Line #37 ApocalypseHow/Class3B


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7	[[WMG:[[center:[-'''ApocalypseHow'''\
8	[[ApocalypseHow/Class0 0]] \| [[ApocalypseHow/Class1 1]] \| [[ApocalypseHow/Class2 2]] \| [[ApocalypseHow/Class3A 3a]], '''3b''' \| [[ApocalypseHow/Class4 4]] \| [[ApocalypseHow/Class5 5]] \| [[ApocalypseHow/Class6 6]]\
9	[[ApocalypseHow/ClassX X]] \| [[ApocalypseHow/ClassX2 X-2]] \| [[ApocalypseHow/ClassX3 X-3]] \| [[ApocalypseHow/ClassX4 X-4]] \| [[ApocalypseHow/ClassX5 X-5]] \| [[ApocalypseHow/ClassZ Z]]-]]]]]
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11	->''[Player's plague] has destroyed the world despite the world's best efforts. The last few humans know they are watching the end of history.''
12	-->--''Videogame/PlagueInc''
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14	Planetary-scale Extinction of the dominant species on a planet, via ''natural'' causes -- things like ice ages, asteroid strikes, and (non-engineered) diseases or viruses. The biosphere as a whole survives, and may someday produce another intelligent species, but the time of the world's current rulers is over.
15	----
16	!!Examples:
17	[[foldercontrol]]
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19	[[folder:Anime and Manga]]
20	* In ''Manga/RaveMaster'', [[spoiler: it's revealed that this happened to the world some time ago, and Lucia's ancestor used Star Memory to create a world where humanity never died out. Endless basically exists because this world shouldn't, and it's his job to destroy it. And the Raregrooves are {{Cosmic Plaything}}s as a punishment for saying ScrewDestiny.]]
21	[[/folder]]
22
23	[[folder:Film — Live-Action]]
24	* ''[[Film/AIArtificialIntelligence A.I.]]'' has every human die in an ice age; the "survivors" are robots who evolved into a new lifeform.
25	* ''Film/DontLookUp'' shows the entire human population [[spoiler: (minus Jason)]] killed due to a comet.
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28	[[folder:Literature]]
29	* Dougal Dixon's ''After Man'' {{Handwave}}s the natural extinction of ''Homo sapiens'', describing species which exist on Earth 50 million years later.
30	* In Creator/GregEgan's novel ''Literature/{{Diaspora}}'', most humans have been voluntarily converted to software, beginning around 2065.
31	* In ''Eva'' by Creator/PeterDickinson, just about everything is done by machines, various animal species have gone extinct, and humanity has basically gotten bored with living. So huge numbers of people just commit suicide, and the titular main character, [[spoiler:who inhabits the body of a chimpanzee after an accident left her original body paralyzed, is left alone with the monkeys.]]
32	* Creator/StephenBaxter's ''Literature/{{Evolution}}'' has two examples.
33	** In the late Jurassic, a sentient species of the theropod dinosaur ''Ornitholestes'' succumbs to extinction when the ''Diplodocus'' herd they hunt dies off due to both the breakup of Pangea causing climate disruption and the death of the herd’s elderly matriarch.
34	** Another example starts happening to humanity in 2031, when a supervolcano erupts, worsening the state of the environment that human activity had already damaged. Some humans survive, but ultimately [[FuturePrimitive lose their sapience]].
35	* The documentary series ''The Future is Wild'' proposes what life on Earth might look like if humanity is no longer a factor in 5 million, 100 million, and 200 million year increments. The lack of humanity is merely a MacGuffin; nothing is mentioned about how or why humanity might go. The Discovery Channel broadcast {{Bowdlerise}}d it by saying mankind had simply abandoned the planet, and was sending a probe every couple of eons to check on the Earth's progress.
36	* In ''Literature/Haunted2005'' by Creator/ChuckPalahniuk is a short story called "Obsolete". In it, humans have discovered that souls that die on Earth appear on Venus, which is heaven. However, as long as people are still alive on Earth, souls will return to them. So the governments do the only logical thing to do in a Creator/ChuckPalahniuk novel and order everyone to commit suicide or be murdered so everyone gets to go to paradise. [[spoiler:The protagonists are a literally named {{Adam and Eve\|Plot}} Goth kids who rebel the only way left: not committing suicide, and having kids.]]
37	* Dan Simmons' ''Ilium'' duology has only a handful of "normal" humans left on Earth after the Final Fax, the rest having turned into [[{{Transhuman}} Posthumans]] living on/in a a series of ring-shaped space stations orbiting Earth. If you're wondering what the Final Fax was, why there are any humans left, or who the Posthumans are...well, this is [[MindScrew Ilium]] we're talking about.
38	* In ''Literature/TheLordOfTheRings'' -- for everything ''except'' humans (Ent, Hobbits, Orcs etc).
39	* In Creator/VernorVinge's ''Literature/MaroonedInRealtime'', we find that anyone not in stasis vanished circa 2204. Many hypotheses are raised, without resolution by the author.
40	* Sharon Cameron's ''Literature/{{Rook}}'' is set a few generations after wandering magnetic poles and solar flares caused a technological apocalypse.
41	* Kate Wilhelm's Literature/WhereLateTheSweetBirdsSang shows the human race, as well as many/most animal species, dying off from a combination of disease, starvation, and infertility. A small group of humans and domesticated animals survive because of the development of cloning technology.
42	* Creator/FrankHerbert's novel ''The White Plague'' reversed the usual pattern of wiping out males, using an engineered virus to wipe out most of the females on the planet, except for those who were isolated at the start of the outbreak.
43	* ''The World Without Us'' is a thought experiment that theorizes about what would happen if all humans just vanished overnight, leaving everything else unaffected.
44	[[/folder]]
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46	[[folder:Live-Action TV]]
47	* In one ''Series/BabylonFive'' episode, the entire Markab race is wiped out by a deadly virus confined to their species, spread from their homeworld to all their colonies. This was due to their belief that the disease only befell those who acted dishonorably, and thus all of them refused to believe they had it -- making any quarantine meaningless.
48	** Could actually be a Stealth Class 3a, as it's at least implied that the plague's role in taking out one of the few races with useful information on how to resist the Shadows was not a coincidence.
49	* The backstory of ''Series/DeepwaterBlack'' is that the entire human population is wiped out by a deadly virus. The only thing they could do about it was to send out a ship to be piloted by clones and stocked with DNA of a large amount of people to leave Earth and apparently come back when the virus is all gone.
50	* Typically subverted by ''Series/DoctorWho'' (and the '''only''' category on this page that the show doesn't really fall into): the human race is explicitly stated, on several occasions (most recently [[Recap/DoctorWhoS29E11Utopia "Utopia"]]) to live to the end of the universe, come hell, high-water, or [[Recap/DoctorWhoS12E2TheArkInSpace solar flare]]. Canonically, the [[EarthThatWas Earth is made uninhabitable]] at least once in the middle-future, but not so near to the present as to make {{Generation Ship}}s and the like impossible.
51	** Cassandra in [[Recap/DoctorWhoS27E2TheEndOfTheWorld "The End of the World"]] is stated to be the "last living human" (and she promptly dies in [[Recap/DoctorWhoS28E1NewEarth "New Earth"]], the kind-of-sequel), but it's more FantasticRacism and a screed against plastic surgery (as Cassandra is literally skin stretched into a frame).
52	** There are, of course, several examples in ''Series/DoctorWho'' of ''nonhuman'' sentient races that have gone extinct by natural means. Humans in that Verse have also abandoned Earth for space in the wake of natural disasters, leaving us at least ''locally'' extinct there.
53	* While ''Series/LifeAfterPeople'' deliberately avoids stating how the Earth's population vanishes, the lack of corpses and the pristine condition of human structures at each episode's beginning implies that it wasn't our own doing: any Class 3a extinction achievable with present-day methods would've been a lot messier.
54	* ''Series/TheOuterLimits1995'':
55	** In the episode "Resurrection", humanity is extinct, but surviving androids create two new humans from preserved DNA as an AdamAndEvePlot to give us a second chance. Of course, "only one mating pair" equals ArtisticLicenseBiology, but still satisfying, as it subverted the series's MandatoryTwistEnding.
56	** In another episode, aliens slingshot several people forward in time to an abandoned Earth. They discover that biological warfare rendered all human females infertile. Stuck in the future, the survivors mope about how humanity's still extinct (there are only five of them)... until they find one more piece of alien technology [[spoiler:that proceeds to read their DNA, scramble it for maximum diversity, and create dozens of infants. Humanity gets another shot.]]
57	* In the ''Series/StarTrekEnterprise'' episode "Dear Doctor", Doctor Phlox discovers that the Valakians are dying not from a plague as they had thought, but a genetic deterioration. He extrapolates that the entire species will be extinct by the twenty-fourth century. Phlox and Captain Archer concur that they should not help the Valakians because it would "interfere with nature."
58	[[/folder]]
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60	[[folder:Tabletop Games]]
61	* Despite the violence of the setting, some planets that die in ''TabletopGame/{{Warhammer 40000}}'' do so in relatively natural ways, such as being consumed by warp storms and more mundane types such as massive famine from climate change and random asteroids.
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64	[[folder:Video Games]]
65	* Most of the Umbral Calamities of ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXIV'' are natural disasters of a planet-wide scale on Hydaelyn. [[spoiler:They straddle the line between Class 3B and Class 3A, since the Calamities are caused by Ascian machinations in the "Shard" worlds.]]
66	** Little is known of the First Umbral Calamity, save that it was accompanied by violent wind storms.
67	** The Second Umbral Calamity was accompanied by a massive volcanic explosion that blacked out the sky and wrought violent lightning storms. The people of the era would be the first pioneers of magic, as their frightened prayers for salvation gave way to the first incantations.
68	** The Third Umbral Calamity, said to be divine punishment against religious authorities for their persecution of mages, was accompanied by the sun growing large and desiccating the land with intense heat and flames. It is believed that Thanalan was transformed from a lush rainforest into a vast desert during this time.
69	** The Fifth Umbral Calamity was an ice age that caused the seas to freeze over. The miqo'te race, exiled to the island of Ilsabard during the Allagan Empire's reign, crossed back into Eorzea over the frozen seas during this time.
70	** Averted with the Fourth, Sixth, and Seventh Umbral Calamities, which are all Class [=3A=] disasters. The Fourth was a result of an overflow of aether from the artificial moon of Dalamud into the Crystal Tower, resulting in massive earthquakes that destroyed the Allagan Empire. The Sixth was a result of the War of the Magi: the White and Black mages of Amdapoor and Mhach overtaxed the world's aether with their rampant spellcasting, resulting in devastating floods. The Seventh and most recent Calamity was the result of Dalamud being pulled down towards Eorzea by the Garlean Empire, resulting in Bahamut's release and an apocalyptic firestorm from the dreadwyrm.
71	* The entire plot of ''VideoGame/FragileDreamsFarewellRuinsOfTheMoon'', where almost all humans are dead as a result of [[spoiler: the failure of the "Glass Cage Experiment," intended to make language unnecessary and eliminate conflict by giving humans the ability to empathize with others' thoughts and emotions. When it was first activated on a large scale, everyone went to sleep...and did not wake up. The BigBad, Shin, now a ghost, is still trying to re-activate the experiment, which will eliminate any survivors.]]
72	* Winning a round of ''VideoGame/PlagueInc'' with any pathogen other than the nanovirus or bioweapon could qualify as this if you ascribe to the idea that geneticists aren't manipulating its DNA/RNA/protein folding as it infects and kills the human race.
73	* ''VideoGame/PrayerOfTheFaithless'': As the game's description says, "The destruction of the world is inevitable; humanity is at the end of its time." but non-human life will survive.
74	* In ''VideoGame/TheTalosPrinciple'', all of humanity has been killed off by a million+ year old virus released from the melting permafrost of Siberia, due to global climate change. You are an AI whose purpose is to complete the trials set before you, [[spoiler:defy Elohim]], and become the start of the newest form of intelligent life to inhabit the earth.
75	[[/folder]]
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77	[[folder:Web Original]]
78	* The backstory of Podcast/EdictZeroFis states that this happened to "Old Earth." The only humans to survive were the ones in spaceships en route to the planet that would come to be known as "Edict Zero."
79	* Resident {{Cloudcuckoolander}} Karl Pilkington of ''Radio/TheRickyGervaisShow'' thinks humanity will go this route because people will get so ugly that no one will want to have sex anymore.
80	[[/folder]]
81
82	[[folder:Real Life]]
83	* Extrapolating current demographic trends, humans might do this due to falling birth rates everywhere. Mind you, it would take several centuries even at low rates, and demographics tend to not be reliably extrapolatable.
84	** There is no danger of this happening at all for the foreseeable future, the planet's population is actually growing at such an alarming rate that there is a real concern that there will be too many people for the planet to support within the next century.
85	** Some areas are below the replacement rate, but it's worth remembering that that's just an average essentially stating that overall births are currently below overall deaths in those areas. Your population will shrink down to where births equal or exceed deaths again over time.
86	[[/folder]]
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Context ApocalypseHow / Class3B