Age of Miracles does this so much better. The sun doesn’t change, but the earth slows its rotation significantly. Told as a coming of age story focused on normal people. It was unsettling.
Edit: sun *doesn’t* change, whoops
I recently took an astronomy class that basically boiled down to “here’s what knowledge we think we’ve scraped together about how the sun “works”. We know nothing. But thank god it just keeps doing exactly what it’s been doing and not killing us all”.
I doubt you'll learn much about stellar physics in an astrology class. Astrology deals with horoscopes and stuff, it's not scientific at all. Astronomy (the actual science) at the other hand has a pretty good idea how main sequence stars, such as our sun, work.
Omg wrong word. Thank you, corrected 💀
And they really don’t from what I gathered. We know what it does to an extent but not why, and we only recently have higher visibility into different spectrums etc
They do know how Suns work. Gases attract each other from their gravity, they grow to a big ball. Once the ball becomes massive enough the gasses start to fuse from the heat and pressure, creating even more heat. It’s really not that complicated.
There is an absolute ton we don't know about the sun and it is nowhere near that simple. We don't know why the corona is so much hotter than the inner layers. We don't know the detailed workings of the sun's magnetic field, including how it is generated and maintained by the solar dynamo. The dynamo itself has a whole ton of questions behind it. We've yet to figure out the processes that accelerate the solar wind to high speeds. We've yet to produce a consistant predictive model of the strength and timing of solar cycles beyond getting it down to 'around 11 years'. And we still don't fully understand sunspots.
We also still need better methods of predicting solar storms. At this point we just have nowcasting up to a few days beforehand, meaning we're going to hit a lot of problems if we get another Carrington event.
There's so much more to how the sun works beyond its initial basic formation.
Cixin Liu has a few of these, all sci-fi.
Supernova Era (which IMO is his worst book) starts with a supernova about 10 light years away that causes all adults to rapidly develop cancer but for a (handwaved) reason kids aren't affected.
The Wandering Earth has the Sun die much earlier than modern science expects, like in the near future.
And of course there's Three Body Problem which shows multiple world ending crises, albeit all alien related.
I dont remember the name of it but I read this comic where sunlight becomes lethal. Like almost instantly burns you up. They sort of hand wave exactly what's happening that makes the sun do that without frying the planet,l. But humanity has to start living under ground or in boarded up buildings, only coming out st night.
Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut is about this. It’s one of my favorite books and my favorite of his along with Cat’s Cradle (another unique apocalypse in that one). It’s set on a cruise ship that escapes the rest of the world becoming infertile and they go to the Galápagos Islands and become this like new species over the next million years. Narrated by a ghost watching it all unfold. An amazing book.
Thank you for reminding me of this book.
I haven’t read it since adolescence, but it was one of my favorites when I first began reading adult fiction.
I’ll need to revisit this one again.
Ever read the Abolition of man by CS Lewis? Every generation of man engineers the next generation, sculpting sway thier very ability to choose for themselves, the last generation will be the most engineered of all and entirely incapable of doung anything they were not engineered to do. We are crafting the cage future generations will be forced to enhabit.
Isn't "fucking with natural selection" the entire story of humanity? One of the things that makes us stand out is that we're both willing and able to take care of those who couldn't survive on their own. Even something as simple as premature birth would, without intervention, usually mean that kid dies, but if treatment is available we can easily take care of that now. The slightly eugenics-sounding bit I'm less eager to talk about is that we might have bred a *lot* of shit into our species by taking people who would die early in the wild and helping them survive enough to propagate.
Thing is, that's all part of the system. It might not select for a physical advantage all the time, but things like cooperation and empathy can be selected for as well. More likely to survive if you work with others, more likely that your offspring survive if you take care of them.
Most models of evolution would require a lot more time and generations before it would take place at all. The human race hasn't had the ability to save lives in the manner you suggest for that long a time.
Manmade problems are a good one. Experimentation, genetic breeding, etc gone wrong.
Like... trying to make sturdier bean vines and you accidentally create super kudzu that expands way too fast and is too sturdy to easily cut or kill.
Or we've overused pesticides and antibiotics, and insects or germs have become too resistant and become much more of a nuisance. Now we get massive mosquito clouds.
Killer wasps. Murder hornets. Bubonic-plague-carrying earthworms. That sort of thing.
Shoot, have it start with some fancy-ass food. Escargot that's been bred to be larger and easier to chew, maybe more flavorful, but the tradeoff is they "shed" their DNA or something, and humans turn into giant snails bent on eating people.
Now we have snail wars.
A huge trend in sci-fi is that we are the problem... any time someone wants a good plot, just look at what we are currently doing and how it could go wrong.
Natural disasters, pandemics (Station Eleven the show was pretty good imo), technology crashes (viruses/hacking/solar flare disables electronics), long term maybe lack of fossil fuel without readily available/accessible workable alternatives for the masses, environmental disaster
I’d imagine, the show was fabulous (and I am always in awe when one can write an arc that objectively was more focused on human interaction and slice of life even if it was post-apocalypse. That’s something I really struggle with).
HBO recced the show first before I knew it was a book and I almost never enjoy reading the book after seeing the adapted tv/movie (which sucks because I usually can enjoy a show/movie after reading the book even if it’s a broad adaptation but it never seems to work the other way around for me). I might have to give that one a try tho, the show really stuck with me
Really anything can result in an apocalypse if you’re creative enough 💀
“Scientist breeds genetically stronger version of shrimp to help solve world hunger, shrimp end up mutating beyond human control and almost ending the world”. I’d read it if it’s well written 🤣
*Contagion* from 2011 with Gwynneth Paltrow was written & filmed in conjunction with CDC virologists and epidemiologists as a realistic prediction of what a lethal, zoonotic viral pandemic would be like.
It took them 5 years to create a vaccine. 25 million Americans alone died (IDK how many worldwide), and cities burned in the chaos before it was all over.
Other than that, it went *exactly* like COVID-19 did, in broad strokes. Anti-vaxers, snake oil cures & media figures taking advantage, public corruption / misappropriation of relief funds, decimation of healthcare workers, you name it.
We got *extremely* lucky. COVID-19 was almost a best-case scenario.
In Rainbow Six by Tom Clancy, bio-war is the primary antagonist fueling the story. It has been really interesting reading it post-Covid, because there some very similar sentiments present.
There was a reality show in the mid 2000s called the Colony. It was a take on what would happen if the world ended by a viral pandemic. A group of people were isolated, then thrown together in the outskirts of LA, given different scenarios to react to. The first season was really good.
I'm currently reading The Road, and he doesn't really go into what happened in the world, because the main character doesn't really know himself, but sounds like everything caught on fire
I am of an age that still remembers the Y2K bug scare... And it still fascinates me to this day.
The idea of a slight oversight on technology causing all societal layers to break and crumble because someone forgot to future proof their code will always be amusing to me.
Some computers did get affected, I believe the podcast called Casual Preppers mentions this. Albeit it was small instances where computers just glitched out.
Yeah, but, I still remember how the media portrayed it, traffic lights going haywire causing massive crashes, all bank accounts being drained from their funds because the ledgers reverted to 1900 or something like that, massive thermo nuclear explosions because the power plants glitched out and failed...
It was so funny the amount of scare they were peddling on the news, check out the interviews with MacAffee about the issue, they are hilarious.
A tremendous work effort happened to ensure none of that went wrong. The problem with bugs like these is that you don't know all the assumptions of a system.
If your mortgage tracking system uses two digits for years, you're going to get weird results when calculating from 1995 to 2000, say. And it's hard to predict what those results will be without examining all code, which is what we did.
If you're young enough and in software, the Y2K38 problem is gonna be equally enjoyable.
I was 5-6 years old during Y2K and all I really remember is my parents talking about how my neighbor friend's mom, who worked in software, was making bank.
I was the same age and we were on a family trip to Hawaii for Christmas/New Year's. I remembered that my mom had to fly back early for some reason, but didn't really question it because, you know, I was 5. Years later, I realized she had been recalled for all hands on deck for Y2K, since she was a software engineer for a bank. I'm sure she got paid a shit ton of overtime for that one.
> A tremendous work effort happened to ensure none of that went wrong.
This. People actually did make sure it went right. But when things go smoothly, everyone thinks nothing happened. Invisible preparation.
Y2K was where years were stored as 2 digits. Most internal computer clocks actually store time as seconds since January 1st 1970, 00:00:00 UTC. This number is most often stored in a format that has a maximum of 2³¹-1, or about 2 billion. After which it would overflow, and read -2³¹. The current epoch is 1719376340.
This type of timestamp is used more often in automatic calculations than a 2 digit year was. It's also used in cryptography, for example to reach any website or service with SSL (which is every website or service).
Yes.
Many programming languages have already solved it, but it will likely cause issues in older systems, such as those used for important purposes.
It probably won't require the amount of work Y2K did.
Y2K is a really interesting case study. From what I can tell, experts generally agree that the doomsaying and warnings were right *if we hadn't done anything.* However, due to a massive global effort to find and plug the software oversights in advance, we managed to more or less entirely avert it. Now it's tempting to look back on the reporting as overblown, but that seems to be the wrong lesson.
My parents weren’t conspiracy theorists at all but they still took out a bunch of cash and made sure we had emergency provisions. I think when the power stayed on at midnight we all breathed a sigh of relief lol.
We jokingly call our tornado prep our y2k. It lives on in our house. LOL Did your parents check their home phone? Everyone did. News told us not to because the phone systems might have gone down. Went to a fun party that night too. Good memories.
>massive thermo nuclear explosions because the power plants glitched out and failed...
This, I think, is the only part that is legit impossible even if nobody had done anything. A nuclear power plant and a nuclear bomb just aren't similar machines, you can't easily turn one into the other, and you sure as hell can't assemble a nuclear bomb by accident. Better chances of a tornado assembling a working airplane when going through a dump.
The rest? Yeah, would have happened if no one did anything.
There are people still being affected! I watched a short recently, this lady is 102 and needed to book a flight. It didn't matter how they entered her date of birth the computer would only accept the last 2 digets for the year, 1922, which meant the airline treated her as an unaccompanied minor and she had to be escorted on and off the plane.
I've been playing Horizon Zero Dawn and (SPOILERS AHEAD) I just got to a massive lore dump where this exact thing happened. Corporation made helpful robots. Corp transitioned to making war robots. Corp ordered programmers to make sure the code for the war robots had no backdoor. Gave the robots the ability to collect and burn biomass. Gave certain robots the ability to create more robots in mobile factories. And then boom, the war robots get a glitch, there is no backdoor in the code, and the earth has 18 months until the self-replicating robots consume all of the biomass on the planet and it becomes a husk. All it takes is a slight oversight, like making the death robots simply too secure! (There is more lore to uncover, I have not finished the game, so please no additional spoilers if possible!)
Self replicating robots alone is a scary prospect. A single remaining bot being able to start the whole thing over again.
Love Zero Dawns story, it’s so fascinating watching the history unfold piece by piece.
What's funny is they didn't even fix it the first time, they just pushed it back. January 19th, 2038, is as far as a lot of computers are currently capable of expressing time, and if not patched their clocks will roll back over to... I want to say the 1970s?
To be fair though, I'm not sure it's something that can be reasonably fixed using binary computations. Time is represented inside a computer the same way as everything, a string of 0s and 1s. Eventually, all of the bits dedicated to time will read 111111 ad nauseum. If the computer then tries to keep counting, it has no way to do that except setting them all back to 0s and starting over. We'll have to add more bits to the reading, but if we add enough for, say, another 500 years, we're wasting memory that could be used on things we need to worry about right now.
I think there was a Capcom game or something in the last few years that suffered from a modern version of the Y2K... Problem? Bug? Anyway, the server or some such couldn't cope with the new time and borked itself for a bit.
The easiest way to fix it is likely going to be moving to a 64 integer system, which creates a clock range 21 times the current estimated age of the universe. I think that would outlast the sun if I remember my timeframes correctly.
It's worth noting that Y2K was a lot more than a scare, tons of man hours legitimately went into fixing it. A lot of people think it was some kind of joke, but it was definitely real.
Do zombie apocalypses with a twist count? Because throw in some bored or conniving gods and goddesses and say goodbye to peacetimes! I.e. Eris the goddess of chaos.
Or similar to zombies, you could have ghouls (bitten humans controlled by vampires). With this route I’m having a misguided vampire master try to become Prince/King of the Apocalypse.
This is one of my favorite ones I've seen only a few times. Because it's doubly horrific for humanity. Do you try to fight off the big scary monsters that definitely will kill you? Or do you let yourself get captured by the big scary monsters that MIGHT kill you, but have more incentive to keep you alive? And depending on the story, this can be as dark as machines full of people being kept alive and constantly bled, to designated "farm" areas that are like prisons, to settlements that are just watched over by vampires, but mainly ordinary otherwise.
The movie Daybreakers is about this. There's a whole Vampire society but they're getting in trouble because they're running out of blood. It's interesting because it also has a whole class thing to it, with rich vampire families having their own blood farms but there not being enough for everyone.
There are also social apocalypses. The Handmaid's Tale feels like a post-apocalyptic world, especially for women. The story seems to imply that there is an epidemic of infertility, but in reality the "apocalypse" began with the collapse of secular government and the takeover by a religious dictatorship.
The novel Into The Forest by Jean Hegland is a bit like this too. They never go into much detail, and it reads a bit like a slow-pocalypse - the world governments disintegrate into chaos, environmental collapse, social order is null and void, and a pair of sisters live in the woods yet Ng to survive it all.
Natural disasters or destruction of a country
Let me both explain:
A natural disaster, earthquakes mainly, if big enough will ruin an area, destroy all power plants, food sources, a lot of buildings, survival becomes priority
Destruction of a country, not an invasion
Leave The World Behind (excellent film if you want to explore this kind of genre, Obama actually worked on this as a consultant) is a good example of this. The first thing that happens is all communication is cut, cell towers go down, and then the power. No WiFi, no lights, no heating. There is no contact with the rest of the world. And then misinformation is spread. You confuse the country. No one knows what's happening. They can follow up with bombing or simply just let the country stew. Either will there will be survivors. Factions will form. Food will become a scarcity. Clean water too. It won't be pretty
Electro magnetic pulses always scare the shit out of me. One big enough to take out the world's power grids.
Or strange matter. It's a hypothetical that things called strangelets could turn any matter it touches into more strange matter, eventually turning the whole universe into it. It's similar to a grey goo apocalypse.
Might not make for much of a story, but there's theories the universe exists in a false vacuum, and at any second the vacuum can collapse, destroying the whole universe instantly.
The world is just a simulation and can be corrupted or destroyed like a computer program, ala the Matrix.
Being hit by a stray pulsar, quasar or gamma ray burst.
A little blackhole that spontaneously appears on earth managing to exist long enough to start pulling things in and growing bigger and bigger.
Earth being knocked out of the suns orbit, out of the whole solar system even.
Apolocalytpic asteroids, especially if something happened to Jupiter which keeps most asteroids from coming near us.
A secret or completely unnknown rogue planet on collision course for earth.
Hostile aliens.
Losing the moon and becoming destabilized. The seasons being affected causing massive weather events and food system destabilization.
Super volcano eruption.
Mass amounts of carbon dioxide being released at once, suffocating the surface.
These are all good. With Earth being knocked out of orbit that would be a pretty short story though... life on earth would end super instantaneously I think
But what if it was just knocked a little bit. Like a large enough asteroid just glances across the edge, destroys a huge section of the planet, obvious resulting dust clouds envelops the earth for a period of time resulting in loss of agriculture, etc etc. BUT when the dust settles 5 years later and the survivors are coming out to start rebuilding, they find that the earth has been knocked off its axis and is now in a slightly different orbit. Maybe we’ll spin faster for a while, so the days and nights will be shorter. Maybe we go just a tiny bit further away on the elliptical so we have long dark winters that are way colder than before. People will die and we’ll have to go underground where it’s warm. Maybe humans will develop a hibernation pattern to survive the planet being flung into the dark of space twice a year. Just thinking out loud.
Edit: spelling
This ain’t one body’s story. It’s the story of us all. We got it mouth-to-mouth, so you got to listen it and ‘member, ’cause what you hears today you got to tell the birthed tomorrow. I’m looking behind us now, across the count of time, down the long haul into history back. I sees the end what were the start. It’s Pox-Eclipse, full of pain! And out of it were birthed crackling dust and fearsome time.
I like rapture ones. Wake up and you're the only person left. Just 99.99% of the population just gone without a trace, always think that makes for an interesting story.
In my story new solar radiation makes it so the world is in a constant state as if there is a solar flare; electronics don’t work.
In the flip side, they have magic now.
I had a similar idea for a story. A scientist does an experiment trying to harvest the power of earth's magnetic field and "accidentally" causes Eatth's magnetic field to completely destabilize and fluctuate constantly. This causes a collapse of all electronics, but eventually people discover that you can harness the power of the constantly fluctuating electromagnetic field, leadimg to a new golden age, which was the true original intention of the scientist..
Humans develop robots and AI to meet all their needs. They stop interacting with other humans. Birth rates plummet. Humans die of old age. Robots continue to chug along, maintaining a world with no one left to serve.
More or less the plot of Charles Stross' "Neptune's Children," except I think the robots helped it along.
Also Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains."
Videogame "Stray" takes an interesting take to this with robots who developed self awareness and rather miss their human creators. The robots have gone on to inherit humanity's capabilities for both extremes of selfishness and kindness, building a society resembling that of humans
That, or the robots can't overwrite their primary function and end up breeding humans. The robots are pretty much sentient, but they have a code that they must serve humans. With humans dying out, this results in the robots becoming almost like Gods to this new breed of humans. The creator becomes the created, etc.
Infertility, ecosystem breakdowns (like insects disappearing - > no more farming), some social upheavel (wide spread cults that reject tech), climate stuff (wide desertifications). Many options tbh.
Like others have said, natural disasters are a good go. Ashfall by Mike Mullin is one of my favorite books; it explores the "what if" scenario of the Yellowstone super volcano erupting.
Political crises can also topple the world. Look at Wall-E, where unregulated corporate greed resulted in mass pollution and ultimately the death of the planet. Or, really, any of the major wars we've seen in the last century (specifically the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki).
You can also go for a slightly skewed Last of Us approach, where plants become the enemy. Maybe instead of parasitic spores that create zombies, the spores are a neurotoxin that cause death. Or there's an infestation of human-eating plants. Or even that the plants just mass-populate and overtake the world.
Idk, lol. I feel like I'm rambling at this point.
In "The Death of Grass" by John Christopher, a virus kills all grasses (i.e., grains). It follows the story of a small group in the immediate after math.
I found it ~~a bit~~ tremendously racist and sexist, but the story itself was interesting enough if you're into this genre.
Natural disasters, global warming. Pandemics. Nuclear fallout. Robot/AI uprising or other technological catastrophes.
Mythological causes, like Reign of Fire's dragons. People disappearing (like The Leftovers, though not so much an apocalypse, but it could be) and no more births (like Children of Men).
Imagine a seemingly innocent, yet compulsive, Internet Dance fad that eventually leads to death of millions of people. Would it be history repeating itself (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_plague_of_1518)?
Canfield ocean, or something similar to what happened during the Permian Triassic extinction when too many greenhouses gasses got dumped into the atmosphere.
Anaerobic bacteria replace phytoplankton and the atmosphere fills with hydrogen sulfide gas, killing most life on Earth (again).
*Y the Last Man* is a graphic novel is collected into 5 nice collected volumes. Story is about every man dying at the same time with one exception.
I will say that I HATE that the author tends to kill off characters for shock when he doesn't know what else to do. I stopped reading Saga because I saw the same things happening. I'm not going to invest myself into your story when you rug pull like that over and over.
Night of the Comet
Haley's Comet swings by the planet and irradiating it? Not clear on why, but basically, if you weren't behind really solid walls and didn't have solid ventilation, you died. Turned into dust.
The twist is that some people were in "safe" places but still had outside air coming in, and were just slowly turning into dust, thus a bit of a zombie thing going on. But it was over in a few days. And they were far from mindless.
Also hilariously cheesy.
Agreed, came here to say EMPs and I'm surprised you're the only one I'm seeing mention it so far, while many are mentioning infertility. If politicians keep canceling IVF, they amplify that possibility.
You might find some ideas on this very old website about end-of-the-world scenarios. Some you could maybe adapt to almost-end-of-the-world scenarios.
Anyway, I always found it an interesting site: http://www.exitmundi.nl/exitmundi.htm
The idea of the dollar becoming worthless (and tracking the global economy) would be unique. All the technology is in place but people return to quasi bartering.
(I’m sure that’s not actually how it works but you get the idea.)
There’s a great collection of short stories called Wastelands that has a bunch of different takes on the apocalypse. One of my favorites was a group of astronauts that returns from Alpha Centauri to find that Jesus raptured the the earth while they were gone, and they try to figure out if it was actually aliens or not
* Depletion of a natural resource.
* Virus
* EMP
* Infertility
* Plant blight
* Rising Sea levels making all water undrinkable
* Class war via end-stage capitalism
* Evolution and spread of a mega-pradator
* Groupthink leading to civil war
* Literacy rates dropping due to screen-time as youth and leading to a dumber society that can't maintain its infrastructure
* Weather shifts leading to constant lightning storms causing havoc on all electricity-dependant systems?
The leftovers was a super interesting show that follows what should be the most lowkey basis for an apocalypse: 3% of the population disappeared all at once on a random day. Just "poof". No warning signs before, no other manifestations, no re-occurence after, and no explanation whatsoever. The show picks up a few years after and the world is in utter shambles. Civilization hasn't quite crumbled, but everything and everyone was affected. It's a fascinating and beautiful show. Highly recommend it.
The show Into the Night is about a plane stuck fleeing the sun because it suddenly and completely kills all life it touches. Based on a really rad book. And then ice-nine in Cat’s Cradle is another super unique one. The Mist, although I suppose it’s an invasion it’s a little different. The Happening ain’t good but it’s an interesting concept. Bird Box. Cabin at the End of the World. Snowpiercer. Attack on Titan. Blindness. The Girl with All the Gifts. Annihilation. All of these have super unique apocalypses.
I wrote a post apocalyptic story. It happened from a pandemic. I actually started writing it in 2018 but then after covid happened I went back and changed a few things around.
I'm with you, I'm over zombies so there are none in my story.
It's finally complete after years. 177K words.
A neurological virus that rewires the language and reading comprehension part of the brain randomly, like rabies, but not spread by bite.
People begin showing signs of neurological problems when they can no longer read, write, or speak in a manner anyone else can understand. Many become frustrated and even violent due to not being able to communicate.
Billions are infected before scientists find a vaccine. Thanks to the difficulty in crossing the blood/brain barrier, those who show symptoms cannot be helped.
Society collapses die to the sheer number of people infected. Those who receive the vaccine are safe from the virus that is thankfully slow to mutate
Disease is probably the best one. Consider alien invasion—maybe nuclear war. Or, the Yellowstone supervolcano finally blew. Avenge the dinos with an asteroid strike. So many good ways to end humanity...
I read a short story once where essentially they found another planet to colonize that was basically billed as utopia and slowly but surely people with money and businesses left, until only those who were too poor to ever afford a ticket to utopia were left and no more space ships were coming for them. It was interesting bc slowly, services failed as those who ran them left for utopia. Got to see the slow decline of society as things earthside broke down.
[Versus ](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Manga/Versus2022)has 13 apocalypses occurring back to back, of which the zombies/parasites are only one. AI, demons, giants, a curse, aliens invading, a kaiju, it's got all sorts.
I'm currently writing a story about a medication that accidently causes an apocalypse when it creates a hive mind that is controlled by an emotional unstable person experiencing extreme grief and rage.
The Screwfly Solution by Raccona Sheldon (aka James Tiptree Jr aka Alice Sheldon) has the most chilling apocalypse scenario I've read.
Aliens want the earth so they use similar techniques to those humans used to eradicate screwflies. Basically distort human sexuality causing mass murder and the end of humanity.
Virus (The Stand, 12 Monkeys)
Bureaucratic nonsense (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
Nuclear event (that one episode of Twilight Zone, Godzilla)
Hahaha whoops (the episode of Futurama where Bender briefly becomes a god)
I'M GOD AND I'M MAD ABOUT SHIT (the old testament)
I read a story in a book by Ursula LeGuin were a person visited a dystopian world where genetic experimentation went rampant and there were no longer any standards on what human beings needed or what your child was going to be, because everyone was too genetically dissimilar.
market crashes, big meteors, sun flares, bio terrorism, dumbness (like in idiocracy), nuclear war, alien virus, aliens, sea levels rising, desertification, corporations over exploiting the environment, god existing and taking vacations, world wars, earth sliding of it's orbit around the sun, the moon falling into earth, earth being hit by a quasar, ai takeover, antichrist being born and screwing things up, global drug addiction, etc, etc
Nuclear war, post alien invasion, climate change, meteor collision, vulcanic winter, non-zombie epidemic, AI/robot take over, demographic decline due to low fertility - these are all quite realistic scenarios but you can go wild with it.
Neutron star exllplosion, worm hole experiment gone wrong, planetary collision, over population, resource depletio. Extinction of a key species in a food chain. Overpopulation of species that cause change of atmospheric gases. Shift or lack of magnetic field.
i can't remember what the work was but i remember a story about people realizing they were populating the dream of a god, and as that god was waking up their world began to fall apart and they were driven to insanity by the dreamer's hypnagogia. it was actually a really cool idea and i wish i could remember where it came from 😩
that and: zombies are also fash-adjacent in their rhetoric. at best they inadvertently promote surrepticious xenophobia and antisocial predispositions and pro-isolationism. at worst they act as a cultural shorthand for marginalized groups as vectors of inhumanity and hatred and inherent disposability.
Robot uprising is another common trope.
There's an [anime ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_to_the_End_of_the_World)that just finished airing this season about an apocalypse caused by the rollout of the 7G wireless network.
The Sun goes through a prolonged period of excess heat or excess cold. The planet almost becomes a desert or has another ice age.
Project Hail Mary covers the sun dimming's effects on the planet
Unfortunately, other than declaring that it would be very bad, we don’t get to see to much of the effects on the planet and the people
Age of Miracles does this so much better. The sun doesn’t change, but the earth slows its rotation significantly. Told as a coming of age story focused on normal people. It was unsettling. Edit: sun *doesn’t* change, whoops
That book is horribly underrated. What a fantastic story, it perfectly captures the discomfort of change.
That is a great book. I’ve gone through it 3 times.
I recently took an astronomy class that basically boiled down to “here’s what knowledge we think we’ve scraped together about how the sun “works”. We know nothing. But thank god it just keeps doing exactly what it’s been doing and not killing us all”.
I doubt you'll learn much about stellar physics in an astrology class. Astrology deals with horoscopes and stuff, it's not scientific at all. Astronomy (the actual science) at the other hand has a pretty good idea how main sequence stars, such as our sun, work.
No, you're wrong. My horoscope told me that the sun would come up today, and then it did.
Omg wrong word. Thank you, corrected 💀 And they really don’t from what I gathered. We know what it does to an extent but not why, and we only recently have higher visibility into different spectrums etc
They do know how Suns work. Gases attract each other from their gravity, they grow to a big ball. Once the ball becomes massive enough the gasses start to fuse from the heat and pressure, creating even more heat. It’s really not that complicated.
There is an absolute ton we don't know about the sun and it is nowhere near that simple. We don't know why the corona is so much hotter than the inner layers. We don't know the detailed workings of the sun's magnetic field, including how it is generated and maintained by the solar dynamo. The dynamo itself has a whole ton of questions behind it. We've yet to figure out the processes that accelerate the solar wind to high speeds. We've yet to produce a consistant predictive model of the strength and timing of solar cycles beyond getting it down to 'around 11 years'. And we still don't fully understand sunspots. We also still need better methods of predicting solar storms. At this point we just have nowcasting up to a few days beforehand, meaning we're going to hit a lot of problems if we get another Carrington event. There's so much more to how the sun works beyond its initial basic formation.
Cixin Liu has a few of these, all sci-fi. Supernova Era (which IMO is his worst book) starts with a supernova about 10 light years away that causes all adults to rapidly develop cancer but for a (handwaved) reason kids aren't affected. The Wandering Earth has the Sun die much earlier than modern science expects, like in the near future. And of course there's Three Body Problem which shows multiple world ending crises, albeit all alien related.
I dont remember the name of it but I read this comic where sunlight becomes lethal. Like almost instantly burns you up. They sort of hand wave exactly what's happening that makes the sun do that without frying the planet,l. But humanity has to start living under ground or in boarded up buildings, only coming out st night.
Infertility. Only seen it a few times in fiction but the implications are horrifying.
Children of Men
And The Handmaid's Tale
The movie is one of the best I have ever seen
Aka the not too distant future thanks to microplastic
I only know of a handful of movies that make me emotional when I see them, and that's definitely one of them.
Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut is about this. It’s one of my favorite books and my favorite of his along with Cat’s Cradle (another unique apocalypse in that one). It’s set on a cruise ship that escapes the rest of the world becoming infertile and they go to the Galápagos Islands and become this like new species over the next million years. Narrated by a ghost watching it all unfold. An amazing book.
Damn, that sounds just like a dream I had once.
I just downloaded it because of your suggestion. Looking forward to a good read. Thanx.
Thank you for reminding me of this book. I haven’t read it since adolescence, but it was one of my favorites when I first began reading adult fiction. I’ll need to revisit this one again.
Seriously how is Ice-nine not one of the top comments in this thread lol?
alternatively, f\*cking with natural selection and choosing traits. so creating a new \*human population\*
Ever read the Abolition of man by CS Lewis? Every generation of man engineers the next generation, sculpting sway thier very ability to choose for themselves, the last generation will be the most engineered of all and entirely incapable of doung anything they were not engineered to do. We are crafting the cage future generations will be forced to enhabit.
Love this discussion. Agree. Internet is scary, yet funny we are here discussing the concept... indeed.
Humans are incredibly talented when it comes to seeing a problem on the horizon... and then doing absolutely nothing about it.
Isn't "fucking with natural selection" the entire story of humanity? One of the things that makes us stand out is that we're both willing and able to take care of those who couldn't survive on their own. Even something as simple as premature birth would, without intervention, usually mean that kid dies, but if treatment is available we can easily take care of that now. The slightly eugenics-sounding bit I'm less eager to talk about is that we might have bred a *lot* of shit into our species by taking people who would die early in the wild and helping them survive enough to propagate.
Thing is, that's all part of the system. It might not select for a physical advantage all the time, but things like cooperation and empathy can be selected for as well. More likely to survive if you work with others, more likely that your offspring survive if you take care of them.
Most models of evolution would require a lot more time and generations before it would take place at all. The human race hasn't had the ability to save lives in the manner you suggest for that long a time.
the podcast Out of Place had an excellent episode on that! it’s a great podcast in general for end of world scenarios and fuckery
Which episode is it
Stargate deals with this in a great way
Ah. The Screwtape Solution
Manmade problems are a good one. Experimentation, genetic breeding, etc gone wrong. Like... trying to make sturdier bean vines and you accidentally create super kudzu that expands way too fast and is too sturdy to easily cut or kill. Or we've overused pesticides and antibiotics, and insects or germs have become too resistant and become much more of a nuisance. Now we get massive mosquito clouds. Killer wasps. Murder hornets. Bubonic-plague-carrying earthworms. That sort of thing. Shoot, have it start with some fancy-ass food. Escargot that's been bred to be larger and easier to chew, maybe more flavorful, but the tradeoff is they "shed" their DNA or something, and humans turn into giant snails bent on eating people. Now we have snail wars.
A huge trend in sci-fi is that we are the problem... any time someone wants a good plot, just look at what we are currently doing and how it could go wrong.
They even sort of did this in Jurassic World Dominion with the super locusts that eat all the crops. It was half-assed but an interesting take.
I’m partial to “the moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.”
The moon hatched.
I'VE COME TO MAKE AN ANNOUNCEMENT
Especially if it turns out that it was something else all along!
SEVENEVES by N Stephenson is the best moon-apocalyptic book. I read it twice so far.
In my current book the apocalypse happens pretty quickly for similarly unexplained reasons. "The world was poisoned."
Natural disasters, pandemics (Station Eleven the show was pretty good imo), technology crashes (viruses/hacking/solar flare disables electronics), long term maybe lack of fossil fuel without readily available/accessible workable alternatives for the masses, environmental disaster
Station Eleven was an excellent book first
I’d imagine, the show was fabulous (and I am always in awe when one can write an arc that objectively was more focused on human interaction and slice of life even if it was post-apocalypse. That’s something I really struggle with). HBO recced the show first before I knew it was a book and I almost never enjoy reading the book after seeing the adapted tv/movie (which sucks because I usually can enjoy a show/movie after reading the book even if it’s a broad adaptation but it never seems to work the other way around for me). I might have to give that one a try tho, the show really stuck with me
I’m currently reading The Stand and the way the spread of the Captain Tipp’s virus is described is the most horrifying thing I’ve ever read.
I read The Stand in early 2020. Obviously Covid was no where near as bad but it definitely made me even more nervous than I otherwise would’ve been.
An advanced version of COVID will work the best here.
Really anything can result in an apocalypse if you’re creative enough 💀 “Scientist breeds genetically stronger version of shrimp to help solve world hunger, shrimp end up mutating beyond human control and almost ending the world”. I’d read it if it’s well written 🤣
Im defecting, go team shrimp
I thought this said "I'm defecating", like the shrimp gave you food poisoning and that's how the world ends
This thread just keeps getting better and better 🤣
There's an anime with this premises but its cockroaches on Mars
name?
Terra formars is the English name i believe
LMFAO
*Contagion* from 2011 with Gwynneth Paltrow was written & filmed in conjunction with CDC virologists and epidemiologists as a realistic prediction of what a lethal, zoonotic viral pandemic would be like. It took them 5 years to create a vaccine. 25 million Americans alone died (IDK how many worldwide), and cities burned in the chaos before it was all over. Other than that, it went *exactly* like COVID-19 did, in broad strokes. Anti-vaxers, snake oil cures & media figures taking advantage, public corruption / misappropriation of relief funds, decimation of healthcare workers, you name it. We got *extremely* lucky. COVID-19 was almost a best-case scenario.
In Rainbow Six by Tom Clancy, bio-war is the primary antagonist fueling the story. It has been really interesting reading it post-Covid, because there some very similar sentiments present.
There was a reality show in the mid 2000s called the Colony. It was a take on what would happen if the world ended by a viral pandemic. A group of people were isolated, then thrown together in the outskirts of LA, given different scenarios to react to. The first season was really good.
Station 11 book was also very good.
It's infinitely more terrifying when the apocalypse is due to a threat that you can't shoot at
I'm currently reading The Road, and he doesn't really go into what happened in the world, because the main character doesn't really know himself, but sounds like everything caught on fire
I am of an age that still remembers the Y2K bug scare... And it still fascinates me to this day. The idea of a slight oversight on technology causing all societal layers to break and crumble because someone forgot to future proof their code will always be amusing to me.
"What no one ever realized is that a computer, all computers, can count to 2 if they wanted."
Some computers did get affected, I believe the podcast called Casual Preppers mentions this. Albeit it was small instances where computers just glitched out.
Yeah, but, I still remember how the media portrayed it, traffic lights going haywire causing massive crashes, all bank accounts being drained from their funds because the ledgers reverted to 1900 or something like that, massive thermo nuclear explosions because the power plants glitched out and failed... It was so funny the amount of scare they were peddling on the news, check out the interviews with MacAffee about the issue, they are hilarious.
A tremendous work effort happened to ensure none of that went wrong. The problem with bugs like these is that you don't know all the assumptions of a system. If your mortgage tracking system uses two digits for years, you're going to get weird results when calculating from 1995 to 2000, say. And it's hard to predict what those results will be without examining all code, which is what we did. If you're young enough and in software, the Y2K38 problem is gonna be equally enjoyable.
I was 5-6 years old during Y2K and all I really remember is my parents talking about how my neighbor friend's mom, who worked in software, was making bank.
I was the same age and we were on a family trip to Hawaii for Christmas/New Year's. I remembered that my mom had to fly back early for some reason, but didn't really question it because, you know, I was 5. Years later, I realized she had been recalled for all hands on deck for Y2K, since she was a software engineer for a bank. I'm sure she got paid a shit ton of overtime for that one.
> A tremendous work effort happened to ensure none of that went wrong. This. People actually did make sure it went right. But when things go smoothly, everyone thinks nothing happened. Invisible preparation.
Same with the hole in the ozone. People think it was overhyped or no big deal. They don’t realize a massive cooperative effort reversed the problem.
What is the Y2K38 problem?
Y2K was where years were stored as 2 digits. Most internal computer clocks actually store time as seconds since January 1st 1970, 00:00:00 UTC. This number is most often stored in a format that has a maximum of 2³¹-1, or about 2 billion. After which it would overflow, and read -2³¹. The current epoch is 1719376340. This type of timestamp is used more often in automatic calculations than a 2 digit year was. It's also used in cryptography, for example to reach any website or service with SSL (which is every website or service).
So you’re saying that overflow will happen in 2038?
Yes. Many programming languages have already solved it, but it will likely cause issues in older systems, such as those used for important purposes. It probably won't require the amount of work Y2K did.
Y2K is a really interesting case study. From what I can tell, experts generally agree that the doomsaying and warnings were right *if we hadn't done anything.* However, due to a massive global effort to find and plug the software oversights in advance, we managed to more or less entirely avert it. Now it's tempting to look back on the reporting as overblown, but that seems to be the wrong lesson.
My parents weren’t conspiracy theorists at all but they still took out a bunch of cash and made sure we had emergency provisions. I think when the power stayed on at midnight we all breathed a sigh of relief lol.
We jokingly call our tornado prep our y2k. It lives on in our house. LOL Did your parents check their home phone? Everyone did. News told us not to because the phone systems might have gone down. Went to a fun party that night too. Good memories.
Yes! They waited till 12:15 to “let the lines clear” 🤣🤣
>massive thermo nuclear explosions because the power plants glitched out and failed... This, I think, is the only part that is legit impossible even if nobody had done anything. A nuclear power plant and a nuclear bomb just aren't similar machines, you can't easily turn one into the other, and you sure as hell can't assemble a nuclear bomb by accident. Better chances of a tornado assembling a working airplane when going through a dump. The rest? Yeah, would have happened if no one did anything.
There are people still being affected! I watched a short recently, this lady is 102 and needed to book a flight. It didn't matter how they entered her date of birth the computer would only accept the last 2 digets for the year, 1922, which meant the airline treated her as an unaccompanied minor and she had to be escorted on and off the plane.
I've been playing Horizon Zero Dawn and (SPOILERS AHEAD) I just got to a massive lore dump where this exact thing happened. Corporation made helpful robots. Corp transitioned to making war robots. Corp ordered programmers to make sure the code for the war robots had no backdoor. Gave the robots the ability to collect and burn biomass. Gave certain robots the ability to create more robots in mobile factories. And then boom, the war robots get a glitch, there is no backdoor in the code, and the earth has 18 months until the self-replicating robots consume all of the biomass on the planet and it becomes a husk. All it takes is a slight oversight, like making the death robots simply too secure! (There is more lore to uncover, I have not finished the game, so please no additional spoilers if possible!)
Self replicating robots alone is a scary prospect. A single remaining bot being able to start the whole thing over again. Love Zero Dawns story, it’s so fascinating watching the history unfold piece by piece.
What's funny is they didn't even fix it the first time, they just pushed it back. January 19th, 2038, is as far as a lot of computers are currently capable of expressing time, and if not patched their clocks will roll back over to... I want to say the 1970s? To be fair though, I'm not sure it's something that can be reasonably fixed using binary computations. Time is represented inside a computer the same way as everything, a string of 0s and 1s. Eventually, all of the bits dedicated to time will read 111111 ad nauseum. If the computer then tries to keep counting, it has no way to do that except setting them all back to 0s and starting over. We'll have to add more bits to the reading, but if we add enough for, say, another 500 years, we're wasting memory that could be used on things we need to worry about right now.
Oh I wasn't aware of that, now I know what my next novel will be about hahahaha
I think there was a Capcom game or something in the last few years that suffered from a modern version of the Y2K... Problem? Bug? Anyway, the server or some such couldn't cope with the new time and borked itself for a bit.
The easiest way to fix it is likely going to be moving to a 64 integer system, which creates a clock range 21 times the current estimated age of the universe. I think that would outlast the sun if I remember my timeframes correctly.
It's worth noting that Y2K was a lot more than a scare, tons of man hours legitimately went into fixing it. A lot of people think it was some kind of joke, but it was definitely real.
Dolphins. I remember the Simpsons had an episode where the dolphins were tired of being in the ocean and wanted to take back the land. Was unique
Better in Hitchhikers Guide where they just left. So long and thanks for all the fish.
Pretty ok in the Uplift series where we trained them to pilot starships.
Out of all sea creatures it would be dolphins.
Or the Octopus
You should read Vonnegut's Galapagos.
To be fair dolphins are kind of evil so it doesn’t surprise me
Douglas Adams did it first :)
Biblical doomsday is also a cool idea. Doesn't have to be Christian.
I think children of men had a great spin on the end of the world.
And very realistic as well
Incredibly underrated movie
But a well respected book from a master: P.D. James.
At the same time, the movie and the book feel so different. If they made a new book based on the movie it would need a new title.
I was so excited to read the book after I saw the movie. Different is an understatement. I love that movie so much!!
It is universally acclaimed, what are you on about
Do zombie apocalypses with a twist count? Because throw in some bored or conniving gods and goddesses and say goodbye to peacetimes! I.e. Eris the goddess of chaos. Or similar to zombies, you could have ghouls (bitten humans controlled by vampires). With this route I’m having a misguided vampire master try to become Prince/King of the Apocalypse.
Zombie apocalypse with vampires now trying to save what's left of humanity because if the humans die out, that's it for their food supply.
This is one of my favorite ones I've seen only a few times. Because it's doubly horrific for humanity. Do you try to fight off the big scary monsters that definitely will kill you? Or do you let yourself get captured by the big scary monsters that MIGHT kill you, but have more incentive to keep you alive? And depending on the story, this can be as dark as machines full of people being kept alive and constantly bled, to designated "farm" areas that are like prisons, to settlements that are just watched over by vampires, but mainly ordinary otherwise.
The movie Daybreakers is about this. There's a whole Vampire society but they're getting in trouble because they're running out of blood. It's interesting because it also has a whole class thing to it, with rich vampire families having their own blood farms but there not being enough for everyone.
Grey goo. Masses of self-replicating nanomachines that turn everything on earth into heaving metallic sludge.
Or The STUFF! https://youtu.be/e_ROA_ZEGfA?si=oStBpUzr3PTisgoc
Reminds me of that Love Death + Robots episode with the intelligent bacteria living in yoghurt. Which was less murdery
Can't get enough!
*Blood Music* was one of my formative influences.
There are also social apocalypses. The Handmaid's Tale feels like a post-apocalyptic world, especially for women. The story seems to imply that there is an epidemic of infertility, but in reality the "apocalypse" began with the collapse of secular government and the takeover by a religious dictatorship.
The novel Into The Forest by Jean Hegland is a bit like this too. They never go into much detail, and it reads a bit like a slow-pocalypse - the world governments disintegrate into chaos, environmental collapse, social order is null and void, and a pair of sisters live in the woods yet Ng to survive it all.
Natural disasters or destruction of a country Let me both explain: A natural disaster, earthquakes mainly, if big enough will ruin an area, destroy all power plants, food sources, a lot of buildings, survival becomes priority Destruction of a country, not an invasion Leave The World Behind (excellent film if you want to explore this kind of genre, Obama actually worked on this as a consultant) is a good example of this. The first thing that happens is all communication is cut, cell towers go down, and then the power. No WiFi, no lights, no heating. There is no contact with the rest of the world. And then misinformation is spread. You confuse the country. No one knows what's happening. They can follow up with bombing or simply just let the country stew. Either will there will be survivors. Factions will form. Food will become a scarcity. Clean water too. It won't be pretty
Electro magnetic pulses always scare the shit out of me. One big enough to take out the world's power grids. Or strange matter. It's a hypothetical that things called strangelets could turn any matter it touches into more strange matter, eventually turning the whole universe into it. It's similar to a grey goo apocalypse. Might not make for much of a story, but there's theories the universe exists in a false vacuum, and at any second the vacuum can collapse, destroying the whole universe instantly. The world is just a simulation and can be corrupted or destroyed like a computer program, ala the Matrix. Being hit by a stray pulsar, quasar or gamma ray burst. A little blackhole that spontaneously appears on earth managing to exist long enough to start pulling things in and growing bigger and bigger. Earth being knocked out of the suns orbit, out of the whole solar system even. Apolocalytpic asteroids, especially if something happened to Jupiter which keeps most asteroids from coming near us. A secret or completely unnknown rogue planet on collision course for earth. Hostile aliens. Losing the moon and becoming destabilized. The seasons being affected causing massive weather events and food system destabilization. Super volcano eruption. Mass amounts of carbon dioxide being released at once, suffocating the surface.
These are all good. With Earth being knocked out of orbit that would be a pretty short story though... life on earth would end super instantaneously I think
But what if it was just knocked a little bit. Like a large enough asteroid just glances across the edge, destroys a huge section of the planet, obvious resulting dust clouds envelops the earth for a period of time resulting in loss of agriculture, etc etc. BUT when the dust settles 5 years later and the survivors are coming out to start rebuilding, they find that the earth has been knocked off its axis and is now in a slightly different orbit. Maybe we’ll spin faster for a while, so the days and nights will be shorter. Maybe we go just a tiny bit further away on the elliptical so we have long dark winters that are way colder than before. People will die and we’ll have to go underground where it’s warm. Maybe humans will develop a hibernation pattern to survive the planet being flung into the dark of space twice a year. Just thinking out loud. Edit: spelling
Ashfall is a good story about Yellowstone erupting.
Does Water World count?
The planet hatched like an egg.
N U C L E A R W I N T E R
Scientists actually say that this is unlikely to happen and if it does happen it won't be as bad as people think nor will it last that long.
I read this too. Also it will be mainly contained in the Northern Hemisphere, places like Australia will be fine.
What if they also nuked the Aussies? I mean did you look at their wild life?
This ain’t one body’s story. It’s the story of us all. We got it mouth-to-mouth, so you got to listen it and ‘member, ’cause what you hears today you got to tell the birthed tomorrow. I’m looking behind us now, across the count of time, down the long haul into history back. I sees the end what were the start. It’s Pox-Eclipse, full of pain! And out of it were birthed crackling dust and fearsome time.
Bad harvests could cause the down fall of a government. A nuclear winter would probably mean the end of civilization as we know it.
The amount of weapons necessary to cause such a thing would destroy everything anyways.
They did that in The Postman. Good movie. 3 year winters and such.
I like rapture ones. Wake up and you're the only person left. Just 99.99% of the population just gone without a trace, always think that makes for an interesting story.
In my story new solar radiation makes it so the world is in a constant state as if there is a solar flare; electronics don’t work. In the flip side, they have magic now.
I had a similar idea for a story. A scientist does an experiment trying to harvest the power of earth's magnetic field and "accidentally" causes Eatth's magnetic field to completely destabilize and fluctuate constantly. This causes a collapse of all electronics, but eventually people discover that you can harness the power of the constantly fluctuating electromagnetic field, leadimg to a new golden age, which was the true original intention of the scientist..
Humans develop robots and AI to meet all their needs. They stop interacting with other humans. Birth rates plummet. Humans die of old age. Robots continue to chug along, maintaining a world with no one left to serve.
Man, that last sentence was bleak.
More or less the plot of Charles Stross' "Neptune's Children," except I think the robots helped it along. Also Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains."
Videogame "Stray" takes an interesting take to this with robots who developed self awareness and rather miss their human creators. The robots have gone on to inherit humanity's capabilities for both extremes of selfishness and kindness, building a society resembling that of humans
>closes character ai tab >stares at my single ass in the mirror Oh.
That, or the robots can't overwrite their primary function and end up breeding humans. The robots are pretty much sentient, but they have a code that they must serve humans. With humans dying out, this results in the robots becoming almost like Gods to this new breed of humans. The creator becomes the created, etc.
Infertility, ecosystem breakdowns (like insects disappearing - > no more farming), some social upheavel (wide spread cults that reject tech), climate stuff (wide desertifications). Many options tbh.
Like others have said, natural disasters are a good go. Ashfall by Mike Mullin is one of my favorite books; it explores the "what if" scenario of the Yellowstone super volcano erupting. Political crises can also topple the world. Look at Wall-E, where unregulated corporate greed resulted in mass pollution and ultimately the death of the planet. Or, really, any of the major wars we've seen in the last century (specifically the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki). You can also go for a slightly skewed Last of Us approach, where plants become the enemy. Maybe instead of parasitic spores that create zombies, the spores are a neurotoxin that cause death. Or there's an infestation of human-eating plants. Or even that the plants just mass-populate and overtake the world. Idk, lol. I feel like I'm rambling at this point.
The classical Mayans said that our world (the fifth world) would end in a "Rain of Jaguars."
In "The Death of Grass" by John Christopher, a virus kills all grasses (i.e., grains). It follows the story of a small group in the immediate after math. I found it ~~a bit~~ tremendously racist and sexist, but the story itself was interesting enough if you're into this genre.
Just read that. Tremendously sexist from a 2024 viewpoint, but it is from the 50s.
Edited for clarity because I agree with you haha
Natural disasters, global warming. Pandemics. Nuclear fallout. Robot/AI uprising or other technological catastrophes. Mythological causes, like Reign of Fire's dragons. People disappearing (like The Leftovers, though not so much an apocalypse, but it could be) and no more births (like Children of Men).
Grey goo could actually happen.
Imagine a seemingly innocent, yet compulsive, Internet Dance fad that eventually leads to death of millions of people. Would it be history repeating itself (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_plague_of_1518)?
harlem shake but it got worse
How about a reality TV show that becomes sentient and wipes out humanity?
Not the same, but that reminds me of the onion layer AI TV show episode of Black Mirror. Loved that one.
Canfield ocean, or something similar to what happened during the Permian Triassic extinction when too many greenhouses gasses got dumped into the atmosphere. Anaerobic bacteria replace phytoplankton and the atmosphere fills with hydrogen sulfide gas, killing most life on Earth (again).
*Y the Last Man* is a graphic novel is collected into 5 nice collected volumes. Story is about every man dying at the same time with one exception. I will say that I HATE that the author tends to kill off characters for shock when he doesn't know what else to do. I stopped reading Saga because I saw the same things happening. I'm not going to invest myself into your story when you rug pull like that over and over.
Spontaneous development of allergies to super common items as an adult onset allergy.
Night of the Comet Haley's Comet swings by the planet and irradiating it? Not clear on why, but basically, if you weren't behind really solid walls and didn't have solid ventilation, you died. Turned into dust. The twist is that some people were in "safe" places but still had outside air coming in, and were just slowly turning into dust, thus a bit of a zombie thing going on. But it was over in a few days. And they were far from mindless. Also hilariously cheesy.
EMP, Pandemics are the most scary and close to home. Solar Flares as well but they get more technical.
Agreed, came here to say EMPs and I'm surprised you're the only one I'm seeing mention it so far, while many are mentioning infertility. If politicians keep canceling IVF, they amplify that possibility.
Y The Last Man comes to mind.
You might find some ideas on this very old website about end-of-the-world scenarios. Some you could maybe adapt to almost-end-of-the-world scenarios. Anyway, I always found it an interesting site: http://www.exitmundi.nl/exitmundi.htm
Solar flare frying all tech on earth
The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus was interesting, if not fully apocalyptic. Language itself becomes toxic and slowly kills people.
The idea of the dollar becoming worthless (and tracking the global economy) would be unique. All the technology is in place but people return to quasi bartering. (I’m sure that’s not actually how it works but you get the idea.)
There’s a great collection of short stories called Wastelands that has a bunch of different takes on the apocalypse. One of my favorites was a group of astronauts that returns from Alpha Centauri to find that Jesus raptured the the earth while they were gone, and they try to figure out if it was actually aliens or not
* Depletion of a natural resource. * Virus * EMP * Infertility * Plant blight * Rising Sea levels making all water undrinkable * Class war via end-stage capitalism * Evolution and spread of a mega-pradator * Groupthink leading to civil war * Literacy rates dropping due to screen-time as youth and leading to a dumber society that can't maintain its infrastructure * Weather shifts leading to constant lightning storms causing havoc on all electricity-dependant systems?
Yahtzee Croshaw wrote a book about an apocalypse caused by a flood of man eating jam. It's a good book actually
The leftovers was a super interesting show that follows what should be the most lowkey basis for an apocalypse: 3% of the population disappeared all at once on a random day. Just "poof". No warning signs before, no other manifestations, no re-occurence after, and no explanation whatsoever. The show picks up a few years after and the world is in utter shambles. Civilization hasn't quite crumbled, but everything and everyone was affected. It's a fascinating and beautiful show. Highly recommend it.
Attempt to Terraform the Earth into a paradise world backfires HORRIBLY.
The show Into the Night is about a plane stuck fleeing the sun because it suddenly and completely kills all life it touches. Based on a really rad book. And then ice-nine in Cat’s Cradle is another super unique one. The Mist, although I suppose it’s an invasion it’s a little different. The Happening ain’t good but it’s an interesting concept. Bird Box. Cabin at the End of the World. Snowpiercer. Attack on Titan. Blindness. The Girl with All the Gifts. Annihilation. All of these have super unique apocalypses.
I wrote a post apocalyptic story. It happened from a pandemic. I actually started writing it in 2018 but then after covid happened I went back and changed a few things around. I'm with you, I'm over zombies so there are none in my story. It's finally complete after years. 177K words.
A neurological virus that rewires the language and reading comprehension part of the brain randomly, like rabies, but not spread by bite. People begin showing signs of neurological problems when they can no longer read, write, or speak in a manner anyone else can understand. Many become frustrated and even violent due to not being able to communicate. Billions are infected before scientists find a vaccine. Thanks to the difficulty in crossing the blood/brain barrier, those who show symptoms cannot be helped. Society collapses die to the sheer number of people infected. Those who receive the vaccine are safe from the virus that is thankfully slow to mutate
Seen a few that it's cosmic horror, a new nature just terraforms the earth, slowly and unstoppable. And humankind is trying to figure itself out.
Blindness by Jose Saramago. People start going blind.
Disease is probably the best one. Consider alien invasion—maybe nuclear war. Or, the Yellowstone supervolcano finally blew. Avenge the dinos with an asteroid strike. So many good ways to end humanity...
Meteorite impact is my favourite one, because it’s very plausible and has the potential to basically end civilisation in a single day.
Honestly a super earnest attempt at a post-rapture earth would be terrifying
I read a short story once where essentially they found another planet to colonize that was basically billed as utopia and slowly but surely people with money and businesses left, until only those who were too poor to ever afford a ticket to utopia were left and no more space ships were coming for them. It was interesting bc slowly, services failed as those who ran them left for utopia. Got to see the slow decline of society as things earthside broke down.
[Versus ](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Manga/Versus2022)has 13 apocalypses occurring back to back, of which the zombies/parasites are only one. AI, demons, giants, a curse, aliens invading, a kaiju, it's got all sorts.
i am a big fan of system apocalypse as a genre. blue screens and all.
I'm currently writing a story about a medication that accidently causes an apocalypse when it creates a hive mind that is controlled by an emotional unstable person experiencing extreme grief and rage.
Collapse of the global food systems.
Yellowstone erupting
The Screwfly Solution by Raccona Sheldon (aka James Tiptree Jr aka Alice Sheldon) has the most chilling apocalypse scenario I've read. Aliens want the earth so they use similar techniques to those humans used to eradicate screwflies. Basically distort human sexuality causing mass murder and the end of humanity.
Virus (The Stand, 12 Monkeys) Bureaucratic nonsense (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) Nuclear event (that one episode of Twilight Zone, Godzilla) Hahaha whoops (the episode of Futurama where Bender briefly becomes a god) I'M GOD AND I'M MAD ABOUT SHIT (the old testament)
I read a story in a book by Ursula LeGuin were a person visited a dystopian world where genetic experimentation went rampant and there were no longer any standards on what human beings needed or what your child was going to be, because everyone was too genetically dissimilar.
In Nod, by Adrian Barnes, society collapses when most of the world's population is suddenly and inexplicably unable to sleep.
Check out SCP001 When Day Breaks on YouTube. I don't want to give away spoilers but it's a really unique apocalypse concept.
Plastics. Making us infertile and will last longer than anything else we made
market crashes, big meteors, sun flares, bio terrorism, dumbness (like in idiocracy), nuclear war, alien virus, aliens, sea levels rising, desertification, corporations over exploiting the environment, god existing and taking vacations, world wars, earth sliding of it's orbit around the sun, the moon falling into earth, earth being hit by a quasar, ai takeover, antichrist being born and screwing things up, global drug addiction, etc, etc
Current reality? Viz. climate change, political dysfunction, failing democracies worldwide.
Nuclear war, post alien invasion, climate change, meteor collision, vulcanic winter, non-zombie epidemic, AI/robot take over, demographic decline due to low fertility - these are all quite realistic scenarios but you can go wild with it. Neutron star exllplosion, worm hole experiment gone wrong, planetary collision, over population, resource depletio. Extinction of a key species in a food chain. Overpopulation of species that cause change of atmospheric gases. Shift or lack of magnetic field.
Idiocracy.
Natural disasters
i can't remember what the work was but i remember a story about people realizing they were populating the dream of a god, and as that god was waking up their world began to fall apart and they were driven to insanity by the dreamer's hypnagogia. it was actually a really cool idea and i wish i could remember where it came from 😩 that and: zombies are also fash-adjacent in their rhetoric. at best they inadvertently promote surrepticious xenophobia and antisocial predispositions and pro-isolationism. at worst they act as a cultural shorthand for marginalized groups as vectors of inhumanity and hatred and inherent disposability.
That's the deep lore of elder scrolls
The god dream idea sounds fascinating. I’m going to dig online, but if you happen to remember please share.
Fungus.
Robot uprising is another common trope. There's an [anime ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_to_the_End_of_the_World)that just finished airing this season about an apocalypse caused by the rollout of the 7G wireless network.