A truly terrifyingly Intrrsting Times the World Almost Ended For Humankind! Sometimes us humans don’t quite realize just how fragile our lives are. In fact, it’s quite shocking how often we come close to wiping ourselves out on a daily and still here we are , still kicking , still surviving still Thriving ,The 'Apex Predetors'.

Even today we struggle to deal with potentially catastrophic situations, such as the rapidly warming global temperatures caused by climate change, or the possibility of a second cold war between the United States and North Korea or Russia Nuking Ukraine , Suicide mass bombers up North , Religious and Tribal Wars, War of the Chemicals .... Lol we are a sitting mine

Despite this, humanity has prevailed time and time again, despite many setbacks. We’ve lived through wars, plagues, and natural disasters. For the most part, we’ve come out the other side mostly unscathed.

That doesn’t mean we haven’t had our fair share of extremely close calls. History shows us there were plenty of times the end of days has come knocking on our door. So far we’ve been pretty lucky. However, here are 15 times the world almost ended, and probably would have if the situations were slightly different.
Budatum, Xmuslim,CAPSLOCKED,hopefullandlord,Lordreed,Dominique,Puvo,Zimri, peaceful, Dominatrix ,Starbuck .Dyt lamanii22

NORAD Computer Chip Malfunction

The Cold War lasted from 1945 to 1990 and was a period of time during which it seemed the whole world was on a hair trigger. Of course, nothing exemplifies this more than the numerous nuclear scares that took place when tensions reached its peak.

One of these such nuclear scares took place on June 3rd, 1980. At 3 AM, the president’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brezezinski, received an emergency phone call warning him that a large US-bound nuclear strike was imminent.

The entire country’s defenses were on red alert. In minutes, Air Force bombers were prepared for taking off and nuclear missiles were primed for launch.

Luckily the attack was quickly discovered to be a false alarm and the counterattack was called off before any serious damage was done. It was only a short while later that a culprit was discovered; a single malfunctioning 46 cent computer chip at the pentagon.

The Eruption of Thera


One of the largest volcanic events on Earth in recorded history was the Minoan Eruption. It took place near the Aegean island of Thera, during the mid-second millennium BCE.

The eruption was estimated to have had the destructive force of 40 atomic bombs exploding in unison. Interesting, the eruption was 100 times more powerful than the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that devastated Pompeii in 79 CE.

Needless to say, it became one of the defining catalysts in the demise of the early Bronze Age civilization of the Minoans.

The eruption of Thera obliterated the city of Akrotiri, present-day Santorini, and caused earthquakes and tsunamis that nearly destroyed the surrounding islands, including the widely populated island of Crete.

It also created a massive cloud of volcanic ash that settled across Europe and altered global weather patterns in the years that followed.

Asteroid 2018 GE3


The thought of a giant asteroid crashing into our little planet and sending us the way of the dinosaurs is terrifying. What is even more terrifying is that it nearly became a reality on April 14, 2018.

First noticed by the Catalina Sky Survey, Asteroid 2018 GE3 shot past Earth only a few hours after its detection. At its the closest point, the asteroid was only 192,317 kilometers from Earth, less than half the distance between Earth and the Moon.

With an estimated diameter of 48–110 meters, this asteroid is currently believed to be the largest known object to have past so close to us. There is no doubt that had it made contact with the earth, the devastation would have been astronomical.

The Carrington Event




In the 1800s, many telegraph operators were familiar with telegraph lines going down due to thunderstorms and other electromagnetic disturbances. However, one killer storm took them completely by surprise!

Between August 28th to September 2nd, the earth experienced its wildest geomagnetic storms in recorded history. Communication around the world was wiped out causing numerous electrical failures and accidents.

These storms were discovered to be the cause of a huge solar flare known as a Coronal Mass Ejection or CME. Fortunately, the world bounced back after a couple of days without telegraphs and some weird weather.

Interestingly, if the same geomagnetic storm took place now, our electrically dependent and interconnected society would suffer severe and possibly apocalyptic repercussions.

Reston, Virginia Ebola Crisis




The Ebola virus continues to strike fear into all who hear about it, and with good reason. This highly contagious disease is nearly impossible to contain, and vaccines have been found to have varying levels of success. Unfortunately, those left untreated often wind up dead less than two weeks following the first symptoms.

So far, the worst outbreaks have yet to reach any major population centers. However, that nearly changed in 1989 when a number of macaque monkeys imported from the Philippines to the US were found to have the virus.

The monkeys were sent to Reston, Virginia for lab testing and all of them died suddenly from a suspiciously Ebola-like virus. To make matters worse, blood samples from a number of researchers who had come in contact with the monkeys also tested positive for the virus.

Luckily, after days of panic, it was concluded that the particular strain of Ebola that killed the monkeys didn’t pose any harm to humans. However, the event did illustrate just how easily wide-scale outbreaks could happen, as well as demonstrate just how unprepared we were at the time to deal with such a pandemic.

SAC-NORAD Communications Error



If you were planning a nuclear attack on the United States, the first place you’d probably want to hit would be the agency in charge of overseeing the country’s defense against said attack, as well as responsible for carrying out a nuclear counterattack.

This is what the US Strategic Air Command thought as well when, on the 24th of November in 1961, they found that all communication with NORAD had gone dead. This meant there was no way for them to know ahead of time if a nuclear attack was on its way.

The SAC, fearful that missiles were coming toward the US, immediately sounded the alarms and prepared to launch a full-scale nuclear counterattack on the USSR.

Luckily the final orders were never given, and it was quickly discovered that the communications were down due to a malfunction at a single relay station in Colorado.

Suez Crisis


On November 5, 1956, during the Suez crisis, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) received warnings that seemed to indicate that a large-scale Soviet attack was under way: a Soviet fleet was moving from the Black Sea to a more aggressive posture in the Aegean, 100 Soviet MiGs were detected flying over Syria, a British bomber had just been shot down in Syria, and unidentified aircraft were in flight over Turkey, causing the Turkish air force to go on high alert. All signs pointed to the ominous, except that, not long after, each of the four warnings was found to have a completely innocent explanation. The Soviet fleet was conducting routine exercises, the MiGs were part of a normal escort—whose size had been exaggerated—for the president of Syria, the British bomber had made an emergency landing after mechanical problems, and, last but not least, the unidentified planes over Turkey? Well, they turned out to be a large flock of swans.

When Fidgety don't blow a horn




On October 25, 1962, again during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a security guard at an air base in Duluth, Minnesota, saw a shadowy figure scaling one of the fences enclosing the base. He shot at the intruder and activated an intruder alarm, automatically setting off intruder alarms at neighboring bases. However, at the Volk Field air base in Wisconsin, the Klaxon loudspeaker had been wired incorrectly, and instead sounded an alarm ordering F-106A interceptors armed with nuclear missiles to take off. The pilots assumed that a full-scale nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union had begun. The planes were about to take off when a car from the air traffic control tower raced down the tarmac and signaled the planes to stop. The intruder in Duluth had finally been identified: it was a bear.

The unstoppable Super Flu



As Jeff Goldblum once said; “your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

While Dr. Yoshihiro Kawaoka wasn’t trying to bring back long extinct reptiles, his studies of the H5N1 bird flu in 2011 certainly raised some serious questions about how far some people are willing to go in the name of science.

By modifying strains of the avian influenza virus, Kawaoka attempted to create a new hybrid strain of the virus that could bypass the human immune system. The scariest part was just how close he had gotten before the study was shut down due to it being a threat to the health of the entire human race.

Kawaoka had managed to create a virus that could be transmitted via the air between test animals held in separate cages and was believed to be only a single mutation away from being so deadly to humans that the body literally had no way to combat it.

The Bonilla Comet


When Mexican astronomer José Bonilla claimed to have observed over 400 dark unidentified flying objects cross in front of the sun while observing sunspots on August 12th, 1883, most of the scientific community wrote it off as a hoax or a high-flying flock of Geese.

At the time, that seemed to be the end of the story. Then, in 2011, a new study into Bonilla’s observations and the pictures he had taken revealed something terrifying.

The dark unidentified objects were not, in fact, a bunch of flying birds at all. As it turns out, they were most likely fragments of a billion-ton comet that passed within 8000 kilometers of Earth, less than the width of Russia!

Genetically Altered Bacteria


The mid-1990s was a time of many scientific advancements around the world. That being said, for every new computer or more eco-friendly car, there was a failure. One such failure could have had astronomical effects on the world, and it came in one of the smallest packages imaginable; bacteria.

Genetically modified bacteria, to be precise. Created by a German biotech company, Klebsiella Planticola was a supposedly helpful microbe that would convert dead plant matter into ethanol, which could then be used in everything from powering our cars to creating drinkable alcohol.

The scientists were quite pleased with the success of their project, and by 1994 they had a working strain of the bacteria that was ready for field testing.

Fortunately, independent testing at Oregon State University found something that the company producing it had somehow missed. They discovered that K. Planticola didn’t wait until plants had died to begin fermenting them, and every plant it was tested on died soon after.

To make things worse, K. Planticola was based on a bacteria present in the decomposition of every type of terrestrial plant on Earth, meaning that it could potentially cause a mass plant extinction that could devastate farms and forests all over the world.

Needless to say, the field tests were called off and all plans to unintentionally create a global plant super plague were put on hold indefinitely.

The Black Death




One of the most devastating global epidemics in history was the Black Death. It was the name of given to a massive outbreak of the bubonic plague that struck in Europe and Asia in the mid 14th century.

The outbreak was believed to have started in China before slowly making its way west via fleas and diseased rats, leaving death and suffering in its wake.

Europe had heard of the so-called “Great Pestilence” in the years leading up to its introduction to the western world, however, it didn’t prepare them for what was to come.

In 1347, a number of ships from the Black Sea arrived in the Sicilian port of Messina with most of the sailors on board dead. Those that survived were gravely ill and covered in oozing boils.

The ships were quickly sent out of the harbor, but the damage had already been done. The plague quickly washed over the rest of Europe, wiping out close to a third of its population by the year 1951.

By the time the Black Death finally subsided it was believed to have caused the deaths of as many as 75 million to 200 million people in Eurasia and the rest of the world.

2012 Coronal Mass Ejection



Remember how we said that the Carrington Event would have been catastrophic in today’s technology-dependent world? Because that’s almost exactly what happened in 2012. On July 23rd, a huge Coronal Mass Ejection easily as powerful as the 1859 solar superstorm came speeding in Earth’s direction.

Luckily for us, it missed, but only barely. The ejection passed Earth by less than a week, and many scientists and economists estimate that the cost of damages had it hit Earth could have exceeded 2 trillion dollars and taken decades of recovery time.

Spanish Flu



The Spanish Flu is widely considered to be one of, if not the worst, global epidemics to strike the human race. Starting around January of 1918, the disease quickly swept across the world, infecting over a third of the world’s population in just over a year. In a matter of months, the virus had caused the average life expectancy of Americans to drop by 12 years.

Aided by the first World War, the flu spread quickly across Europe. Fueled by close contact and unsanitary conditions, entire troops were taken down by it.

The flu was not limited to Europe and spread with vicious intent. When the pandemic had subsided, cases of the Spanish flu had been found even on isolated islands in the Arctic and South Pacific.

By the end of the epidemic, an estimated 500 million individuals had been infected and more the 50 million killed. Roughly three to five percent of the world’s population perished.

Norwegian Rocket Incident


When Russian radar systems detected a missile heading over their northern border in 1995, their first thought was that the United States had sent a preemptive nuclear attack. With no time to lose, they quickly sounded the high alert and prepared for war. Russian commanders waited with bated breath for the launch commands.

Luckily, before the order could be given, Russian observers watched the presumed missile drop harmlessly into the Arctic Ocean.To date, the incident has been the only time that the Russians had brought out the so-called “nuclear briefcase.”

The device that in the hands of the Russian president can send the command to send thousands of nuclear missiles towards their enemy. An hour later, Russia learned the rocket was launched by a team of American and Norwegian scientists as part of an experiment studying the Northern Lights.

President Boris Yeltsin later commented that this was the closest Russia had ever been to staging an attack the United States.

Let me sound unscientific and religious (stupid), if Asteriod 2018 had made contact with the Earth, we would have picked its particles.

Maybe God wanted to bless us with something more than gold. Hallelujah

Veggieseedies:
Let me sound unscientific and religious (stupid), if Asteriod 2018 had made contact with the Earth, we would have picked its particles.

Maybe God wanted to bless us with something more than gold. Hallelujah

seriously....

it is definitely a coincidence that i had an end-of-the-world dream last night and I am seeing this post on nairaland

We might not be lucky next time

Cc: Righteousness89, Uprightness100, Holinessforever

Somebody is holding this world together. Things will not just happen by chance. The end cannot just come arbitrarily

Nice one Op
Is this "explorer"

Summary:


The world will come to an 3nd due to activities from man or nature.

Secondly, make America and Russia dey calm down....

Small thing they have pointed guns towards each other direction

Hmm last last the world will end someday and somehow

New creatures will then emerge in the face of the earth.

Watched a movie where a comet that would've been avoided hit the earth due to the selfishness of man, some people took a space ship to another planet only to be eaten by some beautiful but mysterious animals over there.

That movie really defines what might happen to our dear earth, someone should remind me the movie name please.

USA and Russia suspecting each other sha....

honestmike:
it is definitely a coincidence that i had an end-of-the-world dream last night and I am seeing this post on nairaland

yeah random coincidence

pointblank247:
Nice one Op
Is this "explorer"

Sourcerer ,The death guy

vincentjk:
Hmm last last the world will end someday and somehow

New creatures will then emerge in the face of the earth.

Watched a movie where a comet that would've been avoided hit the earth due to the selfishness of man, some people took a space ship to another planet only to be eaten by some beautiful but mysterious animals over there.

That movie really defines what might happen to our dear earth, someone should remind me the movie name please.

don't look up.

It's a satirical representation of current issue with earth. Global warming

This


Spanish flu.


So NORAD has been mentioned three times!

With all these listed attempts, think it's safe to say that the Earth is an elastic/resilient entity. Nukes or volcanic/tectonic events may not kill it, but deforestation for the purpose of urbanisation surely will.