What was the deadliest calendar day in human history?

[Elmer_J.Fudd]

@hajario

Do you know of something specifically where we need the distinction?

Yes. Deaths from disasters like the 2004 tsunami took place over several time zones.Also, someone who died in New York of heart failure at the same time the tsunami hit wouldn’t qualify as someone who died on the same day as the disaster on the other side of the world.

[LSLGuy]

Cool cite. Thanks. I note it was written in 2015.

As the cite says, the 2051 date is for a keyhole pass that, given really bad luck, leads to an impact in 2068.

Speaking just for selfish little me, I’ll be 93 and 110 respectively. So I might get the chance to watch humanity go apeshit at the news of certain Apocalypse just 17 years hence. But even if civilization hangs together under that threat to keep me in porridge and cardigans, good bet I won’t be around to see it materialize.

But it would be sort of cool to be just about at the end of my natural life and still go out in the biggest physical bang and biggest human cataclysm ever. I hope the Verye Olde Fartes’ Home where I’ll be living throws a really big good-bye party for everyone and everything.

OTOH, wiki has this bit to say in its 99942 Apophis - Wikipedia article:

@Wiki (Cites and internal links removed)

Radar observations in March 2021 helped to refine the orbit, and in March 2021 the Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced that Apophis has no chance of impacting Earth in the next 100 years. The uncertainty in the 2029 approach distance has been reduced from hundreds of kilometres to now just a couple of kilometres greatly enhancing predictions of future approaches.

So evidently the Asteroid Day article’s prediction about 2051/2069 risks has become outdated. Whew! But can we still have a party on my 110th?

[Chronos]

@HMS_Irruncible

I would have a hard time using “event” to describe something that has neither a distinct ending or beginning. Forms of the Spanish Flu are still circulating and still kill people, but I don’t think it’s correct to characterize it as an ongoing event.

The Kansas Flu is still circulating and still kills people, but it isn’t still an epidemic. Epidemics do indeed have defined beginnings and ends (though still difficult to pin down as precisely as a day).