What's The Most Dangerous Place on Earth?

Hello, Vsauce. Miguel here. 93% of all humans who have ever lived are dead. For every person alive right now, there are 15 people who are no longer alive. The Earth is

dangerous

... but

what

is the

most

dangerous

place

on Earth? Ignoring strange events,

what

is the

most

persistently dangerous

place

on our planet's surface? Well, let's get to the temperature. Extreme heat and cold can kill in a matter of hours, if not minutes. In cold environments, without clothing, the human body, on its own, does not do a very good job of maintaining a temperature high enough for life. It just takes too much work.

Even when you feel comfortable and warm, almost half of your daily caloric intake is used simply to keep your body temperature where it should be. If you took a human, stripped them naked, and put them in a 0 degree Celsius environment, they would die from having too cold an internal temperature in about 20 minutes. We need warmth. But something we need most immediately is oxygen. And that brings us to the top of Mount Everest. This place on the Earth's surface has incredibly thin air. At the top of Mount Everest there is only a third of the breathable oxygen there is at sea level.

Climbers can withstand the conditions for short periods of time if they acclimatize for months, but if you were to teleport from wherever you are now directly to the top of Everest, you would most likely die in just 2 or 3 minutes because there isn't enough. oxygen. Death would come even faster if you were at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. There, you would be submerged under almost 7 miles of water, about 11 km, causing the pressure around your body to exceed 15,000 pounds per square inch. At normal swimming depths, you can always hold your breath, but at that depth, with that much pressure, your lungs would collapse immediately and, without oxygen, your brain would be unconscious within 15 seconds and you would be dead in less than 90.

You would die almost as quickly as someone who would walk into outer space without a suit. But falling into a lake of molten lava is probably the most spectacular way to do it. Contrary to what you see in many movies, your body would not burn a little and slowly sink as if in quicksand. Instead, there would be a lot of fireworks. Hot, molten lava is liquid rock, 4 times hotter than an oven can get. And the human body is composed primarily of water, which, when exposed to that kind of heat, turns into steam...explosively. There's a fantastic video here on YouTube where a guy throws a bag of organic material containing a lot of moisture into hot lava.

Not only does it sink, it causes a miniature eruption. I highly recommend you go see it. But what if we want to measure danger not by how quickly you would die, but by the actual total number of deaths caused? Well, for this we're going to need to get much, much smaller. Like microscopic. In 1918, influenza killed almost 100 million people, which at the time represented 3% of the world's population. But the places where and when the plague has spread rapidly are even more terrifying. Between 1347 and 1353, a third of the European population died from the bubonic plague, an infection caused by Yersinia Pestis.

It's easy to think of the plague as something that goes back in time, but it's still here. Of course, we now have antibiotics, which can help in most cases, but, believe it or not, in the United States alone, between 5 and 15 people still contract the plague each year. However, in terms of fatalities, plague and flu are nothing compared to the danger caused by this type: plasmodium. It is a microorganism that can reach our blood due to mosquito bites and causes malaria. Throughout human history, the number of deaths attributed to malaria is incredible. Researchers such as Nobel laureate Baruch Blumberg have studied the history of the human genome and human migration, and have determined that of all humans who have ever existed, half have likely died of malaria.

So, in terms of total deaths throughout all of human history, a place where plasmodium could enter the bloodstream due to a mosquito bite, statistically speaking, could be considered the most dangerous place on Earth. But let's switch gears for a moment and talk about places that are dangerous not because of the Earth or the creatures of the Earth, well, actually, just because of one specific creature: us. La Oroya is a mining town in Peru where the homicide rate is low but pollution is high. The city's smelter emits pollution into the air, and temperature inversions in the atmosphere above the city trap gases inside, causing the city to have 85 times more arsenic in the air than is considered safe.

But that's nothing compared to Lake Karachay in Russia. It was named the most contaminated place on Earth by the World Watch Nuclear Waste Institute. The lake contains so many radioactive contaminants that you can receive a lethal dose of radiation just by spending an hour near certain parts of the lake. The Global Peace Index classifies countries according to their level of security. It takes into account a number of factors, including crime and political corruption. The safest country, according to the Index, is Iceland. And the least safe is Somalia. But to know the highest homicide rate you will have to go to Juárez, Mexico, where of every million inhabitants, 1,477 are murdered every year.

I've always found it surprising how many serial killers Miami seems to have on the show "Dexter." But Miami is a big city, and despite all those serial killers, its murder rate on the show isn't the highest of any fictional city on a TV show. That honor goes to Cabot Cove, the town where "Murder She Wrote" occurred. An analysis of the "Murder She Wrote" episodes revealed 274 murders, but a city population of only 3,500, making Cabot Cove's murder rate 1,490 per million residents. Until recently that figure did not correspond to reality, but last year, the city of San Pedro Sula in Honduras reported a homicide rate of 1,588 murders per million inhabitants.

Let us conclude by revisiting pollution, specifically the Chernobyl accident, and a certain contradictory danger. For 10 days in 1986, radioactive isotopes leaked from the core of a burning reactor, forcing mass evacuations. More than 25 years have passed and many parts of the exclusion zone remain incredibly deadly. But without humans there, many parts of the exclusion zone have seen wildlife flourish, especially endangered species that can come to the exclusion zone, live, reproduce and be safe... from us. We managed to ruin a place to the point of endangering our lives and had to leave and in doing so we left parts of it a little safer for other life forms.

You can read more about all of these topics by following the links in the description below. Keep learning. And as always, thanks for watching.