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536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)
- danharaj 6y agoMaybe not for Americans :) The eruption was hypothesized to have occurred in North America but did the team try to cross reference with native accounts of that time period?
- vkou 6y agoGiven that ~90% of native Americans were killed over the first decades of European contact by smallpox, measles, and war, it's entirely possible that there had been a worse year for them.
- michaelmrose 6y agoThis is an interesting point context matters.
- jandrese 6y agoNorth American natives were not good about writing stuff down, and by the time Europeans showed up it was almost a millennium later so the records would have been scanty even if the Europeans hadn't gone on insane rampages spreading death, disease, and destruction everywhere they went.
- anonAndOn 6y agoDoesn't "not good" in this context mean NEVER. Are there any native tribes/peoples that had a writing system before European contact? AFAICT, it's one of the main causes so many native languages are dying/extinct.
- thaumasiotes 6y agoHaving a writing system and using it to record history are surprisingly independent. For example, in ancient India they wrote all kinds of stuff down, but virtually none of it is history. Most of what we know about the history of India comes from the records of other peoples who came into contact with the Indians.
- yorwba 6y agoWriting developed in America long before Europeans showed up and continued to be used until Europeans showed up, but the Europeans destroyed most books they could find and forced the natives to learn the colonizers' languages. That's the main cause why so many native languages are dying/extinct. Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_writing_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_writing_systems
- anonAndOn 6y agoIt looks like writing developed in present-day Mexico and never made it north of the desert border (Mojave/ Sonoran/ Chihuahua). So NONE of the estimated 296 languages spoken by natives in US and Canada had a written language that we have evidence of. [0] [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_languages_of_the_Americas#Language_families_and_unclassified_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_languages_of_the_Am...
- perl4ever 6y agoThe article says near the top: "An extensive Mesoamerican literature has been conserved, partly in indigenous scripts and partly in postconquest transcriptions in the Latin script." It also says: "The Florentine Codex, compiled 1545-1590 by Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún includes a history of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire from the Mexica viewpoint"
- AlotOfReading 6y agoThere's at least one script that's absolutely, a 100% definitive written language, Maya. There are about half a dozen more that qualify for certain reasonable definitions of writing. Beyond that, there are hundreds of systems of proto-writing that rely primarily on the cultural context of the speaker to interpret. These were still used to record events and stories, though.
- murat131 6y agoWriting was invented in Mesopotamia around 3200BC, while in the Americas the necessity of writing things down triggered the same invention around 600BC. Main reason was because Eurasia was in the east-west plane where climate is similar and communication/commerce was not difficult to employ which helped Europe, ME, Asia, and far east to increase interaction. Americas on the other hand lays on the north-south plane, Isthmus of Panama is narrow to pass through, variances in climate and terrain greatly limited communication and commerce between north and south. When European showed up on the shores of Caribbeans and the mainland of Americas it was already too late.
- jcranmer 6y agoClearly, you've read Guns, Germs, Steel, whose accuracy when it comes to anthropology is on the same level as the (Christian) Bible's accuracy with respect to cosmology. > Americas on the other hand lays on the north-south plane, Isthmus of Panama is narrow to pass through, variances in climate and terrain greatly limited communication and commerce between north and south. It should be noted that there is rather little evidence of technologies spreading along the main East-West axis of Eurasia (particularly Neolithic technologies), while there is far more evidence of such technology spreading along the North-South axis of the Americas. For example, pottery may well have spread from its invention in the Amazon Rainforest across the Caribbean to Mesoamerica and the Southeast US; corn did spread from its initial domestication Mesoamerica to both the US (where it largely supplanted preexisting domesticants) and down into the Andes (where it supplemented the existing potato crops); and metallurgy spread from its Andean origins along the Pacific coast to Western Mexico and the Southwest US.
- boomboomsubban 6y agoThough worldwide it's difficult to keep records intact for a thousand years, the Mayans had writing systems for nearly two thousand years. The Spanish priests burned any writing they found during the Mayan conquest,
- danharaj 6y agoOral traditions record, among other things, historical events.
- Synaesthesia 6y agoSounds like it was a cold time
- mark-r 6y agoI don't think native accounts had dates associated with them, even if you could track them down.
- chrisco255 6y agoAccording to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_weather_events_of_535%E2%80%93536 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_weather_events_of_535%... there is some evidence of it hitting the Moche culture in Peru.
- bwanab 6y agoI’ve recently gotten through this period in the “History of Byzantium” podcast series. Justinian had just recently retaken many of the old western Roman provinces, not least of which was Rome itself, and the breadbasket of North Africa. Things were finally looking good for the Romans again when the plague hit. The armies were unfortunately overextended and now half their ranks were dead or dying. It was an irresistible target for the Persians, the steppe horsemen and the Goths which ultimately weakened them all just in time for the Arab invasions.
- datenhorst 6y agoI listened to this years ago but could still remember Procopius' quote. I just looked it up and apparently the consensus at the time of recording (2013) was a meteor strike rather than a volcanic eruption. Interesting.
- koheripbal 6y agoWonderful series. Absolutely amazing. ...and he's now producing the set that extends through the Crusades. If you haven't listened to it, the one on the Siege of 717 deserves it's own bowl of popcorn - super super entertaining. I loved the original The History of Rome podcast that goes through to the fall of the West, but I think I've come to prefer this one even more. The first few episodes require a little patience as the author gets his footing - but it pays off. Awesome podcast.
- phist_mcgee 6y agoLink?
- avibhu 6y agoReminds me of the year without a summer[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
- _kst_ 6y agoFor those who don't follow the link, it's 1816.
- Synaesthesia 6y agoThe Christian revolution around that time in Europe also put civilisation back there. See “The Darkening Age” by Catherine Nixey
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoA glance at Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Darkening_Age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Darkening_Age) indicates that the book was not well received - not by Christians, but by academics.
- freehunter 6y agoI have no skin in the game either way but it seems like any book that tries to tackle controversial materials would have some people who don't like it. Interestingly the Wikipedia page only lists negative feedback in the Reception section, despite the book having generally good reviews and accolades from multiple different experts. The fact that the book won awards from NYT, Royal Society of Literature, BBC, and many other publications and is well-reviewed, yet Wikipedia only lists negative feedback in the Reception section indicates to me that there must be bias in the Wikipedia article. I don't see any other answer for why more than half of the article is just listing criticism that doesn't seem to be reflected across the broader industry. Again I haven't read the book and don't really care about the subject matter either way, but the Wikipedia does not seem to hide its bias.
- Ascetik 6y agoChristian 'revolution'? What nonsense. The missionaries were never interested in revolution (not in the modern sense at least), but converting people to Catholicism. St. Bede's History of the Church in England is a good example. Or the life of St. Boniface. The term "Dark Ages" was coined by anti-Christians to undermine the conversion of Europe to the Catholic faith.
- deanCommie 6y agoThese kinds of cataclysmic volcanic eruptions could happen today right? What's.......our intended process for dealing with this? Are there any technical solutions for dispersing ash from the atmosphere? I know this is a stupidly naive question to some degree - how do you prevent acts of god, but I am curious if someone has thought about it.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago> Are there any technical solutions for dispersing ash from the atmosphere? Seems like the dispersal of the ash is the problem, and you'd want to be collecting it.
- mc32 6y agoThat would be quite the challenge since fine silica and other particles would foul just about any kind of machinery.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- castis 6y agoone of the attributes of an act of god is being unpreventable by humans. in the event of something like this, having the supplies to just weather the fallout would be best. a years worth of supplies on-hand would be a good start.
- waterhouse 6y ago> one of the attributes of an act of god is being unpreventable by humans. That may be, but the set of things that humans can prevent gets larger over time. For example, 100 years ago, an asteroid hitting the earth would be an act of God we could do nothing about, but today it is at least within the realm of possibility that we could observe a large asteroid on a collision course and send in a spacecraft or missile to divert it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_impact_avoidance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_impact_avoidance
- chadlavi 6y agoThe worst year to be alive _so far_
- izzydata 6y agoI imagine there will come a time when the earth is just on the cusp of no longer being able to sustain the massive population that it has grown to or human life at all. Since the earths human population will be so high even a 5th of people dying off will be drastically more deaths than any worldwide catastrophe of the past. Maybe within another 1000 years.
- xwdv 6y agoHuman lives are worth less and less as time goes on and the population increases, so by the time this happens the loss of life might not be anymore troubling than say the amount of people killed in car crashes in a year.
- harryh 6y agoCurrent projections of Earth's population have a peak population of about 11B (only 40% higher than today) towards the end of the century and then declining. It's always hard to know what's going to happen in the future, but currently it's pretty unlikely that we'll ever see a worldwide population all that much higher than what we already have.
- caogecym 6y agoCurious - did the projection say what’s the cause of the decline after the peak?
- TechBro8615 6y agoI'm just speculating, but probably declining birth rates as economies develop.
- taneq 6y agoMaybe within 100 years. Hopefully not within 10.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dang 6y agoDiscussed, a little, at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18469891 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18469891
- twic 6y agoI didn't realise HN had been running that long.
- pureliquidhw 6y agoHow susceptible are we to another catastrophic volcano eruption? After COVID-19 shut down supply chains, there were some problematic delays, but seems like we quickly recovered. If the entire planet's crops were wiped out, we're all just SOL if we don't get canned goods in time? If we had 12 months notice, could we as a planet get it together? 6 months? 3 months? Is there forecasting for volcanoes? (looks like yes: https://volcanoes.usgs.gov/vhp/forecast.html https://volcanoes.usgs.gov/vhp/forecast.html) How often do geologists cry wolf?
- chrisco255 6y agoForecasting volcanoes is a lot like forecasting earthquakes, it's really difficult to do and often there's very little warning, maybe a couple of days at most, but sometimes comes with no warning at all. The White Island volcano killed several people last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Whakaari_/_White_Island_eruption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Whakaari_/_White_Island_e... This place was a famous tourist destination. One of my favorite sites for tracking Volcanic eruptions is: https://www.volcanodiscovery.com/volcano_news.html https://www.volcanodiscovery.com/volcano_news.html . It provides real-time updates on volcano advisories. I would say we're still very susceptible to a supervolcano eruption. There is no stopping that level of force. It can dramatically shift the climate for years, if not decades. And it would be catastrophic for crop production. I suspect we would need to move a large portion of our crop production into greenhouses and growhouses in order to survive that level of event.
- dekervin 6y agoI am genuinely curious, what hobby of yours makes you track volcanic eruptions regularly ?
- chrisco255 6y agoI just study climate developments and geological history sometimes and volcanoes are a big part of that. They've shaped life on earth.
- 6y ago
- umaar 6y agoI noticed there are a number of popups/stickies/banners on this site. How do folks feel about blocking them with uBlock considering it's a nonprofit, and one of those banners was asking for a donation? The page in incognito: https://i.imgur.com/EHhGjJ9.png https://i.imgur.com/EHhGjJ9.png The page with uBlock, sticky elements removed, and the sidebar removed: https://i.imgur.com/mNJFMyj.png https://i.imgur.com/mNJFMyj.png
- yesco 6y agoPersonally I find them obnoxious, if they weren't glued to the bottom of the screen it'd be better. In fact if they weren't already being blocked by ublock I would have immediately added them to my filter list manually.
- duxup 6y agoFrom 536 through the end of the Justinian plague in 543... what level of mortality are we talking about? The article indicates that the plague killed 35%–55% of the population.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y agoHmm, you know you feel lucky to live in the present when a sign of coming out of the worst time in history was a rise in "airborne lead".
- Avalaxy 6y agoCould we use this against global warming? Artificially put something in the atmosphere that bounces part of the sunlight back?
- stuff4ben 6y agoClearly you're not a fan of sci-fi as every time we do that we screw it up. Snowpiercer on TBS is the latest iteration on that concept. More seriously though, I think there are better and more economical ways to combat global climate warming.
- harryh 6y agoYes, potentially. But the potential side effects are scary. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-03/solar-geoengineering-cooling-the-planet-can-be-fast-and-cheap https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-03/solar-geo...
- Symmetry 6y agoMany people have proposed putting sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere. It looks relatively easy and could potentially be within the means of even poorer countries like Bangladesh which have a lot to loose from rising sea levels. But we can't predict exactly how it would turn out and it would certainly make ocean acidifcation worse so it's very much a desperation play.
- walleeee 6y agoYes. Marine cloud brightening has also been proposed. IMO we'll almost certainly see either that or stratospheric aerosols as nations begin to feel the increasing effects of climate change and grow more desperate. Whether it might be uni- or multilateral is also interesting, given the possibly serious effects on e.g. agriculture in "downstream" geographic regions. It's not much of a stretch to imagine it kicking off some kind of war.
- koheripbal 6y agoSeems more likely that populations will just move to new stable areas.
- freetanga 6y ago2020: “Hold my beer”
- tus88 6y agoThe fact this is down-voted shows how far HN has lost its way.
- shoes_for_thee 6y agoNot for me it wasn't.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y agoSince this article, there has been new research indicating that the Plague of Justinian may not have been as bad as previously thought. https://www.princeton.edu/news/2019/12/02/maybe-first-plague-wasnt-bad-say-researchers https://www.princeton.edu/news/2019/12/02/maybe-first-plague...
- throw3fj43 6y agoThat claim should be greeted with skepticism, if you are interested in learning more please consider this reply: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-%E2%80%98Justinianic-Plague%E2%80%99%3A-An-%E2%80%9CInconsequential-A-Meier/8223a0b66b46065f0678d990d02ccb864ce88053 https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-%E2%80%98Justinian...
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y agoExcellent article. I guess it is especially important to be somewhat skeptical of “exciting” new research that hits the popular press and make sure to read all the analyses.
- subsubzero 6y agoHow many people reading this have a years worth of food? Could any of us survive something similar to this eruption? I think covid really opened alot of peoples eyes to extreme worldwide disasters (volcanos, large earthquakes, pandemics) and how most are not prepared for it at all and yes these things do and will continue to keep happening.
- divbzero 6y agoI hope this pandemic has opened everyone’s eyes to the benefits of disaster preparedness. If more of us get into the habit of stocking up in advance, we would experience less of a spike in demand when the next disaster strikes.
- ryandrake 6y agoI considered myself an "aspirational Prepper" before the pandemic, but I'm getting more and more serious about it. Watching society totally freak out over as little as going without TP for a few weeks and going without their manicure for a few months has been eye-opening. My plans to stock up on survival supplies and buy a little bug out property in a remote spot have gone from "wouldn't that be neat?" to "maybe it is time to set some money aside and start building up a savings for this" pretty quickly.
- subsubzero 6y agoI try to be prepared as possible, at least for covid there was a little warning, I was extremely concerned late Jan. '20 and bought extra TP/paper towels/razors before everything went crazy. For a volcanic eruption there is little to no warning so having essentials on hand seems pretty important. I went to school/knew alot of Mormons and used to poke fun at them for having so much canned food(the church mentions stocking up on a years worth of food) and that doesn't seem that out of line now.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ghaff 6y ago
- lgl 6y agoThe 2010 eruption of Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull [0] was a small sample of the perturbations that a volcanic event can have on day to day lives. And it was a relatively small eruption. Anything much larger than that will most likely have devastating effects on modern society on pretty much all levels and it's not really a matter of "if" but "when". Besides eruptions, many other scarier events can cause huge shifts on the planet's thermal equilibrium including our current state of global warming or many other unknown events (like whatever happened to cause the Younger Dryas [1] "only" ~13k years ago which is theorized to have been either a mega eruption, impact event or stellar supernova). It's pretty scary and definitely not something that we're at all prepared even with all our technology so we're basically in a permanent state of risk of complete reset which is guaranteed to happen eventually. Sadly it's not something most of us spend too much time thinking or preparing for. I guess this is largely because we live very short lives and that make these kind of events appear much "larger than life" so they go mostly ignored except for some underfunded science departments or the occasional billionaire. To me this is the main reason that going multiplanetary or space habitat based is basically the only way to escape this inevitable doom even though that is also a huge barrier to overcome on so many levels. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_eruptions_of_Eyjafjallaj%C3%B6kull https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_eruptions_of_Eyjafjallaj%... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas
- f_allwein 6y agoMichio Kaku wrote about how it is the challenge for each civilization to guard against such life-threatening catastrophes: https://mkaku.org/home/articles/the-physics-of-extraterrestrial-civilizations/ https://mkaku.org/home/articles/the-physics-of-extraterrestr...
- yummypaint 6y agoIt's also a good reason to leave fossil fuels in the ground and not just extract them as quickly as possible wherever we find them. It seems conceivable that we could eventually find ourselves thermodynamically unable to recover after a catastrophy like a big solar flare. Unfortunately there is no way for anyone to make money by being responsible in this way. We are effectively draining our planetary rainy day fund and spending it on cocaine.
- chromaton 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_weather_events_of_535–536 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_weather_events_of_535–...
- MannishMan 6y agoI know this is pedantic, but based on the order of events in the article wouldn’t 543 be the worst year to be alive? By then you would have experienced the cumulative horror of starving and freezing through two volcanic events and watching a third to half of your friends and family die of plague. 536 would have a been frightening and confusing as the volcanic fog began to roll in, but you couldn’t know the terror of what was to come.
- kanobo 6y agoThat's not pedantic, it's a good comment. I had the same thought when reading the article and wondered if others were wondering the same.
- TrainedMonkey 6y agoObjectively you are right, subjectively I think what matters is short term contrast. 535 vs 536 has a much steeped drop in quality of life than 542 vs 543.
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y agoBut the title is "worst year to be alive", so while the contrast of 536 was likely the biggest, measured objectively by food availability, life expectancy etc 543 was the worst.
- TrainedMonkey 6y agoObjectively you are right, subjectively that statement is technically correct and that is worst kind of correct :)
- afterburner 6y agoPlague and second volcano hitting in 541 is also a good candidate.
- yesplorer 6y agoI agree with you, but I also think 536 could be considered worst because of the initial shock. But as other events roll in with time, people may become used to expecting the worst. I'm thinking this way because of our current situation with the corona virus. Initially people were all into doing everything to protect themselves but as time goes in, we kind of get used to living our lives around the existence of the pandemic and the videos of people dropping dead in china aren't going around anymore.
- cs702 6y agoNot just the worst year to be alive, but also the beginning of the worst century to be alive: "The repeated blows, followed by plague, plunged Europe into economic stagnation that lasted until 640." Imagine the kind of horror and suffering that a century of global economic stagnation inflicts on generations of people.
- bhaak 6y agoYou can take that even further as the sewage systems in Europe didn't recover until the 18th/19th century.
- bleuarff 6y agoInteresting, can you elaborate?
- bhaak 6y agoThe water supply and sanitation in Europe took a deep dive where the Roman infrastructure broke down. In many places it was rather recently that sanitation was on par or better than in Rome (but of course, not everywhere in the Roman Empire the standards were as high as in the capital). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanitation_in_ancient_Rome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanitation_in_ancient_Rome
- 01100011 6y agoAnd this is why we, as a species, need to embrace science and technology, and engineer solutions to ensure our survival and prosperity. We need geoengineering now. If a volcanic eruption occurs and blocks out a significant portion of light, we need a way to compensate for it(solar mirroring/concentration?), or eliminate the particulates.
- datenhorst 6y agoIt's interesting to imagine that the ramifications of this were still felt in the 620s when Mohamed united the Arab tribes and he and his successors pretty much overran the Byzantine and Persian empires.
- afterburner 6y ago> Then, in 541, bubonic plague struck the Roman port of Pelusium, in Egypt. What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse, McCormick says. I dunno, sounds like 541 was the worst year to be alive. That year also had a second volcano eruption according to the article.
- ardit33 6y agoIt seems to have been over a decade of misery.... and I guess 536 was the start/first year of it....
- ummonk 6y ago> What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse, McCormick says. Hastening its collapse several centuries later?
- asdff 6y agoIt did. Justinians gains in italy were lost not long after the plague to the lombards, who saw a power vacuum. The empire had just spent quite a bit on wars and capital expenses, and the tax base never recovered. It hobbled the economy and manpower of the empire and left it susceptible to attacks from enemies virtually on all sides, and territory shrunk by the century until Constantinople was merely a city state, mostly abandoned within its rotting walls which it no longer had the manpower to fully defend, with a few Grecian possessions and vassal states by the time it succumbed to the Turks.
- jkingsbery 6y agoI had the same reaction. Constantinople fell in 1453. That's 917 years later. Justinian maybe represented the high water mark, but the empire continued to contract and expand in the centuries to follow. So few human institutions have lasted 917 years, it's hard to compare this claim to anything. It's a little bit like arguing that the sack of Rome in 390 BC was a mere precursor to the one that took place in 410 later, or like arguing Charlemagne and the Carolingian Renaissance helped hasten along the Italian Renaissance.
- runarberg 6y agoTwo things strike me as odd in this article: > 536 Icelandic volcano erupts, dimming the sun for 18 months I’m not aware of any evidence that the 536 eruption happened in Iceland. Ash has been found in both Antarctica and Greenland indicating that the eruption was probably much closer to the equator[1]. > 541–543 The “Justinian” bubonic plague spreads through the Mediterranean, killing 35%–55% of the population and speeding the collapse of the eastern Roman Empire. The Roman empire stood for another 9 centuries after the Justinian plague. I was under the impression that Justinian the Great had overextended the empire in the sixth century so it naturally shrunk to a more manageable size. 1: https://kvennabladid.is/2018/11/20/ekkert-bendir-til-ad-risagosid-536-hafi-ordid-a-islandi-segja-eldfjallafraedingar-hi/ https://kvennabladid.is/2018/11/20/ekkert-bendir-til-ad-risa... (Icelandic)
- asdff 6y agoHistorical consensus favors the plague as quite significant, even if the city of constantinople managed to survive independently for several more centuries. The weakened mediterranian presented opportunities for the gothic tribes to take territory in gaul and italy in the decades following, and the economy nor the manpower of the empire never recovered. By the fall, Constantinople was a hollow shell of what it was, controlling hardly any territory and partially in ruins, ultimately abandoned by its few remaining allies in the face of the Turks.
- koheripbal 6y agoYou are way way way oversimplifying nearly 1000 years of history between the plague of Justinian and the fall of Constantinople. The Justinian expansion was untenable. If you look at it on the map - there are strong enemies on literally all sides. It was a desperate but hopeless attempt to regain the Western Empire. The plague made it worse - but was hardly the catalyst. ...and the East Roman Empire was far more than a city state for a majority of the remaining NINE centuries.
- mikhailfranco 6y agoYes, the Icelandic volcanoes are capable of this level of atmospheric disruption, but there is not yet a smoking hill in Iceland identified for these events: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_weather_events_of_535%E2%80%93536 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_weather_events_of_535%...
- sprainedankles 6y agoWhile an 18-month fog sounds terrifying, I'm absolutely fascinated by the amount of clues we can gather from geological formations like glaciers. The universe has encoded information in so many neat ways, and our ability to cross-reference these measurements with written histories is pretty cool. Fascination aside, this is another one of those sobering reminders that whatever I spend my time on as an engineer might be worth absolutely nothing in the near-term, and that's a bit frustrating. What could I be doing to help engineer a better world for future generations? How do I optimize my individual talents so I can achieve the most impact in my lifetime? How do I find the right team of other humans to work toward this? Convince others or myself that it's a worthy cause? (I could care less about legacy or personal comforts/gains - I just want to help humanity move forward, not maintain it)
- ardit33 6y agoNote, that after this period (536-600), there were huge swaths of Europe that was depopulated, and or decimated, and this enabled major migration movements... Eg. After this period, in the early 600's, Slavic tribes migrated south, all the way to Greece/Egean sea, but eventually were pushed back to current/modern areas.... So, these events contributed heavily to even modern borders and some events.... I know, there are some weird post-modernist movement to say 'dark ages were not that bad', but indeed, these were some of the darkest/harshest time in our recorded history.... The volcano being in Iceland, could explain on why Britain was one of the harshest hit areas by the dark ages....
- restalis 6y ago"indeed, these were some of the darkest/harshest time in our recorded history" I'm still inclined to believe that this is just nowadays optics. The life was very harsh in general for pretty much all but recent history. There were a lot of life risk vectors all around and the capacity to do something about that was modest at most. For us looking back only the major events stand out -- the pandemics like the black death, the major depopulating military campaigns like that of the Mongols, or the climate altering events. People died of diseases, wars, famine, or whatnot all the time though. Not just a few here and there like we see nowadays, but community-wide wipe-outs, with survivors having no-one-they-knew left alive. I doubt that for them it made much difference that the faced calamities were limited only to their region or were world spanning, or that the cause for the latest bane was this or that out-of-control event.
- kristjankalm 6y agopretty much any metric you could come up with to "measure" civilisation -- literacy, urbanisation, economic output, monetary economy -- went to historic lows. slightly orthogonal to this, but the original motivation behind the 'dark ages' label was that for large parts of europe there are very few written records for the 5-7th centuries. e.g., we know practically nothing what happened in 5th century england because the only written source -- gildas -- is mostly concerned with pontificating about sinful behaviour in artful ways. even some actual people he mentions in passing get biblically coded nicknames so we have to make wild guesses who's he referring to. and that's our only source for pretty much a century.
- LukeEF 6y agoI don't mean to be too precise, but the article is slightly undermined by the claim in the graphic that the 543 Justinian plague hurried the collapse of the eastern Roman Empire. The 'Eastern' Roman Empire fell in 1453 when the walls of Constantinople were breached by the Ottomans. Very difficult to claim that the Romans fell in the 6th Century. I mean nearly 500 years later Basil is rolling back into Syria on the back of repeated victories over the Bulgarians. Always feel let down by these sorts of overblown claims that are easy to slap into an info-graphic.
- indigo945 6y agoThe precise date of the fall of the Roman Empire -- and the point where it became Byzantium -- is a subject of debate. There is no unanimous agreement that referring to Constantinople as the Roman Empire is much more useful than, say, calling the Holy Roman Empire "Roman". Whatever your personal views may be on this matter, there indeed are some scholars that date the fall of the Roman Empire on the failure of Justinian's restauratio imperii, which coincided with the plague. [1] [1]: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=F33DA79F872937C22C8F78FA3CCAFC3F http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=F33DA79F872937C22C8...
- twic 6y ago> There is no unanimous agreement that referring to Constantinople as the Roman Empire is much more useful than, say Finland! https://imgur.com/gallery/eNuUdTd https://imgur.com/gallery/eNuUdTd
- hodgesrm 6y ago> There is no unanimous agreement that referring to Constantinople as the Roman Empire is much more useful than, say, calling the Holy Roman Empire "Roman". Except that Constantinople had essentially continuous government dating from the 300s AD until it was sacked by the army of the 4th Crusade in 1204, whereas the Holy Roman Empire's first emperor--Charlemagne--was crowned in 800 AD, some 324 years after the dissolution of the Roman Empire in the West. The Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne was, as you imply, an entirely different beast from the original Roman Empire.
- suryabeep 6y agoGood thing I wasn't alive in 536 then.
- emptybits 6y agoObvious, yet still interesting to imagine IMO ... all of us here had ancestors who suffered and survived that year and we're all, in some way, a result of what they went through in 536.
- totorovirus 6y ago"Winter is coming"
- kazinator 6y ago> Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell 1.5°C to 2.5°C, initiating the coldest decade in the past 2300 years. Yikes! What can we do to make sure that doesn't happen again? Oh, right, nevermind.
- tromp 6y agoI couldn't help but notice an ambiguity in the phrase > Summer temperatures drop by 1.5°C to 2.5°C While I now understand that it means a drop of roughly 2°C plus or minus 0.5°C, my initial reading was that the temperature dropped from 4°C (in the previous Summer) to 2.5°C (in Summer of 536). Is the meaning of "a drop by A to B" always to be inferred from context?
- hnuser123456 6y agoProposing the following modification to the English language: For your interpretation: "drop by X, to Y" For author's intention: "drop by X-Y"
- carl_dr 6y agoIn the timeline on the page, it uses both uses - "Summer temperatures drop by 1.5°C to 2.5°C" and "Summer temperatures drop again by 1.4°C–2.7°C in Europe". It took a few reads and an internal debate over whether European summer temperatures could possibly have been 4°C in the 6th century to understand what the author meant.
- Tepix 6y agoWhat are the estimates for those volcanic eruptions on the volcanic explosivity index? Was it an VEI-8? If it wasn't, what would a VEI-8 eruption cause?
- supernova87a 6y agoIs it just me, or does anyone else find it odd that the graphic shows the years increasing downwards, where if you take this to graphically depict the ice core dug out of the ground, going down is decreasing in years (going back in time, earlier)? Things lower in depth were laid down earlier.
- iomind 6y ago"What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse, McCormick says." Considering when the ERE "fell", the plague did a pretty poor job of hastening it's collapse, no?
- lioeters 6y agoNot being familiar with the history, the dates that I found seem to support your point. > The Plague of Justinian (541–549 AD) > The Byzantine Empire, also referred to as the Eastern Roman Empire..[was] in 555 under Justinian the Great, at its greatest extent since the fall of the Western Roman Empire. > It survived the fragmentation and fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD and continued to exist for an additional thousand years until it fell to the Ottoman Empire in 1453.
- contrapunter 6y agoDon't disagree with the facts but the suffering of humans depends as much on the content of their thoughts as it does on material conditions. A civilisation at the apparent height of its power and security can eat itself from the inside and decline rapidly. A wealthy individual living a privileged life can be beset by anxiety, and so on. Both of these things are strongly affected by the ideas that predominate in a given era. These include subtle ideas which can't readily be identified and which nevertheless spread and cause harm. So those ideas are a relevant part of the environment when considering which was the worst year so far.
- opwieurposiu 6y agoAhh yes, the Buddha teaches us that the root of suffering is desire.