Apocalypse How/Class X-4

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Universal-scale Physical Annihilation. Everything that has ever been observed by anyone, anywhere. Eradicated. Or at the very least, not organized into galaxies, stars, and planets anymore.

It is the end of all things. Unless there are other dimensions; those are safe.

Examples of Apocalypse How/Class X-4 include:

Anime and Manga

  • The eventual result of Getter Rays use in Getter Robo, caused by the energy going out of control, is the end of the entire universe. Some of the AU series like New Getter Robo and Armageddon suggest that the consequences could go beyond that, into other universes, as well.
  • Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann's Spiral Power is described by the Anti-Spiral as, if left unchecked, able to cause the entire universe to collapse into a black hole, ending the universe.
    • The Anti-Spiral's pocket universe actually IS destroyed when the Super Tengen Toppa Giga Drill Break meets the Anti-Spiral Giga Drill Break. Good thing it was almost completely empty.
  • In Slayers, the destruction of the entire universe is the least you can expect if the Giga Slave goes out of control... barring a Deus Ex Machina, anyway.
  • What the Data Overmind, the Agency, and Mikuru's boss want to prevent indirectly by not allowing Suzumiya Haruhi to discover her powers.
    • In an unsettling twist, it's implied that the Class X-4 has already happened at least once, about three years ago, and that's why Mikuru's organization was suddenly unable to time-travel past that point. No one else noticed anything amiss, since their memories were generated from scratch along with everything else in the new universe.
      • Rather uncomfortably, this happened around the time when a young Haruhi went to a sporting event and saw enough people in one place that it made her feel small and insignificant. That is all it takes for Haruhi to rewrite the universe. No wonder everyone is worried.
  • Transformers Cybertron has Unicron's death leaving a universe-threatening black hole behind.
    • Before that, though, he had already eaten a fair number of universes, bit by bit. That's what his planet eating ultimately culminates into. However, the information is All There in the Manual.
  • Kyubey's goal in Puella Magi Madoka Magica is to prevent the heat death of the universe through the breaking of the Second Law of Thermodynamics through magic. Being an emotionless Starfish Alien that doesn't care one whit about humans, his way of pursuing this goal -- creating a cycle where he harvests emotional energy to combat entropy through turning girls into magical girls who eventually turn into Eldritch Abominations that prey upon humanity and that other magical girls have to fight -- is rather suspect, to say the very least, particularly since he doesn't care if the world and humanity cease to exist, so long as the universe itself survives.
    • By means of a complete fluke, Kyubey gets what it wants... By making Madoka a goddess. However, in so doing, Kyubey also shoots himself in the foot. In her wish to become a goddess, she also takes out the entire magical girls-to-witches system and destroys the universe as they known it as a result. This is rectified only by her being a goddess and re-writing the universe after its destruction. Her new world isn't perfect. Demons apparently threaten the world but also give Kyubey a new source of energy to prevent the heat death of the universe with, and the means to keep creating magical girls (bar one).
  • The forfeit for losing the "game" in Bokurano is this: complete destruction of the loser's universe. Of course, the reward for the pilot of the winning team is instant death.

Comic Books

  • Although Countdown to Final Crisis is largely Canon Discontinuity now, Universe-51 of the current 52 universes of DC was destroyed. Twice. The first time was a battle between Superman-Prime and Monarch (aka Captain Atom being evil again). Prime ripped open Monarch's suit which released all of the energy Monarch had collected (similar to the movie The One Monarch had killed and absorbed all of his multiversal duplicates), which destroyed the entire universe, save for its Monitor and one single plant. The second time was much more low key, a highly mutative virus affected everyone on Earth and was spread throughout the universe by Hal Jordan, initially a Class 3b or a 4. But at the beginning of Final Crisis the Monitors wipe all life from it, making it devoid of life.
  • Hal Jordan as Parallax was responsible for this in Zero Hour: Crisis In Time when he erased all of existence save for a few individuals that he spared just so he could remake the universe as he wanted it.
  • In The Metabarons, at some point in its storyline our universe gets invaded from a parallel universe. A member of the eponymous noble family saves our universe by destroying the other universe with his Psychic Powers.
  • The supervillain Annihilus from Marvel is a good example; he's so obsessed with living forever he plans to exterminate all other life in the universe, just so there's nothing that can threaten him.
  • During the original US Marvel |The Transformers comics, Primus related the story that Unicron predated the current universe, and had actually eaten the previous one. After the Big Bang, he woke up and started over.
  • The alternate-reality Marvel Zombies 2. A grouping of superheroes-turned-zombies, all charged with cosmic powers, fly into space and with the exception of a small group of humans, eats the population of the entire known universe. Or as Hank Pym says, "I can't believe we ate the whole thing."

Film

  • The worst-case scenario of a time paradox in the Back to The Future universe is a class X-4 unravelling of the space-time continuum.
    • Doc surmises that it may actually be limited to an X-3, only destroying their own galaxy. Marty is not comforted by the thought.
      • Which makes it a good thing that counterparts usually faint.
  • The aliens in Plan 9 from Outer Space claim that they only want to destroy humanity in order to prevent humanity from developing Solabonite, a weapon that could destroy the entire universe. At the end of the movie the aliens are defeated. Meaning that humanity will go on to develop Solabonite and destroy the entire universe. "You see? All you of Earth are idiots!"
  • Ghostbusters: Don't cross the streams. Just don't.
  • Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness: Usage of the Darkhold can cause a universe-destroying incursion. 838's Strange caused one while trying to defeat Thanos. We also see another Darkhold-corrupted Strange left in the ruins of what is implied to be an incursion involving that universe.

Literature

Narrator: There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

  • In Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence, the Photino Birds are deliberately turning every last star in their entire universe into a red dwarf, making it uninhabitable for all other life. In Manifold Time, the Blue children instigate a vacuum collapse incident, causing the fabric of space to collapse into a new energy state within a bubble expanding at lightspeed.
  • Greg Egan, Schild's Ladder: A science experiment gone wrong creates a sphere of complete annihilation expanding at half the speed of light. The sphere actually contains an entirely new universe filled with far richer and more vibrant life than ours, but that's small comfort to those in the universe being destroyed. Except for the sufficiently advanced posthuman.
  • In Frederik Pohl's Gateway series, the Foe are energy beings who are reversing the expansion of the universe with the intention of surviving through the Big Crunch so they can reshape the subsequent rebounding universe into one with more suitable physics for pure energy beings. They'll inflict Class 3s along the way, to make sure no one can interfere with the process.
  • The climax of Charles Stross's The Atrocity Archives is set on an alternate world where the top-secret Nazi necromancy project used the souls of those murdered in the Holocaust to summon the infovore, creature of a universe that succumbed to Entropic Heat Death aeons ago and use it as a weapon against the Western Allies and the Soviet Union, wiping out all life on Earth except for the Nazis. Unfortunately for them, the Nazis didn't realize that they weren't in control of the infovore until it was much, much too late - and after it ate the Nazis as well, it began consuming the energy of the rest of the universe, meaning that by the time of the events of the novel (which is set in the present day), that universe is days away from suffering Entropic Heat Death in turn. Nice going, Nazis.
  • The Lone Power in the Young Wizards series causes a star to go nova in an attempt to kill just two people. That's the least of their worries. What about the Pullulus - the rapid dark-matter expansion that caused the universe to literally tear itself apart at the seams, made people more violent, and, oh yeah, cause wizardy to stop working? That one got closer to Apocalypse Wow towards the end.
  • In the deterministic cosmos of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, Billy Pilgrim learns that in the distant future, a Tralfamadorian will invent a spaceship fuel that when ignited will accidentally destroy the universe. Since it's fated to happen, this bothers no one. So it goes.
  • The possibility of accidentally doing this to ourselves is the focus of Joe Haldeman's Forever Peace. A massive supercollider with a diameter the same as one of Jupiter's moons (being built along said moon's equator) won't just simulate conditions within nanoseconds of the Big Bang -- it'll set off another Big Bang. Because we now have the ability to annihilate not just ourselves, but possibly the entire universe, the main characters consider themselves under an ethical obligation to explore and perhaps force peace upon humanity through some Applied Phlebotinum, because somebody's going to push that button someday. In fact, somebody wants to.
  • In Alan Dean Foster's Humanx Commonwealth series, the galaxy (and many before it, by all accounts) is threatened by a region of ultimate emptiness that annihilates all matter and energy that it comes into contact with. It's somehow sentient and malevolent... and it's heading our way. While you wrap your mind around that, consider that the Lost Superweapon that the Xunca created to counter it uses the combined energy of several million galaxies to rip holes in spacetime. And even before all this came into the picture, The End of the Matter featured a massive, rogue, solar system-devouring black hole (X-2 classification) -- and a Lost Superweapon to counter that.
  • Triumph Of Time (UK title: A Clash of Cymbals) by James Blish ends with the destruction of the entire Universe. However the Multiverse endures, as everyone is given the opportunity to shape a new universe themselves. The main character believes so much in free will he refuses to give any shape to his own new universe and blows himself up, thus creating a totally random universe.
  • Philip Jose Farmer's Dark Is The Sun takes place on Earth billions of years in the future. At one point, humankind's civilization was so advanced that they found a way to move the Earth to avoid being burned away by the Sun when it eventually expanded into a red giant star. When the book starts, civilization has reverted to a primitive level, and eventually the group of protagonists discover that the universe itself is coming to an end via the Big Crunch. Their new goal is to find a way to enter another universe to avoid being crushed into a singularity along with everything else in their universe.
  • This rank of apocalypse is subverted in Discworld, where the universe is continuously being destroyed and recreated non-stop by the Anthropomorphic Personification of Time. Also once by a pissed-off postal worker.
  • In the two prequel novels to the Liaden Universe series the enemies are so powerful they Destroy the entire universe the main characters are from. The only way they escape is fleeing to a different universe.
  • Iar Elterrus features this with the Executioners in Belief of the Outcasts. Said Executioners wander from universe to universe looking for certain symptoms or events. While some universes are healthy and some require intervention, an Executioner might encounter an universe damaged and corrupted beyond salvaging. The Executioner's duty in this case is called Judgement: wipe out all life, all afterlife and any spiritual residue of the universe and maybe some neighboring corrupted ones as well, placing their job between X-4 and X-5. While not a happy job by any means, the Executioners would better not slack off - any universe left for itself in spite of fulfilling the criteria for Judgement will spread the corruption and slowly destroy other universes, leading to a potential merging of class X-4 and class X-5 events into a single class Z event.
  • Happens at the end of the Left Behind book Kingdom Come, as the old earth passes away and the "new heavens and new earth" is created, in accordance to the Word of God.
  • Justified in Shel Silverstein's poem "Hungry Mungry", when Mungry starts out by eating his parents, and then proceeds to go all the way up to Class X-4 by eating up the United States, the world, and finally the universe!
  • Labyrinths of Echo by Max Frei:
    • While Khumgat, the Corridor Between Worlds, is likely a fixture, worlds themselves are not. They may be born or created and may as well die with the creator.
    • Part of the Just Before the End setting in the Kingdom of Echo where Author Avatar Max travels to. The world is in danger of being destroyed by magic overuse. While an Ancient Tradition organization is working to prevent it, most of the members are capable to move to Another Dimension should they fail.
    • Loyso Pondokhva's agenda was initiating an X-4 to X-5 event to grab the world's power as said world ended.
    • Return of Ugurbado: The eponymous Ugurbado has a unique relation with his killers, coming back to life with a copy of their powers. Juffin Khalli notes that if Ugurbado was to obtain Arbiter powers in this fashion, he and fellow True Magic users would start looking for a new world, condemning Echo.
    • Shavankhola's Gift: an ancient mage unwillingly created thousands of worlds where their artificial inhabitants are locked in And I Must Scream state. Hence two mages aware of those Dead Illusion Worlds are actively working on achieving an X-4 to X-5 in every one of those worlds as a form of Mercy Kill. Max calls Loyso Pondokhva to their aid, giving him a job to match his life's dream.

Live-Action TV

  • Doctor Who: The Master nearly does this in Logopolis. The rest is only saved by a Heroic Sacrifice.
    • In the episode Utopia, the Doctor travels 100 trillion years into the future to the end of the universe, though it's natural entropy.
    • In the Eleventh Doctor's first season, he spends the whole series figuring out why Time-itself is cracked and leaking- well...time- until he figures out that the universe blames him for destroying it. In the end, he's fallen into a parallel, broken universe designed to delay him and distract him from the eventual apocalypse, with the intention of preventing it. The result: The Doctor is imprisoned at the exact moment that the universe dies, unable to save it. He warps around time until he realizes that the device, himself imprisoned in it, and his exploding TARDIS are the only way to restore the actual timeline. So he kills himself, but leaves enough clues to his companions to remember his existence in the real timeline, somehow (Magic) bringing him back to life.
  • Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars - At the climax of the show, John Crichton unleashes a wormhole weapon which will "eat the universe" unless the warring sides make nice. Having spent four years desperately warning people that it's not a good idea to have them he finally builds one and goes on to prove his point by creating a weapon that swallows a planet, two entire battlefleets and doubles in size every fifteen seconds or so, and will never, ever stop growing. Even Magnificent bastard, and sometimes omnicidal maniac (towards the Scarrans at least) Scorpius admits that this weapon is madness.
  • Lexx had the From Nobody to Nightmare Big Bad Evil Guy Mantrid destroy the Light Universe by converting it all into self-replicating drones, then sent every drone into a very confined area, accidentally causing the Big Crunch.
  • The Magog of Andromeda eat galaxies.
  • One episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine involved an accident that threatened to overwrite the universe.
  • In Charlie Jade, a side-effect of Vexcor's plan to steal water from a parallel Earth would have been the destruction of a third universe (ours, incidentally).
  • Glory's portal on Buffy the Vampire Slayer would have merged our dimension and all others. Considering the differences in physical laws between dimensions, this probably would have killed almost all beings in almost all of them.

Tabletop Games

  • This is what the werewolves of Werewolf: The Apocalypse were fighting to stop -- the transformation of Earth and all realms beyond into a breeding ground for the Wyrm, a being of universal entropy and decay.
  • Mage: The Ascension has the Nephandi trying to destroy everything (the scope of "everything" is fuzzy, but at least includes all of Earth). For some, that's the end goal, while others want some Cosmic Horror or another to come in and replace it.
    • In the fourth doomsday scenario for Mage, the Nephandi actually win. However, they don't destroy universe, but merely make it a real crapsack.
  • In Warhammer 40,000:
    • The second most omnicidal faction in the setting is the Tyranids, a Horde of Alien Locusts. If they have their way, the only life in the universe will be Tyranids floating in the depths of space; all life-supporting worlds will be reduced to airless, freezing rocks, the high end of a Class 5.
    • The Necrons are among the purest, most literal Omnicidal Maniacs in any setting. Their purpose is, like the Tyranids, a Class 5 on the entire galaxy: quite literally the annihilation of all life, right down to bacteria, the harvesting of everyone's souls as delicious dessert for their star-god masters, and the complete destruction of the Warp, the plane of existence upon which souls exist.
      • Actually the Necron's ultimate goal is "merely" to sever the Galaxy from the Warp, destroying Chaos and also rendering all sentient life into soulless cattle for the C'tan. Thay most certainly don't want to wipe out all life. Hell, the whole reason they went to hibernation in the first place was that the Enslavers were wiping out nearly all life in the Galaxy, depriving the C'tan of the life energy of mortals. So they decided to go to sleep until life repopulates.
  • Destroying all non-terran life in the universe is the ultimate goal of the insane Army of the Expeditionary Force in 3:16 Carnage Amongst the Stars.

Gamebooks

  • The Heart of Volent in Heart of Ice will give any human who touches it absolute power over the world. Sort of. Using the Heart will utterly destroy the entire universe, and replace it with one of the user's making and with them as an omnipotent deity.

Video Games

  • The ultimate goal of Super Paper Mario's resident Omnicidal Maniac, Count Bleck and Dimentio is to cause a Class Z, but Bleck succeeds in destroying one universe, leaving a white void.
  • Star Ocean: The Second Story presents us with the Ten Wiseman. While nine of them seem to be just a bunch of jerkass, their leader, Indalecio, wants to destroy the entire universe by the Crest of Annihilation, which produces infinite amount of mass and causes the universe to collapse. The party only makes it worse by killing him, which triggers the said Doomsday Device. This trend continues in the third game of the series, where every enemy you hear of in the Space Opera portions of the game seem to be trying to one-up each other in terms of omnicidal mania.
    • Diminished in the third installment because it turns out the whole universe is nothing but a simulation and large scale MMORPG for people in another dimension. Reducing the threat from universal omnicide to some idiot threatening to destroy the World of Warcraft servers. Sure, millions of nerds would be devastated but that's rather less of an impact than the destruction of an actual universe.
  • At the end of Commander Keen 6, it's revealed that the bad guy was planning to blow up the entire universe.
  • Happens in the end of Super Mario Galaxy where the universe is destroyed in a supermassive black hole. It is reborn again anew, though it is commented that a reborn universe is never quite the same as it was before.
  • Marathon Infinity: The release of the Wrkncacnter wipes out everything in the universe, forcing our Space Marine hero to warp to an Alternate History and Set Right What Once Went Wrong.
  • In Pokémon Platinum, Cyrus is planning to destroy the entire universe by summoning and controlling Dialga and Palkia (the gods of, respectively, time and space).
  • In Meteos, the planet Meteo is hellbent on destroying every celestial body in the universe with signs of intelligence by pummeling them with phantasmagoric meteors until they explode. Stars, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, dimensional anomalies...nothing is spared, and it's your job to stop it from doing that.
    • This also includes the realms of Heaven and Hell, or at least their cosmic equivalents.
  • Near the end of System Shock 2, the rogue AI SHODAN finds a way to alter reality using an experimental FTL engine. If she was not thwarted by the player, eventually the entire universe could be re-shaped to her liking.
  • In the Interactive Fiction game Curses, there is a control panel for the entire universe. Changing its settings is vital to proceeding in the game, but one of the controls is for modifying Planck's Constant, and tampering with it has predictably universe-ending results.
  • If you're defeated by the final boss in Romancing SaGa 3, he causes an Earthshattering Kaboom that takes out the entire universe.
  • If you lose in Star Control 2: The Ur-Quan Masters, the Kohr-Ah faction of the Ur-Quan will eventually prevail in their Doctrinal War with the Kzer-Za faction, and they will proceed to take the Sa-Matra on a Death March to wipe out all non-Ur-Quan sapient life in the galaxy, and, after that, the rest of the universe. It is implied that the Kohr-Ah had, by that point, already wiped out all sapient life in one half of the galaxy, constituting approximately fifty-thousand sapient species.
  • In Jets N Guns, the main plot revolves around a universe-destroying quantum cannon stolen by Xoxx. After you defeat him in the final stage. it is revealed that he already set the gun to go off, before he escapes through time to enslave a different universe. Once the gun fires, the only things surviving are your ship, asteroids, and a Shout-Out to The Neverending Story. In the Gold Edition you find a restaurant, in which you upgrade your ship to be able to chase Xoxx down.
  • Ultimecia from Final Fantasy VIII's true goal is to compress time and space down to one singular point. It's not really Universal Destruction but just a stone's throw from it.
    • One could argue that it almost came close to a Class Z, as well. It seemed like her original goal was to make the universe such that only she could exist in it and, thus, basically become God. Yet towards the end of the final battle with her, it becomes apparent that what is really happening is different -- a good example is when she declared that all existence be denied, and if a party member falls, you get a message saying that they've been absorbed into time (something she doesn't control anymore at this point because Time Compression was halted halfway through). Sounds like she was getting in over her head; who really knows what would have happened if Ellone hadn't of halted Time Compression halfway through or the Big Damn Heroes had failed? It's quite possible Ultimecia could have destroyed herself in the process and reality would have been irrecoverably destroyed.
  • If the Soulless Ones from Lusternia are fully released from their prisons, they'll devour everyone and everything in the universe (including each other!), until only one bloated, amorphous mass remains.
  • Happens in the Bad End for Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice. To be specific: Looking for a new adversary to slay and regain his former glory, Super Hero Aurum spends 200 years grooming Mao into what he hopes to be the strongest Overlord ever. In this ending, he ends up a little too successful.
  • In Skyrim, the main idea is that Alduin does this so a new universe can be created in cycles of time called "kalpas."
    • The Thalmor's ultimate goal is too attain divinity, believing that they were once divine souls who were trapped on Nirn when Lorkhan created the planet. Their current plan is to completely stamp out worship of Talos, who is holding the physical world together with his presence. This will help unmake the world, which will allow the mer people to return to their once-divine status.
  • In Xenoblade Chronicles, it is revealed at the end of the game that Zanza accomplished this in order to become a giant Physical God. Afterwards, he kept causing Class 4 whenever his civilization became advanced enough to leave his body.
  • Despite Umineko no Naku Koro ni being mostly a romance-mystery novel, in the final battle between Lambdadelta and Bernkastel , both rapid-fire attacks that shatter entire fragments using the force of big bangs and crunches. Each fragement is an entire parallel universe. On a (comparitively) lesser scale, Willard cuts an entire fragement in half with a single sword slice.
  • Asura's Wrath reveals that Chakravartin has been doing this to the universe since the beginning of existence itself. While he says world, the fact that he can become bigger than entire clusters of galaxies not unlike Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: Lagann-Hen, it implys this.

Web Comics

  • Due to a not-quite Stable Time Loop, the universe of Tryslmaistan in Unicorn Jelly has a storm that gradually grinds down everything in the universe into dust.
  • In the Sluggy Freelance story arc "GOFOTRON: Champion of the Universe," the main characters wind up in another world called the Punyverse, based off of sci-fi and anime parodies. A series of complicated events results in every piece of matter in the alternate universe being converted into energy. Only the main characters and a small spaceship manage to escape back the main universe. Later on, it's implied that the Tangle in the Web of Fate threatens to destroy, at the bare minimum, the entire main Sluggy universe, and possibly take down all the parallel ones along with it.
  • Order of the Stick: The Snarl destroys a whole pantheon of gods, then moves on to wipe out all of creation in under 30 minutes. The remaining gods managed to lock it up in the process of remaking the world.
  • Irregular Webcomic, New Year's Eve, 2008. May have been a Class X-5, depending on one's definition of "universe".
  • A Beginner's Guide to the End of the Universe actually takes place after the heat death of the entire universe. The only thing that thwarts the Big Crunch and the birth of a new universe is that the Everyman, an anthropomorphic representation of the humanity's collective unconscious, somehow intervened at the last moments and created some buildings, air and light that are the only thing left within the void, forming the basis of the Ontological Mystery the comic begins with.
  • In Eight Bit Theater, Black Mage, as a manifest Nexus, has the potential to destroy the universe. The only thing that stops him doing so is that A) the assorted forces of the universe are smart enough to not let him die (as his physical being acts as a Restraining Bolt and it's only when he dies that he gains full access to his power), and B) Chaos knocks him and the other Light Warriors back to their starting levels, which means he has to start all over again the whole process of getting access to enough of his power to destroy the universe. As long as he's still the Universe's Cosmic Plaything, and it doesn't let him get access to enough of his power, he'll probably left at just attempting to act out his Omnicidal Tendencies
  • Homestuck: Lord English is stated to cause this in every universe he comes to, and since he can time-travel he can set up the parameters of his summoning personally. He's also the Big Bad.
    • Jack Noir and Spades Slick have both destroyed universes as well. Both were essentially pawns of English
  • In Narbonic, Mell and Artie find a videotape sent from the future. The world is a ruin, and Mell has taken over as President of the United States to keep the world from ending up like it is: the time machine needs all the energy in the universe to work, so she is destroying her entire universe to try to save Artie in a different timeline.

Web Original

  • According to various Transformers Timelines stories, the universe of Challenge of the Go Bots is at risk of this.
  • In QNTM's Ed stories, the original energy virus (the expanding-sphere version) would do this (it alters the fabric of the universe at a fundamental level and expands at the speed of light). It was created by the Eridanians, who hear in radio, in an attempt to block out Earth's radio noise from driving them all insane. (It was intended to form a hollow globe with E Eridani in the middle, that would forever cut it off from the rest of the universe. They got the formula a little wrong, and got the expanding-sphere version instead.)
  • Happens in What The Fuck Is Wrong With You? after Space Guy tries to turn the filter back on.
  • The SCP Foundation has a situation known as ZK, dubbed as a reality failure but behaves more as universal destruction. This falls in line considering the most prominent work that features the ZK Reality Failure.

Western Animation

  • Stimpson J. Cat, in the Ren and Stimpy episode "Space Madness", cannot resist pushing the "jolly, candy-like" History Eraser Button.
  • In the Futurama episode "Anthology of Interest I", the What-If Machine predicts the entire universe being destroyed as a consequence of Fry not being frozen. Given that his removal would create at least one paradox and without him, the Brainspawn would have destroyed the universe, it's amazingly accurate.
    • In "The Beast with a Billion Backs", the Democratic Order of Planets utilizes a Universe-to-Universe Missile in an attempt to destroy Yivo's universe and free our universe from tentacle terror.
    • Fry, Bender, and Farnsworth watch this happen in "The Late Philip J. Fry" as they warp forward in time to the end, watching the universe explode, only to watch a new one exactly identical to it emerge immediately afterward in a new Big Bang.
  • Played for laughs in The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy when Mandy smiles, causing the the destruction of reality in a Crowning Moment of Funny that ends with them having replaced the Powerpuff Girls.
  • During the Pizza Planet segment of the first Toy Story, Andy, explaining the backstory to some piece of media to his mother, blurts out "...and the universe explodes!" Considering the scene in question focuses more on Woody trying to get Buzz to jump into Molly's stroller, we never quite figure out what that was all about; whatever it was, though, it was an example.
  • In What If...? episode 4, Strange Supreme uses the power he's accumulated to overcome the absolute point and resurrect Palmer, but this causes the universe to collapse. Eventually he is the only left.

Real Life

  • It's gonna happen eventually some way or another.
  • The most likely ultimate scenario is currently considered to be the heat death of the universe. Thermodynamics dictates that eventually every bit of usable energy will be used up, all the stars in the universe will die, and there will not be enough energy for any planet anywhere to sustain life.
  • Three words: Quantum Vacuum Collapse.
    • The quote itself would be Crowning material if there were such a thing as a Crowning Moment of Doom.

Coleman and de Luccia: [...] One could always draw stoic comfort from the possibility that perhaps in the course of time the new vacuum would sustain, if not life as we know it, at least some structures capable of knowing joy. This possibility has now been eliminated.

  • The Simulation Hypothesis puts forward the possibility that reality as we know it is no more than a simulation. If its creators or some other outside force were to turn it off...
  • It all depends on what the true nature of dark energy is. One hypothesis is the Big Crunch, stating that the universe will slow down in its' expansion and eventually go into a sort of reverse Big Bang, collapsing back into a singularity. The more optimistic Big Bounce idea is that the Big Crunch happens, but the revertion of the universe into a singularity again will trigger another Big Bang. The universe thus remakes itself with a bang and a crunch through cycles of rebirth, maybe for all eternity.
    • Contrariwise, another hypothesis suggests that Dark Energy will eventually accelerate the Universe so fast that it will even overpower the energy bonds that hold matter together, so that even subatomic particles will be ripped apart. Strangely, this acceleration would still continue until it reaches the speed witnessed during the inflationary period of the Big Bang, allowing the creation of new particle-antiparticle pairs from the vacuum energy, just as it did originally. In this scenario, again, the destruction of our Universe potentially brings about the birth of a new much larger and potentially much richer Universe.
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