What Was The Worst Year In Human History? | Answers With Joe

dear advertising industry, it is April 2022, the pandemic has lasted for two full

year

s and yet I keep hearing the terms unprecedented times, difficult times, new normal in every commercial block of any television show or pre-video ad in the name of good. I humbly ask everyone I write to, for the love of God, to stop doing it. We are all well aware of

what

a clogged toilet this world has become and we don't need to be reminded of it or our anxieties around said Phil Bull bit. be weaponized against us in an attempt to seize our dwindling money reserves and at least understand that weaponizing our anxieties is generally the goal of advertising.

It would be preferable if you could at least try to be original. phrase, approach it a slightly different way, let me make some recommendations instead of saying unprecedented times, maybe something like post-decency

year

s instead of hard times, try excruciating hours instead of the new normal, do you? How about the old and abysmal? These are options. It occurred to me that surely if you put all your young twenty-something editors in a room with a bottle of whiskey and a bag of groceries for a day, they could come up with something that would actually sing, so I'm looking forward to hearing it.

what

you come up with is good luck and happy flibbityflubity oh i'm going to keep that signed in the world these are the times that try the souls of men wrote the american revolutionary thomas payne more than 100 years later, the british statesman joseph chamberlain said that at no time could I remember that I had bought so many new items for anxiety.

It sounds familiar these days, we are constantly reminded that things are bad, we lived in difficult times, unprecedented times, times of the new normal and I'm not here to say we don't have it. Any problems we definitely have, but you know, Billy Joel once said we didn't start the fire. Yeah, I just went from quoting Thomas Paine to Billy Joel. Don't judge my journey, believe it or not, there have been worse times to be alive. and not even close, so today I thought I'd take a look at some of the years throughout

history

that experts consider some of the

worst

years of all time.

Now there's a year that looks to be the

worst

, but let's start by talking about some contenders. Spoiler alert. Pandemics will be a topic on this list. The Black Death began in the 14th century, when a variety of bubonic plagues swept through the Near East, North Africa, and Europe. Imagine it, it's Sicily 1347. A fleet of ships docks in the port of Messina and everyone in the city runs out to see what was on the ship because, well, they didn't have Internet back then, what else are you going to do but when they arrive? ? When they arrive at the dock they find out that the ship had some surprises in store for them and one of those big surprises was that half of the soldiers were dead and of those who were still alive the majority were sick bodies covered in sores called boobos in Latin which It is where it got the name now that they knew about the importance of quarantining at this time, but before they could make the quarantine effective, the plague managed to jump on the spectators and within a year it was already all over the continent and when it arrived . had run its course, about 200 million people had died now, for perspective, 200 million was 30 to 50 percent of the entire European population at the time, like Covid sucks, right?

I mean, we all know someone who has died, at least we all know someone who is very close to someone who has died, but imagine if suddenly half the people you know developed strange swellings and boils all over their bodies, started to bleed and vomit and then die in a day, you'd be pretty scared, well, people in the 13th century were scared. They also get scared, and when people get scared, they tend to gravitate toward some of their worst impulses, like finding a group of people to blame during the Black Death attacks that were perpetrated on Jewish cities and neighborhoods and killed thousands of Jews. .

In fact, it is known as the medieval holocaust. Funny how a disease that kills Christians, Muslims and Jews alike is the fault of all Jews. Yes, the Black Death is as bad as you heard. In fact, it was probably a little worse and reshaped the continent in many ways, but the first outbreak. goes back to that fleet of ships, so 1347 is our first contender for worst year ever, and speaking of ships, our next contender for worst year ever involved a bunch of people who probably had them because the people of the sea called them, the sea.

These people are one of the greatest mysteries of all time, no one seems to really know where they came from, but suddenly, in the 13th century BC. C., they appeared out of nowhere attacking Egypt, Palestine, Cyprus and the Hittites and whoever they were, according to archaeologists, they helped trigger the collapse of the Bronze Age in 1177 BC. I say it helped because they were far from the only problem, in fact they were sort of a result of some of the other problems, like a long drought in the decade before the sea people invasions that brought them to you.

They know how to attack other countries for resources and a famine that had already devastated the empires of the sea peoples struck, making them especially vulnerable. The tomb of Pharaoh Ramses III records a devastating battle with the sea peoples. Egypt won, but they went into decline soon after. But the Hittites got the worst of it all, their capital city was sacked and destroyed, they basically ceased to exist as a people. The victim of other sea people was the Canaanite city of Megiddo. Today there are still ruins on Mount Megiddo from that conflict, although it is not just that many battles were fought over Megiddo over the years.

This is where the word Armageddon comes from. Are you Armageddon? There was also the explosion of the Etera volcano, also known as Santorini these days, probably had a big role to play. Ultimately, the collapse of the Bronze Age was simply a perfect storm of disasters and conflicts that destroyed multiple economic systems at once. Civilization was set back hundreds of years and some empires were lost forever. This all started around 1177 BC, so This is a candidate for the worst year in my

history

. I've mentioned the year without a summer in previous videos, but it was mostly just kind of a huh, isn't that an interesting nugget of information?

Yes, it turns out it was a nice year. The previous year's traumatic event, 1815, saw possibly the most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded

human

history at Mount Tambora in Indonesia. It spewed out 180 billion cubic meters of material and may have killed up to 90,000 local residents, but that was just the beginning of the problem there. There was so much ash from the drum and other eruptions that temperatures around the world plummeted the following summer. It was so cold that people froze to death in summer snowstorms, and I'm not talking about some distant place. Not from the north, this is the continental United States this snow and frost damaged crops and caused famines throughout Europe and China this destabilized society and riots broke out in England that became known as the Blood Bread Riots in India the hottest temperatures cold weather changed nature overturned and caused drought during the monsoon season and then flooding during the dry season, this obviously affected crops, but also had the strange effect of causing a local strain of cholera to mutate and adapt to climate change and This mutation was able to bypass

human

immunity and cause one of the largest cholera pandemics of all time, eventually killing two million people.

Oh, that's a lot of damage for a volcanic eruption, but that's how crazy the Mount Tambora eruption was and that's why 1816 is our contender. Worst year so far on this list, disease and disasters have played the biggest role in making the years the worst, but 1914 is a little different, what made it terrible was politics and war , which is like a spicy policy. The first half of the year is quite calm. As things go, the biggest story really in the first six months was the accidental sinking of the RMS Empress of Ireland, which everyone seems to have forgotten, but 1012 people died, it's the seventh deadliest shipwreck in history, yeah, that was the much of 1914 because in June. 1914 Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria was murdered, his wife Maria was also murdered but that is another bit of news that always seems to be forgotten.

He was murdered by a terrorist or a freedom fighter depending on who was listening to who had the goal of uniting the citizens of Austria. serbia against the austro-hungarian empire austria-hungarian had conquered part of serbia in the previous years this is something that has been simmering for a while but this murder triggered everything and put both countries at war, both called their allies came to help and in a few Within a few months the entire world was neck-deep in what we now call the First World War. Over the next four years, from 1914 to 1918, around 20 million people died and half of them were civilians, tens of millions more.

They were displaced and spread across Europe and this helped spread disease. One particular wave of influenza became especially virulent and spread around the world, infecting 500 million people and eventually killing 50 million people. This was, of course, the Spanish flu, which by the way, didn't really come from Spain, but all the other countries that had some kind of embargo on reporting on it, except Spain, so since they were the ones talking, of Somehow they kept his name, now most of the suffering I'm talking about. What happened here happened in the years after 1914, but it all started from events that happened in 1914, so 1914 is definitely a contender for worst year of all time.

Yes, we will go there for 400 years. 1492 has been celebrated in American culture as the year. When America was discovered, there is a contingent of people on this continent who see it differently and we have all heard how monstrous Christopher Columbus was, we don't need to go over all that, but some of the biggest effects of his discovery were completely unintentional because, if Well millions of Native Americans were killed in the war and enslaved, that's just a drop in the ocean compared to the number of deaths caused by foreign diseases, the indigenous peoples of North and South America had been separated from the rest of the world. for dozens. thousands of years old and had never been exposed to things like smallpox, influenza, or our old friend the bubonic plague, so these diseases ran rampant through the population, killing millions of people.

Various studies have said the population decline is between 50 and 95 percent. and it is estimated that pre-Columbian populations may have reached 112 million, so we could be talking about around 100 million deaths. It's just amazing and the only disease we thought went the other way was syphilis, syphilis sucks, but it doesn't. It doesn't have the same impact, I mean in fact the population of Europe increased by 25 people in 100 years after Columbus and all that growth required resources to sustain it with which the new world was ripe and so began the violent conquest of North America and the serious conquest that drove families. tribes, nations and cultures on the verge of extinction, so no, they don't celebrate Columbus Day and that's why I think 1492 should be a candidate for worst year of all time, but there is still one year that many Scholars say it is worse than all of these, a year that is worse. than the years that began the Black Death, the collapse of the Bronze Age, the endless global winter war and the near genocide of indigenous peoples.

I will begin with an appeal to authority. This theory that I am about to explain is not mine. Medieval scholar Michael McCormack put it. The theory is put forward that the worst year of all time was 536 AD. and, like 1816, the culprit was a massive volcanic eruption, actually possibly two volcanic eruptions, according to some samples and tree ring data, it is believed that there may have been one in Iceland and one in Iceland. El Salvador, regardless, clouds covered the entire planet from Europe to Asia and global temperatures fell significantly and remained low just as in 1816 there were snow storms in the summer, crop failure, widespread famine, in fact we have records of people starving in Ireland and China and all this hunger weakened. population and caused disease outbreaks, one of which would become the first true global pandemic.

This became known as the Plague of Justinian and caused most of its damage throughout the Mediterranean in the Middle East simply by destroying the Byzantine and Sassanian empires. I presentall the booboos that vomited a quick death and wiped out between 40 and 60 of the population. It became known as the Plague of Justinian because Justinian was Byzantine Emperor at the time and decided that while all this was going on it would be a good time to start a great ancient war. He was trying to bring together the western and eastern arms of the Roman empire, but he was super brutal about it.

In fact, according to the court historian, he insisted that plague survivors pay the taxes of deceased neighbors. because of their wars, the famine, the war, the plague, being left without horsemen here, but this was actually not just a Mediterranean problem. Archaeological evidence points to floods that occurred in Peru around the year 540. The volcanic eruption is not known to have had anything to do with this, but there was a large-scale migration of the ancient Moche civilization that abandoned their cities and simply disappeared. history and in Europe the economy collapsed for more than 100 years. It's actually interesting how you know this silver mining apparently leaves traces in the atmosphere and based on ice core samples there is a big gap in the century after 536.

So to review 536 was a year without a summer that started a period of famine, plague, war, climate change and economic upheaval, in other words, hard times, but what was it? In reality, it's like living in the worst year ever, as if they knew they were living in the worst year ever. of all times. You know, as human beings with our limited life expectancy, we have a hard time seeing the historical context of the times in which we live. Most of us just keep our heads down trying to get through another day, but labels like worst and best depend on historical context.

After all, one bad year could start a century of innovation, but I mean, let's face it between the plays and famines and floods there is a high probability that you have been affected in some way in the period after 536. and these are all levels of society. I mentioned Emperor Justinian's court historian before, he lost his wife, children and grandchildren to the plague, but he had no idea what was going on in South America, he didn't even know it existed, whereas today We know all the problems that happen around the world all the time, besides the plague and now the war, so I don't know, I think there might be.

It can be argued that our current communication infrastructure could be causing us to feel more anxiety, confusion and panic than in previous times. In that sense, maybe we are actually experiencing the worst year in our history, but of course. Those same communication technologies are making us more capable of finding solutions to these problems and innovating and adapting, perhaps that is our legacy. The last few years haven't been very good, but you know when we look back in the decades ahead, when our descendants look back in the centuries to come with some historical context, I mean, maybe it's not so bad, maybe these years be seen as the catalyst that sparked a period of radical advancement that set the world on an entirely new course.

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answers

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