Apocalypse How/Class 2: Difference between revisions

 

 

* ''[[Cowboy Bebop]]'', in which the Gate Disaster takes out half the moon and makes Earth uninhabitable for all but the hardiest of humans. It should, however, be noted that the rest of the [[terraform]]ed planets and moons in the system are okay; Earth is still in contact with the greater solar community, but is regarded as a backwater. This makes this Class 2 ''in theory'', but it's really more a large-scale Class 0.

* ''[[Blue Gender]]'', in which giant bugs ravage the human population of Earth, forcing the humans into space. Admittedly, humans as a species are allowed to survive as small hunter gatherer tribes, but that still necessitates all modern civilization's knowledge and technology to be wiped out lest [[Gaia's Vengeance]] do an encore.

 

 

* In [[The Bible]], The Great Tribulation. Exact numbers are unknown, but the description "Mortals will be rarer than the gold of Ophir," combined with Revelation detailing the fact that over half of the population will die from the war, famine, plagues and various other disasters, and most of the Christians will be beheaded, burned or starved to death, while none of the unbelievers survive Armageddon means that you could expect maybe one out of a thousand people who enter the Tribulation to come out alive, perhaps a bit more.

* ''Dies The Fire'' and the other [[Emberverse]] books by [[S.M. Stirling]], where a mysterious event causes all recent power sources to stop working at all (electricity, steam engines of any useful efficiency, gunpowder, etc.). About 95% of humanity dies off in the first year from starvation and lack of knowledge on how to survive in primitive conditions. Another large percentage of what's left dies off once cannibalism is no longer an option due to lack of other humans. By the end of the first book it's clear humanity is going to survive—most remaining threat comes from would-be warlords and despots, who want to enslave rather than kill—but the cultures that are springing up aren't precisely what you'd expect.

 

 

* In a [[Bad Future]] of ''[[Heroes (TV series)|Heroes]]'', the immortal Adam Munroe unleashes the Shanti virus, wiping out most of the world's population so they can build anew.

* In the ''[[Babylon 5]]'' episode "Deconstruction of Falling Stars", its shown that humanity all but wiped itself out in a massive civil war. It takes quite a while and the aid of the Rangers to fix that mess.

 

 

* ''[[De Genesis]]'', a German roleplaying game set [[After the End]] sees presumably all of civilization completely destroyed. Humanity got back to their feet, making the initial apocalypse only a Class 1 case. However, since the asteroids left some alien material that constantly expands its turf, the survival of the human race is all but probable.

* The Great Rain of Fire, a planetary cataclysm that devastated the D&D setting of ''[[Mystara]]'' 3000-odd years ago, knocked human and elven civilization from scifi-grade technology back to savagery. The exact nature of the weapons Evergrun's elves and Blackmoor's humans threw at each other is unknown, but nukes were probably the ''least'' of them, as their conflict was so violent that it ''changed Mystara's axial tilt''. Note that this same event rates as a Class 3a for some of the other races that were around back then, and that still others only subverted a Class 3a [[Apocalypse How]] because the Immortals preserved some of them in the Hollow World.

 

 

* [[Earthshattering Kaboom|The Shattering]] in ''[[Bionicle]]'' is implied to have reduced the population of Sphereus Magna, and significantly decreased the amount of resources available, resulting in a [[Scavenger World]] where villages have to fight for supplies.

 

 

* ''[[Chrono Trigger]]'', at least after the Day of Lavos. It's clear that a few isolated pockets of humanity have survived Lavos' wrath, but it's also clear that those isolated pockets are screwed, no matter how much "hope" is spread by the main characters. Luckily, the theme of the game is [[Time Travel]]...

* The freeware game ''[[Iji]]'' begins with a vast majority of all life on the planet blown to bits, your job is to try to save the remaining life from being blown into even tinier bits.

 

 

* In ''[[The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob]],'' the [[Dinosaurs Are Dragons|dragons]] [http://bobadventures.comicgenesis.com/d/20100518.html did this to themselves] with an "iridium bomb," wiping out the [[Everything's Better with Dinosaurs|dinosaurs]] in the process. All because they panicked during a clumsy [[First Contact]].

* One of these appears in the backstory of ''[[Wapsi Square]]''. Thousands of years before the comic starts, an ancient civilization tried to create the ultimate weapon. [[Gone Horribly Right|Predictably]], they lost control and it destroyed most of the world. The three parts of the weapon are now main characters.

 

 

* ''[[Tech Infantry]]'' had the ''Exodus'' spin-off project, where a much larger catastrophe wiped out most life in the galaxy, and one planet worth of survivors quickly lost most of their high technology and regressed to a Medieval stage of civilization.

* The [[Set Right What Once Went Wrong|entire reason]] why the time traveler in the ''[[United States of Ameriwank]]'' visited George Washington in the first place.

 

 

* This was actually the ending to the last cartoon of the "future trilogy" [[Tom and Jerry]] cartoons from the Chuck Jones run.

 

 

* The [[wikipedia:Toba catastrophe theory|Toba Catastrophe]] is an event that may have happened about 75 thousand years ago, when a supervolcano reduced human population to 10,000 individuals total. There's a lot of tantalizing evidence that this may have happened, but no absolute proof.

* Mass Extinction-level events would certainly count as high-level class 2's; events such as the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) event, which among others killed off the dinosaurs. Or the great extinction event ever, which was the Permian-Triassic event, which killed off approximately 90-95% of ''all life on earth''. It's not for nothing that archaeologists, who aren't a profession usually given to mass hyperbole, refer to it as '''''The Great Dying'''''.