A week ago, for science Wednesday, I wrote about THE WORST CATACLYSM EVER FOR PLANET EARTH. Today, what was the worst event for Humanity?
Here is one viewpoint, with the gray bar indicating how many people would have died today if projected to our current population:
The second world war only comes in at #11, mostly because it was too recent.- China seems to monopolize this list.
- Not taking current population as the base, Wikipedia says the Khans might have disposed of 80 million, and so did Mao and Deng. But various Marxist-Leninist leaders did away with nearly 150 million.
- Adolf Hitler? "Only" 25.5 million.
- The Black Death around 1350 might have killed up to 200 million.
- The world population then was 370 million.
- Doing the math, this means if the same percentage of people in the world died, the equivalent today would be 4.3 billion, which is more than half our current population.
- Genghis Khan killed the equivalent of fewer than 0.8 billion.
- There is some speculation that the Spanish flu in 1918 killed as many as 100 million.
- There were 1.9 billion people then, so brought up to today, that would be an equivalent of 421 million.
- So far, around 6.4 million have died from COVID-19. With the current decline in deaths, you might say that our pandemic was puny.
But is the worst event the one where the most number of people died? Maybe not. A case can be made that around 70,000 BC, human beings almost vanished:
- This is a speculatively controversial topic.
- One study says we were then down to 1000 reproductive adults.
- Another says we hit a population low of 40 breeding pairs.
- To quote from that article
...bedraggled Homo sapiens struggled together in pitiful little clumps hunting and gathering for thousands of years until, in the late Stone Age, we humans began to recover. But for a time there, says science writer Sam Kean, "We damn near went extinct.
What happened?
- Mount Toba on Sumatra in Indonesia went off as the largest volcanic eruption ever:
- 2.4 inches of ash fell all over South Asia, the Asian, Arabian South China oceans.
- There is something called the Explosivity Index:
- Mount St. Helens rated at 4.5.
- Tambora at 6.5.
- The highest number is 8.
- There have been 40 of these within the last 132 million years, including at Yellowstone 630,000 years ago.
- During human existence.
- Toba 70,000 BC
- Taupo 26,500 BC
You ask, how did we so well survive the New Zealand Taupo Volcano Oraunui eruption only 24,500 years?
- Don't know.
- Is on the Pacific Ring of Fire.
- Debris covered the North Island (where 77% of New Zealanders live) 660 feet deep, or the equivalent of 9 feet over California.
- Taupo has erupted 28 times since then, with the most recent being in the year 232.
- Still has almost daily earthquakes, and considered to be dangerous today.
- Looks like a lake today, the largest in volume in all of Australia and New Zealand.
- Been there. Beautiful. Didn't realize this was a treacherous super volcano.
The most boring day in history, apparently, or at least of the past 110 years, was April 11, 1954. The Telegraph notes that "on that day a general election was held in Belgium, a Turkish academic was born"--that would be Professor Atalar--"and an Oldham Athletic footballer called Jack Shufflebotham died.
I leave you with a new study published in Frontiers in HumanNeuroscience about an illusion that does not represent physical reality. See the image below?
If you perceive that the central black hole is expanding, as if you're moving into a dark environment, or falling into a hole, you are among the 86% that also do. This because that setting fools you into thinking that you are heading forward into a hole or tunnel. This is how your pupils and brain work.
The same researchers from Oslo also noticed that the color of this image affected your response. For example 14% of participants didn't react if the color was black, while this percentage increased to 20% when in color.
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