Apocalypse How/Class 1

Planetary-scale Civilization Disruption. A lot of people die, but civilization is still surviving in a reduced state.

Anime and Manga

 * Mai-Otome seems to have been partially the inspiration for Class 1. Unlike it, however, civilization has already pretty much got back on its feet -- it isn't even apparent at first that there was an apocalypse.
 * The world got nuked from hell to back in Fist of the North Star, and it's basically become the world in the Mad Max films. Humanity may one day recover, but for the time it's stuck in a "might makes right" world filled with mohawk-wearing motorcycle gangs.
 * Trinity Blood takes place 900 years After the End. The events of the series all take place in Europe due to it being the only inhabited continent.
 * Simoun takes place long After the End, when civilization is back on its feet, though not to its former level.
 * Humanity got back on its feet in the Vampire Hunter D movies, albeit with some difficulty. Computers and energy weapons still exist, but the largest settlements humans could rebuild are large towns. From what we can gather watching the two movies, there are no more sprawling metropolises in the vein of Tokyo or New York City. In the original novels, there's one such metropolis, though the humans didn't actually build it.
 * The world after the Zentraedi attack in Macross/Robotech is around a 1.5: while most of humanity is killed off by a brutal orbital bombing, the survivors and the residents of the SDF-1 were able to repopulate. They also have their advanced technology, and civilization is shown to recover (both in the later Macross series, such as Plus, and in the Masters and New Generation seasons of Robotech, which were dubbed versions of other series).
 * In Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, industrial civilization has obliterated itself from the world. The remaining kingdoms and empires are busily destroying each other through war, and the ever-expanding Sea of Corruption is making large areas completely uninhabitable to all animals except its own giant insects. Thus, a Class 1 disaster threatens to become a Class 3.
 * The prestory to Ergo Proxy destroyed essentially the entire biosphere of planet earth, though humans still managed to survive.
 * In So Ra No Wo To a big war against what appears to be aliens results in civilization taking several steps backwards. There are a lot less people around, and few of them knows how to use the remaining technology that was state of the art 200+ years earlier.
 * Trunks' Bad Future from Dragon Ball, devastated by the Androids. King Piccolo's conquest of Earth 300 years prior to the series also amounts to this.
 * The Second Impact in the backstory of Neon Genesis Evangelion, which killed over half of human population, rose the sea level enough to submerge entire cities and heavily altered the climate.
 * Gundam X is a Class 1 disaster due to the Seventh Space War's conclusion. Nearly all the Colonies used a Colony Drop on Earth, sending it into a seven year Nuclear Winter. However, 15 years after the War, everything is stabilized and despite taking place After the End, it is upbeat and hopeful.
 * Heat Guy J As explained in a Hannibal Lecture given by Clair, the people of Earth got a hold of the Applied Phlebotinum of the resident Superior Species. That was fine, until they started using said phlebotinum for war, and most of the population of Earth was wiped out, save for a few hundred-thousand people, who now live in seven isolated city-states (and some small towns/villages surrounding them.)
 * GaoGaiGar FINAL shows an apocalypse between Class 1 and Class 2 due to the actions of the Soul Masters trying to steal all the Dark Matter in the universe. Hundreds of well known cities are in ruins, the ice caps melted, and there were apparently a lot of casualties. However, it seems civilization and humanity will definitely bounce back after a few months to years! All because of Courage!
 * The Thirteen Day War in the backstory of Legend of Galactic Heroes involved a nuclear exchange between the major powers of Earth, which reduced the world's population to 1 billion and some 90 years would pass before order was restored on Earth.

Comic Books

 * Part of the backstory of the Post-Rapture graphic novel, Therefore Repent!.

Film

 * In Independence Day, most major cities are destroyed, but it seems humanity will survive... though it's debatable whether an Inferred Holocaust has occurred, which would knock this film into the Class 2 range.
 * In The Day After Tomorrow, the Northern Hemisphere has been caught in a sudden Ice Age. Millions of people are instantly frozen to death and survivors flee to Southern countries.
 * Children of Men, where humanity is slowly going extinct due to a combination of universal infertility and the resulting societal collapse . Class 3 is not entirely ruled out.
 * French film Time of the Wolf, Humanity is in dire straits due to polluted water. Although it's never fully explained how. the audience only knows that uncontaminated water is scarce and livestock have to be burned. Maybe considered a 1.5
 * WALL-E, in which Earth has become an uninhabitable trash dump, but it appears most of humanity fled on cruise ships.
 * We don't have a lot of information about the disaster preceding the exodus from Earth - including the percentage of Earth's population that escaped into ships. It seems that a decaying form of civilization exists on the Axiom and sister ships, but from the perspective of Earth, it's a Class 4.
 * Escape From L.A.: Though it doesn't involve anyone actually dying, Snake activates the Sword of Damocles satellite system at the end of the movie, unleashing a massive electromagnetic pulse that neutralizes every electrical power source on the entire planet, thereby (according to the President's Dragon, at least) setting the progress of human civilization back about 500 years, leading to the deaths of thousands, if not millions, indirectly as a result of entire cities shut down.
 * Contagion: A worldwide pandemic that spreads about as easily as the flu, and kills about a fifth of the people infected. The US government survives, but things get pretty rough for a while.

Literature

 * The Ur Example is the various Great Flood myths that appear in various cultures. Western tropers are probably most familiar with the Judeo-Christian version in the Book of Genesis, but The Epic of Gilgamesh was earlier, making this Older Than Dirt.
 * Lucifer's Hammer (1978) looks much worse at first, what with a comet's direct impact apparently destroying civilization, China nuking Russia (and getting nuked by both the Soviets and USA in retaliation), a cannibal army roaming through what's left of California, and the lack of any organization outside the local level. But by the end of the novel, we still have electricity (from a nuclear power plant, even), at least regional government, and contact with people that can put a plausible claim toward being the national government. Amusingly, the authors claim (and suitably demonstrate!) that it was the mailman doing his job that kept civilization afloat and the story out of the nastier categories below.
 * It's also speculated, though never established, that countries south of the equator would escape the impact and the worst of the weather changes. If that's true, Australia, South Africa and most of South America could probably maintain social order.
 * David Brin's The Postman (1985), which features a drifter who finds a postal uniform, and starts a postal network in an effort to stay fed, and ends by reuniting the northwest USA. Better known as the Film of the Book starring Kevin Costner.
 * The Breaking of the World in Robert's Jordan's The Wheel of Time series. Also borders on class 2.
 * A Canticle for Leibowitz shows the stages of humanity recovering from nuclear war, as civilization rebuilds itself and technology is rediscovered. Then there's another nuclear war. Fortunately
 * Stephen King's The Stand -- the flu has wiped out almost everyone (we see only the situation in America, but it is confirmed several times the pandemic was global), but the forces of good and evil are calling the survivors to two cities, and once they begin to gather it turns out there are thousands. The potential for abuse of abandoned power sources is a main issue, suggesting that after evil is defeated humanity will get right back on its feet in terms of technology (which actually worries some of the protagonists). In the end, (perhaps surprisingly, more an example of Chekhov's Gun than Deus Ex Machina), and the folks in the good city appear to.
 * Of course, 99.44 percent of humanity being wiped out and all, it's unlikely they could simply restart all that technology outside of a few cities. It seems more likely that The Dark Tower is an alternate-reality future America, After the End, since it's confirmed that Captain Trips happened there in the distant past, as well. Which places it in a high Class 1, verging on Class 2.
 * Also see Swan Song by Robert R. McCammon, which deals with the aftermath of a nuclear war and bears certain ... similarities to The Stand.
 * S.M. Stirling's The Peshawar Lancers centers on a set of comets hitting the North Atlantic and North America in 1878, creating tidal waves that ruin what is left of the U.S. and most of mainland Europe. Britain (having lucked out with Ireland as a waterbreak) is dealing with the nightmarish Winter that follows when a group of scientists point out to Prime Minister Disraeli that Spring will not come for another three years at best. So of course they evacuate the Army, the Royals, a chunk of the nobility and government, the contents of several Universities, as much factory gear/skilled workers they can get their hands on, and so forth over to India. The book itself starts in 2025, with the Angrezi Raj pitted against the plots of a Russian Empire run by a Satanist Cannibal Cult and guided by an order of precognitive slaves.
 * Spider Robinson's Telempath has an unusual mechanism for this: the release of a virus that improves humanity's sense of smell by a ridiculous amount. Result: a hefty percentage of the population dead or catatonic from the sensory overload, and the survivors forced to flee their now-unlivable cities. On top of which, they're under attack from a formerly-hidden nonhuman race, because.
 * World War Z shows how humanity the Zombie Apocalypse.
 * Years of Rice and Salt. The Black Death was 90+ % fatal between the Volga and the Atlantic, depopulating Europe in the 1300s. The book covers the next 6 centuries of how the other civilizations go on without Western civilization's interventions and contributions.
 * L. Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth has only 30,000 humans left, but the other trillions of beings left in the Universe can be hired as needed to rebuild the world, as the Earth's people more-or-less own the Galactic Bank and hundreds of thousands of unused colony planets.
 * John Christopher's The Tripods series of books (The White Mountains, The Tripods, The City of Gold and Lead, and a fourth prequel, When the Tripods Came) have a world where a race of extraterrestrials have conquered Earth. They ride around and visit communities in huge three-legged vehicles, and have "capped" every human adult with a device attached to their heads to keep them from starting a revolution and fighting back. The world has more-or-less been knocked back to or just above semi-rural agricultural society, where there is essentially no motorized equipment. A small group of rebels is determined to take Earth back from the tripods, the only question is whether they will have enough time to do so.
 * When the Tripods Came was published some thirty years after the first three, in 2000, and is an extremely moving book, for all its simplicity.
 * In Greg Bear's Blood Music artificially enhanced lymphocytes gain intelligence and spread quickly across the entire North American continent, converting all biomass into more entities like themselves. (Although they are capable of encoding and converting intelligences into their cellular-level versions, so nobody strictly "dies" during the epidemic.) After the incident resolves itself, North America has been wiped clean and humanity in the rest of the world is trying to adjust
 * Greg Bear also manages a Class 1 in  Add to this the Class X in Forge of God mentioned below, and he'd wiped out most of humanity three times in three of his earlest novels.
 * The main land in The Obernewtyn Chronicles. They got hit by a nuclear holocaust that left most of the land and water tainted.
 * In Sewer Gas and Electric: The Public Works Trilogy by Matt Ruff, a racist-designed plague turns nearly every person of black African descent on the planet into dust. Only ethnic Africans with green eyes -- a minute fraction of the total -- are spared.
 * In Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer, an asteroid hits the moon and causes chaotic climate changes. Tsunamis and volcanoes start happening across the world. The volcanic ash blocks the sun and causes a mini-Ice Age.
 * In John Ringo's Posleen War Series, humanity has roughly 5 out of every 6 people (that is, about five billion) killed by the end of the war with the Posleen. Arguably they veer into Class 2 territory, but while humanity gets hammered hard, they keep most of their technological knowledge.
 * Prior to Sabriel, book one of Garth Nix's Old Kingdom, something like this occured thanks to Kerrigor.
 * In the Second Apocalypse, the first Apocalypse exterminated an entire cradle of human civilization, the Ancient North. Now its ruins are haunted by baying Sranc. At least they killed the No-God, though: his very existence caused infants to be stillborn. For eleven years.
 * The main point of the series is to prevent the titular Second Apocalypse, which would entail the resurrection of a now-unstoppable No-God and an eventual class 4-6, all so that the two surviving Ichoroi can avoid going to Hell.
 * In Without Warning, an Alternate History written in 2009 but beginning in 2003, an energy field of unknown type and origin called "the Wave" wipes out all primates in most of the Lower 48, the more populated eastern half of Canada, about 90% of Mexico and three-quarters of Cuba. This leads to a very different Iraq War in which Hussein goes on the offensive and is joined by Iran, the global economy starts sliding down the toilet and the world in general starts edging into Mad Max territory. Also fires caused by untended fires spread, due to the lack of human intervention (although automatic sprinkler systems catch some) wiping out large chunks of entire cities with the resulting ash being spread throughout the northern hemisphere in "pollution storms" that wipe out major harvests. Four years later   in the sequel After America, the food and oil shortages caused by the pollution storms and   have most civilized nations still on rationing, although no-one is starving, many people growing private gardens and bicycles and horses outnumbering private cars.
 * M. K. Wren's The Phoenix Trilogy takes place a thousand years after a Class 1 Pandemic wipes out most of the planetary civilization. In the chapters covering the historic re-building of human society, almost all of the emerging powerhouse civilizations are from remote areas of the planet. The planetary government winds up being centered in Australia.
 * In John Barnes' Mother of All Storms set Twenty Minutes Into the Future, a UN sanctioned nuclear strike on an illegal Siberian military base sets off a chain of events that culminates in a series of super-sized hurricanes that ravage coastlines on aglobal scale and completely wipe out entire nations (Bangladesh, Japan, Micronesia) as well as the state of Hawaii and cause roughly two billion deaths but thanks to the intervention of  civilization as a whole and the Unted States in particular are preserved with the coastal areas due to become new frontiers.
 * Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel, begins with a pandemic that kills off over 99 per cent of humanity. Civilization takes a major hit because there aren't enough people to maintain an industrialized society, but luxuries like touring acting troupes still exist.
 * In John Barnes' Mother of All Storms set Twenty Minutes Into the Future, a UN sanctioned nuclear strike on an illegal Siberian military base sets off a chain of events that culminates in a series of super-sized hurricanes that ravage coastlines on aglobal scale and completely wipe out entire nations (Bangladesh, Japan, Micronesia) as well as the state of Hawaii and cause roughly two billion deaths but thanks to the intervention of  civilization as a whole and the Unted States in particular are preserved with the coastal areas due to become new frontiers.
 * Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel, begins with a pandemic that kills off over 99 per cent of humanity. Civilization takes a major hit because there aren't enough people to maintain an industrialized society, but luxuries like touring acting troupes still exist.

Live-Action TV

 * In Jericho, 25 of America's major cities have been nuked, including Washington, D.C., dividing the country in three. It's arguable whether this belongs in 0 or 1, because for all we know, the rest of the world could be pretty much okay.
 * We do know that, due to the Cheyenne Government's cover-up and Puppy-Kicking, Iran and North Korea no longer exist.
 * Every government seems to be throwing money and goods at the US in hopes that the wounded beast won't start lobbing nukes at random. In the end, America may drag the rest of the world down with them.
 * Survivors, created by Terry Nation (he of the Daleks and Blakes Seven), featured the few remaining inhabitants of a virus-ravaged Earth. However, enough human knowledge survived in the form of books to prevent this going to Level 2.
 * In Star Trek: First Contact we see Earth just after World War III. Suffice to say, Vulcans were VERY surprised that humans could develop FTL under such conditions.
 * A Class 1.5 Catastrophe is depicted in "Friendship One", an episode Star Trek: Voyager.
 * Jeremiah shows life after a plague has wiped out nearly every post-pubescent human being.
 * Doctor Who manages a class 1 in the series 3 ending episodes. Human life on Earth is ordered decimated the old-fashioned way--10% of the population gets killed.
 * Thankfully this is an alternate reality.
 * Babylon 5: The Deconstruction of Falling Stars depicts a future where after a war, technology has fallen back several centuries. In a direct homage to A Canticle for Leibowitz, it's revealed that at one of the monks shown is a Ranger in direct contact with the Interstellar Alliance.
 * New Zealand-based family drama The Tribe - a government project into anti-aging goes wrong and the resultant virus wipes out all adults in the world. Although the surviving children resort to small insular tribes and anarchy rules periodically from then on, enough knowledge survives in books that technologies can still be slowly rebuilt by those who are smart enough, making this a solid Class 1. Its sequel series, The New Tomorrow, takes this much closer to a Class 2.

Tabletop Games

 * Rifts varies from place to place. A number of modern cities have been (re)built, including a scant few that survived from before the magically-charged cataclysm, but only the most powerful states expand their influence beyond the borders of their own cities (or have "city" be plural, for that matter). Mankind is slowly rebuilding, but the initial catastrophe of the Coming of the Rifts was just shy of a full-blown class 2. It's taken the world 300 years of rebuilding to reach the point of a class 1.5 and is only a couple of good shoves from falling back into class 2 territory. The presence of alien monsters/invaders/the return of magic has been both a blessing and a curse, as some areas have come back much faster than others, but very differently than how they were before and often with humans at the bottom of the pecking order.
 * Individual planets suffered everything up to and including Class 5 in the Final War of Traveller, but human civilisation as a whole is starting to reclaim the stars 80 years on.
 * The post-World War Three world of Twilight 2000 is Class 1, bordering on Class 2. It's clear that humanity has a lot to do, but generally implied that civilisation would rise again. The starfaring game 2300 AD was Ret Conned into being a sequel, so this interpretation is more-or-less official.
 * Gamma World has both humans and assorted mutant species slowly reinventing civilization after a nuclear-chemical-biological war.
 * As does Mutant Future, the close-as-you-can-get-it retroclone of the game that uses the Labyrinth Lord rules.
 * The Anime Multiverse Setting of Big Eyes, Small Mouth has Enid, a world in which most of humanity was driven into arcologies underground by violent storms, that since ravish the lands. There's also a world-spanning war going on between two factions that try to restore the planet in two different ways.
 * The VITAS plagues cut back the global human population by about 1/4 in the future history of Shadowrun. Some countries weathered the pandemics better than others, with North America coming through relatively intact, while some Third World regions such as Madagascar were left virtually deserted.
 * In Nuke War, if you win, it's only a class 1 disaster; if everyone loses, it's somewhere from class 2 to 4.
 * Earth went through at least one of these in the backstory of Warhammer 40,000, plunging an advanced civilization into barbarism as a result of a global nuclear war. Earth rebuilt and subsequently went through at least two or three more apocalypses, becoming known as [Holy] Terra along the way, but those were part of higher marks on the apocalypse scale.

Video Games

 * Final Fantasy VI, most of the world is destroyed, but humanity survives in quite large numbers and most towns are unscathed. However, Kefka is a god after this and keeps blasting the survivors when he gets bored, pushing the crisis up to Class 4/5 a year later, with plant and animal life dying off and humans struggling to rebuild in-between Kefka's rampages. During the confrontation with Kefka before the final battle, he directly states he's gonna go for Class X and beyond. The party kills him before he gets a chance to try, and.
 * The 1,000 years before the events of Final Fantasy X results in this, creating a state of affairs where Sin roams the world, wrecking any human settlement (with the exceptions of Bevelle and Luca) that gets any larger than a small town.
 * Gears of War skirts between this and Class 2. Given 99% of the human population were wiped out by the Locust, the remaining were fighting an offensive war against them and later the Lambent, and that they had to destroy their last bastion to cripple the Locust at the end of GOW 2, things didn't look too rosy.
 * By the time Halo 3 rolls around, humanity is at least in a position like this, with most non-earth colonies having been utterly annihilated, the entire remaining military capacity of humanity being about a dozen starships and a few hundred thousand soldiers, and the human population being reduced to less than one percent of its former numbers, about 300,000,000 according to the Bestiarium. If the Gravemind spared any of its unknown numbers of FTL-capable ships to spread the Flood, then not only will they easily overwhelm the entire galaxy, but the Ark, the only safe haven from the rings and the means by which the galaxy will be reseeded post-activation, has been severely damaged and is now inaccessible. If this is the case then either the Flood will absorb all life in the galaxy, or the rings will destroy all sentient life in the galaxy, making this a hybrid of a class 3 and class X-2 either way.
 * Deus Ex gives the player the option to instigate a non-lethal type 1: because.
 * Uplink also features a non-lethal type 1,.
 * ''The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, set After the End, features Ganon laying waste to Hyrule prior to the start of the game. Later, the three gods flood the land, although it's not clear how much of the entire world is affected, or how many fled to higher ground.
 * Half-Life has entire cities laid to waste, with Xen wildlife taking over and Earth under complete control of an interdimensional empire. It's unknown how few people remain, but the fact that there's still a resistance movement 20 years after the Seven Hour War implies that there's still hope, even when there's Everything Trying to Kill You and the infrastructure is under decay.
 * Almost voiding the Downer Ending of it's prequel is Dead Rising 2-it's quite clear that the Zombie Apocalypse has come and gone, but thanks to the government being actually competent, civilization itself has endured quite nicely and the outbreak hasn't really knocked people back significantly-there's even a Reality Show based around it. This, combined with a way to actually fight the infection means that the epidemic will probably end with humanity on top (admittedly, it's going to take a while...)
 * This is the setting for the Fallout universe. After global thermonuclear war wipes out civilization and much of the human population, a post-nuclear Zeerust-filled Crapsack World provides the backdrop for the games.
 * Sword of the Stars - humankind comes under orbital bombardment from a neighbouring, established spacefaring civilisation just after hte first colony ship was launched. Civilisation collapses, then comes back in a form, but as an effectiive fascist dictatorship bent on forcible expanson into habitable worlds.
 * Shin Megami Tensei I. Thor's Hammer. The Great Flood. Japan's left as a charred, sunken husk of what it was. It's implied the world beyond is little better if at all.
 * Forgetting the demon invasion, have we?
 * Metro 2033 takes place in Moscow after a nuclear war has destroyed most of Russia (and presumably most of the rest of the world.) Civilization has survived by moving into the subways and sewers beneath the city and humans now live in self-contained underground cities. Of course, the tunnels are now overrun by mutants and other dangerous creatures and the player has to run a gauntlet through underground cities run by communists and Nazi's.
 * In BlazBlue, the war against the Black Beast resulted in a toxic mist spreading across all of Earth, rendering the planet totally uninhabitable to humans except on the highest mountaintops, where the mist is too thin to have an adverse effect. Civilization now exists in at least thirteen city-states dotted around the world (though a few are destroyed over the course of the games), with transportation between them via gigantic airships. Nearly all of Earth's species have died out because of this mist, but a few animals and plants seem to have been replaced by mutant variants that can thrive in it.

Web Comics

 * Terinu's backstory has the Earth being subjected to an attack 500 years previously by the Varn Dominion using a titanic tractor-pressor beam to to destroy major population centers via earthquakes and tsunamis. This results in a Class 1.5 destruction as somewhere between one and a half to three billion people die in the initial attack and subsequent chaos. Australia was left intact with a functioning economy however, as a sort of human game preserve. In addition, the Vulpine suffered a 50% population loss as they were hit by the "Bloody Plagues" during the subsequent human led rebellion.
 * The Zombie Hunters near-future Post-Zombie Apocalypse setting finds the planet overrun by The Undead, and the The Virus did in fact serve as a Depopulation Bomb. What few humans remain cling very tenuously to Class 1 status, with the struggle to avoid becoming a full-bore Class 2 as a driving force in the plot. To keep their Island Military Base running, and the populace cozy they depend on teams of dormant Zombie Infectee Disaster Scavengers (the eponymous "Zombie Hunters") to venture out into "the Wastes" and risk getting bitten to retrieve much-needed salvage. They only have two helicopters and a ship to work with. A handful of doctors, scientists, engineers and Military are respectively trying to Find the Cure, keep the island's technological infrastructure running, and build a viable secondary colony on the mainland. The loss of any of these people or things, even a relatively expendable Zombie Hunter, represents a huge setback for the potential future of the human race.

Web Original

 * In Pokegirls, the Revenge War and the Plague that follows it wipes out over three-quarters of the entire human race, but structures of society and technology seem mostly intact and it looks like we can get back on our feet eventually. The 'modern' era, 300 years later, confirms this- things are still a bit precarious but for the most part we're out of the woods and advancing instead of sliding backwards.
 * Tech Infantry has a large meteor strike the earth and render it temporarily uninhabitable, but by that point, humans have colonized many other planets, so the species survives.
 * Coruscant in The Gungan Council had at least a quarter of its surface damaged and possibly even wiped out by a Death Star exploding in its orbit.
 * 1983: Doomsday, a timeline from the Alternate History Wiki, is set in a world where a nuclear war occured in the early eighties. Most of the nations in the Northern Hemisphere cease to exist, yet the survivors manage to establish new states in their wake. The Southern Hemisphere, meanwhile, escapes mostly unscathed.

Real Life

 * A "limited" nuclear exchange between the superpowers probably would be a high Class 1, depending on where the nukes landed, at least in the early part of the Cold War.
 * Japan and Germany wanted to do this to their own people as a final act during World War II. Thankfully there were smarter higher-ups on both sides.
 * Eastern Europe as a whole walked the edge between this and Class 0 as a result of the two World Wars, particularly in Poland and the Soviet areas.
 * Also happened to Paraguay in the War of the Triple Alliance, in a strange cross between this and a regional Class 3a.
 * The Black Death halved Europe and China's populations, killing an estimated one hundred million people and setting civilizations back by centuries in the fourteenth century.
 * A strong enough solar flare could render most electronics (especially ones with computer chips) severely damaged and useless, which would knock humans back to the 1930s in terms of technology. However, it is temporary, so after the turmoil (caused by removing essential technology like radios, the computers in plane cockpits and the machines hooked up to hospital patients), we would be able to replace it eventually.
 * The night side during the flare would probably have electronics more or less okay, so even if one were to hit Earth (itself a very slim prospect but likely a reality some point in the future), there's a decent chance the bulk of the damage would be over the Pacific or Atlantic oceans. However such an event would damage satellites completely, and in the worst case scenarios, human progress would be stalled out for a few decades while infrastructure and industry recovered. Deaths would probably be limited to medical patients and people in situations requiring electronics at the time though.
 * And the however many thousands of people in the airplanes which use electronics in the navigation equipment and more importantly to run the engines. No electronics, bye bye engine; no engine, bye bye thrust; no thrust, bye bye forward speed; no forward speed, bye bye lift; no lift ... oh no... we're gonna die. Most planes built during the last 15 years can't function without computers. If the computers are fried you either replace them or turn the aircraft into Coke cans.
 * While most air passengers would likely die, modern commercial airliners are equipped with backups (most notably Auxiliary Power Units and Ram Air Turbines) that can provide some power and control in the event of engine failure and power loss. Depending on their positioning, it's quite possible that a percentage of planes would be able to ditch or land in relative safety. But yeah, it probably wouldn't work out well for most people in the air when the event happened.
 * More ominously however, most people in today's Western society have no access to clean water or food without electronics, which in a worst case scenario could bump this up to a Class 2.
 * According to a theory based on genetics, a volcanic eruption 70,000 years ago reduced the human race to between 1000 and 10,000 breeding pairs. If this is true, then it's the closest we've had to a worldwide class 1.