The End Is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments, from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses

by Dan Carlin

To imagine the twenty-first-century world being hit with a great plague like the great disease pandemics of the past is fantasy, yet it’s also extremely possible and has happened many times before.

A history professor once told me that there are two ways we learn: you can put your hand on the hot stove, or you can hear tales of people who already did that and how it turned out for them.

Will we ever again have the type of pandemics that rapidly kill large percentages of the population? This was a feature of normal human existence until relatively recently, but seems almost like science fiction to imagine today.

Smallpox is one of the most infamous diseases in history. To give an idea of its virulence, it killed an estimated 300 to 500 million people in the twentieth century alone,* but the disease was eradicated from the planet in 1980*—meaning half a billion people were killed by smallpox in just eight decades.

This brings up the question of how much the people living in a dark age would even realize it. If you were born in Greece in 1000 BCE,* did you know (or care) that there was a greater age before yours? Take a kid born in the United States in 1929, at the beginning of the Great Depression. On his tenth birthday, the world was still mired in the effects of the crash. To that child, the privation and lowered sense of expectations felt normal; he had no experience or memory of anything else. His parents, however, likely felt that times had gotten tougher.

The anthropologist Joseph Tainter said that in some regions the Roman Empire taxed its citizens so highly, and provided so few services in return, that some of those people welcomed the “conquering barbarians” as liberators.

At its height, whole cities in the United States were virtually shut down, as areas where human beings congregated were closed to prevent people from transmitting the illness.* People stayed home from school and work rather than risk exposure, and the gears of society in some places seemed imperiled by the justifiable fear of getting sick.