Ten Worst Years in History - TopTenz Reaction

Yesterday: "We are gonna do something light-hearted tomorrow." Today: "Ten worst years in history"

Literally any year before indoor plumbing was invented is way worse than 2020 lol

VTH after the torture video: "We're going to do something more lighthearted after that one" Something more lighthearted: Lol

Simon is responsible for at least half of YouTube’s content by now

"We are going to be light-hearted tomorrow." Tomorrow: "Ten Worst Years in History"

Seeing 2020 in here is just hilarious.

The approximate 45 million deaths associated with the Great Leap Forward might qualify 1959 and 1960.

The eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 led to the “year without a summer” in 1816, but it also led to the Panic of 1819 in America once European crops were restored. The situation was absolutely hopeless in many parts of Europe for a few years after the eruption, so I wouldn’t dismiss the possibility of it leading to one of the worst years of all time

A few years I might include: 1177 BC - Described by historian Eric Cline as "The Year Civilization Collapsed", represents the bronze age collapse, which led to a large decline in living standards all over the ancient middle east. You have a lot of war and famine over the period, so I think it probably qualified as a pretty terrible time in history. 263 AD - In the west, you have the Third Century Crisis going on in Europe, with lot of wars, the Cyprian plague killing millions of people, famine, and general catastrophe. In China, you also had the Three Kingdoms system start to break down, leading to a bunch of wars over there. Overall, pretty bad time to be alive. 1644 AD - In China, this is the year that the Qing took Beijing, one of the high points in the conquest. This war is one of the deadliest in human history, though it's not often talked about. In the west, you have the Thirty Years War still raging in Central Europe, and the English Civil War raging in the North 1846 AD - You have famine in both China and Europe. In Europe, this was most heavily felt in Ireland, which lost quite a bit of its population at the time. The general unrest this caused in Europe can be directly tied to the revolutions of 1848. In China, famine is noted as a direct cause for the Taiping rebellion, which killed tens of millions in China (I'm not super knowledgeable on this, so I'm hesitant to say if this particular famine was a direct cause) 1960 AD - This is here pretty much entirely because of the Great Leap Forward in China, which killed tens of millions. I'm not super knowledgeable on this, so I can't really elaborate further, but for death toll alone it probably deserves an honorable mention. One thing I'll add to the discussion of the 1300s being the worst century in history is Timur (Tamerlane). He didn't conquer as much territory as the mongols did, but he made up for it with sheer brutality. He is said to have killed about 5% of the global population at the time. You also have the fall of the Yuan dynasty in China. I can't find any solid figures for how many people died there, but if other transfers of power in China are to be taken as a baseline, it was probably a lot. Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. I'm going mostly off of memory, plus a couple quick trips to Wikipedia, so I could be wrong on this, especially on the Chinese history, which I'm less familiar with.

Easily the worst year ever: 1972. The year the Miami Dolphins went undefeated

2020? Really? 😆The recency bias is strong with this one.

I agree I’d like to live through 2020 every year over being drafted into any world war or have to been in any other pledge

Chris, Volcanoes are massive controllers in our worlds climate, fortunately most of these in recent years are small ..... So the eruptions of Tambora in 1815 is VEI-7 and Pinatubo in 1991 is VEI-6; however there is no written records of the largest eruptions (in terms of mass of material erupted) VEI-8 which changes the global climate for decades/centuries. The last of these was 70,000 years ago the erruption of the super-volcano Toba (Indonesia) almost wiped out the human species (, we can see this in a "genetic bottleneck" in our DNA and that of other mamalian speces). The erruption is classified as VEI-8 as the layers of volcanic ash "it is estimated to be 2800 cubic km" blanketing the land in the surrounding areas to an average of 200m thick (in places like India and China) with the effects being felt across the globe for almost 100 years with the injection of the CO2and SO2 into our atmosphere.

I met a volcanologist at a conference and he had just returned from Yellowstone Park doing study of the volcano there. I naively asked 'how many volcanoes are in the park?' His response was 'One, and it's pretty much the whole park from end to end.' I then asked, since it's clearly active, what would happen if it erupted. He then did an 'explosion gesture' and said 'ka-boom!'

No bronze age collapse year? Strange.

I'm with you on saying it should be 1914 and not 1918. The 2008-2009 recession wasn't the second biggest recession ever. 1837 & 1892 were both worse than 2008. The Great Depression didn't lead to the rise of Hitler, the fallout from WWI did. Germany's economy was already bad before 1929, so it had no effect. Mussolini came to power in 1922 and the Soviets came to power in 1917, emperor Hirohito come to power in 1926, all long before the depression. This is my issue with Top Tenz, they get so many easily verifiable facts wrong.

I love how the video is talking about 2020and then he proceeds to cough 😂😂😂😂

Barbara Tuchman's "A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century" is a fascinating read about that horrible hundred years.

I feel like if you were born in Europe in the year 1300, your chances of living to 1350 were below 5% even

Yea under no circumstance would I consider 2020 a top 10 worst year for human history. I'd rather live in 2020 than pretty much any year before like 1930. In the grand scheme of things, most of us just sat at home and worked on our computers or wore a mask when we went out in public. I'll take that over all of the horrible things that happened to people hundreds of years ago before our modern conveniences were invented. You can claim maybe 2020 was the worst year in a half century, but that's about it.