Holy Shit, the Cuban Missile Crisis!

About a year and half ago, I shared the story of Stanislav Petrov, the Soviet Air Defense officer who saved the world by neglecting his duty...because at that moment his duty was to start a nuclear war. It may or may not surprise you to learn that, in the almost half-century time period where there was a terrifying standoff between nuclear powers, that wasn't the only time someone almost pushed the big red button.

In fact, there was one situation that was arguably a closer brush with the proverbial Midnight. That one you probably remember reading about. It involved Cuba. And missiles. And a crisis.

And aerial reconnaissance photos that mean nothing to the untrained eye

The Cuban Missile Crisis started because Fidel Castro was sick of the CIA trying to topple his fledgling Communist nation, and Nikita Kruschev wanted to make the U.S. sweat. See, the so-called "missile gap" was an actual thing. But it was a thing that almost comically favored America. The Soviet Union really didn't even have the capability to strike most of the United States from a distance, whereas the United States had both a wealth of ICBMs and missile sites in Turkey, close enough to nuke the baldness off of the Soviet Premier.

So Kruschev sent some nukes to Cuba. When the U.S. noticed, the world started to figuratively explode with the fear that it would soon literally explode. The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously advised President Kennedy to invade Cuba. Let that sink in. Such a decision would absolutely, unequivocally guarantee that the U.S.S.R. would, at the very least, invade West Berlin. And that action would almost as certainly lead to a nuclear reprisal from NATO.

Shit. Is. On. Fire.

In short, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff were, with one voice, telling Kennedy that it was time to end the world. Kennedy thought maybe we should try a few other solutions first. The compromise was a naval "quarantine," which is like a blockade but you get to not use the word "blockade," because that's defined as an act of war by international law.

At some point, the ships of this blockade announced that they would be dropping practice depth charges on Soviet submarines. They weren't powerful enough to cause severe damage, but they would usually force a submarine to surface, negating its stealthy advantage. Somehow, the Soviet Foxtrot-class submarine B-59 didn't get the memo.

I choose to believe it was the result of outdated communication methods.

When the depth charges hit, everyone aboard was under the impression that the Cuban Missile Crisis - and by extension, the Cold War - had just gone hot. That's where Vasili Arkhipov comes in. He was second-in-command on B-59, and he was one of three officers upon whose shoulders fell the decision of whether to fire a nuclear torpedo. The two other officers voted an emphatic "YES."

Arkhipov, thankfully, said "Well, I don't know." If he hadn't been a hero from a previous incident involving a nuclear accident at sea, his words may have been drowned out. But he stood his ground, and he had a reputation for being heard. B-59 surfaced, and Moscow informed them of the situation. The very next day, Kruschev announced that the missile sites were being removed, in exchange for assurances that the U.S. would not invade Cuba and, secretly, the removal of missile sites from Turkey.

I mean, where were we even keeping them?

It's easy to think of the Cold War as a distant memory now. As a foregone conclusion. But we should remind ourselves once in a while that there were multiple occasions where a single voice of reason made the difference between continued detente and global annihilation. The Cold War was a game of Russian Roulette, and the Cuban Missile Crisis was the closest we ever came to pulling the trigger at the wrong time.

Holy Shit.

Holy Shit, Mass Extinction!

Mass extinction is, you might (very correctly) assume, a pretty bad thing. I mean, every mass extinction so far has paved the way for a new form of dominant life on Earth, so there are some silver linings. We're here because of mass extinction.

But still, an event where over 50% of the species on Earth have been wiped out can only be called a catastrophe. This has happened on at least five occasions on the geologic time scale. The worst of them was the Permian-Triassic Event over 250 million years ago.

This chart is the visual equivalent of jargon, but the Event in question is the highest blue peak.

In that event, up to 96% of the species on Earth were completely eliminated. While there are several theories as to the cause of this disaster, it's nearly impossible to tell for certain what happened. Maybe a large meteor struck the planet or a supervolcano erupted and kicked up enough dust to choke out the majority of life. Maybe a massive, cross-species plague swept through every living thing. Maybe the atmosphere simply changed and most life couldn't catch up.

The point is, shit died. A lot. And that was just the worst Mass Extinction Event. There have been several others. The most famous was the one that finished off the dinosaurs.

It's not like they were even phoning it in by the end. T-Rex was one of the last surviving species

The criteria for a mass extinction is that roughly half the species on the planet must have been destroyed within a short period of time. A short period of time on a geologic scale, mind you, means "within a million years or so."

Or, "Significantly longer than the entirety of human history

So when I tell you that Earth has lost 50 percent of its wildlife in the past forty-five freaking years, you should know that this means serious business. We are absolutely in the middle of a mass extinction. Right now. And we are absolutely the cause. Whatever your feelings are about the environment, there is no way that this will end up being anything but terrible for humans.

Because "mass extinction" really is just as terrifying as it sounds.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Reston Virus!

Our story begins as many unhappy stories begin: in an animal testing facility in 1989. This particular facility is located in Reston, Virginia, which is within the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. A group of Crab-eating Macaques decided to take their own way out and, rather than suffering at the hands of horrific drug testing...uh, suffered at the hands of a horrific hemorrhagic fever.

It was rough, and many monkeys died. Too many. It was starting to get suspicious. While locking down the source of the disease, a researcher from USAMRIID, who had been dispatched to investigate the infection, noticed a new filovirus in some of the samples he observed. Being somewhat knowledgeable in microscopic terrors, the shape of the new virus scared the ever-loving piss out of our friend the researcher. Because it looked like this:

That doesn't look too scary...

Which kind of looks like this:

Yeah, but it's just a couple of lines...

Which is fucking Ebola.

As of this writing, Ebola is kind of a big deal. There's an outbreak underway in parts of Africa that has many of the more paranoid among us donning their brown pants. Imagine how brown their pants would be if they saw the above under a microscope in a lab where almost 200 people had potentially been exposed to it.

The lab was locked down, and everyone who had been in contact with the Macaques was immediately tested for the new virus. These are people who had been out in the general public after handling infected monkeys. The general public of Washington, D.C. As it turns out, six of them were definitely infected.

I guess that's it, then. Pack it in, America. We had a good run.

By the time this was discovered, the monkeys were dying at a rate of about one or two per day. One third of the lab's population died by the end. Apply that to Washington D.C. and you've got yourself a recipe for disaster - albeit one that would rid us of a number of unpleasant politicians. But by a stroke of unimaginable luck, whatever mutations the virus had undergone between plain old Ebola and Reston Ebola rendered it almost completely harmless to humans. When this was determined, the quarantine was broken.

Before you feel too much better, know this: evolution happens over many, may generations, but viruses live out many generations in a short period of time. Reston virus has already evolved in the time between when it was discovered and today. It can now transmit from pigs to humans. All it would take is a small variation for it to suddenly become as deadly as any other strain of Ebola.

And as far as we know, there are people in America -- people even in our nation's capital -- who already carry it.

So try to show a little respect.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, the Great War!

One hundred years and two days ago, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia after a series of political machinations that followed the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Due to a tangled web of alliances and escalations, this declaration of war was followed by at least half a dozen others in less than a week. The next four years tore Continental Europe apart, both figuratively and literally.

This is Beaumont-Hamel after almost a century of healing.

World War I isn't as sexy as its sequel. It's much messier. There's not a clear "bad guy" to hate. I mean, if you're looking for a villain, you're not going to do much better than friggin' Hitler. No such luck in The Great War. The villain there was the war itself. The trenches. The ineffectual artillery barrages and futile charges into certain death. The gas.

Which...you know...fuck that noise.

All told, nearly 18 million men, women, and children died as a direct result of the war. That's close to 2% of the population of the participating countries. Some fared worse than others. Serbia may have lost as much as 18% of their population, which...Jesus, can you imagine what that would do to your country? That's not to mention the specific battles like the Battle of the Somme, where the first day of the fighting cost 20,000 allied lives and resulted in a single mile change in the battle lines.

It was horrific, to say the least. And a lot of people will tell you it started because of a sandwich. Because several assassination attempts failed on the day Franz Ferdinand's death set the wheels in motion, and Gavrilo Princip happened to sit down and ruminate on the day's events with a sandwich from a deli that happened to be exactly where the Archduke's car would stop after the driver got turned around. Rest assured, though, that the sandwich had nothing to do with it.

It wasn't a coincidence. Princip went there not to ruminate, but because he suspected that the motorcade would come that way. Aside from that, the bare fact is (and I can't believe I find it necessary to explain this) sandwiches don't cause world wars. Not even a little bit. World Wars are caused by tangled webs of diplomacy, mass escalation at crises, and overconfident world leaders whose only experience with war is in fighting a vastly technologically inferior foe.

Which was this whole other thing

If it wasn't Franz Ferdinand, it probably would have been someone else. Germany, France, England, Russia, and Austria-Hungary were positively itching for a fight. Germany was once the voice of reason. Otto von Bismark kept the whole thing together more or less by sheer force of will for quite some time. But then he was sacked, and the world began its inexorable march toward a preview of Armageddon. And no, I don't mean the campy oil industry wet dream film.

After the Great War came and went, nothing would ever be the same. My pet example of the effects of World War I is Dadaism. The avant-garde art movement was born of a complete rejection of everything in civilization up to that point, because that's what got us into this mess. Realism, reason, and logic were thrown out the window, and artists embraced the absurd. Because when you're dealing with constant explosions, fruitless sacrifices, and gas that melts your face and lungs, what else are you going to embrace?

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, the Oxygen Catastrophe

Let's say your an obligate anaerobic organism, and it's roughly two and a half billion years ago. You're hanging out on Earth, and you've pretty much got the whole place on a string. The world is your oyster (except those don't exist yet, so the world is your...I don't know, other, smaller type of obligate anaerobe).

One day, a new guy shows up. Or several million new guys, because they're bacteria and they come in large groups. These new guys, the cyanobacteria, are pretty different. They go through this whole process of photosynthesis and end up producing oxygen, and it's kind of weird. You're not a fan. In fact, the stuff is toxic to you.

More like toxygen, amirite? Guys? Hehe. Classic.

Luckily for you, dissolved iron and organic matter ends up capturing most of the oxygen, so you continue on your merry way for another 200 million years or so. At that point, the oxygen sinks become fully saturated. That means oxygen starts becoming a part of the atmosphere. For you and all your friends, that's a bad thing. A very, very bad thing.

The "anaerobic" part of "obligate anaerobic" means "without air/oxygen." The "obligate" part means oxygen will straight murder you. Which is exactly what happened. The same event that started Earth's atmosphere down the path toward being breathable also caused one of the largest mass extinctions of all time. It was essentially an apocalypse. The only survivors were the culprits -- who passed on the trait of photosynthesis to future generations -- and a few varieties of anaerobic bacteria that could tolerate the new atmosphere.

Oxygen was basically the Cthluhu of the obligate anaerobic world.

To get an idea of just how big the Oxygen Catastrophe was (and yes, that is an official name for it), just imagine the same thing happening today. Instead of oxygen, imagine it's an element that humans can't breathe. One that might cause dangerous fluctuations in the living conditions on Earth for the majority of its species. Something like, I don't know, carbon dioxide.

Oh, wait...

Well this isn't totally comforting.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, HIV.

The second I wrote the title of this post, I realized that I didn't want to make this topic funny. I can write about all kinds of promising research into a cure for HIV/AIDS. I can write about how much progress has been made in removing the stigma from both the virus and the gay community. But instead, I'll just tell you to look at this graph:

That's what HIV/AIDS has done to sub-Saharan Africa. It's effects, particularly in the late '80s, were downright apocalyptic. Young people are most susceptible. In the coldest possible terms, that means countries with major AIDS epidemics are deprived of a taxable work force. Which means they just can't afford to fix the problem.

Progress has been made, but we're a long, long way from recovering fully as a species from what HIV/AIDS has wrought. To this day, there are countries where one in four people are HIV positive. I honestly don't have the stomach to say much more than that. Maybe I'll revisit more specific elements later.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Oil!

Oil!

That's right, oil. Black gold. Texas tea. A number of other metaphors, not all of which are featured in the introduction of The Beverly Hillbillies.

Though I don't personally see the use in a Clampett-less oil metaphor.

More specifically, petroleum, which is one of those pesky words that mix their etymological roots. It comes from the Greek word petra (stone) and the the Latin word oleum (oil). At least it's not as bad as the scientific name for swordfish (Xiphias gladius. Greek and Latin for sword sword. Come on, science. It's like you're not even trying.)

More to the point, petroleum has been a part of human society for at least 4,000 years, when it was used in its semi-solid state (asphalt) to build the walls and towers of Babylon. In 1847, oil got its big break, like a young, diamond-in-the-rough musician impressing a talent agent at a dive bar with her moxie and soothing, soulful voice. Except instead of a talent agent, it was a Glaswegian chemist named James Young.

With a remarkably bitchin' dwarf beard.

And instead of moxie and vocals, it was petroleum's ability to turn into kerosene that piqued Young's interest. From there, it was a meteoric rise to world superstardom. Especially when gasoline was invented a few decades later.

Suddenly, petroleum became one of the most vital natural resources of all time. Like all precious resources, it moved nations to violence. Ever wonder why Japan was being such a dick in 1941 with the whole surprise attack thing? Well, the U.S. wasn't too happy about their expansion, so we cut off their supply of sweet, sweet oil.

Around the same time, Hitler went on an ill-fated vacation into Russia. He talked a big talk about living space and the evils of Communism and Slavic people, but I'm pretty sure those plump Caucasus Oil Fields had something to do with it as well.

Oh, and hey, remember how the U.S. has been involved to some extent in every major conflict of the Middle East for the past century or so? I wonder what that could be all about. Well, it starts with a dinosaur and a bunch of rock (nature's extremely slow juicer)...

Mmm. Fossily.

Except WAIT.

No.

It doesn't.

There's been an abundance of dead dinosaur jokes concerning oil lately, and I want to dispel that myth here and now. It's important to remember that just because everything we know about dinosaurs was gleaned from fossils doesn't mean that all fossils are dinosaurs. It especially doesn't mean that "fossil fuels" are dinosaurs.

The weird thing is, fossil fuels are organic matter. Petroleum is essentially made of algae and bacteria, buried under sedimentary rock and heated over millions of years by geothermal energy. The millions of years thing is a problem. In 1965, new oil discovery reached its peak. In the 1980s, oil production began to outpace oil discovery. By many estimates, peak oil has either already occurred or is expected in the very near future.

It's not gonna go back up.

That's a very, very bad thing. I mean, on the plus side we'd have to worry about climate change a little bit less. On the downside, though...we'd pretty much be looking at a thorough, worldwide economic collapse. Petroleum is in everything. On top of being the linchpin of the transportation industry, it is a key ingredient in plastic. Try to go a single day without using something that is plastic. If you're reading this on a computer, you probably already failed that challenge. If you're reading it on something that is not a computer, I'll probably have an idea for my next topic.

With that in mind, it might be time to consider investing a little bit more in alternative energy. Because oil, a foundational pillar of the global economy, is starting to crack.

Unless, that is, we can replicate a process that takes millions of years and do it in a few minutes. Which is apparently not out of the question.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Eyam!

Remember the plague?

Well, the village of Eyam certainly does.

Eyam is a small village in central England with a population of around 1,000. It is best known for one of the boldest and most suicidal efforts to stop the Plague in British history. In 1665, a tailor in Eyam received a package of cloth from London that was full of Plague-infested fleas. Within a week, he was dead and the disease was spreading throughout the village. When residents began to consider fleeing to neighboring towns, the local rectors stepped in and asked everyone to voluntarily brave the horrific tempest of the plague and close themselves off from the outside world.

How I would've reacted.

The town agreed. A system was established where merchants and couriers would drop supplies off at The Coolstone outside of town. Money for the shipment would be left there soaked in vinegar, which was believed to prevent infection. It may have actually been true - the acetic acid in vinegar does function as an antibacterial agent.

I'm sorry if the smell of my PLAGUE-PROOF FRIES bothers you.

Aside from that indirect exchange, Eyam ceased all contact with the outside world. The plague tore the village apart for fourteen months. Deaths were constant and well-documented. Families were asked to bury their own dead for fear of quickening the spread of the plague, and in one case that caused a woman to bury her husband and all six of her children over the span of eight days. Incredibly, she survived the pestilence, never even becoming ill.

After fourteen months, it became clear that the plague had run its course in Eyam, and the village opened its borders once again. When the plague hit, the population of Eyam was 350. When the quarantine ended, there were only 83 people left. Almost 80% of the people of Eyam died within about a year. There are debates over whether the decision even did any good to stem the tide of the plague, but I think we should just let them have that one. Give them an A for effort, if nothing else.

Good hustle, you guys. I'm proud of you.

It's not every day that 350 people will accept horrific disease and almost certain death because it might help a bunch of people they probably don't even know. But that's exactly what happened in Eyam.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, the Svalbard Seed Vault!

One day, something terrible is going to happen to the Earth. I mean, the Earth will be alright. In most apocalyptic scenarios, the Earth will do just fine. That's not what people are really worried about when they say we need to save the planet.

No, what they mean is that we need to save ourselves. In a big ecological disaster, the crops we grow are going to become incredibly scarce. Maybe even extinct. That's problematic if you're a fan of eating. Even if you're strictly carnivorous, your food is not. I don't know why I feel the need to clarify this, but without crops, humanity is just...super dead.

Deader.

Luckily, we have a contingency plan. Yeah. That's not just something from disaster movies. There is a very real, very functional contingency plan with an out-of-the-way, isolated, 11th hour savior station and everything. It's called the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, and it is aptly named.

Because it's in Svalbard, is a global initiative, has seeds, and is a vault. It's that simple, yes.

Funded by various world governments and organizations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is humanity's insurance policy. It's the destination for real life post-apocalyptic scientists/farmers who want to save the world.

I'm gonna be honest. I want to make fun of this concept. I want to make light of it. At first glance, it's so bizarre that this place exists. At second glance, it's even more bizarre that it has funding.

But you know what? I can't. It's goddamn terrific that we, as a species, are planning so far ahead as to stuff a bunch of biodiversity into nature's refrigerator. All I can do is share it and reassure you that, should you find yourself starving due to a meteor, nuclear war, or massive blight, there's a little beacon of hope in one of the coldest places on Earth.

SUBTLE METAPHOR.

A place where you are legally required to carry a hunting rifle outside of towns so that you can defend yourself from polar bears, sure, but it's there. And one day, it may save the world.

And yes, I'm serious about the polar bear gun thing.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Hospitality!

No, but seriously. Hospitality. I know it doesn't sound like the kind of thing that could dazzle you into swearing, but there's a long and storied history behind hospitality that makes it one of the most important concepts in Western Civilization. The best place to learn about it is in Greek mythology.

Among the high concepts associated with Zeus was that of Hospitality, or Xenia. If someone in a Greek Myth disrespects hospitality, the King of the Gods considers it a personal affront. Personal affronts to the mightiest of the gods was something the Greeks generally wanted to avoid, since anyone who managed to insult him was guaranteed an exceptionally and creatively severe punishment.

You may have heard of some of the poor suckers who thought it would be no big deal to disrespect a tradition associated with the guy who casually tosses lightning down from Mount Olympus in his spare time.

I don't know if you were aware, but not a lot of people can do that. Also, horse penis.

Take Sisyphus. Sisyphus was sent to Tartarus (which is basically Hell) to push a massive boulder up a hill with a rounded top. Every time he crests the hill, the rock rolls down the other side and he's forced to start all over again. Forever. His crime? As a king of Ephyra, he murdered guests and travelers in his home. That's a pretty flagrant violation of Xenia.

Cheer up, little fella. Someday, Camus will make you a metaphor for the human condition.

Tantalus killed his own son. On it's own, filicide was not bad enough to warrant the full brunt of Zeus-style justice. But he also disrespected Xenia by bringing a His-Son Pie to the table of his hosts. And his hosts were the gods.

What the hell is wrong with you?!

Jesus Christ. I mean...why on Earth would he think that was a good idea? You don't just pull a fast one on Zeus. Tantalus was sent to Tartarus for his trouble, where he was placed in an inescapable pool of water next to a low branch full of fruit. Cursed with everlasting hunger and thirst, Tantalus soon learned that every time he reached for the fruit, the branches would rise just above his grasp. When he leaned down to drink, the water level would recede to just below his lips. That's where we get the word "tantalizing."

According to the myths, when Ixion murdered his father-in-law it was the first kinslaying in history. Zeus's response? He invited Ixion to dinner. He figured, "What the Hell Tartarus, right? Everyone makes mistakes." When Ixion arrived, he started making googly eyes at Hera and caressing her under the table.

"I can't see how this could end poorly."

Here we have a double whammy. Not only did Ixion dishonor Zeus's favorite virtue, he made Zeus the victim of his crime. For that, he was tied to a winged wheel of fire that will continue spinning ceaselessly until the end of time, causing him thousands of lifetimes of horrible, searing pain. Not because of the murder, because of the hospitality.

Of course, the Greeks didn't have a monopoly on hospitality. Most cultures have similar feelings on the matter. In fact, a compelling argument has been made that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed not so much because of all the butt sex, but because citizens were planning to perform said butt sex forcibly upon angels of the Lord who had just been explicitly granted hospitality by citizens of the two cities. Old Testament God responded with his typical remedy for disrespect.

I love the smell of brimstone in the morning. Smells like...piousness.

The shared moral of these stories is that disrespecting hospitality, historically speaking, is about the same as slapping a god in the face. So...maybe don't kill your guests or anything.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Stanislav Petrov!

Recognize the guy in the photo? It's unlikely that you do, but I'm not going to tell you not to feel bad about it. Because that man is Stanislav Petrov, and you very likely owe him your life.

The year was 1983, and the U.S. and Soviet Union were playing for keepsies. Their on-again-off-again relationship was decidedly in the off-again setting, and the U.S. said, "Hey, you know what would be a lot of fun in an atmosphere of extreme geopolitical tension and nuclear paranoia? A war game with unprecedented realism that makes it look like we're about to nuke the shit out of Russia!"

Shit's on fire, yo.

The Soviet Union wasn't too fond of the idea. Especially since it kind of looked like their longtime rival was actually planning to rain hell fire onto their faces. They saw enormous forces massed on their borders. They saw fully armed nuclear bombers coming right to the edge of and sometimes slightly within their airspace before turning away. They saw unprecedented mobilization. And they started to flip a shit.

That's where Mr. Petrov comes in. Stanislav Petrov was an officer in the Soviet Air Defense Program in charge of monitoring their Early Warning System. On September 26, 1983, said system blipped. A blip on your "We're All Gonna Die" radar is literally the last thing you ever want to see in that situation. But there it was. A blip headed straight for the Motherland.

OH GOD, DEFINITELY DO NOT WANT.

Stanislav the Manislav, being a reasonable man(islav), figured that a single blip could easily be a defect. "Something must be tripping up the system," he told himself. So he decided not to report it. As he came to that decision, four more blips appeared. So now there were five possible missiles headed into town to get rip-roaring, rowdy, and...you know...nuclear.

At this point, Stanislav neglected his duty. He declined to report the attack. It was still a small number, and the reliability of the system had been questioned before, so he took it upon himself to not worry the top brass with it. It's a goddamn good thing, too, because the top brass had an itchy trigger finger and an unhealthy dose of panic at that moment. If they had any reason to believe the U.S. was launching a nuclear strike, they would not hesitate to end life on Earth.

Luckily, Mr. Petrov was 100% correct. Sunlight was in perfect alignment with a few high altitude clouds and the satellites used to track potential missiles, which caused the false alarm. After a brief moment of panic on November 9th, when Able Archer 83 simulated a movement to Defcon 1 (meaning imminent nuclear strike), NATO forces packed it all in and went back to their regularly scheduled mild panic.

As for Petrov, he was removed to a less sensitive position. A lateral move, you'll be happy to know. He was neither punished nor rewarded for his actions, but his direct superiors praised him and said that his actions were "correct."

Many years later, after the story was made public, Petrov was much more justly rewarded. The Association of World Citizens gave him their World Citizen Award. Twice. And a documentary was made about him, aptly titled The Man Who Saved the World.

Because he did that.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, We're Alive!

How come the world isn't ending?

Because Mayans didn't have the clairvoyance to predict the end times.

And because even if they did have the power, they didn't use it to predict the end of the world. Just the end of the calendar. Kind of like how the end of our calendar is coming up in a week and a half. On neither occasion is the world going to end.

Just thought we should all be aware.

Holy Shit, Tsutomu Yamaguchi!

Let me tell you the story of Tsutomu Yamaguchi. Mr. Yamaguchi was a 29-year-old designer for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in 1945 when he took a three month Summer business trip. To Hiroshima. You may recognize that as a pretty nasty place to be in the Summer of 1945.

On August 6th, the day he was supposed to leave the city, Tsutomu was on his way to the train station when he realized he had forgotten his travel papers. So he went back into the city to get them (ruh roh). As he was approaching his office, he heard the sound of a single American B-29 bomber and saw two small parachutes descending from the sky. Then he saw a flash that left him temporarily blind and heard an enormous explosion that ruptured both of his eardrums.

Like this, but at half the distance.

Yes, that bomber was the Enola Gay (snort), and those two small parachutes softened the descent of the atomic bomb known as Little Boy - the first to ever be used against people. Yamaguchi was roughly 3km away from Ground Zero. He survived with severe burns and crawled to a bomb shelter, where he was treated. The next day, he found his colleagues and got the hell out of the fiery inferno of a city, making his way back to the comfort of his home.

In Nagasaki.

"God damn it."

Two days later, Yamaguchi was back at work. His supervisor asked him to describe the explosion and -- I'm not making this up -- in the middle of his description, he would have been able to point toward a window and say, "Actually, it looked exactly like that."

Once again, like this but much closer.

For at that very moment the slightly lesser known bomber Bockscar dropped the Fat Man atomic bomb on the poor guy's home city. The kicker? Tsutomu Yamaguchi's workplace was 3km from ground zero. Again.

This time he suffered no new injuries, but his old ones got infected when medical supplies became scarce. Still, he survived. When I say "survived," I mean damn did he give death the finger. He went bald temporarily and was constantly bandaged for several years, but for the most part he lived a healthy, productive life. A life full of activism for nuclear disarmament, because Jesus, why wouldn't it be?

Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the man who survived the only two atomic attacks in history, lived to be 93 freaking years old. He died of stomach cancer in January 2010, almost 65 years after he was double-nuked.

Holy shit.