When we look at the dangers of our planet, our minds often wander to extreme climates, treacherous landscapes, or deadly creatures. Yet, the true dangers of Earth extend far beyond what meets the eye. 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… To understand it, we need to delve into statistics, historical events, and environmental disasters, uncovering a tapestry of danger that spans from microscopic threats to human-made catastrophes.
Temperature
Let’s begin with temperature… Extreme heat and extreme cold can kill within hours if not minutes. In cold environments, without clothing, the human body, by itself, doesn’t do a very good job of maintaining a high enough temperature to live. Even when you feel comfortable and warm, nearly half of your daily caloric intake is used merely to keep your body’s temperature where it should be. If you took a human and stripped them naked and put them in an environment at 0 degrees Celsius, they would die from having too cold of an internal temperature within about 20 minutes. So it’s sure that we need warmth. But what about the thing we need more immediately than that? It’s oxygen…
Mount Everest
This place on the surface of Earth has incredibly thin air. At the top of Mount Everest, there is only one third as much breathable oxygen as there is down at sea level. Climbers can endure the conditions for short periods of time if they acclimate for months, but if you were to teleport from wherever you are right now directly to the summit of Everest, you would most likely die within only 2-3 minutes because there isn’t enough oxygen.
Mariana Trench
Death would come even more quickly if you were at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. There, you would be submerged under nearly 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 that far down, with that much pressure, your lungs would collapse immediately, and without oxygen, your brain would go unconscious in 15 seconds, and you’d be dead in under 90. You would die pretty much just as quickly as someone who walked into outer space without a suit on.
Molten Lake
But falling into a molten lake of lava is probably the most spectacular way to go. Contrary to what you see in many movies, your body wouldn’t just burn a little bit and slowly sink as if it were in quicksand. Instead, there would be a lot of fireworks. Hot, molten lava is liquid rock, 4 times as hot as your oven can ever get. And the human body is mainly made up of water, which, when exposed to that kind of heat, turns into steam…explosively.
But what if we want to measure danger not by how quickly you would die, but by the actual total number of fatalities caused?
Well, for this, we’re going to need to get much, much smaller. Like, microscopic. In 1918, influenza killed nearly 100 million people, which, at the time, was 3% of the world’s entire population. But places where and when the plague has spread rapidly are even scarier. Between 1347 and 1353, a third of everybody in Europe died because of the bubonic plague, an infection caused by Yersinia Pestis. It’s easy to think of the plague as something from way back in the past, but it is still here. Of course, now we have antibiotics, which can help in most cases, but, believe it or not, in America alone, 5 to 15 people still get the plague every year.
In terms of total fatalities, however, the plague and influenza are nothing compared to the danger caused by plasmodium. It’s a micro-organism that can get into our blood because of mosquito bites and causes Malaria. Across the totality of human history, the number of deaths attributed to Malaria is unbelievable. Researchers like Nobel laureate Baruch Blumberg have studied the history of the human genome and human migration and determined that of all the humans who have ever existed, it is likely that half died from malaria. So, in terms of total fatalities across all of human history, a place where plasmodium could enter the bloodstream because of a mosquito bite, statistically speaking, could be called the most dangerous place on Earth.
