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It's impossible to turn on the news or go the movies without hearing about some disease or cataclysm that's about to end the world. There's a movie coming (2012) that as far as we can tell is about every apocalypse happening at once, and in the news the flavor of the week is swine flu--though so far the fatality rate has fallen rather short of, say, Popsicles. Our apocalypse fixation ignores the fact that the things we're afraid of are old-hat. Extinction level events have happened again and again throughout history and, lo and behold, we're still here. And hell, we probably wouldn't be without number five... #5.
The K-T Extinction
Everyone knows this story: For millions of years, dinosaurs roamed the earth, snacking on the odd mammal that was unfortunate enough to get in their way. They were big, hungry and had some terrifying weaponry.
As for mammals, our only saving grace was that we bred like crazy and were too small to easily kill. We presumably spent our days scurrying in terror and it was pretty clear who'd won the genetic lottery. Then one sunny day 65 million years ago, a big rock fell out of the sky like a game of cosmic billiards gone drunkenly sour. This falling space matter is suspected to have made the 110-mile-wide Chicxulub crater in the Yucatan. To understand the scale of the collision, know that according to newer versions of the theory, the crater in question was caused by only one of several fragments of a larger asteroid that did to our planet what a falling cinder block does to a Chihuahua. Also remember that the Yucatan crater is 100-damn-miles across.
The initial blast(s) threw up enough ash to blot out the sun, killing all plant life. With the plants gone, the food chain snapped, leaving all the dinos yabba-dabba dead. The mammals' policy of being small and annoying paid off, and they grew up to be us, you and the Knicks City Dancers.
The K-T rock was six-miles across. If that sounds big, know that the earth is approximately 7,000-miles across (which is quite small by stellar standards). Heck, K-T wasn't even the biggest one to hit our planet--a few billion years ago, one such impact shat out the entire moon.
Don't worry, though. The good news is that we have dedicated teams of nerds giving up their social lives to stare at the night sky in order to tag and track most cosmic debris in the solar system longer than a mile. The bad news is that objects smaller than mile across can still ruin your day, particularly if your name is Ann Hodges. #4.
The Clovis Comet
So could something like K-T happen to humans? Well, it already did. In Michigan. Crap.
They call it the Clovis Comet, and if you want a very small idea of the scale of this thing, look at the above photo. At first glance, you may believe that this image is the result of nuclear testing, rabid beavers or some horrifying combination thereof. In fact, this is a picture of the aftermath of the Tunguska explosion, which demolished Siberia in 1908. The blast, which some scientists attribute to an earthbound comet, leveled 80 million trees with the force of 1,000 Hiroshimas. Scary, right? Now raise Tunguska to the power of "holy fuck" and you'll get an inkling of how devastating the Clovis Comet was. "How devastating?" you query. Well experts say it was an explosion equal to about 1.5 billion Hiroshima bombs (or 20 million Megatons).
The Clovis Comet exploded over the Great Lakes about 12,900 years ago. The blast ignited continent-wide forest fires, spurred global cooling and killed all the neat animals like mastodons and 14-foot tall grizzly bears.
As humanity's big innovation that millennia was putting the meat on sticks before cooking it, we weren't in much of a position to do anything about the biosphere turning into tears and excrement, so we apparently gritted our teeth and boned our way back to the top. #3.
The Bubonic Plague(s)
The bacterium, Yersinia pestis, has beaten the human race into a gibbering mess with such regularity that it's embarrassing. The first known outbreak--the Plague of Justinian--hit the Byzantine Empire in 541 AD. At its peak, the contagion killed an estimated 5,000 people a day in Constantinople.
Think of it this way--if you met a friend for a nice cup of Turkish coffee, chances were one of you was either A) infected or B) already dead. And if your buddy looked healthy, it was probably a good time to go update your will.
After killing 50-60 percent of Europe's population, the Justinian Plague laid low for a couple centuries, repackaged itself as the Black Death and killed a third of Europe from 1348-1350. Like your mom's cooking, the bubonic plague wouldn't stay down--it hung around until the 1600s, when improved medicine and sanitation stanched its spread. And like your mom's cooking, the Black Death gave people fatal, necrotic tumors.
One hundred million people. And because we love ruining your day, we'll inform you that the bubonic plague is still kicking about. Just move to the West Coast! |
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Holy f**k! And we cry over destructive magic of planetary aligment and invisible aliens :)
I like the 14' human in your picture with the 14' bear.
hahah, do you know how huge that bear would be if it was 14' on all fours? The bear is 14' when its standing up genius, the man on the other hand is not
The boobs picture always makes my day happier
I want to say that one reason why the plague spread so much was because of the Church. During that time it was also the "witch hunt" period and the Church killed cats in mass thinking they were evil and linked to witches and the devil. With less cats to hunt and kill the rats the disease spreaded a lot more than it should have.
Wiccans are gay.
I think I might write to Cracked and ask them to eliminate the comments section. This seriously raises my blood pressure.
Relax, Merc. Don't take it all so seriously. People like to vent, b***h, whinge and moan, let them, laugh it off and acknowledge that most cracked-commenter is little more informed than what the wikipedia article has to say on the subject.
so who is the owner of those jugs, anyway? she should get some royalties or a "miss cracked" award, given the fact that her balconies have become stock footage on this site.
go to the boobs topic here on cracked, there's a little bit about her.
I have often wondered this
Her name is Kate. Google Kate Boobs.
Great article! Its a shame that its going to need an amendment after the Horizon Oil Spill.
p.s. Since I find it probable that someone somewhere is going to take this in the wrong way: Its a joke.
Actually, Lake Toba is the volcano. The eruption blew such a big hole you can see it from space.
Point A) Yersinia pestis killed off one third of Europe in one particular wave. Spanish flu killed off one third of Europe in one particular wave. Spnish flu had only one wave to speak of. Yersinia pestis was like the chinese army, wave after wave after wave. The two are not exactly equivilent,smallpox perhaps should have been chosen to represent viruses.
Point B) 1918, antibiotics? You're off by a couple decades buddy, and even if antibiotics had existed in 1918 they wouldn't have done jack s**t against a virus. You did know the flu is cause by a virus, didn't you?
Ah, Spanish flu did have waves and it's only because the people of the time understood germ theory and quarantining that it didn't have persistent waves like the plague did.
And, one of the main reasons people died of 'pneumonic influenza' was because of the pneumonia and lung infections it caused - all treatable with antibiotics. So if advanced antibiotics had been around, there might not have been as many deaths (even though the virus would still have been just as virulent). They did however have inoculations and vaccines... but given their limited knowledge of viruses (they still thought the flu was bacterial), they weren't very effective.
The fact that the flu only killed 12000 people in Australia is testament to the quarantining and masking regulations they were able to implement at the time. Not so achievable today.
How did you mention the K-T event but not the great dying(Peremian-Thirassic extinction event)...
It was THE worst extinction event we know of and wiped out 96 percent of ALL marine species !!
Nobody cares what happens in the water
Maybe they should care about this extinction. After all, most of the relatives of the ancestor of mammals died in that extinction. It almost killed our distant ancestors. Also, it lead to the rise of the Dinosaurs.
Also in relation to the article, the Spanish flu didn't kill off a third of Europe. It killed 2.64 million, according to a French study. Still a lot, but a far cry from a third.
The 1/3 figure actually should refer to the percentage of the world that was INFECTED. Almost 100 million could have died around the world, but that's a worst-case estimate.
Bubonic plague is endemic in rodents in Northern California. I was on a field exercise while in the Army at Fort Hunter Liggett. We had set up camp while watching some guys in those white biohazard suits doing something a few hundred yards away. It was 115 degrees and, of course, they waited until we had all out stuff set up before coming over to tell us we had to move because they had detected plague in the area.
an important fact to note is that the tunguska metorite is theorized to have been composed of anti-matter, and thus instead of converting a portion of the maters energy as with a nuclear weapon it converted almos one-hundred percent of the surrounding matter ie air., thus explaining the odd patern of appearing to have exploded or atleast emitted an ass load of energy above ground, feel free to point out any incorrect things as i have not slept in a while and studied this about three years or more ago
uhh, dude, like, a paperclip worth of antimatter would obliterate a city. also the piramids were not built by aliens Oo.
P.S. Holy s**t!! 10.000 ppl oO
Theorized by morons who don't know what they are talking about. No reputable scientist would support the antimatter theory. The explosion has been studied and reproduced in the laboratory, including the distinctive "butterfly" pattern of fallen trees with the trees at the epicenter still standing. It was either a comet or meteoroid that exploded before it hit the ground. They have calculated the approximate size, speed, and trajectory of the object and detected mineral deposits in tree resin that conclusively disprove an antimatter explosion.
uhh, dude, like, a paperclip worth of antimatter would obliterate a city.
Ah, so we measure mass in stationary now?
actually anti-matter is becoming a very commom theory
Antimatter...? That would obliterate itself instantly when it touched the edge of the atmosphere, there's no way the Tunguska meteor was made of antimatter.
The Bubonic Plague wasn't beated just because of sanitation and medicine. In a win for Darwin, the Asian black rat, which hosted the specific flea that spread the disease, was killed off by the Norwegian brown rat because it was bigger, badder, and needed more food.
Beated? Really? So how come the disease is still around today? Many different types of rodent, including ground squirrels, can be vectors for the disease.
also praia dogs (sorta like american mercats) carry it to
Do you mean prairy dogs? I think everyone knows what a f**king prairy dog is.
I don't know what a prairy dog is. I know what a prairie dog is, though.
*facepalm*
also, i live in baltimore so a crowd of 10 thousand is about average for an orioles game.
now, considering there would probably be about 5,300 females there and about 2-5% would be attractive (according to seinfeld), we could easily be up to 100 thousand within 2 years. seriously. if my sole purpose for existence was to hunt food and fuck, id probably assume i died from whatever and was in heaven.
If only 2-5% were attractive that means they must have gotten around to fermenting stuff awful quick to make the beer goggles.
It explains why fat chicks still exist.
you know, if this teaches us one thing it should be that no matter what happens, humans will survive because we just love fucking that much. literally all other life around us could be dead and we would be too preoccupied by tits and the fact that we could FINALLY use the concept of being the last man on earth.
so thank you penis (no homo), for i know that even though u can be slightly annoying or embarassing at times, we can make it thru an apocolypse together. which is more than we can say for pandas.
@Autumn_2426 - No, this article is not incorrect. Homo erectus did not die out 400,000 years ago. They disappeared about 70k years ago. I think you are confusing it with another offshoot, Homeoheidelbergensis, which fits that date you describe.
This article has taught me one thing: All problems can be solved with sex.
...
And the resulting babies. 8D
Hoorah for sexual intercourse! =D
It's obvious what we should do in response to the Swine Flu, people. Quickly, remove you're pants!
I'm surprised nerdy scientists aren't using that logic to get laid.
jackmack, if you gonna be a dick about it.. penicillin was invented in 1928..
how about you do YOUR research?