What’s The Most Dangerous Place on Earth?

Hey, Vsauce.  Michael here.  93% of all the humans who have ever lived are dead.  For everyperson alive right now, there are 15 people who are no longer alive.  The Earth is dangerous. . . butwhere is the most dangerous place on Earth? Ignoring freak occurrances, where is the mostpersistently 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’tdo a very good job of maintaining a high enough temperature to live.  It just takes too muchwork.  Even when you feel comfortable and warm, nearly half of your daily caloric intake isused 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 degreesCelsius, they would die from having too cold of an internal temperature within about 20minutes.  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 Earthhas incredibly thin air.  At the top of Mount Everest there is only one third as much breathable oxygenas 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 ofEverest, you would most likely die within only 2-3 minutes because there isn’t enoughoxygen. 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 thepressure 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, withthat much pressure, your lungs would collapse immediately, and without oxygen your brainwould 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 withouta suit on. But falling into a molten lake of lava is probably the most spectacular way to go.  Contraryto what you see in many movies, your body wouldn’t just burn a little bit and slowlysink as if it were in quicksand.  Instead, there would be a lot of fireworks.  Hot, moltenlava is liquid rock, 4 times as hot as your oven can ever get.  And the human body ismainly 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 materialcontaining a lot of moisture into hot lava.  It doesn’t just sink in, it causes a miniatureeruption.  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 actualtotal number of fatalities caused.  Well, for this, we’re going to need to get much, muchsmaller.  Like, microscopic. In 1918, influenza killed nearly 100 million people, which, at the time, was 3% of theworld’s entire population.  But places where and when the plague has spread rapidly areeven scarier.  Between 1347 and 1353, a third of everybody in Europe died because of thebubonic 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 stillhere.  Of course, now we have antibiotics, which can help in most cases, but, believe it ornot, 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 comparedto the danger caused by this guy: plasmodium. It’s a micro-organism that can get into our blood because of mosquito bites, and causesMalaria.  Across the totality of human history, the number of deaths attributed to Malariais unbelievable.  Researchers like Nobel laureate Baruch Blumberg have studied the history ofthe human genome and human migration, and determined that of all the humans who haveever existed, it is likely that half died from malaria. So, in terms of total fatalities across all of human history, a place where plasmodiumcould enter the blood stream because of a mosquito bite, statistically speaking, couldbe called the most dangerous place on Earth. But let’s switch gears for a moment and talk about places that are dangerous not becauseof 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 atmosphereabove the town trap gasses within, causing the town to have 85 times more arsenic inits air than is deemed safe. But that’s nothing compared to Lake Karachay in Russia.  It was named the most pollutedspot 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 radiationmerely 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 anumber of factors including crime and political corruption.  The safest country, accordingto 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 every1 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 theshow “Dexter. ” But Miami is a big city and so despite all those serial killers, it’smurder rate in the show is not the highest of any fictional town from a TV show.  Thathonor goes to Cabot Cove, the town where “Murder She Wrote” occurred.  An analysis of “MurderShe 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 PedroSula 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 oxymoronicdanger.  For 10 days in 1986, radioactive isotopes spilled out of a blazing reactor core, forcingmass evacuations.  It’s more than 25 years later now and many parts of the exclusionzone remain incredibly lethal.  But without humans there, many parts of the exclusionzone have seen wildlife flourish, especially endangered species which can go to the exclusionzone, live, reproduce, and be safe. . . from us.  We managed to ruin a place to the pointat which it endangered our lives and we had to leave and in doing so we left partsof 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 descriptionbelow. Keep learning. And as always,thanks for watching.

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