What was the best year?
I’ll take 1977.
Why 536 was 'the worst year to be alive' (2018)
61–70 of 115 posts
Re: Why 536 was 'the worst year to be alive' (2018)
#62And nothing prevents new volcanic explosions from doing this again. How would the northern world deal with this today? Not that well.
Much better than it did back then. Modern farming is much more resilient than farming back then as is proven by how rare famnes are today when they used to be common in the past.
That’s more a function of over production due to subsidies than inherent resilience.
Annual crop production still varies wildly, we just have much larger buffers and better distribution than our ancestors before starvation kicks in so a 12% drop isn’t noticeable for the average consumer. https://www.indexmundi.com/agriculture/?country=us&commodity...
Re: Why 536 was 'the worst year to be alive' (2018)
#63The worst year was probably something more like 70,000 years ago, when the human population fell as low as 2,000 individuals. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2975862.stm
Possibly caused by the Youngest Toba supervolcano eruption:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory
See "Genetic bottleneck hypothesis"
Re: Why 536 was 'the worst year to be alive' (2018)
#64What was the best year? I’ll take 1977.
Because Star Wars was released in theaters?
Re: Why 536 was 'the worst year to be alive' (2018)
#65And nothing prevents new volcanic explosions from doing this again. How would the northern world deal with this today? Not that well.
Much better than it did back then. Modern farming is much more resilient than farming back then as is proven by how rare famnes are today when they used to be common in the past.
I think that it's more of a supply-chain thing than modern farming being inherently more resilient. We can irrigate when it's dry (as long as there's a pipe from water _somewhere_, which isn't always a given). But can't do much about floods. Certain pests can be controlled, but monocultures make for very brittle systems when a pest evolves past the known defenses (see: bananas).
Ultimately, we have transport and distribution across the entire globe, so a crop failure in one place doesn't mean a famine there as we can ship food there (unless you're a poor country, in which case the rest of the world doesn't care much).
Re: Why 536 was 'the worst year to be alive' (2018)
#66The worst year was probably something more like 70,000 years ago, when the human population fell as low as 2,000 individuals. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2975862.stm
It doesn’t mean the population fell that low. It means some sub population that size happened to be the ancestors of today’s humans. Nothing is proven about why the other sub populations aren’t represented today or when they died out. It could have been gradual, after our common ancestor group had successfully outcompeted the other groups.
Re: Why 536 was 'the worst year to be alive' (2018)
#67We are just one volcano eruption away from global cooling.
*temporary global cooling.
Re: Why 536 was 'the worst year to be alive' (2018)
#68What was the best year? I’ll take 1977.
Because Star Wars was released in theaters?
The Apple II, Tandy TRS-80, Commodore PET, and Atari VCS/2600 were released.
Jimmy Carter pardoned hundreds of thousands of draft dodgers.
Fleetwood Mac released Rumours.
Howard Stern began broadcasting.
Voyager 2 probe was launched.
Elvis Presley, Charlie Chaplin, and Bing Crosby died.
Re: Why 536 was 'the worst year to be alive' (2018)
#69*in Europe and Asia. I kind of weep for the loss of oral and comprehensible physical histories in the Americas and Africa, since scholarship like this shows that one can combine those with unlikely natural records and scientific analysis to triangulate on remarkable narratives about our past.
If 536 was particularly bad due to a massive volcanic eruption blotting out the sun, they can't have been having a great time in the Americas or Africa either. 536 would have stiff competition from every year of the century following 1492 for the title of "Worst Year to be Alive in the Americas".
Couldn't the Coriolis effect basically keep it mostly to the Northern hemisphere? There would be secondary effects to the Southern hemisphere due to cooling in the North (e.g. ocean and atmospheric currents), but depending on where the volcano was, the direct cooling might have been localised.
Re: Why 536 was 'the worst year to be alive' (2018)
#70What was the best year? I’ll take 1977.
Definitely the best year for music.
Television, Kraftwerk, Eno, Bowie, Iggy Pop, the Clash, Fleetwood Mac, and The Ramones all released great albums