What Was The Worst Year In Human History? | Answers With Joe

dear advertising industry it is april of 2022 the pandemic has been going on for two full years and yet i still continue to hear the terms unprecedented times trying times new normal in every commercial block of any television program or pre-roll ad on behalf of well everyone i am writing to humbly request that you please for the love of god stop we are all well aware of the clogged toilet that this world has become and don't need to be reminded of it or for our anxieties around said chunk phil bull to be weaponized against us in an attempt to take our dwindling reserves of money and at the very least understanding that weaponizing our anxieties is in general the whole point of advertising it would be preferable that you could at least you know try to be original use a different phrase come at it a slightly different way allow me to make some recommendations instead of saying unprecedented times perhaps something along the lines of post-decency years instead of trying times try the excruciation hours instead of the new normal how about the old abysmal these are options i just came up with surely if you put all your 20-something junior copywriters in a room with a bottle of whiskey and a bag of edibles for a day they could come up with something that would really sing so with that i look forward to hearing what you come up with good luck and happy flibbityflubity oh i'm going to keep that one signed the world [Music] these are the times that try men's souls wrote american revolutionary thomas payne over 100 years later british statesman joseph chamberlain said that at no time could he remember he had bought so many new objects for anxiety sound familiar these days we're reminded constantly that things are bad they were living in troubled times unprecedented times times of the new normal and i'm not here to say that we don't have any problems we definitely do but you know as billy joel once said we didn't start the fire yes i just went from quoting thomas paine to billy joel don't judge my journey believe it or not there have been worse times to be alive uh and not even close by a very long shot so uh today i thought i would take a look at some of the years throughout history that experts consider to be some of the worst years of all time now there is one year that does seem to be the agreed upon worst but let's start by talking about some contenders spoiler alert uh pandemics are going to be a bit of a theme on this list the black death began in the 14th century when a variety of bubonic plagues swept through the near east north africa and europe picture it it's sicily 1347. a fleet of ships dock at the port of messina and everybody in town comes running out to see what was on the boat because well they didn't have internet back then what else are you gonna do but as they get to the dock they find out that the ship had some surprises in store for them and one of those big surprises was that half the soldiers were dead and of those that were still alive most of them were sick bodies covered in sores called boobos in latin which is where it got the name now they knew about the importance of quarantining at this time but before they could get the quarantine in effect the plague managed to jump onto the onlookers and inside of a year it was all over the continent and by the time it had run its course something around 200 million people had died now for perspective 200 million was about 30 to 50 percent of the entire european population at the time like covid sucks right i mean we all know somebody who's died we all at least know somebody who's very close to somebody who's died but imagine if suddenly like half the people you know develop strange swellings and boils all over their body started bleeding and vomiting and then just died within a day you'd be pretty freaked out right well people in the 1300s were freaked out too and when people freak out they tend to gravitate towards some of their worst impulses like finding a group of people to blame throughout the black plague attacks were levied at jewish towns and neighborhoods killing thousands of jewish people it's actually been known as the medieval holocaust funny how a disease that kills christians and muslims and jews equally is all the jews fault yeah the black death is about as bad as you heard in fact it probably was a little bit worse and it reshaped the continent in a myriad ways but the first outbreak can be traced back to that fleet of ships which is why 1347 is our first contender for worst year ever and speaking of ships our next contender for worst year ever involved a group of people who probably had them because they were called the sea peoples the sea peoples are one of the biggest mysteries of all time nobody really seems to know where they came from but suddenly in the 13th century bce they just appeared out of nowhere attacking egypt palestine cyprus and the hittites and whoever they were according to archaeologists they helped trigger the collapse of the bronze age in 1177 bc i say helped because they were far from the only problem in fact they were kind of a result of some of the other problems like a lengthy drought in the decade before the sea people's invasions that drove them to you know raid other countries for resources and a famine that had already raged across the empires of the sea peoples attacked which made them especially vulnerable the tomb of pharaoh ramses iii records a devastating battle with the sea peoples uh egypt won but they went into decline soon after but the hittites got it the worst of all its capital city was sacked and destroyed it they basically ceased to exist as a people another sea people's victim was the canaanite city of megiddo there are still ruins today on the mount of megiddo from that conflict although it's it's not alone there were a lot of battles fought over megiddo over the years this is actually where the word armageddon comes from are you armageddon there was also the explosion of the volcano ethera also known as santorini these days it probably had a big part to play in the bronze age collapse ultimately it was it was just a perfect storm of disasters and conflicts that destroyed multiple economic systems all at once civilization was set back hundreds of years and some empires were lost forever and all of this started around 1177 bc which is why this is a contender for the worst year ever i've mentioned the year without a summer in previous videos but it was mostly just in sort of a huh isn't that an interesting nugget of information kind of thing yeah turns out it was a pretty traumatic event the previous year 1815 saw possibly the most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded human history at mount tambora in indonesia it ejected 180 billion cubic meters of material and may have killed as many as 90 000 locals but that was just the beginning of the problem there was so much ash from tambora and other knock-on eruptions that the temperature around the world plummeted the next summer was so cold that people actually froze to death in snow storms in the summer and i'm not talking about like up in some distant part of the north no this is continental u.s this snow and frost damaged crops and triggered famines across europe and china this destabilized society and riots broke out in england that came to be known as the bread breader blood riots in india the colder temperatures kind of flipped nature on its head and caused drought during the monsoon season and then floods during the dry season this affected crops obviously but it also had the weird effect of causing a local strain of cholera to kind of mutate and adapt to the flipped weather and this mutation was able to bypass human immunity and cause one of the largest cholera pandemics of all time it eventually killed two million people oh that is a lot of damage for one volcanic eruption but that's just how insane the mount tambora eruption was and that's why 1816 is our contender for worst year ever so far on this list disease and disaster have played the largest role in making years the worst but 1914 is a little different what made it terrible was politics and war which is like spicy politics the first half of the year is pretty calm as things go the biggest story really in the first six months was the accidental sinking of the rms empress of ireland which everybody seems to have forgotten about but 1012 people died it's the seventh deadliest shipwreck in history yeah that was the good part of 1914 because in june of 1914 the archduke franz ferdinand of austria was assassinated his wife maria was assassinated too but that's another little piece of news that seems to always be forgotten he was assassinated by a terrorist or freedom fighter depending on who he listened to who had the goal of uniting the citizens of serbia against the austro-hungarian empire austria-hungary had conquered part of serbia in the previous years this is something that kind of been boiling up for a while but this assassination kind of set everything off and put both countries into war both called their allies to come help out and within a few months the whole world was neck deep in what we now call world war one over the next four years from 1914 to 1918 about 20 million people were killed up to half of them civilians tens of millions more were displaced and scattered about europe and this helped spread diseases one particular wave of influenza became especially virulent and spread throughout the entire world infecting half a billion people eventually killing 50 million people this was of course the spanish flu which by the way didn't actually come from spain but all the other countries that sort of had an embargo on reporting on it except for spain so since they were the ones that were talking about they kind of got their name stuck with it now most of the suffering that i'm talking about here happened in the years after 1914 but it did all start from events that happened in 1914 which is why 1914 is definitely a contender for worst year ever yeah we're going there for 400 years 1492 has been celebrated in american culture as the year that america was discovered there is a contingent of people on this continent that see it differently and we've all heard what a monster christopher columbus was we don't need to go over all that but some of the biggest effects of his discovery were completely unintentional because while yes millions of native americans were killed in war and enslaved that's just a drop in the bucket compared to the number of deaths caused by foreign diseases the indigenous peoples of north and south america had been separated from the rest of the world for tens of thousands of years and they had never once been exposed to things like smallpox influenza or our old friend the bubonic plague so these diseases just went rampant throughout the population killed millions of people various studies have said that the population decline is between 50 and 95 percent and it's estimated that pre-columbian populations may have been as high as 112 million so we could be talking about around 100 million deaths it's just staggering and the only disease that we think of that went the other way was syphilis which syphilis sucks but it didn't have the same impact i mean in fact europe's population increased by 25 in 100 years following columbus and all that growth required resources to support it which the new world was ripe with and thus began the violent conquest of north america and earnest which drove families tribes nations and cultures to the brink of extinction so no they don't celebrate columbus day and it's why i think 1492 should be a contender for worst year ever but there's still one year that many scholars say is worse than all these a year that's worse than the years that started the black death the bronze age collapse the endless winter global war and the near genocide of indigenous people i'll start with an appeal to authority this this theory i'm about to explain is not mine medieval scholar michael mccormack put forth the theory that the worst year of all time was 536 a.d and much like 1816 the culprit was a massive volcanic eruption actually possibly two volcanic eruptions according to some samples and tree ring data is thought that there may have been one in iceland and one in el salvador regardless clouds blanketed the entire planet from europe to asia and global temperatures dropped significantly and they stayed down just as in 1816 there were summer snow storms crop failure widespread famine we actually have records of people starving in ireland and china and all this hunger weakened the population and caused outbreaks of disease one of which would go on to become the first true global pandemic this became known as the plague of justinian and it did most of its damage around the mediterranean in the middle east just destroying the byzantine and sassanid empires it featured all the plague hits booboos vomiting swift death and it wiped out 40 to 60 of the population it became known as the plague of justinian because justinian was in byzantine emperor at the time and he decided while all this was going on it'd be a great time to start a big old war he was trying to reunite the western and eastern arms of the roman empire but he was super brutal about it in fact according to the court historian he insisted that plague survivors paid the taxes of the deceased neighbors to pay for his wars so famine plague war running out of horsemen here but this actually wasn't just a mediterranean problem archaeological evidence points the floods that happened in peru around 540. it's not known as volcanic eruption had anything to do with this but there was a large-scale migration of the ancient moche civilization which abandoned their cities and just disappeared from history and back in europe the economy collapsed for more than 100 years it's actually kind of interesting how they know this silver mining apparently leaves traces in the atmosphere and according to ice core samples there's a huge gap in the century following 536. so to review 536 was a year without a summer that kicked off a period of starvation plague war climate change and economic upheaval in other words uh trying times but what was it like to actually live through the worst year ever like did they know that they were living through the worst year ever you know as humans with our limited lifespans we have a hard time seeing the historical context of the times that we live in you know for the most part we just keep our head down just trying to get through another day but labels like worst and best depend on historical context after all one bad year might start a century of innovation but i mean let's face it between the plays and the famines and the floods there's a high probability that you would have been affected in some way in the period followed by 536. and this is all levels of society i mentioned emperor justinian's court historian earlier he lost a wife kids and grandkids to the plague but he had no idea what was going on in south america you didn't even know that existed whereas today we know all the problems happening all around the world all the time on top of the plague and now war so i don't know i think there might be an argument to be made that our current you know communication infrastructure could be causing us to feel more of the anxiety and confusion and panic than in earlier times might have felt so in that sense maybe we actually are living through the worst year ever but of course those same communication technologies are making us more able to find solutions to these problems and innovate and adapt maybe that'll be our legacy look the last few years have been not great but you know when we look back in the decades to follow when our descendants look back in the centuries to come with some historical context i mean maybe it won't be all that bad maybe these years will be seen as the catalyst that set off a period of radical advancement that put the world on a on a whole new course now what that course turns out to be is up to us so today we've got a new sponsor for the show so say hello to henson shaving now hold on hold on i know you may be thinking what a shaving sponsor on a science show but why well i'll tell you why because according to my analytics like 84 percent of you people are dudes hairy hairy dudes and the other 14 are hairy hairy women it's okay you're a mammal it's it's supposed to be that way but my assumption is if you're watching this a you're a mammal and b you have places where you want hair and places where you don't so razors now i know shaving is a very personal thing we all have our own certain ways of doing it rituals even but let me give you a few reasons why you might want to give hints in a try if you know you're open to new things first of all henson uses these single blade safety 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Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 521,578

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott

Id: ynTUjFCfGVA

Length: 19min 10sec (1150 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 18 2022