from Hacker News

Why 536 was 'the worst year to be alive' (2018)

by mvexel on 1/1/23, 6:44 PM with 113 comments

  • by dang on 1/1/23, 7:42 PM

    Related:

    Volcanoes, plague, famine and endless winter: Welcome to 536 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30621640 - March 2022 (39 comments)

    Skies went dark: Historians pinpoint the 'worst year' ever to be alive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26786838 - April 2021 (117 comments)

    536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23565762 - June 2020 (356 comments)

    Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18469891 - Nov 2018 (4 comments)

    Others?

  • by vegetablepotpie on 1/1/23, 8:30 PM

    I’m amazed by the amount of historical information held in ice. Activities from silver mining to volcanic eruptions thousands of years ago can be found as chemical traces in the cores.

    There’s just a few years where this kind of research will be possible. I hope we can maximize our discoveries before the world loses most of its ice.

  • by ProjectArcturis on 1/1/23, 11:06 PM

    The worst year was probably something more like 70,000 years ago, when the human population fell as low as 2,000 individuals.

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2975862.stm

  • by ch33zer on 1/1/23, 9:35 PM

    > The team deciphered this record using a new ultra–high-resolution method, in which a laser carves 120-micron slivers of ice, representing just a few days or weeks of snowfall, along the length of the core. Each of the samples—some 50,000 from each meter of the core—is analyzed for about a dozen elements. The approach enabled the team to pinpoint storms, volcanic eruptions, and lead pollution down to the month or even less, going back 2000 years, says UM volcanologist Andrei Kurbatov.

    How do they know for sure that the ice samples are chronological? What happens if in a given year the top layer of ice melts away?

  • by herrrk on 1/1/23, 7:43 PM

    So far!

  • by rnk on 1/1/23, 7:46 PM

    And nothing prevents new volcanic explosions from doing this again. How would the northern world deal with this today? Not that well.

  • by alexfromapex on 1/1/23, 8:32 PM

  • by csomar on 1/2/23, 12:59 AM

    > The repeated blows, followed by plague, plunged Europe into economic stagnation that lasted until 640.

    Islam first appeared on 610. I wonder if these events had any effects on that.

  • by garbagecoder on 1/2/23, 12:31 PM

    I read a book called like Justinian’s Flea I believe that argues the plague was the real end of any chance at a Roman state in the west because it stopped the East’s reconsolidation of the west and wounded the successor kingdoms. A different book on the collapse of Britain I will always remember for the quote “the horseman ride together.” Anyway, I still doubt this is true. The worst year was probably long before 536.

  • by yterdy on 1/1/23, 8:31 PM

    *in Europe and Asia.

    I kind of weep for the loss of oral and comprehensible physical histories in the Americas and Africa, since scholarship like this shows that one can combine those with unlikely natural records and scientific analysis to triangulate on remarkable narratives about our past.

  • by ummonk on 1/1/23, 8:26 PM

    The years after the Younger Toba Eruption would have been objectively far worse than this.

  • by quickthrower2 on 1/1/23, 10:32 PM

    Could we handle a similar eruption these days? Should we be building more nuclear power stations as well as solar, because if this happens, solar even with batteries is going to be useless?

  • by optimalsolver on 1/1/23, 8:29 PM

    I hear 1348 wasn't too great either.

  • by xdavidliu on 1/2/23, 1:24 AM

    I assumed referring to the Plague of Justinian, but apparently that happened a few years later in 541-549

  • by tamaharbor on 1/1/23, 9:51 PM

    We are just one volcano eruption away from global cooling.

  • by Kaibeezy on 1/1/23, 11:22 PM

    What was the best year?

    I’ll take 1977.

  • by jaggs on 1/1/23, 7:59 PM

    How interesting that a bunch of tech nutcases now want to geoengineer the planet by dispersing sulphur into the stratosphere to dim the sun to 'tackle' climate change. Mind-blowing stupidity.