Is it possible to figure out on what day in Earth’s history the most people died?
Hope that is worded in such a way as to make sense.
For most of Earth’s history, extensive records were not kept. So the best bet would be to pick a day that a natural disaster took out a fairly well known number of people, and assume that the normal background death rate did not dip down to balance it out.
Other possibilities are well documented plagues (although we won’t have an exact highest-rate day) and wars (ditto).
Oh, and as the population of Earth rises, the number of deaths per day will rise, just because there are more people available to die. Would you be more interested in a death year as a % of population?
The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami has to be a contender.
The question makes sense, but I can’t help beyond some guesses. Most likely that day will be when some catastrophic natural phenomenon occurred. Earthquake, flood, hurricane, tsunami, that sort of thing. Next guess would be some disease outbreak’s worst day. Next most likely some battle or war-related calamity.
Are you wanting a day that was relatively free from that sort of thing?
No. Just the day where the most people died. Could be a combination of natural deaths and deaths caused by disasters.
For large swathes of that history, however, the human population was relatively low. Whatever killed the most people on any single day would probably have happened in the last 500 years or so.
If we assume that the death toll on any given day is relatively constant - even in times of fatal pestilence, such as Spanish Flu, the increase to the global death toll on any given day wouldn’t have been that significant, since the outbreak went on for months - then the kind of thing to cause a spike in numbers would likely be a natural disaster of some kind.
Wikipedia’s list of natural disasters by death toll gives the Shaanxi earthquake in China as the single event that killed the most people on a specific day, with an estimated 830,000 extra people dead that day.
So I nominate January 23, 1556.
Would it makes sense to figure out on average what percent of the earths population dies every day naturally or in a manner not related to a major disaster? Then add that number to the total number of deaths directly related to a major disaster?
Hmm, OK I think I might have erred there. Because the OP is asking for the “most people” rather than the “highest proportion”. Clearly “most people” is also a function of the global population. In which case I nominate the Bhola cyclone in Bangladesh, which was November 13, 1970. The aftermath of which, incidentally, precipitated the war that resulted in Bangladesh’s independence.
The Haiti earthquake and Indian ocean tsunami are also contenders, but then you’d have to cross-reference global population/death rate for both of those years vs. that of 1970, and I don’t have the energy.
I suspect (don’t actually know) that any reliable average of daily deaths would have had to include (on the high side) those really bad days along with the other extreme where relatively few died. So to add an average to a “bad day” would be a bit of overkill.
And, as has been said, any actual figures on daily deaths are only going to be reliable for a few hundred years, at most.
Well, if you can just wait until next week when the new type of neutrinos from the next round of sunspots reach the Earth’s core and…
Oh, wait - I’m not supposed to talk about that. Continue on…
So we need to know how big the error bars (standard deviation from average) are on the average number of deaths each day. If the largest single-day loss of life due to a recent catastrophe is smaller than half of the error bar, then the answer is always going to be yesterday.
Is there an agency that has the average and standard deviation calculated?