(gentle music) - [Narrator] Scientists are
constantly trying to understand more about our world by conducting all manner of experiments. But in the past, they've toyed with incredibly dangerous things
they didn't entirely understand that some predicted would
have apocalyptic results, from nuclear tests setting
our entire atmosphere on fire to man-made black holes that
might tear the world apart. Well, it's time to grab your
lab coats and science goggles as we take a look at some
scary scientific experiments that could have ended the world. (bright music)
(screen zipping) (logo yelling) (gentle music) Digging deep. First up, we're traveling over to Russia and back to the 1970s. This was a time when the
USSR was warring with the USA and both nations were trying to prove which of them was the superior superpower. Both were planning separate efforts to drill as far into the
Earth's crust as possible to see what lay beneath. But while American efforts
(glass smashing) were crippled in 1966
due to lack of funding, the Soviet plowed on, or
more accurately, down. From 1970 to 1994, the Soviet's drill on the Kola Peninsula slowly dug the deepest hole in the world. The attempt consisted of
several super-deep holes branching off one main column. The deepest, called SG-3,
was just 9 inches wide and eventually cut a staggering
7.6 miles into the Earth. For contrast, this hole
is 4,000 feet deeper than the Mariana Trench, aka,
the deepest place on Earth! While geologists and
dirt-nerds got very excited, more religious citizens were terrified. They believed the hole
would reach into hell, releasing an army of demons, or maybe even the devil himself! While they all prayed for protection from the super-small demons that could fit through that 9-inch gap, others feared more logical consequences. Some scientists believed that intense drilling at those depths would dislodge so much rock so quickly that it would trigger some unknown seismic forces
nobody could control! But it turns out there was
nothing to worry about. After reaching the 7.6-mile mark, efforts stalled because of the unexpected 356 degree Fahrenheit heat, which was far hotter than
scientists predicted it would be. For comparison, if the world was an apple, the Kola Superdeep Borehole
wouldn't even pierce the skin. In 1995, due to lack of funds,
the project was mothballed and the well to hell was sealed up. Looks like the Devil's arrival
will be delayed indefinitely. (screen whooshing) Weaponized plagues. In 1989, towards the end of the Cold War, a Soviet director named Vladimir Pasechnik contacted the British embassy and surprisingly offered to defect. Assuming he'd be a valuable
source of information, the British took him in, but what he eventually
revealed terrified them. Vladimir had been the director of the Institute of Ultrapure
Biological Preparations in Leningrad. It was here he learned that the Soviets were developing weapons
that used deadly pathogens, microorganisms that cause
viruses and diseases. These bioweapons were being made in a network of secret laboratories and chemical plants
across the Soviet Union, which the Western Allies
knew almost nothing about. With all these resources,
they were trying to create new antibiotic and
vaccine-resistant strains of highly contagious diseases and viruses that would leave sufferers defenseless! The pathogen Vladimir knew
most about was Yersinia pestis, the bacteria responsible
for the bubonic plague. Back in the 14th century, it's estimated that a staggering 60% of the European population
was wiped out by this plague. Did this mean the Soviets
were planning round 2? Chillingly, Vladimir revealed that they'd already
successfully weaponized one variant of this plague and
were testing it in warheads that could target anywhere in the world! If what Vladimir had said was true, then the Soviets had plans to
wipe out entire populations with the push of a button. Britain's suspicions were
only deepened in the '90s when espionage experts
found gut-wrenching proof of the facilities Vladimir had detailed. But, following the collapse
of the Soviet Union in 1991, the facilities went dark. What's most terrifying of all, though, is that it was never revealed just how big this germ warfare effort was, or what's happened to it since. Moscow has assured the rest of the world that Russia no longer has a
biological weapons program, and I for one really hope that's true. Just imagine a bunch
of new, deadly diseases that are resistant to treatment being released into the
world every few months! Yikes, and I thought COVID was bad! Well before the anti-vaxxers show up and start spamming the comment section at the mere mention of COVID, help me fight back by hitting those like and
subscribe buttons down below! Don't do it for me,
(bell ringing) do it for science! And speaking of science, what world-ending experiment
have we got coming up next? (screen whooshing) Contagious crop disease. When it comes to food, the world relies on 3 main
staples, corn, rice, and wheat. Together they make up a huge 51% of the world's calorific intake. Obviously, any disruption
to their production causes big problems, but some of the worst
come down to blights. These are funguses that
make the plants inedible while releasing thousands of spores that can contaminate an
entire area overnight. Specific wheat and rice blights, known as Puccinia gramminis
and Magnaporthe grisea, exist in a worrying 80 countries, and entered the United States in 1996. While many farmers saw this as a curse, the US decided to use
it to their advantage. Like the Soviets, America once had a
biological weapons program. But while the USSR was
focusing on pathogens that hurt people, documents reveal that
America was investigating how it could weaponize
these crop diseases. If a super contagious,
fast-spreading variant could be developed and
distributed by sprays or bombs, they could devastate an
entire country's food supply. The only issue with this,
aside from being barbaric, is that it probably
wouldn't stay contained to one target country. Seeing how widespread the non-tampered versions
of the blights are, it'd likely spread to
the rest of the world, causing an unstoppable worldwide famine! Nobody knows for sure
if the US has ever used or even tested this
catastrophic crop disease, but as a man whose diet
consists almost solely of pizza, I really hope they never do! (screen whooshing) Alien apocalypse. Back in 2020, the US Defense Department released historic Navy videos
of unidentified flying objects that it, scarily, couldn't explain. Some of these objects
were flying over the Earth at hypersonic speeds of
around 3,800 miles per hour, before changing direction
almost instantly, something human technology is
decades away from achieving. The Defense Department have no evidence to suggest this is alien activity, but on the super-small off
chance they just might exist, NASA established SETI, the Search for Extra
Terrestrial Intelligence unit. For 60 years, SETI have
been using radio telescopes to scour the sky, listening for signals coming
from other civilizations on planets orbiting distant stars. But, so far, they haven't heard a peep. A group of impatient scientists are now pushing for a more
proactive program called METI, Messaging Extra Terrestrial
Intelligence, to take the helm. They want to send powerful messages towards potential civilizations in an attempt to provoke a response. Now, all this talk of sending
texts to ET is pretty funny to anyone who isn't a tin-hat
wearing conspiracy theorist. But on the small chance
there are aliens out there, then we could be in big, big trouble. As it stands, there's
absolutely no regulation of off-world messaging. This means anyone with access
to powerful transmitting tech can say anything they
want to the stars above, and I mean anything! From terrible insults and your mom jokes, to declarations of interstellar war! But if there are aliens out there, they might not see the
funny side of such threats. If those high-tech UFOs
were in fact aliens, then it's clear their weaponry
would be well beyond our own, leaving us totally exposed
and ripe for the, er, probing! (screen whooshing) The Trinity test. On July 16, 1945, the very
first nuclear bomb in history was detonated in the New Mexico desert. This was the Trinity test, a combined effort by American
and British scientists to create a weapon of mass
destruction so devastating it would deter all current
and future enemies. But not every scientist
was on board with the idea, like Enrico Fermi. This Nobel Prize-winning physicist was the creator of the
world's first nuclear reactor, so he had a pretty solid understanding of the risks involved in this test. He, and several other physicists, raised a slight concern that
detonating the 22-kiloton bomb would trigger runaway
fusion, a chain reaction that would set all of
Earth's atmosphere ablaze! In short, there was a
chance that this test would destroy all life on Earth. Fortunately, the hypothesis
was completely wrong, and the Trinity test
went off without a hitch. But when a Nobel Prize-winning physicist tells you your experiment
might destroy the world and you go ahead with it anyway, that's one hell of a gamble! Even though we didn't go
out in a radioactive blaze, humanity still didn't understand just how destructive or dangerous nuclear weaponry really was. More than a decade later, nuclear tests were
casually being conducted by armies around the world, but their men on the ground weren't given any kind of protection! Scientists continued to test the limits of their new nuclear toys by detonating them in
all manner of scenarios, like here during 1952's
Operation Tumble Snapper. The nuke was suspended
300 ft from the ground on a series of cables and detonated. As the plasma ball expanded, the radiating energy superheated
and vaporized the cables just ahead of the fireball, giving it those strange-looking
spikes at the bottom. Since then, humanity has built more than 13,500 nuclear weapons, though scientists believe
it would only require 100 to completely destroy a single society. Jeez! All those tests might have
proven that humanity's smart, but it looks like we just never learn! (screen whooshing) Man-made black holes In New York, back in 1999, the opening of the brand new Relativistic Heavy Ion
Collider, or RHIC for short, had the whole world holding its breath. This collider was designed to accelerate a beam of charged particles, the building blocks of
all matter on Earth, close to the speed of light, which is around 186,000 miles per second, before smashing them together
in a controlled environment. These collisions would create miniature fireballs of superdense matter, with temperatures of up
to 4 trillion degrees, conditions similar to
that of The Big Bang. Obviously, scientists were
keen to get this thing going, but then a disturbing revelation
took headlines by storm. There was a chance that these collisions could reach such a high density that they would create
miniature black holes! In the realm of astrophysics, black holes generate
intense gravitational fields that suck in all surrounding matter. Even a black hole the size of an atom would have the mass of Mount Everest, and anything larger than that would be more than capable
of tearing up the Earth and consuming it from the inside out! The risk, however, was small. So small that less than 10 years later, another even larger collider was built, aptly called the Large Hadron Collider, in Geneva, Switzerland. At 16.6 miles in circumference, particles would make more than
11,000 laps of the circuit in a fraction of the
time it takes to blink before being smashed together. And this came with even
more potential dangers. One theory argued that quarks, a kind of elementary particle, would be triggered by the collision to rearrange and shrink themselves into dense objects called strangelets. By contagion, it would affect
everything around them, transforming the Earth
into a hyperdense sphere just 330 feet across! That's smaller than a football pitch! Well, last I checked,
we're all still alive. But if Geneva or New York
disappears in the near future and begins sucking in all the
nearby countries, we know why. (screen whooshing) Project Seal. New Zealand is known more
for its peace-loving hobbits than it is for weapon innovation. But in 1944, during World War II, this island nation
collaborated with the US to create artificial tsunamis,
known as Project Seal. Now New Zealand is no
stranger to tsunamis, which are long, high sea waves caused by underwater earthquakes. These massive waves
can reach 100 feet high and sweep 10 miles inland, devastating everything in their wake. If they could be
artificially created, though, their wielders would be able
to strategically wipe out enemy ports, naval bases,
and even entire cities! But how do you create a wall of water even a fraction of that
size without an earthquake? The answer was trinitrotoluene, more commonly known as the
highly-explosive chemical TNT. From the seabed to the surface, scientists set off around 3,700 explosions across the South Pacific Ocean. Using different amounts of TNT, ranging from a few grams
to more than 660 pounds, they experimented with
the size of the waves they could create. Eventually, they determined
that by detonating a 5-mile line of about 10 bombs made up of a gargantuan 2200 tons of TNT, they could create a terrifying man-made
tidal wave 40 feet high. The only problem was that the placement of
the charges was critical. Even a slight deviation would
rob the wave of its momentum. But six months later, as
the Western Allies closed in on the end of the war,
Project Seal was closed down. Its potential was never fully realized, which is a good thing, considering that, if it
ever went mainstream, shorelines would no
longer be safe for humans, and any power-mad idiot with
an explosive device big enough could try to flood the world, causing widespread chaos and death! Though that didn't stop scientists from testing out the effects
of nukes in the water later on in the 1950s! Off the coast of Hawaii, Operation Hardtack saw the detonation of multiple nuclear warheads underwater, creating gargantuan waves that effortlessly crashed over their ships and quickly swept inland! Fortunately, no country has dared to try recreating Project
Seal with nukes, yet. (screen whooshing) Project Volcano. So, we've heard about the
world-ending possibility of the first nuke, and seen the potentially
devastating impacts of nuclear-detonated tsunamis, but what about underground nukes? Okay, when I say it out loud, it sounds way too dumb to be real. But if we rewind to 1988 and travel over to the Soviet Union, that's exactly what
scientists were testing. During this period of the Cold War, Soviet scientists were experimenting with the terrifyingly named tectonic bombs at a site in Kyrgyzstan. Their objective, called Project Mercury, was to develop a way of remotely
triggering an earthquake by destabilizing seismic forces using an underground nuclear explosion. If they were successful, this would give them the power to create devastating earthquakes
almost anywhere in the world. It would be the ultimate
underground weapon! While there's no information about how big the underground blast was,
the test was a success, and paved the way for the
much larger Project Volcano. However, Azerbaijan's independence from the Soviet Union in 1992 brought a halt to
experimentations on its soil, and so, mercifully, the project shut down. The most disturbing part of all, though, was that it was hinted Project Volcano was
linked to the Soviet idea of nuking Yellowstone
National Park in the USA. Yellowstone is situated
on top of a super volcano, which, if it ever erupted, would be approximately
1000 times more powerful than a regular volcano. The amount of ash and debris
hurled into the atmosphere would blanket most of North America, killing countless plants,
people, crushing buildings, blocking roadways, and
grounding all air travel. To the Soviets, planting
a nuke underground to trigger this mega eruption must have seemed like a sure-fire
way to win the Cold War. But they might not have
realized that all that ash could block enough sunlight to temporarily cool the entire Earth. This would've resulted
in worldwide crop damage, leading to vast famines that, depending on how long
Yellowstone erupted for, the world might never have recovered from. Phew, thank the Kremlin that
the Union fell when it did! (screen whooshing) Starfish Prime. So, man has tested
nuclear weapons on land, in the sea, and underground, despite their world-ending potential. Well at least we haven't been dumb enough to try nuking space, right? (sighs) Let's rewind to 1962. A few years earlier, America discovered the Earth was encircled by belts of intense radiation held in place by its
protective magnetic field. These were named Van Allen Belts, after their discoverer, James Van Allen. They worried scientists because any satellites or
astronauts sent up to space would be exposed to this radiation, with potentially fatal results. So they suggested trying to clear them with a healthy dose of nuclear radiation, by detonating a nuclear weapon in space. Van Allen himself predicted
that the weapon's radiation wouldn't affect the belts in any way. But Van Allen was wrong, very wrong. On the night of July 8, 1962, Starfish Prime, a 1.4 megaton bomb, 500 times more powerful than
the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, was launched off the coast of Hawaii. People in the area gathered on rooftops to see if they could spot the event, assuming it would be a
brief flicker in the sky. 250 miles above the Pacific Ocean, which is about the height of the International
Space Station's orbit, Starfish Prime detonated, and the night sky suddenly
glowed bright as day! For 15 minutes, charged
particles from the blast collided with the molecules
in Earth's atmosphere, and the sky was lit up in rainbow colors that could be seen as
far away as New Zealand! While it looked pretty,
(bomb booming) the blast to the Earth's magnetic field triggered a huge electromagnetic pulse that knocked out radio stations, set off emergency sirens,
(siren wailing) and caused streetlights to
black out across Hawaii. On top of that, the ionized
radiation from the explosion created a new artificial
radiation belt around the Earth. The belt lingered around
the Earth for 10 years, knocking out essential
communication satellites that passed through it! It was so, so much worse
than anyone predicted. But if the geomagnetic field
had been permanently damaged, the Earth would have been
left with no protection from the deadly radiation of space's countless cosmic
rays and solar winds! In a few years, this would have destroyed all life on the planet. These results were so
shocking that in 1967, the Outer Space Treaty was put into force, banning the use of nuclear
weapons in outer space. Well that's one small step for man, and one big lesson learned for mankind. (screen whooshing) Project Cirrus. We all wish we could control the weather, but back in the 1940s, America took that wishful
thinking a little too far. The US is struck by an average of 17 hurricanes every 10 years, which cause hundreds of
billions of dollars in damages. But, for all their cyclonic might, they rely on a surprisingly precise and fragile system of temperatures. At their center, warm and moist air rises and is replaced by cooler air. This new air then heats up and also rises, creating a spiraling cycle that develops raging rains, wailing hail, and winds that can reach
over 155 miles per hour! After figuring this out in the mid 1940s, US researchers hypothesized that if they disrupted the rising hot air with an injection of
a super-cold material, like dry ice, which is a frosty negative
109 degrees Fahrenheit, they could disable the hurricane. Now this theory wasn't airtight, and there were a lot of
holes in the science, but the temptation of weather control was just too much for the US
government to resist testing. So, in 1947, Project Cirrus took flight. A plane was flown above
the Cape Sable hurricane, which was heading harmlessly
out into the Atlantic, before the plane dumped
180 pounds of dry ice into its swirling clouds. But what happened next
was a worst-case scenario. Instead of dissipating like
the scientists predicted, the storm suddenly changed direction, making landfall in Savannah, Georgia and causing a colossal $2
million worth of damage! That's a little over $24 million today! Messing with incredibly
complex weather patterns that they didn't entirely understand had obviously been a very bad idea. What if they'd used more ice and accidentally created
a huge, unstoppable, super powerful cyclone instead? Who knows where the
destruction would have ended? Understandably embarrassed, the government denied the
storm was ever tampered with, though the truth eventually
came out 12 years later followed by several lawsuits. But it turns out, it was all for nothing. Meteorologists pointed out that many other historic hurricanes had also suddenly swerved at
the last minute naturally, without any dry ice. So the Americans hadn't
nearly brought about a weather disaster. Still, messing with major
powers they didn't understand was a huge risk that could
have blown us all away, literally. (screen whooshing) Operation Big Buzz. America's pretty proud of
the weapon advancements they've made over the last 100 years, although there's one that they'd prefer the public didn't know about. In the 1950's, the US Army Chemical Corp decided to secretly test the effectiveness of using animals as weapons. But we're not talking about attack dogs or cats with guns strapped
to their paws here. Think smaller, mosquito
sized, to be exact. Yep, the USA took the most
annoying animal on Earth and attempted to turn them into a weapon. Mosquitoes are able to carry
diseases that don't affect them but do affect the humans
they bite, like yellow fever. This hemorrhagic disease can kill sufferers in around 10 days and is a serious epidemic
in some parts of Africa, where mosquitoes naturally thrive. So, if the Chemical Corp
could figure out how effective dumping swarms of infected mosquitoes would be on a populated area, they'd be able to harness
this horrifying power and use it against their enemies. But how did they know this kind of entomological
warfare would work? The horrendous answer was
by testing it on civilians, their own civilians! In 1955, Operation Big Buzz was conducted by releasing more than
300,000 uninfected mosquitoes into Savannah, Georgia. Wait, the same city that was
later hit by Project Cirrus? Jeez, those guys just
couldn't catch a break! Then in 1956, a further 600,000 mosquitoes were released in the residential areas of Avon Park, Florida. The Corps then estimated
how many mosquitoes had entered houses and bitten people by the number they caught in baited traps laid about the city. After they gathered the data, they determined that the cost of releasing these infected mosquitoes into major population hubs would
be just 29 cents per death. That was frighteningly efficient, though that wasn't the only issue. In case anyone has tried recently, you can't control mosquitoes. Increasing their populations artificially could lead to an uncontrollable
reproduction rate, leading to billions, if
not trillions of mosquitoes swarming entire continents. According to official records, the infected moz-bombs
were never detonated, and in 1972, it became
illegal to use such weapons. Whether that's enough to stop any country from using this tactic
in the future though is anyone's guess. Best add mosquito nets and bug spray to your doomsday prep list! (bright energetic music) After that, I'm amazed
any of us are still alive! Which of these experiments
did you think was the worst? Let me know down in the comments below. Now I'm off to find a bunker to live in for the rest of my life. And as always, thanks for watching!
