Times That Were ALMOST The Apocalypse!

Every so often, there comes an event, a disease, or a mistake that puts the lives of everyone on Earth at stake, and many people don’t even know they happened. Some are blissfully unaware of the times we’ve all been on the brink of total destruction, which makes it our job to enlighten them. Here, we’ve collected all kinds of events that could have destroyed humankind. This is Terrifying Times the World Could Have Ended! Subscribe for weekly wacky videos and learn interesting facts about the world with awesome top 10 lists and other amazing videos. 5. Russian System Faults The nuclear early-warning system started sounding off at the Serpukhov-15 bunker on September 26, 1983, and it was up to a lieutenant colonel named Stanislav Petrov to make a call. It was just after midnight, and the early-warning system showed one incoming ICBM from the United States, something Petrov immediately disbelieved. Why did he not believe it to be real? Because he figured that if the U.S. were going to pull off a first-strike nuclear attack, they’d send hundred of ICBMs at once to ensure the Soviets had no way to retaliate. So he waited, and it’s unclear whether he alerted high higher-ups or not. His instincts proved right when no missiles hit the country, and when the alarm sounded again later on and showed four missiles on their way, he disregarded that too, thinking it was another malfunction, and it was. It turns out it was sunlight hitting high-altitude clouds and the position of the Soviet satellites’ Molniya orbits that triggered the false alarm. Clouds and sunshine could have killed us all—sheesh. 4. Black Death Maybe it’s time that we move on from human mistakes and get to some seriously scary epidemics. The Black Death or Black Plague was one of the most terrible epidemics humankind has ever seen and may have started spreading as early as 1331. It peaked in Europe between 1347 and 1351, and it was the first major plague outbreak in the area. Estimates put the number of fatalities around 75 to 200 million, with around 50 million in Europe alone, and it’s thought that it took out between 30 and 60% of Europe’s entire population. It also hatched a bunch of social, economic, and religious upheavals, and wholly changed European history forever. It took more than 200 years for world population levels to reach pre-plague levels again, and recurrent outbreaks happened in Europe all the way up until the 19th century. 3. Spanish Flu One would think that it would be hard to beat out something as destructive and devastating as the Black Plague, but it happened, and it wasn’t good. This took place between January of 1918 and December of 1920, and it was the first of two different pandemics where people had to deal with the H1N1 virus. More than 500 million people were infected worldwide, and the mortality rate was between 10 and 20%, and even those in the Arctic got sick, as well as people on remote islands in the Pacific Ocean. It quickly became one of the most deadly natural disasters in the history of the world and took out an estimated 50 to 100 million people, which at the time was between 3 and 5% of the entire world population. In the United States, during the first year of the pandemic, life expectancy dropped twelve years, as around 28% of the country’s population contracted it and 500,000 to 675,000 people didn’t beat it. 2. Mount Tambora Back in 1815, a volcano named Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa blew its top, and it caused more than just loss of life. The volcano had been dormant for many centuries before it erupted, although it started showing signs of significant activity as early as 1812. When it did finally go, it erupted many times, and overall, it’s thought that on the Volcanic Explosivity Index, the Mount Tambora eruption was a 7. The eruption packed around four times as much power as the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa and pumped out about 24 cubic miles worth of pyroclastic trachyandesite. Tambora took the lives of between 71,000 and 117,000 people, directly and indirectly, and it destroyed every bit of vegetation on the island. The eruption also sent out massive tsunamis in all directions and pumped so much ash into the atmosphere that it encircled the globe and created odd optical phenomena, adversely affected plant life, and set many places up for famine. 1...