Throughout our history, humans have come up with increasingly creative ways to kill one another, and make the world a generally worse place. And while the marvels of modern science and medicine have undoubtedly improved society, they've also been subject to some dark repurposing.
Here are 18 of humanity's most terrifying inventions.
1
The atomic bomb. (Obviously.)
2
The giant strip mining machine in Germany, the Bagger 293. The idea that we are genuinely capable of tearing apart mountains with relative ease is insane, and for the sake of coal.
3
There is a bioweapon invented in the former USSR that essentially tricks the body into attacking the myelin sheaths around neurons. So somebody thought of a way to essentially give people MS as a weapon.
4
The ‘Real Housewives’ shows.
5
Landmines. Most of them don't go off during the war, they sit around and injure or kill civilians, often children. Nobody comes back and cleans them up, that task is left to the inventive work of the people most affected by them.
6
The Brazen bull torture method.
7
White phosphorus and other chemical weapons.
8
Agent Orange, a chemical herbicide and defoliant used by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War.
9
That Project Pluto was even considered is just appalling. It was to be a cruise missile that used a nuclear engine. After flying to the Soviet Union and dropping its payload of nuclear bombs, it would fly back and forth over populated areas, spewing radiation and poisoning the land while using its sonic shockwave as a weapon against the populace.
10
Auschwitz and other Zyklon B shower facilities. The evil of some random engineering team at a German manufacturing plant just casually designing a machine that serves no logical purpose other than to dispose of a massive amount of bodies at a time when your government is rounding up millions of people.
11
Meat processing plants. The scale and mechanical callousness of the process really shows the depth of human cruelty and dehumanization.
12
Napalm. is only really an anti personnel weapon.
13
The gun. Specifically, semi-automatic rifles. The amount of damage they can do is enormous, and they barely takes any practice to be proficient enough to kill dozens of people.
14
Flamethrowers. I wanna set those people on fire, but I'm not close enough.
15
Mega churches. Pastors should become billionaires off the money of their congregations.
16
Cyberbullying. The amount of vile stuff you can say to someone just because you’re behind a screen is horrifying.
17
Crucifixion. The actual mechanics and process is horrifying.
18
Modern fighter jets. Flying machines that can travel faster than the speed of sound, dish out advanced missiles of all kinds around the world, pull 10Gs through turns, and detect each other from many miles away with radar. And many of them are designed with stealth in mind too.
