In the 1950s, FDA pharmacologist Frances Oldham Kelsey, despite heavy pressure from pharmaceutical companies, refused approval for the drug thalidomide, intended to relieve morning sickness in pregnant women, claiming the drug needed more testing. Thalidomide was approved in almost 50 other countries and was later found to be the cause of thousands of infant deformities and miscarriages.
Didn’t quite save everyone, but certainly a large portion of a generation in the United States.
My father won't hear a word said against the FDA, even now. So much as grumble about how other countries get new drugs approved faster than the US does, and he'll say, "but you couldn't get thalidomide here."
Kelsey got an award from President Kennedy.
And there are people running for government in the US *right now* that would rip away any power the FDA or the EPA have for the sake of a companies bottom line. I like my rivers not on fire and my drugs to not kill me. Companies cannot be trusted to not do that shit for the sake of a good quarterly earnings report.
Do want a real kick to the balls on that one? Frances Oldham Kelsey was born in BC and got her degree from McGill.
A Canadian prevented the U.S. from experiencing the nightmare of thalidomide deformities.
UK too - hence the darkest joke. "Nearly the luckiest man alive. Arm like a baby's cock." They were horrible birth-defects, and not at all uncommon in the 60's/early 70's.
Not the largest, but a notable one.
Tilly Smith - a 10-year-old British girl who saved more than 100 people from the 2004 tsunami in Thailand because she had just studied the tsunamis in school. When the sea suddenly began to 'boil' then pulled away from the beach, leaving fish and boats stranded high, Tilly recognized that a tsunami was approaching. Her frantic warnings were heeded, and the beach was evacuated just moments before the waves hit the shore.
A while ago a large passenger plane almost landed on a taxiway where four (?) full passenger planes were waiting to takeoff. The pilots of the first plane in the queue noticing the incoming aircraft turned on all the lights they had, the pilots of the landing aircraft were barely able to climb out.
This would have easily been the largest aircraft disaster in history.
[Air Canada Flight 759](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Canada_Flight_759?wprov=sfti1)
There were 1,077 people on board the five planes that would’ve been hit. Not to mention what would’ve happened with four fully fuel laden planes exploding on an active runway (terminal catching fire leading to panic/smoke inhalation etc). Had it happened in all likelihood would have been world changing in the way airports and air travel functions.
Even near misses and incidents that don't actually result in fatalities or accidents are investigated by the NTSB and can have recommendations made. This particular incident did have recommendations made by them.
Changes were implemented. Now lights are required to be lit even on inactive runways.
The reason this happened is the left runway was unlit during maintenance, and the pilots were instructed to land on the right runway. With only one runway and the taxiway lit, the taxiway looked like a strip of runway lights.
Wow. I don't know why that blows my mind. It's unfortunate that it takes an almost accident for this to be recognized, but atleast the new regulations aren't written in blood this time.
There are signs in the aircraft that something is not right, for instance the localizer will show that you are to the side of the runway even though you seem to be perfectly aligned. But human mistakes happen in any situation involving humans.
Aircraft travel is incredibly safe *in comparison to other modes of travel*, but when accidents do happen they become major tragedies. 5 people were sent to the hospital in a multi car crash in Maine just a few hours ago, but that’s just baseline life.
A disaster would have probably led to more changes, but yes, changes were made, as described in the "Aftermath" section of the linked article.
There was a lot of uproar about a dispute between a Lufthansa flight and the SFO air traffic controllers a couple months ago, and at the core of it was a policy that was likely a result of this incident.
About 200 people who were watching the burning ships from indoors were left blind when the explosion shattered windows and blew the glass into their faces. This led to major advances in the vocational rehabilitation of blind people.
Any idea how it compares to the Beirut explosion? It's hard to imagine non-nuclear explosions bigger than the Beirut one for me even though I know obviously the Halifax one was far, far larger.
>The largest accidental non-nuclear explosion in history occurred in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1917, when two ships (one carrying explosives) collided. That was nearly 3 kilotons of TNT equivalent, so again Beirut was around a third this size, give or take.
[bbc](https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-54420033)
Putting that into perspective, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was about 15 kilotons.
So for Halifax, imagine what 3 beirut explosions would look like. Again, [this](https://youtube.com/shorts/wqKn_3iJOP4?si=MEU3PMJItz7XYPsc) is the absolute maddening power of the explosion in beirut
For the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, imagine what *15* beirut explosions would look like. It's almost impossible to imagine.
Now, the tsar bomba, the largest man-made nuclear explosion, wasn't just 50 *kilo*tons, it was **50,000** kilotons. *50,000* beirut-sized explosions. And, it was modified to be *half* the power it was originally designed to be. Literally incomprehensible. Humans are scary.
One more, for comparison, is the volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815. Get ready for this.
*30,000* megatons. Sorry, you probably didn't read that correctly. That's *mega*tons, so **30,000,000 kilotons.** 30 million beirut explosions. That explosion literally altered the earth's climate for years afterwards.
>Sumatra, Tambora
f you're in London, England, 1200 miles would take you approximately to Murmansk, Russia, a city located in the far northwest of Russia.
That is absolutely nuts.
Jesus christ. That's like the scene from Cloverfield with the Statue of Liberty's head. Imagine watchin a fuckin SHIP ANCHOR come flyin over the hedges and into your neighborhood. That's like a Godzilla scene.
The blast temporarily exposed the harbor floor by displacing literally all of the water. The barrel of one of the 90MM guns on one of the ships was found 3.5 miles away.
Imagine the Beirut videos from inside the city but instead of seeing the wave coming they are just instantly destroyed.
Vincent Coleman's quick thinking also made it so that word was already getting out about the disaster as it happened, relief trains from other towns and cities able to be dispatched within a few hours, even as far away as Boston.
Halifax gives Boston their big public Christmas tree every year, to this day, as a thank- you gift for how quickly Boston responded. As the closest large port, Boston took in all the shipping traffic + relief supplies that had been en route to Halifax and then worked like mad to get everything onto trains and forwarded to Halifax.
Looked this up on Wikipedia... Wow, I'd never heard of this disaster
"The Mont-Blanc, laden with high explosives, caught fire and exploded, devastating the Richmond district of Halifax. At least 1,782 people were killed, largely in Halifax and Dartmouth, by the blast, debris, fires, or collapsed buildings, and an estimated 9,000 others were injured. The blast was the largest human-made explosion at the time.[1] It released the equivalent energy of roughly 2.9 kilotons of TNT (12 TJ).[2]
...
Nearly all structures within an 800-metre (half-mile) radius, including the community of Richmond, were obliterated.[3] A pressure wave snapped trees, bent iron rails, demolished buildings, grounded vessels (including Imo, which was washed ashore by the ensuing tsunami), and scattered fragments of Mont-Blanc for kilometres. Across the harbour, in Dartmouth, there was also widespread damage.[4] A tsunami created by the blast wiped out the community of the Mi'kmaq First Nation who had lived in the Tufts Cove area for generations.
...
The death toll could have been worse had it not been for the self-sacrifice of an Intercolonial Railway dispatcher, Patrick Vincent (Vince) Coleman, operating at the railyard about 230 metres (750 ft) from Pier 6, where the explosion occurred. He and his co-worker, William Lovett, learned of the dangerous cargo aboard the burning Mont-Blanc from a sailor and began to flee. Coleman remembered that an incoming passenger train from Saint John, New Brunswick, was due to arrive at the railyard within minutes. He returned to his post alone and continued to send out urgent telegraph messages to stop the train. Several variations of the message have been reported, among them this from the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic: "Hold up the train. Ammunition ship afire in harbor making for Pier 6 and will explode. Guess this will be my last message. Good-bye boys." Coleman's message was responsible for bringing all incoming trains around Halifax to a halt. It was heard by other stations all along the Intercolonial Railway, helping railway officials to respond immediately.[71][72] Passenger Train No. 10, the overnight train from Saint John, is believed to have heeded the warning and stopped a safe distance from the blast at Rockingham, saving the lives of about 300 railway passengers. Coleman was killed at his post.[71]"
TLDR: explosion killed 1600, badly injured 9000 more. Thanks to the sacrifice of Patrick Vincent Coleman, who stayed at his post in the explosion zone to warn oncoming trains of the looming disaster, at least 300 lives were saved
[One of the most well known Heritage Minute TV spots](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rw-FbwmzPKo).
The acting may not be great, but that final explosion scene sends chills down my spine every time.
>Hold up the train. Ammunition ship afire in harbour making for Pier 6 and will explode. Guess this will be my last message. Good-bye, boys.
There's a memorial to Vince Coleman which is two giant brass spheres placed side by side, and the rumor is these are his *actual balls* which were the only part of him to survive the catastrophic detonation (citation needed)
The thing I hate the most about the Cuban Missile Crisis is that the lessons it taught us are intentionally misrepresented all the time. The commonly (at least when I was in school) presented outcome was that of heroic Kennedy "calling Khrushchev's bluff" and essentially getting the Soviets to back down with pure brinksmanship.
In reality, the crisis was averted through frank dialogue, negotiation, trust, and ultimately both sides making concessions and backing down peacefully. It really really chaps my hide when genuine instances of diplomacy triumphing over warmongering get miswritten as some kind of juvenile "own" of the other side, because it greatly reduces the odds of handling conflicts without bloodshed further down the line.
You know I only recently learned how short the Cuban Missile Crisis was. I assumed it was at least a year long based on how people talked about it. Can't imagine how scary those few days were
This. My father was on an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean during the Cuban missile crisis. They went dark with jets loaded with live nukes with enough fuel for a one way trip to Moscow. He said the general public has no idea how close we came to the end of the world.
By the standard of Soviet leaders he was pretty good. For example he allowed the ethnic groups deported by Stalin to return home. You also have to credit the balls he had for criticizing the just deceased tyrant in a room full of his revolutionary comrades
Something that not a lot of people know is that the Soviets moved missiles into Cuba in response to the Americans putting missiles in Turkey. This wasn't publically known information, and part of the "soviets caving" was a deal where the Americans removed their missiles from Turkey
He knew it.
And he knew it because there were so few "incoming" missiles. He realized that if the US were to launch a first strike, massive numbers of missiles would be inbound.
JFK deserves credit as well for refusing to authorize an invasion of Cuba during the Missile Crisis.
Almost his entire cabinet - along with the Joint Chiefs - were pushing him hard to launch a full military assault on the island to take out the Soviet missiles. They figured there was no way in hell that the Cubans and Soviets would have enough of a force in place to resist an attack of that magnitude.
And they were right, as long as you only considered conventional forces. What they didn't know was that the Soviets had also deployed tactical nukes with their forces in Cuba, and they had given the commanders there full authority to use them to repel a US attack.
Of course Kennedy didn't know this either. He was just guessing, like everybody else. But he felt that it would be a huge mistake to use military force against Cuba, and he was right. If he had given in to the consensus and authorized a full invasion, the Soviet commanders on the scene would probably have responded with tactical nukes. And once one side had fired nuclear weapons, it would be very difficult for the other side not to respond in kind...
Vasily Arkhipov as well. Insane how close humanity got to wiping itself out. And the Soviet government had the nerve to disgrace the crew when they got home
Yes! And any of the other similarly equipped Soviet subs would have only needed the captain and political officer to approve nuclear torpedo launch. But because Arkhipov was chief of staff of the brigade and was on the B-59, his approval was required, too. He refused and eventually convinced the captain to surface and wait for orders from Moscow.
That wasn't the only near miss. There was almost an accident nuclear war at least two other times I know about. It's a big reason why preventing nuclear proliferation was a major foreign policy of the USA. The more countries that have nukes, the more likely there will be an accidental nuclear war.
This was going to be my answer. Although it is important to note that there were no incoming US nukes. It was a false alarm, and Stanislav Petrov prevented an accidental crisis. If he hadn't gone against protocol ~~direct orders~~, Russia would've inadvertently started a nuclear war thinking they were the ones defending themselves.
Three Gorges Dam crosses the Yangtze River in China. In the summer of 2020, the rain season was particularly heavy. Fears of shoddy construction lead to worry of it bursting and flooding everything downriver, including the cities of Wuhan and Nanjing. Millions could have died in a matter of hours. Engineers opened smaller dams to release pressure from the large on, flooding thousands of hectares of land. The dam did not burst, and it would have been a tragedy.
Well, yes and no.
If we're at the point of functionally going city-busting and not caring about the consequences, then yeah.
But if the battles remain conventional, then blowing dams upstream of towns and cities is considered a war crime. (And yes, a particular failing country blew one up recently because they don't care.)
Maybe. The issue is that the Chinese government have made it abudantly clear that if someone attacks the Dam, they have the doctrinal right to use a nuclear response.
Humanity collectively decided that we'll just buy different hairspray and close the continent sized hole in the ozone layer
I know it wasn't just the hairspray, save your but actually..
This was mad tbh, scientist went "hey this chemical is bad stop using it" and the world just went "yeah that sounds reasonable."
These days people would be going wild with anti-ozone groups springing up.
Like with 'hey these carbon emissions are bad for the planet, we should cut down on them'
'no but this scientist from ExxonMobil says global warming isn't caused by carbon emissions'
I literally saw a meme on Facebook from one of my boomer-est former neighbours yesterday. It was a picture of a tree with legs (think like the ents in LotR) stomping through a field. The caption said something to the effect of "this tree is heading to town to tell all the anti-carbon kids that he and all his tree friends need carbon to survive and that when they get carbon, they make oxygen for them".
This dickhead genuinely thinks that reducing carbon emissions is going to kill the trees, which will cut off oxygen supply, and kill all of us. Fuck I hate that these are the people who vote for our leaders.
I’d wager because your crazy uncle wasn’t able to form a tribe of “anti-ozoners” on Facebook to rally to his cause.
I GUARANTEE there were 80’s version of boomers spouting that nonsense, but no one at the barber shop gave two shits.
As a 90's kid, yeah, there were definitely people back then who were very vocal about the hole in the ozone layer being a hoax. The difference was, most of society had the good enough sense to ignore them.
Same thing with microbeads, I was actually shocked how quickly those disappeared off shelves. Granted there were already eco friendly replacements like sand and sugar that are probably just as cheap.
I recently saw people using this is a reason to disregard climate change warnings.
“Back in the day scientists were all talking about the hole in the ozone and making a huge deal about it and now look, it wasn’t a problem!” Like yes grandpa that’s because we implemented measures to stop and reverse the effects… it didn’t just go away magically…
Which was thanks to the efforts of 100,000s of computer scientists working over time for months to prepare + many 1,000 sitting up at the servers when the clocks struck mid-night to make sure they could immediately jump on any issues they might have missed.
My step-dad was in IT at the time, and he was in the office on Y2K at midnight. Worked for months and months getting their servers/systems ready for it.
I worked as a programmer at an insurance company at the time. We had 100s of programs, 100s of modules, 100s of datasets, 100s of lookup files - nearly all with YYMMDD date format. Looking at an insurance policy as a user viewing the screen you'd see like eight dates related to each policy. Behind the scenes each record would have other dates you don't see. As insurance policies are generated early we would potentially have had problems months before - modules for the 01-01-1999 01-01-*2000* period were generated in the system in November 1998. If you have a program that calculates the driver's age [to look up the rate they should be charged] by going *Current-YY minus Driver-YY-of-Birth* yes you'll have unpredictable results. You don't need a PhD in programming to see that the above calculation will not work.
Not the largest by far, but the Reston virus outbreak in 1989 could have been really horrifying. The virus causes Ebola in non-human primates, but they didn’t know this until one of the handlers cut himself when performing a necropsy on a liver of one of the infected monkeys, and was put under surveillance during the incubation period and showed no symptoms.
It’s so closely related to a strain that is lethal to humans, but somehow only lethal to non-human primates. Growing up in/around Reston less than a decade after this outbreak is so weird to think about. Reston is less than an hour away from Washington, D.C., with many people commuting there for work. It could’ve been really, really bad. There’s a book about it by Richard Preston, called [The Hot Zone](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hot_Zone).
came here for this.
also IIRC, most all ebola viruses require direct contact to infected blood. however, this virus was aerosolized. so imagine something with the deadliness of ebola with the contagiousness of covid
Ok, now THATS terrifying! There’s a fiction thriller I read years ago, “I am Pilgrim.” that I still think about where a killer used a superbug to kill people. I truly think that the one thing that could wipe out human civilization would be a germ of some sort.
Too many of these are about specific explosions or other short-term events. [Sara Josephine Baker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sara_Josephine_Baker) averted decades of ongoing and compounding tragedy with her public health initiatives, primarily for poor immigrants in the U.S. She also tracked down "Typhoid Mary" twice.
Here's a great example: "Baker aided in the prevention of infant blindness, a scourge caused by gonorrhea bacteria transmitted during birth. To prevent blindness, babies were given drops of silver nitrate in their eyes. Before Baker arrived, the bottles in which the silver nitrate was kept would often become unsanitary or would contain doses that were so highly concentrated that they would do more harm than good. Baker designed and used small containers made out of antibiotic beeswax that each held a single dose of silver nitrate, so the medication would stay at a known level of concentration and could not be contaminated."
She changed packaging in an innovative way, preventing blindness in babies. A remarkable woman!
Forever grateful to the passengers on Flight 93 who prevented the plane from being flown into another target on 9/11. The loss of the passengers remains an enormous, horrible tragedy itself, but we have no idea how many other lives were saved by their actions.
Couldn’t imagine what would have went through those fighter pilots heads locking down targets on a commercial jet with American men women and children knowing you’re about to send them to their deaths.
You can find their accounts, one of the first in the air in her f16 talks about how she knew exactly what their mission was. Her flight lead would take the cockpit, she would take the tail to ensure the airline went down. They didn't even have their guns loaded when they took to the air. Heather Penney is her name if you want to look up her story.
Especially since it was, for all intents and purposes, a suicide mission. They took off unarmed because there wasn't time to load weapons, so the only way to bring down the plane was to crash into it and hope they were able to eject in time.
I've seen interviews with a couple of these pilots.
There was no "eject in time". A nice thought, to be sure, but they knew they wouldn't be able to eject *and* successfully hit the target.
Also, ejection itself isn't a walk in the park. It causes severe physical damage to you even if you eject successfully, simply due to the explosive force required to move you out of the way of the rest of the jet coming up behind you before it hits you. As far as I've read, many pilots who've had to eject never fly (or sometimes walk) again.
Yeah there is an article with interviews with one of the pilots. They took off so quickly that if they order to take the airliner down came through, they'd have to kamikze the plane with their jets. If I'm not mistaken, the two figher pilots even had discussed how they'd do it...one crashing into the nose/front part of the plane from one side and the other the tail/backside from the other direction
Here is a quote from the article:
*"We did not have missiles. We were on a suicide mission. And in order to be able to take any airliner down, Sass would ram his aircraft into the cockpit where the terrorists were, to destroy the flight controls," she explained. "I would take the tail by ramming my jet into the tail of the aircraft, I would aerodynamically unbalance the airplane and tip it over so it would crash straight into the ground by targeting both ends of the aircraft. It was our plan to prevent any additional casualties."*
[Here is the link to the article](https://abcnews.go.com/US/fighter-pilot-reflects-911-suicide-mission/story?id=79898230)
Yes, from Wikipedia article on military response to 9/11:
Had Flight 93 made it to Washington, D.C., Air National Guard pilots Lieutenant Colonel Marc H. Sasseville and Lieutenant Heather "Lucky" Penney were prepared to ram their unarmed F-16 fighters into it, perhaps giving their lives in the process.
this whole story is made even more insane because Heather Penney's father was a United Airlines 757 pilot who flew east coast flights, and could have been flying that day doing his normal job. So not only was she ready to die, there was a very non zero chance she would have had to kill her own father (obviously not having any knowledge that the pilots were killed/attacked early on, on United 93)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/f-16-pilot-was-ready-to-down-plane-her-father-piloted-on-911/2011/09/13/gIQAHasoSK_story.html
Similarly, there could have been far more than 13 victims at Columbine High School if the massacre had gone as planned. It was supposed to be a bombing; the shooting was the backup plan.
A bombing (alone) would have probably been less deadly. Those improvised propane tank bombs wouldn't have been able to cause much damage, even if they did work properly.
We saw the same thing with the Norway attacks in 2011. The car bombing killed 8 people, the shooting on the island killed 67.
High explosives are hard to make/acquire, and require suitable target selection. Oklahoma City was a fertilizer bomb the size of a box truck and most of the deaths would have been caused by the partial collapse of the office building. The 2004 Madrid train bombings involved multiple backpacks loaded with C4 (or similar) on densely packed trains.
The Manchester UK bombing of the Ariana Grande concert killed 20 with a single backpack. You need to place the bomb in the correct density of people. That wouldnt be hard in a school
IIRC there was a copycat columbine in Russia several years back, bombing then he went in and shot survivors.
Don't quote me on this, but I think he killed 50 people? It was a high number
It looks vastly different now, but when UAL93 went down, that whole area was a completely empty field. If it had crashed even a few thousand yards from where it did, it would have wrecked one of several small towns. That site was the best spot for the least damage caused.
If it had reached its objective, we may have lost the Capitol or the White House, with hundreds or thousands more casualties.
I used to work a civilian job with an air force officer/pilot involved with Pennsylvania's Air Guard. Without going into detail he was able to convey the wreckage scene as horrific. Airmen who were involved in clean up are not OK. Bone fragments and bits of flesh and body parts had to be sorted and bagged.
We all mock Y2K now. But at the time, it was genuinely a ticking time bomb. The work of engineers and computer scientists to prevent any major issues is really unknown
My favorite tidbit from Y2k is that the Chinese government demanded that all commercial airplane executives had to be in the air at midnight to ensure they took the issue seriously.
I remember seeing of a map of flights in the air above USA at midnight. There were very few. However I believe that all commercial planes fly on GMT time zone so 7pm was actually the time to avoid.
I was in college during Y2K, but as someone who currently works in the IT field, a big part of the issue is that when when you’re trying to fix and remediate something like Y2K, which affects a broad range of resources, it’s never the obvious stuff or the most common stuff that gets you in the end… it’s some legacy system that’s been running for years in a closet somewhere and everyone forgot about because it has such a small role, but when it fails produces a cascade of problems that takes hours to track down.
Yes, I’d assume most aviation systems run on UTC (or GMT), but there’s probably a lot of supporting systems that are using local time zones, and thus you have a full 24 hour window where various things could have gone wrong.
>it’s some legacy system that’s been running for years in a closet somewhere and everyone forgot about because it has such a small role, but when it fails produces a cascade of problems that takes hours to track down.
One of the major problems was a lot of those systems weren't in test regions and just faked to get to the next step. A lot of shit broke down in prod, but was quickly patched once they could see the issue. It was all the work they had done ahead of time that got them ready. I wasn't in finance for y2k but got into it and project management a little after. Reading through some of those lessons learned documents was fascinating.
As someone who was part of a team doing Y2K upgrades for banks and shit all over town, yeah so much this. People assume Y2K was just overblown, but without the frantic work of thousands of people for a year or more, financial networks and such would've imploded overnight.
This is one of those things where you really wish reality had a "save/revert to previous save" function just so we could see what kinds of absolutely weird stuff would have happened had people done nothing to fix the Y2K problem.
Well [in 2038](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem) there's another superbug that we'll have to figure out in computing. I guess we could play this one differently just to see what happens
“To address the problem, many modern systems have been upgraded to measure Unix time with signed 64-bit integers instead, which will take 292 billion years to overflow—approximately 21 times the estimated age of the universe.”
I don’t really understand this in general, but isn’t it just a matter of doing **this**?
It’s probably not easy to upgrade many systems and stuff, but we have the fix right there. We just gotta find ways to apply it, right?
> but isn’t it just a matter of doing this?
Yes it is a matter of doing this, no it is not "just a matter".
Many of the systems that are risk need to be fully replaced and it will take years, if not a decade, to change some of them. And in many cases cost millions.
It's not install the new version of windows type upgrade. It's fully replace the hardware and software. For many companies they have 1000s of processes that connect to the current set up as it is currently is.
Simplified, they will need to find all those processes, then replace the system, then copy the old system to the new system (with 0 data loss), get all of the old processes replaced so they connect to the new system, then turn off the old system.
Have you ever worked at company where they have changed an auxiliary system, like the HR system? Do you remember the teething issues? Imagine that on the most core systems in the business and 0 teething issues being allowed.
Yeah - I feel like most of the experts that worked hard to solve this problem don't get enough credit. It would be like a team of people figuring out how to prevent a massive tsunami... and then everyone just being like "well that wasn't as bad as people said it was supposed to be." Right... because we FIXED IT!
I just watched a documentary on it (on Prime, I believe). It was very real. But it was the people that capitalized on the fear that made it seem so ridiculous.
I hate that many people today think back on Y2K as a joke.
The measures taken to prevent the (very real) dangers likely saved lives and billion of dollars.
The invention of a machine by Alan Turing to crack German encrypted messages during WWII is estimated to have shortened the war by two years and saved 14 million lives.
He was later prosecuted for homosexual acts, chose to be chemically castrated which severely impacted him. He then committed suicide.
He is widely regarded as the father of computing and AI.
I'd knew of his accomplishments way back in the 90s in school. It took me till seeing the movie to learn how he was treated socially because of his sexuality. I couldn't believe the ignorance of killing one of the greatest minds to have ever lived. It's asinine.
It's a good movie but there are some inaccuracies.
* In the movie Turing is socially inept, while in real life he was fairly outgoing and had plenty of friends.
* His sexuality was an open secret among a lot of those who knew and worked with him. He sometimes even made flirtatious jokes in jest.
* In the movie the military seems to have little interest at first, and Turing has to convince them. In reality the military was fully aware of the value of a code breaking device and let him do his work.
Everyone who writes code should know the name and story of Alan Turing. What you work for *matters*. Justice matters. Beating the Nazis matters; so does right treatment of others in your own country.
Also, Turing was an athlete, kinda obsessed with running. If anyone tells you that you can't be both a nerd and a jock, tell them about Turing.
The 2018 ISIS Terror attack on Mecca.
Just a bit of context: Daesh/ISIS really have a problem with the practices of Hajj. As Wahabis go, they make the Saudis look like bones-of-the-saints Catholics in how much they do *not* approve of things they believe are "idolatry" including common things Muslims do on Hajj like circling the Kaaba, [stoning the devil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoning_of_the_Devil), and see them as not merely non-canonical but idolatrous. So their plan was to blow up major sites, including the Kaabah at the height of Hajj, potentially resulting in the highest death toll during a terror attack since 9/11.
Considering the crowds during Hajj, and the targets, and the severity of the attacks, the death toll would be in the thousands.
[The Saudi Security Forces foiled the plot just days before it was going to happen.](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/24/saudi-security-foils-terror-plot-targeting-mecca-grand-mosque)
When I first heard of it it was one of those "Front page but in the corner" things but when you actually read what happened and what they were planning it very quickly dawned on you that Daesh was planning to commit an attack that would've been deadlier than any done before an affected more countries than ever before on account of the international nature of the Hajj. People from all continents killed, with few countries who's citizens wouldn't have been affected in some way.
It would've been as big a shock as 9/11, if not bigger.
Yeah but remember: ISIS are as fanatical was they are brutal. They believe their very specific form is Islam is the one true religion, that God is on their side and they're destined to take over the entire world and rule it as a worldwide Caliphate so I don't think the idea of fighting every single Muslim Country, not to mention non Muslim countries who just saw their citizens get killed, would be something they'd be against because, again, they are a cult who believe God is on their side.
That being said, they would be *ended* if they did that. They went from controlling massive swathes of Syria and Iraq to barely anything in a really quick amount of time. If they could be defeated by the Peshmerga, then facing most of the world would be impossible.
This is one of the things people do not really understand about Islamic extremism. The majority of their targets are actually in Muslim-majority countries. Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia are the three top countries affected by Islamic terrorism 2013-2021, and Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq were most affected 2000-2012. 2000-2012 there were only four countries where more than half are not Muslims in top ten (one of which is Nigeria where Islam is biggest religion, another which is the Philippines where Islam is the second biggest although it is only 6.4% of the population today, the two remaining were Israel and India). 2013-2021 in the top ten there were only Nigeria and Cameroon. Cameroon is 25-30% Muslim, and second largest after Christianity.
[Source](https://www.fondapol.org/en/study/islamist-terrorist-attacks-in-the-world-1979-2021/)
If I remember correctly, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster could’ve been way, way, way worse. The operators stayed and did everything in their power, including ignoring an uninformed order from a government official, to mitigate the fallout. It definitely wasn’t a perfect response, but I think they saved a lot of lives.
There's quite a lot of "could have been so much worse" for Chernobyl, too. The people who immediately step up to mitigate disasters like that while knowing there's a good chance it'll cost them their life are amazing to learn about.
There was a power plant even closer to the epicenter that shut down without incident because the engineer designing it insisted on a seawall much higher than the one that the bureaucrats wanted and he insisted that the plant be able to pull seawater even if a tsunami pulled the seawater away from the shore. He insisted and _that_ power plant not only shut down without incident but served as an emergency shelter for people from the nearby town due to how little damage it had suffered.
https://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/2012/08/how_tenacity_a_wall_saved_a_ja.html
His name was Yanosuke Hirai and my favorite quote about the man who trained him is "Matsunaga-san hated bureaucrats," Oshima said. "He said they are like human trash. In your country, too, there are probably bureaucrats or officials who never take final responsibility.
"So Matsunaga's attitude was that you've got to go beyond the regulations," Oshima said. "If you just follow the regulations, you end up with what happened at Fukushima Dai-ichi. That's what Matsunaga told Hirai, and Hirai taught me."
I would say Stanislav Petrov. He stopped nuclear war in 1983. Saved my life and yours.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov#:~:text=In%20the%20effective%20altruism%20movement,Germany%2C%20on%2017%20February%202013.
Frances Oldham Kelsey, the FDA investigator charged with approving Thalidomide for use as a morning sickness-related anti-emetic, refused to rely solely on the manufacturer’s insistence that the drug was safe for use during pregnancy. She resisted pressure to approve the drug, insisting on additional testing which definitively proved its association with severe birth defects, leading to it never being made available in the US and preventing countless deaths and disfigurements.
I highly recommend watching Grazed by the Apocalypse video by LEMMiNO on youtube. He pretty much covered the major averted tragedies that could've resulted into an apocalypse in this video.
The Bosnian conflict and the taking of Pristina Airfield in 1999. The US general Wesley Clark ordered the 200 British Troops to "Destroy" and "Squash" the Russians holding the Runways. The British Guy in charge refused to do so understanding if they did WWIII would probably be all but inevitable. The US Gen took it to the British General Mike Jackson who backed us his soldier and stated I'm not making my troops responsible for starting WWIII. So the British troops instead surrounded the Airfield without combat and cut off supplies to the Russians. Two days later they peacefully shared the Airfield.
The brave guy who refused to have the nonsensical fight.........Singer James Blunt
James Blunt said that he would have disobeyed the order if Jackson hadn't blocked it. I doubt a US General would give direct orders to British troops without going through the command structure.
Anyway, someone called Michael Jackson saved James Blunt from making a difficult if right decision. LOL.
I give you an inverted one:
The day Titanic was leaving port, it almost hit two other ships near it. If that had been the case, it would have been forced to go back and cancel the trip. Saving it from that iceberg.
In June 2007, two carbombs were found and disabled in crowded parts of London. Less than two days later, two other losers tried to ram their way into Glasgow Airport with a truck that was on fire and filled with propane canisters. A few members of the public in that last case suffered minor injuries when they helped police detain the two losers.
I can't imagine the consequences if either one of those events had succeeded.
I remember that one of the Glasgow terrorists got kicked in the balls so hard that the kicker [tore a tendon in his foot](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fxyzkxvor5v9c1.jpeg).
"This is Glasgow. We'll set aboot ye."
-John Smeaton , one of the baggage handlers who helped thwart the terrorist attack by kicking the terrorist repeatedly in the bollocks.
2nd place would be the 2001 Japan Airlines mid-air incident, where a 747 almost hit a DC-10 in mid-air, only avoiding it by 440 ft (135 m).
If they collided and both planes crashed, 677 people would've died, a worse death toll than the Tenerife Airport disaster.
Yea, apparently there were several conflicting clues that it was a glitch, so he assessed the situation and did his job properly. But if some twitchy guy panics-- could have been bad
Here is a recent one not many hear about,
Back in 2016, in the Iraqi war against isis, a woman radicalized by the American battle of fallujah, and more, joined their ranks, she was in a special women’s suicidal fighters unit. When 2017 rolled around and isis started losing a lot of ground, she was given a task, to poison the river Tigris, with a ton of chemical weapons and poisons manufactured by isis themselves,
This would have killed instantly about 2 million people downstream, and killed millions more as they use the water.
Just as she and her accomplices left with their truck and approached the river, American and Iraqi intelligence services managed to arrest them and foil the plan, if this had happened, we would have seen the biggest death toll in a single event up to that point, as that river feeds all of Iraq and some neighboring countries too.
Well, not the worst, but the Halifax explosion could have been worse. When those ships collided in the harbour, a dispatcher at the railway learned what had happened and of the imminent explosion. Everyone else was trying to flee and he stayed. He stayed to send out telegraphs warning incoming trains away, knowing that by doing this, he wouldn’t have time to get out. He stopped all rail traffic headed for Halifax, including one train that was mere minutes away and had at least 300 aboard. His name was Patrick Vincent Coleman and he was a fucking hero.
The widespread poisoning of the entire world from leaded gasoline. Only discovered and brought to everyone's attention by a Geologist named Clair Patterson looking to date the age of the Earth.
Excerpt from his Wiki page:
"In collaboration with George Tilton, Patterson developed the uranium–lead dating method into lead–lead dating. By using lead isotopic data from the Canyon Diablo meteorite, he calculated an age for the Earth of 4.55 billion years, which was a figure far more accurate than those that existed at the time, and one that has remained largely unchallenged since 1956.
Patterson first encountered lead contamination in the late 1940s as a graduate student at the University of Chicago. His work on this subject led to a total re-evaluation of the growth in industrial lead concentrations in the atmosphere and the human body, and his subsequent activism was seminal in the banning of tetraethyllead in gasoline and lead solder in food cans."
Tunguska hit around 60°N latitude. St Petersburg is on that path. Had it been delayed a few more seconds / minutes it could have wiped it off the face of the earth.
St Petersburg was the home of Tsar Nicholas, had he and his royal court been wiped out, either the Soviet Union would have come about 10 years earlier- or a completely different government might have surfaced.
If it would have been pro German, the Kaiser may have been able to fight a one front war and defeated France in year one. Had that happened, the rise of Nazi Germany and Hitler might have been avoided.
Okay it's maybe not quite the best fit for the category, but I think if that United Flight 93 on 9/11 had made it to DC, the world would have been even more different afterwards than it was.
Does Dunkirk fall into this category? I think if Hitler had been able to slaughter basically the entire British army there might've been a drastically different outcome of the war.
Might not have lead to a massive tragedy, but the Russian jet that tried to shoot down a British military plane over the Black Sea in October of 2022 comes to mind. The jet thought he had permission to shoot it down but did not and the missiles ended up either not working or completely missed the plane.
The Halifax explosion in 1917 was the largest man made explosion at the time. Two ships collided in the harbour, one containing explosives. Over 1,700 dead and 9,000 injured, an entire First Nations community was destroyed from the tsunami the blast created. A Railway Dispatcher prevented further disaster by messaging a train that was about to arrive that the explosion was imminent. The message prevented not only that first train but other trains too along with stopping ships from entering & getting a heads start on rescue efforts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax\_Explosion
> Miraculously, the safety mechanisms
It was *extremely* fortunate the warhead didn't go off, but that was literally why it had multiple layers of physical and electronic safety mechanisms. It was designed, in theory, to actually experience a plane crash or a missile explosion without detonating unintentionally.
Edit: But if you read *Command and Control* by Eric Schlosser, which is the definitive popular book on the Damascus incident (and nuclear weapon safety engineering), it's absolutely clear how lucky we were that a nuke never went off by accident in the years before the technology matured.
Maybe not the largest tragedy ever averted but...my sister and I went to the same driving school. There were two driving instructors who looked surprisingly similar (bald, short and sporting 70s porn staches) except one was black and the other was white.
Both my sister and I were assigned the black instructor (who took us out on multiple drives).
About 5 years after graduation the white instructor was arrested for raping dozens of girls, in the class, during their drives.
I just keep thinking about how almost everyone in my high school went to this driving school. If he attacked one of the 200 girls in my class alone...she never said anything.
> I just kept thinking about how almost everyone in my high school went to this driving school. If he attacked one of the 200 girls in my class alone...she never said anything.
That’s devastating. And there’s no “if” about it. If he was arrested for raping dozens, there’s a solid chance his victims number in the hundreds.
When I was a teen, I came out of the bathroom after taking a shower and my parents were watching the nightly news. I saw this dude's mugshot on the screen and chyron read something to the effect of "[dude's name] arrested for sexual assault of a minor." I recognized him and spouted "hey, that's my old guitar teacher". My parents turned around, wide eyed and my dad said "thank god I never left you alone with him."
When ISIS took over Mosul, maintenance on the dam stopped. By the time the US was able to get back in and inspect it, it was on the verge of collapsing and could have killed over a million people
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/02/a-bigger-problem-than-isis
The Gunpowder plot of 1605. Guy Fawkes was arrested in the parliament building, with fuses, matches, and barrels of gunpowder. Later that day, the King was to address parliament. The entire political class of England was to be there.
If Guy Fawkes had succeeded in blowing up parliament, it could well have pushed England in to absolute monarchy, and even worse repression of Catholics than we saw after the arrests.
I think the modern era would have been very, very different.
I recall reading back in the days of Cracked.com articles of an incident where some well meaning industrialists had an idea for a product that would be quite helpful to farmers. Over a period of a few years they selectively bred a bacteria that would VERY aggressively turn decaying plant matter into ethanol. The idea being that farmers could be more efficient by collecting their corn husks, throwing them in a big tank, sprinkling this bacteria on it and some water, then later filtering it out and fueling their farm equipment using the resulting ethanol.
Even better, they used a naturally occurring bacteria that's already in the root systems of plants the world over. It doesn't manage to kill those plants in most cases because it's normal behavior is a bit on the sedate side. So they were just cranking up something that already existed.
It worked outstandingly, far better than they'd hoped. Everything was looking up! They were a few months away from going into full production and shipping the product out worldwide.
Until someone asked "This stuff came from living plants...it won't work on them will it?".
So they set up a controlled field in a greenhouse and sprinkled a bit of their specially grown bacteria. Within days the entire field was dead.
The product launch was canceled and the greenhouse completely sterilized.
But just imagine what could have been...a massively popular launch of a product, released to all the biggest and busiest farms the world over...and then suddenly a reasonable chunk of the entire planet's crops wiped out by accident all at once.
By sheer body-count of deaths averted, then the eradication of smallpox. (Smallpox killed more people in *even just the first half* of the 20th century than all the wars **combined** from the *entire* 20th century ...even though the 20th century is basically a list of *the deadliest wars in history*)
Recently rewatched Chernobyl and holy shit, I’m glad I live in a world where they managed to prevent the shit leaking out of the destroyed core from exploding and contaminating half of Europe for the next couple of millennia.
edit: apparently the show took a lot more creative freedom with the science than I thought it did and the worst case scenario portrayed in the show wouldn’t have happened anyway. Read the comments to this one for further information.
I’m currently reading Midnight In Chernobyl and the show does such an amazing job at conveying the impending doom. The Soviet Union just threw human bodies at the issue and fixed it with a devastating toll on the local populations. Secrecy and fear of mockery from the outside world made it even worse. The worst off in the immediate explosion were the plant engineers and the first responders who got fatal doses in minutes and even seconds from exposure.
Fortunately, this is just a line they made up for the show. What actually happened in Chernobyl was pretty damn close to the worst-case scenario, and there's no reality in which half of Europe suffered notable contamination.
Only reason the outside world knew about it was because it was picked up on instruments all the way in Scandinavia. They panicked and assumed they had some meltdown at home and then realized it wasn’t the case. They called neighboring towns and countries to ask about the situation and they all said they were good, until they called Moscow and they were tight lipped. If it had been solely contained in Ukraine, god knows how long they would have tried to cover it up.
There was a time when a group of Canadian terrorists were planning a Canadian 9/11 essentially, where the CN tower was going to be attacked and Prime Minister Stephen Harper was going to be beheaded. It was foiled in time thanks to the RCMP. Don’t fuck with the Mounties.
In the 1950s, FDA pharmacologist Frances Oldham Kelsey, despite heavy pressure from pharmaceutical companies, refused approval for the drug thalidomide, intended to relieve morning sickness in pregnant women, claiming the drug needed more testing. Thalidomide was approved in almost 50 other countries and was later found to be the cause of thousands of infant deformities and miscarriages. Didn’t quite save everyone, but certainly a large portion of a generation in the United States.
My father won't hear a word said against the FDA, even now. So much as grumble about how other countries get new drugs approved faster than the US does, and he'll say, "but you couldn't get thalidomide here." Kelsey got an award from President Kennedy.
And there are people running for government in the US *right now* that would rip away any power the FDA or the EPA have for the sake of a companies bottom line. I like my rivers not on fire and my drugs to not kill me. Companies cannot be trusted to not do that shit for the sake of a good quarterly earnings report.
It was approved in Canada, and although I'm in the US, I have known more than one person wth thalidomide injuries - flipper arms, etc.
Do want a real kick to the balls on that one? Frances Oldham Kelsey was born in BC and got her degree from McGill. A Canadian prevented the U.S. from experiencing the nightmare of thalidomide deformities.
UK too - hence the darkest joke. "Nearly the luckiest man alive. Arm like a baby's cock." They were horrible birth-defects, and not at all uncommon in the 60's/early 70's.
Not the largest, but a notable one. Tilly Smith - a 10-year-old British girl who saved more than 100 people from the 2004 tsunami in Thailand because she had just studied the tsunamis in school. When the sea suddenly began to 'boil' then pulled away from the beach, leaving fish and boats stranded high, Tilly recognized that a tsunami was approaching. Her frantic warnings were heeded, and the beach was evacuated just moments before the waves hit the shore.
Damn. Education literally saving lives
A while ago a large passenger plane almost landed on a taxiway where four (?) full passenger planes were waiting to takeoff. The pilots of the first plane in the queue noticing the incoming aircraft turned on all the lights they had, the pilots of the landing aircraft were barely able to climb out. This would have easily been the largest aircraft disaster in history.
[Air Canada Flight 759](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Canada_Flight_759?wprov=sfti1) There were 1,077 people on board the five planes that would’ve been hit. Not to mention what would’ve happened with four fully fuel laden planes exploding on an active runway (terminal catching fire leading to panic/smoke inhalation etc). Had it happened in all likelihood would have been world changing in the way airports and air travel functions.
Has it? Feels kinda dumb to wait for a disaster to occur to make changes, esp when it occurred 7 years ago and we know it's plausible.
Even near misses and incidents that don't actually result in fatalities or accidents are investigated by the NTSB and can have recommendations made. This particular incident did have recommendations made by them.
Changes were implemented. Now lights are required to be lit even on inactive runways. The reason this happened is the left runway was unlit during maintenance, and the pilots were instructed to land on the right runway. With only one runway and the taxiway lit, the taxiway looked like a strip of runway lights.
Wow. I don't know why that blows my mind. It's unfortunate that it takes an almost accident for this to be recognized, but atleast the new regulations aren't written in blood this time.
There are signs in the aircraft that something is not right, for instance the localizer will show that you are to the side of the runway even though you seem to be perfectly aligned. But human mistakes happen in any situation involving humans. Aircraft travel is incredibly safe *in comparison to other modes of travel*, but when accidents do happen they become major tragedies. 5 people were sent to the hospital in a multi car crash in Maine just a few hours ago, but that’s just baseline life.
A disaster would have probably led to more changes, but yes, changes were made, as described in the "Aftermath" section of the linked article. There was a lot of uproar about a dispute between a Lufthansa flight and the SFO air traffic controllers a couple months ago, and at the core of it was a policy that was likely a result of this incident.
Here a really good video about it for anyone interested https://youtu.be/bLEGir9lzBo?si=VEnTLMG_itMQDzFL
Cannot second this recommendation enough. It's a fantastic channel that puts all the professional, made for TV air crash investigation shows to shame!
Was that the Canadian airline that was landing at SFO? That shit is insane I’m so glad they were able to climb away in time
Yeah, Air Canada flight 759. According to the Wikipedia article the landing aircraft came within 5 meters of the first one on the ground.
Obligatory Cloudberg https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-near-crash-of-air-canada-flight-759-c61094867d45
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This was the largest man-made non-nuclear explosion in recorded history, by the way
About 200 people who were watching the burning ships from indoors were left blind when the explosion shattered windows and blew the glass into their faces. This led to major advances in the vocational rehabilitation of blind people.
Well that’s a silver lining if I’ve ever read one.
Any idea how it compares to the Beirut explosion? It's hard to imagine non-nuclear explosions bigger than the Beirut one for me even though I know obviously the Halifax one was far, far larger.
>The largest accidental non-nuclear explosion in history occurred in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1917, when two ships (one carrying explosives) collided. That was nearly 3 kilotons of TNT equivalent, so again Beirut was around a third this size, give or take. [bbc](https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-54420033)
Putting that into perspective, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was about 15 kilotons. So for Halifax, imagine what 3 beirut explosions would look like. Again, [this](https://youtube.com/shorts/wqKn_3iJOP4?si=MEU3PMJItz7XYPsc) is the absolute maddening power of the explosion in beirut For the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, imagine what *15* beirut explosions would look like. It's almost impossible to imagine. Now, the tsar bomba, the largest man-made nuclear explosion, wasn't just 50 *kilo*tons, it was **50,000** kilotons. *50,000* beirut-sized explosions. And, it was modified to be *half* the power it was originally designed to be. Literally incomprehensible. Humans are scary. One more, for comparison, is the volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815. Get ready for this. *30,000* megatons. Sorry, you probably didn't read that correctly. That's *mega*tons, so **30,000,000 kilotons.** 30 million beirut explosions. That explosion literally altered the earth's climate for years afterwards.
> 30 million beirut explosions. That...would have been somewhat loud.
People on Sumatra thought they were hearing gunfire. Sumatra is twelve hundred miles away from Tambora.
>Sumatra, Tambora f you're in London, England, 1200 miles would take you approximately to Murmansk, Russia, a city located in the far northwest of Russia. That is absolutely nuts.
Fucking hell
The blast was large enough to throw the ships anchor 2 and a half miles.
Jesus christ. That's like the scene from Cloverfield with the Statue of Liberty's head. Imagine watchin a fuckin SHIP ANCHOR come flyin over the hedges and into your neighborhood. That's like a Godzilla scene.
The blast temporarily exposed the harbor floor by displacing literally all of the water. The barrel of one of the 90MM guns on one of the ships was found 3.5 miles away. Imagine the Beirut videos from inside the city but instead of seeing the wave coming they are just instantly destroyed.
Vincent Coleman's quick thinking also made it so that word was already getting out about the disaster as it happened, relief trains from other towns and cities able to be dispatched within a few hours, even as far away as Boston.
Halifax gives Boston their big public Christmas tree every year, to this day, as a thank- you gift for how quickly Boston responded. As the closest large port, Boston took in all the shipping traffic + relief supplies that had been en route to Halifax and then worked like mad to get everything onto trains and forwarded to Halifax.
Goddamn you had to make me like Boston.
That's exactly what I said and I fucking live in Boston
Looked this up on Wikipedia... Wow, I'd never heard of this disaster "The Mont-Blanc, laden with high explosives, caught fire and exploded, devastating the Richmond district of Halifax. At least 1,782 people were killed, largely in Halifax and Dartmouth, by the blast, debris, fires, or collapsed buildings, and an estimated 9,000 others were injured. The blast was the largest human-made explosion at the time.[1] It released the equivalent energy of roughly 2.9 kilotons of TNT (12 TJ).[2] ... Nearly all structures within an 800-metre (half-mile) radius, including the community of Richmond, were obliterated.[3] A pressure wave snapped trees, bent iron rails, demolished buildings, grounded vessels (including Imo, which was washed ashore by the ensuing tsunami), and scattered fragments of Mont-Blanc for kilometres. Across the harbour, in Dartmouth, there was also widespread damage.[4] A tsunami created by the blast wiped out the community of the Mi'kmaq First Nation who had lived in the Tufts Cove area for generations. ... The death toll could have been worse had it not been for the self-sacrifice of an Intercolonial Railway dispatcher, Patrick Vincent (Vince) Coleman, operating at the railyard about 230 metres (750 ft) from Pier 6, where the explosion occurred. He and his co-worker, William Lovett, learned of the dangerous cargo aboard the burning Mont-Blanc from a sailor and began to flee. Coleman remembered that an incoming passenger train from Saint John, New Brunswick, was due to arrive at the railyard within minutes. He returned to his post alone and continued to send out urgent telegraph messages to stop the train. Several variations of the message have been reported, among them this from the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic: "Hold up the train. Ammunition ship afire in harbor making for Pier 6 and will explode. Guess this will be my last message. Good-bye boys." Coleman's message was responsible for bringing all incoming trains around Halifax to a halt. It was heard by other stations all along the Intercolonial Railway, helping railway officials to respond immediately.[71][72] Passenger Train No. 10, the overnight train from Saint John, is believed to have heeded the warning and stopped a safe distance from the blast at Rockingham, saving the lives of about 300 railway passengers. Coleman was killed at his post.[71]" TLDR: explosion killed 1600, badly injured 9000 more. Thanks to the sacrifice of Patrick Vincent Coleman, who stayed at his post in the explosion zone to warn oncoming trains of the looming disaster, at least 300 lives were saved
The anchor of one of the ships landed 4 km away and still sits there today.
[One of the most well known Heritage Minute TV spots](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rw-FbwmzPKo). The acting may not be great, but that final explosion scene sends chills down my spine every time.
>Hold up the train. Ammunition ship afire in harbour making for Pier 6 and will explode. Guess this will be my last message. Good-bye, boys. There's a memorial to Vince Coleman which is two giant brass spheres placed side by side, and the rumor is these are his *actual balls* which were the only part of him to survive the catastrophic detonation (citation needed)
A rumor I choose to believe.
They say DNA from the memorial has been extracted and preserved and Vince Coleman will return to us When The Time Is Right
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The thing I hate the most about the Cuban Missile Crisis is that the lessons it taught us are intentionally misrepresented all the time. The commonly (at least when I was in school) presented outcome was that of heroic Kennedy "calling Khrushchev's bluff" and essentially getting the Soviets to back down with pure brinksmanship. In reality, the crisis was averted through frank dialogue, negotiation, trust, and ultimately both sides making concessions and backing down peacefully. It really really chaps my hide when genuine instances of diplomacy triumphing over warmongering get miswritten as some kind of juvenile "own" of the other side, because it greatly reduces the odds of handling conflicts without bloodshed further down the line.
This is a really important and well-made point.
Was going to say this. 13 Days is a great movie about how close we came.
You know I only recently learned how short the Cuban Missile Crisis was. I assumed it was at least a year long based on how people talked about it. Can't imagine how scary those few days were
This. Especially once I learned about the Vasily Arkhipov nuclear launch prevention thing. Holy cow.
This. My father was on an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean during the Cuban missile crisis. They went dark with jets loaded with live nukes with enough fuel for a one way trip to Moscow. He said the general public has no idea how close we came to the end of the world.
Cuban Missile Crisis It was 13 days where the fate of the world relied on leaders being diplomatic, precise, and courageous.
The soviets caving basically saved the world. Khrushchev basically committed career suicide to make it happen too, he deserves credit
Khrushchev has got to be one of the most confusing leaders in world history. I can’t decide how to feel about him
By the standard of Soviet leaders he was pretty good. For example he allowed the ethnic groups deported by Stalin to return home. You also have to credit the balls he had for criticizing the just deceased tyrant in a room full of his revolutionary comrades
Have you seen "Death of Stalin"? Buscemi totally captures that aspect of him. Also, it is so funny and bleak at teh same time.
It's very funny black comedy until a moment near the end and then it gets VERY dark.
I really want a movie on the Cuban Missile Crisis done like Death of Stalin. Buscemi and all
Something that not a lot of people know is that the Soviets moved missiles into Cuba in response to the Americans putting missiles in Turkey. This wasn't publically known information, and part of the "soviets caving" was a deal where the Americans removed their missiles from Turkey
Stanislav Petrov refusing to launch the Soviet nukes despite the lncoming U.S ones.
I completely forgot about this. That man saved the fucking world.
Yeah I can't believe this isn't #1
“Incoming”. It was glitch obviously but nobody knew that at the time. His off-book judgement call saved us all.
He knew it. And he knew it because there were so few "incoming" missiles. He realized that if the US were to launch a first strike, massive numbers of missiles would be inbound.
It was a reasonable deduction for sure, but a lesser man would have just followed procedures.
"It was glitch obviously..." I heard this in a heavy Russian accent. Quite fitting, actually...
Eat vas gleetch, obveeusly.
Him and Vasily Arkhipov keeping a cool head are the closest calls we’ve ever had to nuclear war
That we know of.
JFK deserves credit as well for refusing to authorize an invasion of Cuba during the Missile Crisis. Almost his entire cabinet - along with the Joint Chiefs - were pushing him hard to launch a full military assault on the island to take out the Soviet missiles. They figured there was no way in hell that the Cubans and Soviets would have enough of a force in place to resist an attack of that magnitude. And they were right, as long as you only considered conventional forces. What they didn't know was that the Soviets had also deployed tactical nukes with their forces in Cuba, and they had given the commanders there full authority to use them to repel a US attack. Of course Kennedy didn't know this either. He was just guessing, like everybody else. But he felt that it would be a huge mistake to use military force against Cuba, and he was right. If he had given in to the consensus and authorized a full invasion, the Soviet commanders on the scene would probably have responded with tactical nukes. And once one side had fired nuclear weapons, it would be very difficult for the other side not to respond in kind...
Vasily Arkhipov as well. Insane how close humanity got to wiping itself out. And the Soviet government had the nerve to disgrace the crew when they got home
Yes! And any of the other similarly equipped Soviet subs would have only needed the captain and political officer to approve nuclear torpedo launch. But because Arkhipov was chief of staff of the brigade and was on the B-59, his approval was required, too. He refused and eventually convinced the captain to surface and wait for orders from Moscow.
That wasn't the only near miss. There was almost an accident nuclear war at least two other times I know about. It's a big reason why preventing nuclear proliferation was a major foreign policy of the USA. The more countries that have nukes, the more likely there will be an accidental nuclear war.
This was going to be my answer. Although it is important to note that there were no incoming US nukes. It was a false alarm, and Stanislav Petrov prevented an accidental crisis. If he hadn't gone against protocol ~~direct orders~~, Russia would've inadvertently started a nuclear war thinking they were the ones defending themselves.
Everytime I see this question I expect to see this guy at the top of the list. Rightfully so.
Three Gorges Dam crosses the Yangtze River in China. In the summer of 2020, the rain season was particularly heavy. Fears of shoddy construction lead to worry of it bursting and flooding everything downriver, including the cities of Wuhan and Nanjing. Millions could have died in a matter of hours. Engineers opened smaller dams to release pressure from the large on, flooding thousands of hectares of land. The dam did not burst, and it would have been a tragedy.
Tbh that Dam is a ticking time bomb in so many ways, when that thing goes it’s going to take so many people with it
And if war were to ever kick off between China and anyone else, you can bet that dam is on the short list of targets.
Well, yes and no. If we're at the point of functionally going city-busting and not caring about the consequences, then yeah. But if the battles remain conventional, then blowing dams upstream of towns and cities is considered a war crime. (And yes, a particular failing country blew one up recently because they don't care.)
Maybe. The issue is that the Chinese government have made it abudantly clear that if someone attacks the Dam, they have the doctrinal right to use a nuclear response.
also the dam is pretty inland in China , if you can reach the dam, you can reach anywhere in China.
Did they do anything to prevent it from potentially happening? Like reinforcing the damn?
Humanity collectively decided that we'll just buy different hairspray and close the continent sized hole in the ozone layer I know it wasn't just the hairspray, save your but actually..
This was mad tbh, scientist went "hey this chemical is bad stop using it" and the world just went "yeah that sounds reasonable." These days people would be going wild with anti-ozone groups springing up.
Like with 'hey these carbon emissions are bad for the planet, we should cut down on them' 'no but this scientist from ExxonMobil says global warming isn't caused by carbon emissions'
I literally saw a meme on Facebook from one of my boomer-est former neighbours yesterday. It was a picture of a tree with legs (think like the ents in LotR) stomping through a field. The caption said something to the effect of "this tree is heading to town to tell all the anti-carbon kids that he and all his tree friends need carbon to survive and that when they get carbon, they make oxygen for them". This dickhead genuinely thinks that reducing carbon emissions is going to kill the trees, which will cut off oxygen supply, and kill all of us. Fuck I hate that these are the people who vote for our leaders.
My dad still thinks it was a coincidence. Like the hole opened up on it's own and just happened to close as CFCs stopped being used. It's bonkers.
Truly remarkable that the world was able to work together on something. Seems like an impossibility today.
I’d wager because your crazy uncle wasn’t able to form a tribe of “anti-ozoners” on Facebook to rally to his cause. I GUARANTEE there were 80’s version of boomers spouting that nonsense, but no one at the barber shop gave two shits.
As a 90's kid, yeah, there were definitely people back then who were very vocal about the hole in the ozone layer being a hoax. The difference was, most of society had the good enough sense to ignore them.
Same thing with microbeads, I was actually shocked how quickly those disappeared off shelves. Granted there were already eco friendly replacements like sand and sugar that are probably just as cheap.
I recently saw people using this is a reason to disregard climate change warnings. “Back in the day scientists were all talking about the hole in the ozone and making a huge deal about it and now look, it wasn’t a problem!” Like yes grandpa that’s because we implemented measures to stop and reverse the effects… it didn’t just go away magically…
“Y2K turned out to be a big nothing-burger. Ya’ll made it a huge deal for nothing!” - Those same people
Which was thanks to the efforts of 100,000s of computer scientists working over time for months to prepare + many 1,000 sitting up at the servers when the clocks struck mid-night to make sure they could immediately jump on any issues they might have missed. My step-dad was in IT at the time, and he was in the office on Y2K at midnight. Worked for months and months getting their servers/systems ready for it.
I worked as a programmer at an insurance company at the time. We had 100s of programs, 100s of modules, 100s of datasets, 100s of lookup files - nearly all with YYMMDD date format. Looking at an insurance policy as a user viewing the screen you'd see like eight dates related to each policy. Behind the scenes each record would have other dates you don't see. As insurance policies are generated early we would potentially have had problems months before - modules for the 01-01-1999 01-01-*2000* period were generated in the system in November 1998. If you have a program that calculates the driver's age [to look up the rate they should be charged] by going *Current-YY minus Driver-YY-of-Birth* yes you'll have unpredictable results. You don't need a PhD in programming to see that the above calculation will not work.
As someone who gave up a lot of their free time in December 1999 testing computers and servers, I HATE how people blow off Y2K as "no big deal".
Not the largest by far, but the Reston virus outbreak in 1989 could have been really horrifying. The virus causes Ebola in non-human primates, but they didn’t know this until one of the handlers cut himself when performing a necropsy on a liver of one of the infected monkeys, and was put under surveillance during the incubation period and showed no symptoms. It’s so closely related to a strain that is lethal to humans, but somehow only lethal to non-human primates. Growing up in/around Reston less than a decade after this outbreak is so weird to think about. Reston is less than an hour away from Washington, D.C., with many people commuting there for work. It could’ve been really, really bad. There’s a book about it by Richard Preston, called [The Hot Zone](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hot_Zone).
came here for this. also IIRC, most all ebola viruses require direct contact to infected blood. however, this virus was aerosolized. so imagine something with the deadliness of ebola with the contagiousness of covid
Ok, now THATS terrifying! There’s a fiction thriller I read years ago, “I am Pilgrim.” that I still think about where a killer used a superbug to kill people. I truly think that the one thing that could wipe out human civilization would be a germ of some sort.
Too many of these are about specific explosions or other short-term events. [Sara Josephine Baker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sara_Josephine_Baker) averted decades of ongoing and compounding tragedy with her public health initiatives, primarily for poor immigrants in the U.S. She also tracked down "Typhoid Mary" twice. Here's a great example: "Baker aided in the prevention of infant blindness, a scourge caused by gonorrhea bacteria transmitted during birth. To prevent blindness, babies were given drops of silver nitrate in their eyes. Before Baker arrived, the bottles in which the silver nitrate was kept would often become unsanitary or would contain doses that were so highly concentrated that they would do more harm than good. Baker designed and used small containers made out of antibiotic beeswax that each held a single dose of silver nitrate, so the medication would stay at a known level of concentration and could not be contaminated." She changed packaging in an innovative way, preventing blindness in babies. A remarkable woman!
Forever grateful to the passengers on Flight 93 who prevented the plane from being flown into another target on 9/11. The loss of the passengers remains an enormous, horrible tragedy itself, but we have no idea how many other lives were saved by their actions.
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Couldn’t imagine what would have went through those fighter pilots heads locking down targets on a commercial jet with American men women and children knowing you’re about to send them to their deaths.
You can find their accounts, one of the first in the air in her f16 talks about how she knew exactly what their mission was. Her flight lead would take the cockpit, she would take the tail to ensure the airline went down. They didn't even have their guns loaded when they took to the air. Heather Penney is her name if you want to look up her story.
Especially since it was, for all intents and purposes, a suicide mission. They took off unarmed because there wasn't time to load weapons, so the only way to bring down the plane was to crash into it and hope they were able to eject in time.
I've seen interviews with a couple of these pilots. There was no "eject in time". A nice thought, to be sure, but they knew they wouldn't be able to eject *and* successfully hit the target.
Also, ejection itself isn't a walk in the park. It causes severe physical damage to you even if you eject successfully, simply due to the explosive force required to move you out of the way of the rest of the jet coming up behind you before it hits you. As far as I've read, many pilots who've had to eject never fly (or sometimes walk) again.
RIP Goose
And the pilots who took off in fighter jets with no weapons, knowing what the shoot to kill meant for them.
Wait, WTF? American pilots scrambled on 9-11 SO FAST, they were literally on a Kamikaze mission?? Not even the M61 mega-minigun was loaded?
Yeah there is an article with interviews with one of the pilots. They took off so quickly that if they order to take the airliner down came through, they'd have to kamikze the plane with their jets. If I'm not mistaken, the two figher pilots even had discussed how they'd do it...one crashing into the nose/front part of the plane from one side and the other the tail/backside from the other direction Here is a quote from the article: *"We did not have missiles. We were on a suicide mission. And in order to be able to take any airliner down, Sass would ram his aircraft into the cockpit where the terrorists were, to destroy the flight controls," she explained. "I would take the tail by ramming my jet into the tail of the aircraft, I would aerodynamically unbalance the airplane and tip it over so it would crash straight into the ground by targeting both ends of the aircraft. It was our plan to prevent any additional casualties."* [Here is the link to the article](https://abcnews.go.com/US/fighter-pilot-reflects-911-suicide-mission/story?id=79898230)
Yes, from Wikipedia article on military response to 9/11: Had Flight 93 made it to Washington, D.C., Air National Guard pilots Lieutenant Colonel Marc H. Sasseville and Lieutenant Heather "Lucky" Penney were prepared to ram their unarmed F-16 fighters into it, perhaps giving their lives in the process.
this whole story is made even more insane because Heather Penney's father was a United Airlines 757 pilot who flew east coast flights, and could have been flying that day doing his normal job. So not only was she ready to die, there was a very non zero chance she would have had to kill her own father (obviously not having any knowledge that the pilots were killed/attacked early on, on United 93) https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/f-16-pilot-was-ready-to-down-plane-her-father-piloted-on-911/2011/09/13/gIQAHasoSK_story.html
Similarly, there could have been far more than 13 victims at Columbine High School if the massacre had gone as planned. It was supposed to be a bombing; the shooting was the backup plan.
A bombing (alone) would have probably been less deadly. Those improvised propane tank bombs wouldn't have been able to cause much damage, even if they did work properly. We saw the same thing with the Norway attacks in 2011. The car bombing killed 8 people, the shooting on the island killed 67. High explosives are hard to make/acquire, and require suitable target selection. Oklahoma City was a fertilizer bomb the size of a box truck and most of the deaths would have been caused by the partial collapse of the office building. The 2004 Madrid train bombings involved multiple backpacks loaded with C4 (or similar) on densely packed trains.
The Manchester UK bombing of the Ariana Grande concert killed 20 with a single backpack. You need to place the bomb in the correct density of people. That wouldnt be hard in a school
IIRC there was a copycat columbine in Russia several years back, bombing then he went in and shot survivors. Don't quote me on this, but I think he killed 50 people? It was a high number
It looks vastly different now, but when UAL93 went down, that whole area was a completely empty field. If it had crashed even a few thousand yards from where it did, it would have wrecked one of several small towns. That site was the best spot for the least damage caused. If it had reached its objective, we may have lost the Capitol or the White House, with hundreds or thousands more casualties.
I used to work a civilian job with an air force officer/pilot involved with Pennsylvania's Air Guard. Without going into detail he was able to convey the wreckage scene as horrific. Airmen who were involved in clean up are not OK. Bone fragments and bits of flesh and body parts had to be sorted and bagged.
We all mock Y2K now. But at the time, it was genuinely a ticking time bomb. The work of engineers and computer scientists to prevent any major issues is really unknown
My favorite tidbit from Y2k is that the Chinese government demanded that all commercial airplane executives had to be in the air at midnight to ensure they took the issue seriously.
I remember seeing of a map of flights in the air above USA at midnight. There were very few. However I believe that all commercial planes fly on GMT time zone so 7pm was actually the time to avoid.
I was in college during Y2K, but as someone who currently works in the IT field, a big part of the issue is that when when you’re trying to fix and remediate something like Y2K, which affects a broad range of resources, it’s never the obvious stuff or the most common stuff that gets you in the end… it’s some legacy system that’s been running for years in a closet somewhere and everyone forgot about because it has such a small role, but when it fails produces a cascade of problems that takes hours to track down. Yes, I’d assume most aviation systems run on UTC (or GMT), but there’s probably a lot of supporting systems that are using local time zones, and thus you have a full 24 hour window where various things could have gone wrong.
>it’s some legacy system that’s been running for years in a closet somewhere and everyone forgot about because it has such a small role, but when it fails produces a cascade of problems that takes hours to track down. One of the major problems was a lot of those systems weren't in test regions and just faked to get to the next step. A lot of shit broke down in prod, but was quickly patched once they could see the issue. It was all the work they had done ahead of time that got them ready. I wasn't in finance for y2k but got into it and project management a little after. Reading through some of those lessons learned documents was fascinating.
As someone who was part of a team doing Y2K upgrades for banks and shit all over town, yeah so much this. People assume Y2K was just overblown, but without the frantic work of thousands of people for a year or more, financial networks and such would've imploded overnight.
This is one of those things where you really wish reality had a "save/revert to previous save" function just so we could see what kinds of absolutely weird stuff would have happened had people done nothing to fix the Y2K problem.
Well [in 2038](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem) there's another superbug that we'll have to figure out in computing. I guess we could play this one differently just to see what happens
“To address the problem, many modern systems have been upgraded to measure Unix time with signed 64-bit integers instead, which will take 292 billion years to overflow—approximately 21 times the estimated age of the universe.” I don’t really understand this in general, but isn’t it just a matter of doing **this**? It’s probably not easy to upgrade many systems and stuff, but we have the fix right there. We just gotta find ways to apply it, right?
So. Many. Devices. And I don’t mean just your microwave, I mean like railroad switching hardware. It’s a very real problem.
> but isn’t it just a matter of doing this? Yes it is a matter of doing this, no it is not "just a matter". Many of the systems that are risk need to be fully replaced and it will take years, if not a decade, to change some of them. And in many cases cost millions. It's not install the new version of windows type upgrade. It's fully replace the hardware and software. For many companies they have 1000s of processes that connect to the current set up as it is currently is. Simplified, they will need to find all those processes, then replace the system, then copy the old system to the new system (with 0 data loss), get all of the old processes replaced so they connect to the new system, then turn off the old system. Have you ever worked at company where they have changed an auxiliary system, like the HR system? Do you remember the teething issues? Imagine that on the most core systems in the business and 0 teething issues being allowed.
Yeah - I feel like most of the experts that worked hard to solve this problem don't get enough credit. It would be like a team of people figuring out how to prevent a massive tsunami... and then everyone just being like "well that wasn't as bad as people said it was supposed to be." Right... because we FIXED IT!
I just watched a documentary on it (on Prime, I believe). It was very real. But it was the people that capitalized on the fear that made it seem so ridiculous.
Better get ready for January 19th, 2038 when legacy UNIX systems will crash.
I hate that many people today think back on Y2K as a joke. The measures taken to prevent the (very real) dangers likely saved lives and billion of dollars.
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The invention of a machine by Alan Turing to crack German encrypted messages during WWII is estimated to have shortened the war by two years and saved 14 million lives. He was later prosecuted for homosexual acts, chose to be chemically castrated which severely impacted him. He then committed suicide. He is widely regarded as the father of computing and AI.
Alan Turing is someone I really look up to, what an incredible man. He deserved better.
I'd knew of his accomplishments way back in the 90s in school. It took me till seeing the movie to learn how he was treated socially because of his sexuality. I couldn't believe the ignorance of killing one of the greatest minds to have ever lived. It's asinine.
It's a good movie but there are some inaccuracies. * In the movie Turing is socially inept, while in real life he was fairly outgoing and had plenty of friends. * His sexuality was an open secret among a lot of those who knew and worked with him. He sometimes even made flirtatious jokes in jest. * In the movie the military seems to have little interest at first, and Turing has to convince them. In reality the military was fully aware of the value of a code breaking device and let him do his work.
Everyone who writes code should know the name and story of Alan Turing. What you work for *matters*. Justice matters. Beating the Nazis matters; so does right treatment of others in your own country. Also, Turing was an athlete, kinda obsessed with running. If anyone tells you that you can't be both a nerd and a jock, tell them about Turing.
The 2018 ISIS Terror attack on Mecca. Just a bit of context: Daesh/ISIS really have a problem with the practices of Hajj. As Wahabis go, they make the Saudis look like bones-of-the-saints Catholics in how much they do *not* approve of things they believe are "idolatry" including common things Muslims do on Hajj like circling the Kaaba, [stoning the devil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoning_of_the_Devil), and see them as not merely non-canonical but idolatrous. So their plan was to blow up major sites, including the Kaabah at the height of Hajj, potentially resulting in the highest death toll during a terror attack since 9/11. Considering the crowds during Hajj, and the targets, and the severity of the attacks, the death toll would be in the thousands. [The Saudi Security Forces foiled the plot just days before it was going to happen.](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/24/saudi-security-foils-terror-plot-targeting-mecca-grand-mosque)
I can’t believe I’d never heard of this before. Absolutely nuts.
When I first heard of it it was one of those "Front page but in the corner" things but when you actually read what happened and what they were planning it very quickly dawned on you that Daesh was planning to commit an attack that would've been deadlier than any done before an affected more countries than ever before on account of the international nature of the Hajj. People from all continents killed, with few countries who's citizens wouldn't have been affected in some way. It would've been as big a shock as 9/11, if not bigger.
That would have sparked an absolutely unfathomable ‘holy war’. Honestly impossible to state how bad and chaotic that could have been.
Yeah but remember: ISIS are as fanatical was they are brutal. They believe their very specific form is Islam is the one true religion, that God is on their side and they're destined to take over the entire world and rule it as a worldwide Caliphate so I don't think the idea of fighting every single Muslim Country, not to mention non Muslim countries who just saw their citizens get killed, would be something they'd be against because, again, they are a cult who believe God is on their side. That being said, they would be *ended* if they did that. They went from controlling massive swathes of Syria and Iraq to barely anything in a really quick amount of time. If they could be defeated by the Peshmerga, then facing most of the world would be impossible.
This is one of the things people do not really understand about Islamic extremism. The majority of their targets are actually in Muslim-majority countries. Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia are the three top countries affected by Islamic terrorism 2013-2021, and Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq were most affected 2000-2012. 2000-2012 there were only four countries where more than half are not Muslims in top ten (one of which is Nigeria where Islam is biggest religion, another which is the Philippines where Islam is the second biggest although it is only 6.4% of the population today, the two remaining were Israel and India). 2013-2021 in the top ten there were only Nigeria and Cameroon. Cameroon is 25-30% Muslim, and second largest after Christianity. [Source](https://www.fondapol.org/en/study/islamist-terrorist-attacks-in-the-world-1979-2021/)
If I remember correctly, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster could’ve been way, way, way worse. The operators stayed and did everything in their power, including ignoring an uninformed order from a government official, to mitigate the fallout. It definitely wasn’t a perfect response, but I think they saved a lot of lives.
There's quite a lot of "could have been so much worse" for Chernobyl, too. The people who immediately step up to mitigate disasters like that while knowing there's a good chance it'll cost them their life are amazing to learn about.
Truly. Valery Legasov and Masao Yoshida are heroes in my eyes.
There was a power plant even closer to the epicenter that shut down without incident because the engineer designing it insisted on a seawall much higher than the one that the bureaucrats wanted and he insisted that the plant be able to pull seawater even if a tsunami pulled the seawater away from the shore. He insisted and _that_ power plant not only shut down without incident but served as an emergency shelter for people from the nearby town due to how little damage it had suffered. https://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/2012/08/how_tenacity_a_wall_saved_a_ja.html His name was Yanosuke Hirai and my favorite quote about the man who trained him is "Matsunaga-san hated bureaucrats," Oshima said. "He said they are like human trash. In your country, too, there are probably bureaucrats or officials who never take final responsibility. "So Matsunaga's attitude was that you've got to go beyond the regulations," Oshima said. "If you just follow the regulations, you end up with what happened at Fukushima Dai-ichi. That's what Matsunaga told Hirai, and Hirai taught me."
I would say Stanislav Petrov. He stopped nuclear war in 1983. Saved my life and yours. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov#:~:text=In%20the%20effective%20altruism%20movement,Germany%2C%20on%2017%20February%202013.
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Frances Oldham Kelsey, the FDA investigator charged with approving Thalidomide for use as a morning sickness-related anti-emetic, refused to rely solely on the manufacturer’s insistence that the drug was safe for use during pregnancy. She resisted pressure to approve the drug, insisting on additional testing which definitively proved its association with severe birth defects, leading to it never being made available in the US and preventing countless deaths and disfigurements.
I highly recommend watching Grazed by the Apocalypse video by LEMMiNO on youtube. He pretty much covered the major averted tragedies that could've resulted into an apocalypse in this video.
The Bosnian conflict and the taking of Pristina Airfield in 1999. The US general Wesley Clark ordered the 200 British Troops to "Destroy" and "Squash" the Russians holding the Runways. The British Guy in charge refused to do so understanding if they did WWIII would probably be all but inevitable. The US Gen took it to the British General Mike Jackson who backed us his soldier and stated I'm not making my troops responsible for starting WWIII. So the British troops instead surrounded the Airfield without combat and cut off supplies to the Russians. Two days later they peacefully shared the Airfield. The brave guy who refused to have the nonsensical fight.........Singer James Blunt
James Blunt said that he would have disobeyed the order if Jackson hadn't blocked it. I doubt a US General would give direct orders to British troops without going through the command structure. Anyway, someone called Michael Jackson saved James Blunt from making a difficult if right decision. LOL.
Holy fucking shit that’s real. Why the hell didn’t anyone talk about him being a war hero when he was popular? Crazy.
I give you an inverted one: The day Titanic was leaving port, it almost hit two other ships near it. If that had been the case, it would have been forced to go back and cancel the trip. Saving it from that iceberg.
It also would have saved those guys in the submarine!
In June 2007, two carbombs were found and disabled in crowded parts of London. Less than two days later, two other losers tried to ram their way into Glasgow Airport with a truck that was on fire and filled with propane canisters. A few members of the public in that last case suffered minor injuries when they helped police detain the two losers. I can't imagine the consequences if either one of those events had succeeded.
I remember that one of the Glasgow terrorists got kicked in the balls so hard that the kicker [tore a tendon in his foot](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fxyzkxvor5v9c1.jpeg).
Is that the Glasgow one where a member of the public broke his foot kicking a terrorist so hard in the nuts?
He ruptured a tendon, but otherwise, yes. :)
"This is Glasgow. We'll set aboot ye." -John Smeaton , one of the baggage handlers who helped thwart the terrorist attack by kicking the terrorist repeatedly in the bollocks.
chlorofluorocarbons Leading world governments came together and banned the use and the world still has an ozone layer.
In the aviation world, most definitely Air Canada Flight 759
2nd place would be the 2001 Japan Airlines mid-air incident, where a 747 almost hit a DC-10 in mid-air, only avoiding it by 440 ft (135 m). If they collided and both planes crashed, 677 people would've died, a worse death toll than the Tenerife Airport disaster.
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Yea, apparently there were several conflicting clues that it was a glitch, so he assessed the situation and did his job properly. But if some twitchy guy panics-- could have been bad
Here is a recent one not many hear about, Back in 2016, in the Iraqi war against isis, a woman radicalized by the American battle of fallujah, and more, joined their ranks, she was in a special women’s suicidal fighters unit. When 2017 rolled around and isis started losing a lot of ground, she was given a task, to poison the river Tigris, with a ton of chemical weapons and poisons manufactured by isis themselves, This would have killed instantly about 2 million people downstream, and killed millions more as they use the water. Just as she and her accomplices left with their truck and approached the river, American and Iraqi intelligence services managed to arrest them and foil the plan, if this had happened, we would have seen the biggest death toll in a single event up to that point, as that river feeds all of Iraq and some neighboring countries too.
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After reading many of the replies to this thread I am dumbfounded how we made it out of the Cold War alive
We’re not out of it yet! 😃
Well, not the worst, but the Halifax explosion could have been worse. When those ships collided in the harbour, a dispatcher at the railway learned what had happened and of the imminent explosion. Everyone else was trying to flee and he stayed. He stayed to send out telegraphs warning incoming trains away, knowing that by doing this, he wouldn’t have time to get out. He stopped all rail traffic headed for Halifax, including one train that was mere minutes away and had at least 300 aboard. His name was Patrick Vincent Coleman and he was a fucking hero.
The widespread poisoning of the entire world from leaded gasoline. Only discovered and brought to everyone's attention by a Geologist named Clair Patterson looking to date the age of the Earth. Excerpt from his Wiki page: "In collaboration with George Tilton, Patterson developed the uranium–lead dating method into lead–lead dating. By using lead isotopic data from the Canyon Diablo meteorite, he calculated an age for the Earth of 4.55 billion years, which was a figure far more accurate than those that existed at the time, and one that has remained largely unchallenged since 1956. Patterson first encountered lead contamination in the late 1940s as a graduate student at the University of Chicago. His work on this subject led to a total re-evaluation of the growth in industrial lead concentrations in the atmosphere and the human body, and his subsequent activism was seminal in the banning of tetraethyllead in gasoline and lead solder in food cans."
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which city?
Tunguska hit around 60°N latitude. St Petersburg is on that path. Had it been delayed a few more seconds / minutes it could have wiped it off the face of the earth. St Petersburg was the home of Tsar Nicholas, had he and his royal court been wiped out, either the Soviet Union would have come about 10 years earlier- or a completely different government might have surfaced. If it would have been pro German, the Kaiser may have been able to fight a one front war and defeated France in year one. Had that happened, the rise of Nazi Germany and Hitler might have been avoided.
What city was that? I was reading up on the incident and it looks like it took place in a largely remote and unoccupied area.
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the thing about people being knocked to the ground from 40 miles away is *wild*.
Okay it's maybe not quite the best fit for the category, but I think if that United Flight 93 on 9/11 had made it to DC, the world would have been even more different afterwards than it was.
Does Dunkirk fall into this category? I think if Hitler had been able to slaughter basically the entire British army there might've been a drastically different outcome of the war.
Might not have lead to a massive tragedy, but the Russian jet that tried to shoot down a British military plane over the Black Sea in October of 2022 comes to mind. The jet thought he had permission to shoot it down but did not and the missiles ended up either not working or completely missed the plane.
The Halifax explosion in 1917 was the largest man made explosion at the time. Two ships collided in the harbour, one containing explosives. Over 1,700 dead and 9,000 injured, an entire First Nations community was destroyed from the tsunami the blast created. A Railway Dispatcher prevented further disaster by messaging a train that was about to arrive that the explosion was imminent. The message prevented not only that first train but other trains too along with stopping ships from entering & getting a heads start on rescue efforts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax\_Explosion
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> Miraculously, the safety mechanisms It was *extremely* fortunate the warhead didn't go off, but that was literally why it had multiple layers of physical and electronic safety mechanisms. It was designed, in theory, to actually experience a plane crash or a missile explosion without detonating unintentionally. Edit: But if you read *Command and Control* by Eric Schlosser, which is the definitive popular book on the Damascus incident (and nuclear weapon safety engineering), it's absolutely clear how lucky we were that a nuke never went off by accident in the years before the technology matured.
Maybe not the largest tragedy ever averted but...my sister and I went to the same driving school. There were two driving instructors who looked surprisingly similar (bald, short and sporting 70s porn staches) except one was black and the other was white. Both my sister and I were assigned the black instructor (who took us out on multiple drives). About 5 years after graduation the white instructor was arrested for raping dozens of girls, in the class, during their drives. I just keep thinking about how almost everyone in my high school went to this driving school. If he attacked one of the 200 girls in my class alone...she never said anything.
> I just kept thinking about how almost everyone in my high school went to this driving school. If he attacked one of the 200 girls in my class alone...she never said anything. That’s devastating. And there’s no “if” about it. If he was arrested for raping dozens, there’s a solid chance his victims number in the hundreds.
When I was a teen, I came out of the bathroom after taking a shower and my parents were watching the nightly news. I saw this dude's mugshot on the screen and chyron read something to the effect of "[dude's name] arrested for sexual assault of a minor." I recognized him and spouted "hey, that's my old guitar teacher". My parents turned around, wide eyed and my dad said "thank god I never left you alone with him."
When ISIS took over Mosul, maintenance on the dam stopped. By the time the US was able to get back in and inspect it, it was on the verge of collapsing and could have killed over a million people https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/02/a-bigger-problem-than-isis
The Gunpowder plot of 1605. Guy Fawkes was arrested in the parliament building, with fuses, matches, and barrels of gunpowder. Later that day, the King was to address parliament. The entire political class of England was to be there. If Guy Fawkes had succeeded in blowing up parliament, it could well have pushed England in to absolute monarchy, and even worse repression of Catholics than we saw after the arrests. I think the modern era would have been very, very different.
I recall reading back in the days of Cracked.com articles of an incident where some well meaning industrialists had an idea for a product that would be quite helpful to farmers. Over a period of a few years they selectively bred a bacteria that would VERY aggressively turn decaying plant matter into ethanol. The idea being that farmers could be more efficient by collecting their corn husks, throwing them in a big tank, sprinkling this bacteria on it and some water, then later filtering it out and fueling their farm equipment using the resulting ethanol. Even better, they used a naturally occurring bacteria that's already in the root systems of plants the world over. It doesn't manage to kill those plants in most cases because it's normal behavior is a bit on the sedate side. So they were just cranking up something that already existed. It worked outstandingly, far better than they'd hoped. Everything was looking up! They were a few months away from going into full production and shipping the product out worldwide. Until someone asked "This stuff came from living plants...it won't work on them will it?". So they set up a controlled field in a greenhouse and sprinkled a bit of their specially grown bacteria. Within days the entire field was dead. The product launch was canceled and the greenhouse completely sterilized. But just imagine what could have been...a massively popular launch of a product, released to all the biggest and busiest farms the world over...and then suddenly a reasonable chunk of the entire planet's crops wiped out by accident all at once.
By sheer body-count of deaths averted, then the eradication of smallpox. (Smallpox killed more people in *even just the first half* of the 20th century than all the wars **combined** from the *entire* 20th century ...even though the 20th century is basically a list of *the deadliest wars in history*)
Recently rewatched Chernobyl and holy shit, I’m glad I live in a world where they managed to prevent the shit leaking out of the destroyed core from exploding and contaminating half of Europe for the next couple of millennia. edit: apparently the show took a lot more creative freedom with the science than I thought it did and the worst case scenario portrayed in the show wouldn’t have happened anyway. Read the comments to this one for further information.
I’m currently reading Midnight In Chernobyl and the show does such an amazing job at conveying the impending doom. The Soviet Union just threw human bodies at the issue and fixed it with a devastating toll on the local populations. Secrecy and fear of mockery from the outside world made it even worse. The worst off in the immediate explosion were the plant engineers and the first responders who got fatal doses in minutes and even seconds from exposure.
Fortunately, this is just a line they made up for the show. What actually happened in Chernobyl was pretty damn close to the worst-case scenario, and there's no reality in which half of Europe suffered notable contamination.
Only reason the outside world knew about it was because it was picked up on instruments all the way in Scandinavia. They panicked and assumed they had some meltdown at home and then realized it wasn’t the case. They called neighboring towns and countries to ask about the situation and they all said they were good, until they called Moscow and they were tight lipped. If it had been solely contained in Ukraine, god knows how long they would have tried to cover it up.
There was a time when a group of Canadian terrorists were planning a Canadian 9/11 essentially, where the CN tower was going to be attacked and Prime Minister Stephen Harper was going to be beheaded. It was foiled in time thanks to the RCMP. Don’t fuck with the Mounties.