4 Times the World Almost Ended

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The end of the world is not normally at the forefront of people’s minds. Armageddon is a distant thing that will take place long after they are dead, or it is something that will come with a great deal of fanfare and warning. The apocalypse is reserved for hellfire and brimstone sermons or cheesy but oh-so-enjoyable disaster blockbusters during the summer. The end is not something that people think about in their everyday lives. In fact, most people do not really consider the end of the world or the implications of that phrase until the world has very nearly ended. This has happened more than most people like to consider.

It is said that God makes it a special point to look out for fools and helpless things. Our bright blue planet and oblivious population of humans at times qualifies as both. In those cases, it seems that God has to intervene to make sure that potentially apocalyptic catastrophes do not actually level the planet. Here are four times the world almost ended but managed to scrape by on luck and divine intervention.

Asteroid 2018 GE3

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Death from above is a popular plotline in disaster movies. What no one likes to consider is that giant flaming pieces of rock dropping out of the sky are a very real risk. Asteroids did not stop zipping by Earth after the dinosaurs died out. Instead, they continue to blow past the Blue Planet and her vulnerable lifeforms like they are playing a demented game of dodgeball. So far, Earth seems to be winning, but the moon has sure taken a pounding.

One interstellar player, however, got awfully close to tagging Earth. In April of 2018, an asteroid approximately three quarters of a mile wide missed Earth by the galactic equivalent of a hair’s breadth. Asteroid 2018 GE3 came between the Earth and the moon and was nearly twice as close to the Earth as the moon. To make matters worse, it was not spotted by astronomers until 21 hours before it hurtled past Earth at more than 76,000 miles per hour, much faster than most objects that get near Earth. One has to wonder which angel took their eye off the giant space rock for a few minutes too long.

Cuban Missile Crisis

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The Cuban Missile Crisis has the dubious honor of being the time that the human race escaped nuclear annihilation by the skin of its teeth. The faceoff between two nuclear superpowers would be frightening enough, but more went wrong than just the USSR and the USA essentially playing nuclear chicken. While the US military sat at DEFCON 2, the USSR dared the US to push the red button and the rest of the world braced for nuclear winter, a guard at a US air base spotted a figure trying to scale the fence. As a result, the guard activated the alarm that would tell nearby military bases that there was an intruder in the area. Unfortunately, the alarm that went off at Volk Field, Wisconsin was not the intruder alarm. It was the “launch nuclear missiles” alarm. There were actually nuclear bombers on the runway preparing to drop the apocalypse on the USSR. The only thing that ended up standing between the human race and Armageddon was a single truck that was frantically flashing its lights to get the attention of the pilots. It later turned out that the “intruder” was a curious bear looking for a snack.

This was far from the only time that technical issues nearly caused nuclear war to break out during the Cold War. A blown fuse, the wrong tape placed in the announcement system, a simulation that was confused with reality and a computer chip that mistakenly announced 220 incoming missiles all nearly plunged the world into nuclear winter. The fact that the world is still standing proves that the angels were working overtime during the Cold War.

2012 Solar Flare

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Solar flares normally just give the awed humans on Earth a spectacular light show. When it comes to phenomenon on the surface of the Sun, most people are either mildly curious or head outside to see if they can catch a glimpse of the Northern or Southern Lights. The 2012 solar flare, however, would have turned just about anything more technically advanced than a spear into firework.

The 2012 solar event was a massive solar flare that erupted in July 2012. The solar flare ripped through Earth’s orbit, but the third planet from the Sun scraped through by the skin of its teeth. The Earth was just outside of the line of fire, but the event hit so close to home that it ripped into the Stereo-A spacecraft and struck the portion of Earth’s orbit where the planet had been sitting one short week earlier. Had the solar flare actually impacted Earth, the results would have been disastrous. A similar event did strike earth in 1859, the Carrington Event.

The Carrington Event slammed into Earth’s atmosphere with the force of 10 billion atomic bombs and was so bright that people thought it was morning. The “solar EMP” that followed the flare knocked out telegraph stations across the world with such force that telegraph offices burst into flames. Imagine the same scenario with the number of electronic devices that litter the world, all of which would be sparking and breaking from the solar flare. As Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado said, “If [the 2012 solar flare] had hit, we would still be picking up the pieces.” Thankfully, God is fond of this little Blue Planet and decided not to quick-fry it in solar radiation.

Reston Ebola Incident

Sometimes almost-Armageddon is caused by forces far beyond what humanity can command, such as solar superstorms and asteroid flybys. Other times, humans manage to nearly engineer the apocalypse all on their lonesome. Such was the case with the Reston Ebola Incident.

Reston, Virginia was the site of America’s introduction to the Ebola virus. In 1989, Reston was home to a quarantine station for imported lab animals. That October, a shipment of 100 monkeys began dying from what company officials thought was a hemorrhagic fever. Testing of the virus, however, revealed that it was the Zaire strain of Ebola, a virus with a 90 percent fatality rate in human beings. This nearly mythical virus was sitting at the doorstep of the nation’s capital, and four workers were already infected. Miraculously, the infected workers did not get sick. Retesting of the virus revealed that it was a previously unknown mutation of the virus, now known as Ebola-Reston. That the disease was not harmful to humans was a minor miracle as it took some time for the virus to be identified as Ebola, during which time it could have spread to dozens of new victims.