These 15 times the world almost ended will shock you to the core, though they thankfully, but narrowly, missed the Earth's core. Armageddon was almost a real-life event both in the olden days of yore and in the 21st century. These near apocalypses, whether due to mechanical failures, miscommunications, natural disasters, and barely avoided cosmic and nuclear events, almost ruined everyone's day at some point in the history of the Earth.
Remember how the Mayan calendar supposedly indicated that the apocalypse was headed for us in 2012? Well, they weren't that far off. As it turns out, a solar superstorm in the summer of 2012 narrowly missed blasting planet Earth. That would've sucked. And that's just one of the many times humanity and all of Earth's creatures have escaped extinction at the last second.
In fact, our planet is no stranger to "the end is near" concerns or real apocalypses, and it wasn't just Y2K. The Black Plague possibly killed as many as 200 million human beings, and you don't even want to hear the numbers when it comes to the Spanish Flu pandemic (that bad boy hit in the early 1900s). From comets, to volcanoes, to accidentally announcing nuclear war and setting off rockets, these are the times that the End of Days was almost just around the corner.
15 Times the World Was Almost Completely Destroyed,
Cuban Missile Crises
The closest we ever came to completely annihilating human existence came during a combination of missteps in 1962. On October 25, an American air base guard activated the wrong alarm, which signaled WWIII from Wisconsin. The next day, America accidentally launched two missile tests in Russia because they had been scheduled before the Crisis began.
Simulation Confused With Reality
The movie War Games is a lot like what actually happened in 1979. The Pentagon thought 1,000 Soviet nukes were headed towards America when an Air Force officer checked out a simulation of exactly that. His computer happened to be hooked up to the mainframe in government control rooms, and the U.S. got ready to launch.
The Black Plague
One of the worst pandemics in the history of civilization, up to 200 million people were killed by the plague. The blame can likely be placed at the feet of Asian rat fleas and black rats that traveled with merchants. Not only was Europe's total population nearly cut in half, but the world population as a whole diminished substantially in the 14th century.
Spanish Flu
The 1918 influenza pandemic infected 500 million people and killed 3-5% of the entire globe's population. One of history's deadliest natural disasters killed 10-40% of those it infected and may have taken the lives of 25 million individuals over just 25 weeks. It topped the charts, killing more humans in one year than the Black Death in 100 years and killed more in 24 weeks than AIDS did in 24 years.
Yeltsin Almost Nukes America
The year was 1995 and the Cold War was over. But when Russia saw what looked exactly like a U.S. ballistic missile on its way, President Boris Yeltsin opened a briefcase with the nuclear codes for the first time. With ten minutes to figure out whether or not to nuke America, Yeltsin ultimately (and fortunately) got word that it was a science experiment he hadn't been warned about.
1950 Broken Arrow
"Broken Arrow" is a code name for a nuclear incident, which is exactly what happened in August of 1950. During the Korean War, a B-29 headed for Guam crashed at a California Air Base. The result? 5,000 pounds of explosives were detonated, 19 people died, and if the bomb had been armed with its fissile capsule, which thankfully it wasn't, potentially 100,000 people could have been killed.
1961 Faded Giant
Idaho Falls almost blew itself up when an SL-1 reactor went off and caused a nuclear disaster. Emergency officials could not go into the control room because of absurdly high radiation levels. When they did, they found three victims, one of whom was pinned to the ceiling and impaled by a control rod due to the explosion.
NORAD Says Armageddon Is Nigh
In the winter of 1971, a teletype operator stuffed the wrong tape into an alert system machine. So, instead of saying "this is only a test," it said that the president of the United States was about to broadcast an emergency alert. 45 terrifying minutes later, NORAD realized their error, but one radio DJ said they were considering billing the agency "for three sets of underwear."
2012 Solar Storm
In the summer of 2012, a massive cloud of hot plasma erupted from the sun and went through our planet's orbit. Had it happened a single week earlier, Earth would have had GPS errors, radio blackouts, and fried satellites. In fact, resulting power blackouts would have been so bad that most of us would have had trouble flushing the toilet.
Comet Hyakutake
The Great Comet of 1996 was great in size but the opposite of great in potential effect. It was the closest approach to Earth of any comet in the previous 200 years. Amateur astronomer Yuji Hyakutake saw it approaching us, leading astronomers to notice X-rays being emitted from a comet for the first time ever.