people fortunately our ancestors just about managed 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 number 8 2012 solar flare in 1859 the earth was struck with a massive solar storm while everyone was messing about doing Victoria new things like trying on corsets and growing amazing mustaches a bizarre white light appeared over Australia although to astronomers Richard Carrington and rich and 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 crippling it and forcing us to live without power that means no artificial light no internet for information no communication more advancement shouting and worst of all no more selfies the scary thing is this almost happened in 2012 in that year there was a massive solar storm that just missed the earth and I mean just if the storm had started six minutes earlier our planet would have been hit and according to NASA we'd still be picking up the pieces number seven 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 a 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 one thousand times more powerful than an a-bomb and 80 million trees were uprooted by the blast people hundreds of kilometers away claimed to have heard the explosion and there a report of windows breaking in nearby towns considering the damage one a bomb did to her Oshima or Nagasaki something with 1000 times the power would have wiped out even the largest city had the meteorites path differed slightly the comet could have hit Moscow turning the city to dust and dramatically changing the course of history number 6 population collapse a million 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 a mysteriously bottleneck in other words the number of humans plummeted something to as low as 18,000 that's low enough to make human beings and endangered species there are a number of theories as to how this happened but the two most prominent theories are these either a we suffered from some mass extinction event like a giant earthquake or a volcanic eruption or B we became overpopulated in one region and killed off a 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 head count solo humans were extremely vulnerable and another cataclysmic event could easily put an end to our species permanently number 5 shanssey earthquake if you woke up to find 60% of China had died it probably feels something like an apocalypse especially if all those people had just been wiped out by a single event well that happened once in 1556 Shanxi Province in northern China was hit with an earthquake so powerful it reached seven point nine on the Richter scale for the non earthquake experts among you that's ten times as powerful as the earthquake that devastated Haiti in 2010 the impact of this China shaking event was massive eight hundred and thirty thousand 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 percent of population of central China that's the equivalent of an earthquake killing 780 million people nowadays the cost of the 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 number 4 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 outlived it all but humans almost didn't get the chance to be plucky little survivors in fact we were almost wiped out long before we even existed way back in 250 million BCE when we were still handsome little rap 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 rap 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 and now you get to sit here watching youtube videos number three 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 God was saying just throw some leeches at it and try not to upset any witches for a plague to be as deadly in the 20th century when we had a decent grounding and 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 overreact to the pathogen by sending countless t-cells to the infected area these cells were often sent in such high concentrations that they to 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 a less deadly strain of flu but in the short time it had killed 50 million people re-emergence of the Spanish flu remains Bill Gates biggest fear for the future in fact he rates the odds of it happening within his lifetime as 50/50 number to world war ii you don't need us to tell you that world war ii was a pretty big deal over 25 million soldiers perished in the conflict and 50 million civilians were murdered add in the victims of the holocaust and that brings the total to a staggering 85 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 even closer to successfully splitting the atom some even claimed that 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 that Nazis were never quite able to reign 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 or fired leaving the Nazis without many of the leading experts they could have relied on number one Toba supervolcano when you hear the term supervolcano you know things are about to get real and the Toba supervolcano is no exception as devastating as all the 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 of the real and epically named volcanic explosivity index describe the eruption as mega colossal yet 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 the atmosphere for comparison the mountain Helens eruption in 1980 only managed to destroy one 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 blackened out most of the sun's light for six years with little plant life and increasingly sparse 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 yes if 80 people hadn't screwed we wouldn't be here today that's pretty scary but there is good news the fact that only the smartest and most resourceful humans managed to survive probably made us a better species in the long run so those were ten apocalypses that we survived which mere catastrophic crisis was your favorite did we leave any humanity threatening moments off the list and if you want to see some apocalypses we might not be able to make it through check out top 10 global apocalypses that could happen today playing on screen now

Channel: Alltime10s

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Keywords: Alltime10s, 10s, facts, video, list, top 10, armageddon, apocolypse, world end, black death, bubonic plauge, yersinia pestis, Ice Age, solar flare, tunguska event, shaanxi earthquake, permian-triassic extinction, spanish flu, world war two, WW2, toba supervolcano, volcano, humanity, mankind, humans, extinction, endangered, China, disease, space, history, asteriod, war, natural disaster, dinosaurs, disaster, cataclysm, USA, apocalypses that we survived, apocalypse predictions, apocalypses we survived

Id: DHSAjPu7M-s

Length: 11min 56sec (716 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 01 2017