The human species seems to be always looking to predict the end of the world in some way. We have already been through several situations like these, among which we can mention the turn of the 2000s, the Mayan calendar predicting catastrophes for the year 2012 that even resulted in movies and several so-called seers who swore they had seen the end of some form. However, we are really close to having our planet destroyed. Keep reading and discover the 5 times the world almost ended for real!
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Our planet has already taken much greater risks than people can imagine, either by wars or by diseases that decimated a large part of the population. Check it out below.
September 26, 1983 was marked as the day the planet Earth was almost decimated. The clashes between the United States and the Soviet Union were still very strong and frequent, therefore, a simple misunderstanding almost generated global extinction.
Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov was in command of a USSR bunker that was designed to detect when an attack might be about to take place. In that sense, the order was to react if they suffered a nuclear attack. Once, the bunker sirens went off and everyone interpreted that as if they were in great danger.
Luckily, Petrov ended up not releasing missiles, since he kept calm to see that the equipment had, in fact, detected clouds. If he hadn't acted like that, today's world would be very different from what we know.
In the year 2012, the fear of the world's population about the end of the world was so real that it almost caused mass hysteria. However, we really passed close to this event. On July 12th, the planet was hit by a massive solar storm that, had it happened a week earlier, we might not be here to report today.
During the 14th century, the European continent lost nearly half of its population as a result of the bubonic plague. This plague caused about 20 million deaths, being considered one of the worst pandemics in history. Therefore, even though it did not affect everyone, the disease had a highly destructive power.
Approximately 70,000 years ago, a strong volcanic eruption took place in Sumatra, Indonesia. The impact of the phenomenon had serious consequences for that region, in addition to having the ability to affect global temperatures. In this sense, it was even reported that the sun would have been “weaker” for a certain period of time.
Smallpox was a disease capable of affecting diverse populations around the world. It is estimated that between 20 and 60% of those infected ended up dying, while another large part was left with serious sequelae. However, today we have access to a very effective vaccine against the disease, and with that, there was success in fighting the disease.
