Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. 93% of all the 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
where is the most dangerous place on Earth? Ignoring freak occurrances, where is the most
persistently perilous place on the surface of our planet?
Well, let's being 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. It just takes too much
work. 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. We need warmth. But one thing we need more immediately than that is oxygen.
And that brings us to the summit of 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.
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.
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.
There's a fantastic video right here on YouTube where a guy throws a bag of organic material
containing a lot of moisture into hot lava. It doesn't just sink in, it causes a miniature
eruption. I highly suggest you go watch it.
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 this guy: 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 blood stream because of a mosquito bite, statistically speaking, could
be called the most dangerous place on Earth.
But let's switch gears for a moment and talk about places that are dangerous not because
of Earth, or Earth's creatures, well, actually, just one specific creature: us.
La Oroya is a mining town in Peru where the murder rate is low but pollution is high.
The town's smelter emits pollution into the air and temperature inversions in the atmosphere
above the town trap gasses within, causing the town to have 85 times more arsenic in
its air than is deemed safe.
But that's nothing compared to Lake Karachay in Russia. It was named the most polluted
spot on Earth by the World Watch Institute on Nuclear Waste.
The lake contains so many radioactive pollutants that you can receive a lethal dose of radiation
merely by standing for one hour near certain parts of the lake.
The Global Peace Index ranks countries by how safe they are. 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 for the highest murder rate you'll have to go to Juarez, Mexico, where out of every
1 million inhabitants, each year 1,477 of them are murdered.
I've always found it amazing just how many serial killers Miami seems to have on the
show "Dexter." But Miami is a big city and so despite all those serial killers, it's
murder rate in the show is not the highest of any fictional town from a TV show. That
honor goes to Cabot Cove, the town where "Murder She Wrote" occurred. An analysis of "Murder
She Wrote" episodes revealed 274 murders, but a population in the town of only 3,500,
making Cabot Cove's murder rate 1,490 per million inhabitants.
Until recently that number was unmatched by reality, but last year, the city of San Pedro
Sula in Honduras reported a murder rate of 1,588 murders per million inhabitants.
Let's conclude by revisiting pollution, specifically the Chernobyl accident, and a certain oxymoronic
danger. For 10 days in 1986, radioactive isotopes spilled out of a blazing reactor core, forcing
mass evacuations. It's more than 25 years later now and many parts of the exclusion
zone remain incredibly lethal. But without humans there, many parts of the exclusion
zone have seen wildlife flourish, especially endangered species which can go to the exclusion
zone, live, reproduce, and be safe...from us. We managed to ruin a place to the point
at which it endangered our lives and we had to leave and in doing so we left parts
of it a little bit safer for other forms of life.
You can read more about all of these topics by following links down in the description
below.
Keep learning.
And as always,
thanks for watching.