5 Times The World Almost Ended (But Didn't)

Apocalypses have long been the subject of human fascination, providing fodder for everything from entire religions to many an apocalypse-themed film. Yet there have been real-life times where our world has been almost entirely annihilated.

Prehistory has been marred by five catastrophic mass extinctions, with the most devastating being the Permian extinction. This cataclysm, which occurred around 250 million years ago and may have been caused by widespread volcanic eruptions that triggered extreme global warming, is believed to have eradicated 94% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial species from the planet.

In more recent memory, there have been times when the world has come quite close to total destruction—but, fortunately for us all, has narrowly avoided disaster. Read about some of recent history's closest calls below.

1. The 1918 Influenza Pandemic
2. The Cuban Missile Crisis (1962)
3. The War Game Simulation Almost Mistaken For Reality (1979)
4. A U.S. Missile Strike False Alarm (1983)
5. A Solar Storm Close Call (2012)

The 1918 Influenza Pandemic

The 1918 influenza pandemic occurred at the tail end of World War I, and saw a deadly outbreak of the H1N1 subtype of the influenza A virus. The pandemic rapidly spread around the world and is thought to have infected over 500 million people, which at the time was about one-third of the world’s population. At least 50 million people are believed to have died, with some experts placing the number closer to 100 million. 

The Cuban Missile Crisis (1962)

Nuclear war was a constant, looming threat during the Cold War, which lasted from around 1947 to 1991 and saw the United States and the Soviet Union vying for political dominance—while each possessed extraordinary arsenals of nuclear weapons.

The period’s testiest moment came during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when the Soviet Union began installing ballistic missiles in Cuba, where they could easily hit the United States if launched. By October of that year, U.S. spy planes had identified a Soviet ballistic missile on a Cuban launching site. 

In response, then-U.S. President John F. Kennedy placed a naval "quarantine," or blockade, around Cuba. Tense messages were exchanged between Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, and at one point, nuclear war seemed dangerously close. Eventually, Khrushchev agreed to halt the missile shipments in exchange for the United States’ promise that it would never invade Cuba and that it would remove its missiles from Turkey.

The War Game Simulation Almost Mistaken For Reality (1979)

On November 9, 1979, U.S. national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski awoke to a phone call telling him that 250 Soviet Union missiles were headed towards America. A second call placed the number at 2,200 missiles. Immediately, Brzezinski began planning a counterattack—but fortunately, he hesitated, and soon received another phone call informing him that other systems had not picked up signs of the attack.

It turned out that a training tape containing a simulated war game had accidentally been uploaded to the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD)'s main systems, which had mistaken it for reality—with nearly devastating consequences.

A U.S. Missile Strike False Alarm (1983)

On September 26, 1983, a Soviet duty officer named Stanislav Petrov spotted an alert warning of an incoming U.S. missile strike. Protocol would have been to alert his superiors, who likely would have sent a flurry of nuclear bombs right back towards America, but Petrov noticed a few incongruencies and made the decision not to report the alert immediately. His hesitation may have saved the world.

“There was no rule about how long we were allowed to think before we reported a strike. But we knew that every second of procrastination took away valuable time; that the Soviet Union's military and political leadership needed to be informed without delay,” Petrov told the BBC. “All I had to do was to reach for the phone; to raise the direct line to our top commanders—but I couldn't move. I felt like I was sitting on a hot frying pan.”

Eventually, enough time passed for it to become clear that no missile strike was incoming. It turned out that satellites had mistakenly identified sunlight on clouds as incoming missiles.

A Solar Storm Close Call (2012)

In 2012, many people around the world were already preparing for catastrophe thanks to a misinterpretation of the Mayan Calendar. Yet the world really did experience a close call in July of that year, when a massive solar storm occurred that could have wreaked havoc on the planet had it happened just nine days earlier.

Had the storm taken place at the wrong time, it could have destroyed satellite systems and torched electrical transformers, among other disastrous events. The solar storm apparently was about as intense as the Carrington Event, another severe solar storm that took place in 1859—only it would have been much worse thanks to its effects on 21st-century technology, had time not been in our planet’s favor.

Read More Like This:

Add us as a preferred source on Google

Follow