How about our earliest ancestor with opposable thumbs?
And let the first multicellular organism off the hook?
What an asshole he was.
Genghis Khan introduced the black plague to Europe (on purpose), so there’s many million deaths. He might approach the top three.
Do we actually know who pushed the button on the Enola Gay?
Thomas Ferebee, the bombardier, was the person on the Enola Gay who executed the irreversable step that released the weapon.
Harry Truman ordered it.
There were fire bombings that had higher numbers of casualties than the nuclear attacks, and of course there were a lot more bombadiers to bring charges against in those cases.
I know the President ordered it and the other crewmen facilitated it, but whichever pilot it was who pushed the button or pulled the lever to deploy the bomb (if that is actually how it worked), then that person will have directly killed 70,000 people. Not ordered it, not sanctioned it, not facilitated it - directly killed them, in the same way as firing a gun or swinging a sword. I can’t think of any other example that comes close to that, other than Nagasaki.
That’ll be the guy I’m talking about I guess.
father time? how many “old age” deaths have there been? a lot more than alcohol-related deaths i’m sure.
She kills everyone of us, eventually.
However, Columbus was not the first European to reach the Americas, nor did he ever set foot in North America or significantly contribute to the colonization and mass destruction of peoples and cultures of North and South America. For that, you would need to look to Hernán Cortés, the first of the conquistadors in the South. In the North American British colonies it is more vague as the original goal of companies that colonized North America was agriculture and commerce, but I’d point to Myles Standish as initiating the tradition of unchecked brutality against the native peoples among the British colonies.
As for someone who had the singular causal role resulting in the deaths of the most number of people, I’d have to that Enola Gay bombareer Thomas Ferebee is at the top of the list. Had the United States and Britain ever gone to a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union, however, every two-man team responsible for launching a single ICBM would share responsibility for more deaths than Ferebee could dream of (in the millions), and the captain and first officer (or in the case of the Soviet fleet, the zampolit) of a ballistic missile submarine would be responsible for even more deaths, as they would be directly culpable for the launch of 12-24 SLBMs, many (for the US, C-3 ‘Poseidon’ and later) missiles had MIRV capability, each deploying between 8 and 14 RVs to independent targets. A single SLBM could conceivably be capable of killing tens of millions of people if targeted at or adjacent to heavily populated areas. One Ohio-class submarine with its complement of 24 D-5 ‘Trident II’ missiles carrying 8 W-88 warheads of an approximate yield of 475 kT could have conceivably killed most of the population of Soviet Russia and East Bloc Europe.
Stranger
Huh?
I thought this influenza pandemic started in France, in army hospitals just back from the front line trenches, and spread quickly due to the highly concentrated groups of soldiers who were available to be infected. And then spread worldwide, as the soldiers were sent back to their homes.
So that would mean we could count all the victims of this influenza pandemic as additional casualties of WWI, so it’s back to Archduke Ferdinand again!
The Japanese Empire killed more people than even the Nazis, estimates go to upwards of 30 million. Not sure who gets the actual ‘credit’ though: Hirohito, Tojo etc.
Yes, but how about that guy who drowned everyone on Earth except for a single family? Stalin and Hitler were pikers compared to him…
They’re not really sure where the Spanish Flu began, but the first known case was at Fort Riley in Kansas. However, the second case was a week later in New York, so it’s likely it’d already spread around by the time the first case was identified.
Maybe, I don’t know anything about the chemistry of CFC alternatives. I expected (based on nothing much) that the effects of leaded gasoline were worse wrt human health than CFCs.
This thread made me think of Harold Shipman, a British doctor who murdered his elderly patients for their savings. Wikipedia places him atop the list of serial killers by number of victims with 218 confirmed victims (though the real number is likely higher).
Smallpox eclipses them all.
As does influenza.
Alfred Nobel’s got a lot of blood on his hands, what with coming up with dynamite, which to this day is still the base ingredient in every bomb and grenade made.
Then there’s the unknown Chinese inventor of gunpowder as a martial device (it originally was used for medicinal purposes).
I wonder what the tally on Alexander the Great’s little stroll was as well.
While not the highest by a long way I think Simo Hayha deserves an honourable mention as possibly the most successful sniper ever (over 500 confirmed kills).