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3%%
4[[quoteright:350:[[Film/PlanetOfTheApes1968 https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/planet_of_the_apes_ending.jpg]]]]
5[[caption-width-right:350:''[[HumansAreTheRealMonsters "You maniacs! You blew it up!"]]'']]
6
7->''"The only danger is if they send us to that terrible Planet of the Apes. Wait a minute... Art/StatueOfLiberty... '''that was OUR planet!'''"''
8-->-- '''Homer Simpson''', ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'', "[[Recap/TheSimpsonsS5E15DeepSpaceHomer Deep Space Homer]]"
9
10In a SpeculativeFiction story where our heroes have crash-landed their spaceship on apparently alien planet, maybe with time travel, wormholes, or portals being involved, they long to return back to Earth. After they spend the story trying to figure out how to get back, there is a DownerEnding and it turns out that this bleak, empty planet was none other than UsefulNotes/{{Earth}}, [[AfterTheEnd warped and twisted by disaster, war, disease, the passage of time]] (perhaps thousands of years passed during the wormhole/portal trip), or some other instrument of drastic change.
11
12Almost invariably this involves a character who was sure he was anywhere but Earth discovering the AwfulTruth, after finding TheConstant. The Constant could be a crumbling relic from old Earth that they find, such as the top of the ruined Statue of Liberty poking out of sand, as seen in the trope's title image.
13
14At some point, this actually was very shocking (partially because humanity was [[TruthInTelevision very close to blowing itself up]] in the 1960s) and is one of the most famous kinds of TwistEnding. Through over-use, these days, it's become TheUntwist; it would usually be more surprising if the apocalyptic planet turned out to be anywhere ''but'' Earth.
15
16'''Variations:'''
17* A classic twist in ''Franchise/TheTwilightZone'': the characters in the story turn out to be HumanAliens. They're stranded on a primitive planet and now have to colonize. On resigning themselves to their fate, the leader says, "And I shall call this planet 'Earth'." [[AdamAndEvePlot Double points if the leader is named Adam or Eve.]] (The original ''[[Series/TheTwilightZone1959 Twilight Zone]]'' actually used this plot in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZone1959S5E9Probe7OverAndOut Probe 7, Over and Out]].") According to [[Website/{{Wikipedia}} The Other Wiki]], this one's known as the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaggy_God_story Shaggy God story]] and was overused to the point of being a DiscreditedTrope as early as the '60s.
18* The preferred ''Series/TheOuterLimits1963'' version: the peaceful folks living in fear of alien invasion are really humanoid aliens. The aggressors? Humans. This variation is also a classic ''[[Series/TheTwilightZone1959 Twilight Zone]]'' episode, "[[Recap/TheTwilightZone1959S2E15TheInvaders The Invaders]]".
19* Instead of believing it to be a different place, believe it to be a different time. You believe you're in caveman days, but later realize you're in the future AfterTheEnd, or you believe you're in the future, but later realize you're in the [[{{Precursors}} past during an enlightened period]] that will later get destroyed (with all record of it also wiped out).
20
21As you might expect, this is an '''EndingTrope''', so there are many '''spoilers''' below. However, once you've read the description above, most Earths All Along are self-spoiling anyhow.
22
23Due to PopCulturalOsmosis in ScienceFiction, this trope is more difficult to credibly pull off in contemporary stories. One needs only to look at the star constellations to know that one is on Earth as constellations appear as they do nowhere else. While the other planets in our solar system may display some of the same star patterns, with the possible exception of the North Star, we can rule out all other planets in our solar system as a plausible "assumed" setting for this trope. Audiences are also more wary of the AliensSpeakingEnglish trope as this should be a clue that one is still somewhere on Earth. In many contemporary stories, if this trope does come up, it's more of a curiosity to the audience than a relevant plot point that the characters care about. The occasional {{Fantasy}} setting turns out this way sometimes due to an EasterEgg, FreezeFrameBonus, or a ChekhovsGun that is insignificant to the characters but recognizable to the audience.
24
25Compare AdvancedAncientHumans, when there was a technologically advanced human civilization in ancient times; FictionalEarth when the planet clearly is some version of Earth, but still very different; and EarthThatWas and EarthThatUsedToBeBetter when Earth was lost, destroyed, or fell on hard times long ago. See also HumansThroughAlienEyes and TomatoSurprise. Sub-trope of NotWhereTheyThought.
26
27'''''Note:''''' This is a SpoileredRotten trope, that means that '''EVERY SINGLE EXAMPLE''' on this list is a spoiler by default and most of them will be unmarked. [[Administrivia/YouHaveBeenWarned This is your last warning]], only proceed if you really believe you can handle this list.
28
29----
30!!Examples:
31[[foldercontrol]]
32
33[[AC:It Was Earth All Along]]
34
35[[folder:Anime and Manga]]
36* The last few episodes of ''Anime/BrigadoonMarinAndMelan'' indicate that Brigadoon, which had appeared to be a different world, is Earth in the distant future.
37* In ''[[Anime/{{Xabungle}} Combat Mecha Xabungle]]'', the low-tech worker-caste "Civilians" scrape out a hard-scrabble existence on a desert world, believing themselves to be descended from Terran colonists; over the course of the series, the planet is revealed to be (of course) Earth, stretched to the very end of its ecological rope. The 'colony' story was spread by the high-tech ruling-caste "Innocents" to cover up their plans to escape off-world and leave the Civilians to die.
38* In ''Anime/EurekaSeven'', it turns out that the planet everyone escaped to to get away from the aliens invading Earth is actually Earth itself, transformed by the [[StarfishAliens scub coral]] into a mostly-unrecognizable shape.
39* ''Anime/FullmetalAlchemist2003'' reveals that it is set in an AlternateHistory of Earth, which also exists as we know it in a parallel universe. The two worlds were the same until their histories diverged when alchemy worked in one and didn't in the other, splitting them into two separate dimensions.
40* In ''Anime/GargantiaOnTheVerdurousPlanet'', this is the FirstEpisodeTwist -- Ledo has rediscovered EarthThatWas, and the ice age that caused his ancestors to abandon it has ended, making it a [[SingleBiomePlanet water planet]]. The rest of the series is him adjusting to the situation.
41* ''Manga/GirlsLastTour'': The {{Eldritch|Location}} world that Chito and Yuuri are in was initially seen to be as an alien planet, due to how commonplace layered cities are, and with the world being totally artificial. Episode 12/Chapter 31 reveals that this is Earth set within the future, destroyed by a huge RobotWar, and they are implied to be what was once Japan. Due to [[HumansAreBastards humanity destroying all natural life in place for mass urbanisation]], Earth is so artificial that not even a single trace of natural environment is seen. The holographic map that Chito and Yuu seen in the space center confirms that this was once Earth.
42* In ''Manga/KamiKatsuWorkingForGodInAGodlessWorld'', Yukito starts the story begging to be reincarnated in a world without gods, and he gets that wish. However, he later discovers that the world he was transported to is his own, only several thousand years in the future following the collapse of civilization and religion.
43* ''Anime/MacrossDoYouRememberLove'', when Hikaru and Misa find out that the planet they were transported to is Earth, totally destroyed after the Zentradi bombardment just prior to the film's events. Subverted as it's not the ultimate spoiler of the film (in fact, for those who had just finished watching ''Anime/SuperDimensionFortressMacross'' the year before, it really borders on ItWasHisSled territory), and is just the setup to a whole series of plot developments that Hikaru and Misa experience on Earth that WOULD have been genuine twists to viewers of the original TV series, including the island of Atlantis having been real and used as an outpost in the distant past for the enigmatic Protoculture civilization that created the Zentran and Meltran Zentradi and Humanity as well.
44* There are sufficient hints at the end of ''Anime/MyOtome'' to make the viewer at least wonder if the apparent colony world is in fact a far-future and much-changed Earth.
45* Played straight in ''Anime/NowAndThenHereAndThere''. The protagonist is transported to a dying desert planet which is later revealed to be Earth.
46* Yasuhiro Yoshiura's ''Anime/PaleCocoon'' inverts this. It was the ''Moon'' all along. People thought they were living under destroyed Earth, and lost most of their historical records, but actually they were living in a Moon-colony with artificial gravity where people escaped environmental destruction. And when the protagonist looks at the sky for the first time, he sees blue Earth shining in the sky, as a sign that the planet has healed long ago, but no-one had thought to look.
47* Sandy Planet from ''Anime/{{Photon}}: The idiot Adventures'' is implied to be Earth as it looks identical to our world after it's been terraformed.
48* Inverted several times in ''Manga/ThePromisedNeverland'': The children seem to be in a normal, if odd orphanage, until the existence of monsters is revealed and challenges the earth-like setting. As the story progresses we understand that it isn't earth with monsters, but not earth at all, with the children being kept like cattle by demons, until another twist explains that the world of human exists somewhere, simply divided from the demon one. The series is ongoing and might twist around some more.
49* ''Manga/{{Psyren}}'', Volume 01 Chapter 005/006: The strange unnatural world that Ageha finds after being transported by a magical telephone call (no, really) is none other than a devastated Japan, as revealed by the crater-scarred face of Mt. Fuji.
50* Parodied in ''Manga/SgtFrog'': Giroro and Natsumi get warped into a Desert of the Real by accident, and while searching for signs of civilisation, find it in the form of a familiar landmark in the series, the NPG Radio Tower - in ruins. The untwist: they're NOT in the distant future, the tower was merely declared obsolete after the NPG company built a better one. And there's several other previously obsoleted towers in the immediate area, just to hammer the point home.
51* Inverted in ''Anime/SoltyRei'', where the people were made to believe that they were on Earth after a major disaster, but turn out to be colonists on another planet after a major disaster cut the colonization process drastically short.
52* ''Anime/SpaceWarriorBaldios'': In the movie anyway. Turns out that Planet S-1 is in fact Earth from far in the future, polluted and damaged so badly that it's become almost unrecognizable. It turns out that the inhabitants of S1 are responsible for polluting the Earth in the first place thanks to a Stable Time Loop, one which our heroes are unable to stop.
53* Chapter 259 of ''Manga/{{Toriko}}'' reveals that the Earth the characters live on ''is'' Earth, with much, much more territory added on by a mysterious mineral.
54* Clow Country in ''Manga/TsubasaReservoirChronicle'' is the Tokyo from the Tokyo/X arc, just at a different point in time. This also counts as NiceJobBreakingItHero since the protagonists were at least partially responsible for what happened to it.
55* ''Anime/{{Vandread}}'' the robotic aliens that pest the protagonists for most of the story turn out to be drones sent from Earth to ''harvest'' living organs.
56* Possibly {{inverted|Trope}} in ''Anime/{{FLCL}},'' as WordOfGod says that an unused idea would have revealed that the town of Mabase was actually on Mars this whole time. ''[[Anime/FLCLProgressiveAndAlternative FLCL Alternative]]'', which may or may not be a [[StealthSequel Stealth Prequel]], ends with Haruko on Mars with some human colonists.
57[[/folder]]
58
59[[folder:Comic Books]]
60* In a bizarre case of this trope (it was not the end of the series, but CliffHanger revelation for the issue), ''ComicBook/SonicTheHedgehogArchieComics'' series had the planet Mobius revealed to be Earth far into the future, after an attempt by Cthulhu-like aliens to [[ApocalypseHow wipe out humanity for crimes against them]]. Sally tried to convince the aliens to leave them alone as the original humans were long since dead. Said aliens, instead, chose the SinsOfOurFathers approach, leading to virtually all of Mobius to fight back.
61* In the ''Magazine/DoctorWhoMagazine'' comic ''The Glorious Dead'', the Doctor discovers that the planet Dhakan is in fact Earth with an altered history, after the discovery of St. Paul's Cathedral.
62* ''ComicBook/TheGreatPowerOfChninkel'': A "before the origins" variation. The planet Daar is in fact Earth around a billion years ago. After [[{{God}} O'ne]] destroys almost all life out of spite for not being worshipped, life re-develops over the course of millions of years and the last Tawals (an ape-like race who barely survived the previous destruction) eventually become modern humans.
63* The planet Levram where ''ComicBook/{{Normalman}}'' is set is revealed to be an AlternateHistory Earth where a SuperSerum from the future and SuperpowerfulGenetics mean EveryoneIsASuper.
64[[/folder]]
65
66[[folder:Fan Fiction]]
67* ''WesternAnimation/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic'':
68** In ''Fanfic/TheWritingOnTheWall'', the titular writing on the wall was left behind by humans, who built the ruins that Daring Do was exploring. They were a warning not to disturb them, and with good reason.
69*** "You should not have come here. This is not a place of honor. No great deed is commemorated here. Nothing of value is here. What is here is dangerous and repulsive. We considered ourselves a powerful culture. We harnessed the hidden fire, and used it for our own purposes. Then we saw the fire could burn within living things, unnoticed until it destroyed them. And we were afraid. We built great tombs to hold the fire for one hundred thousand years, after which it would no longer kill. If this place is opened, the fire will not be isolated from the world, and we will have failed to protect you. Leave this place and never come back."
70** In ''[[https://www.fimfiction.net/story/239715/ruin-value Ruin Value,]]'' Celestia wanders through the ruins of a destroyed city after the world has been ruined by magic. It turns out that the city was, in fact, a human city, and while it was AfterTheEnd, it was actually set long before ''WesternAnimation/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic''.
71** In ''Fanfic/DiariesOfAMadman'', thanks to DramaticIrony the reader finds out early on that Equestria is actually set on a version of Earth far into the future after humanity is ([[LastOfHisKind mostly]]) extinct, but it takes some time before the human protagonist finds this out for himself.
72** ''Fanfic/TheLastHumanATaleOfThePreClassicalEra'' is a FusionFic of ''Literature/TheLastUnicorn'' and ''WesternAnimation/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic'', but it's eventually revealed Equestria is a fusion of post-apocalyptic Earth and Ponyland from the G1 cartoon ''WesternAnimation/MyLittlePonyAndFriends''.
73[[/folder]]
74
75[[folder:Films -- Animation]]
76* Shua spends much of ''Animation/SkyBlue'' talking about how great Gibraltar will be, and how he'll go there after the fall of Ecoban. Guess where Ecoban is.
77[[/folder]]
78
79[[folder:Films -- Live-Action]]
80* [[InvertedTrope Inverted]] in ''Film/DarkCity'', where the City is assumed to be located on Earth for much of the film, but TheReveal shows that it's actually a simulated environment in space.
81* The Czech science fiction film ''Ikarie XB-1'' (released in the US as ''Voyage to the End of the Universe'') actually gained one of these through a DubInducedPlotlineChange; in the original film, the characters were human astronauts seeking "The Green Planet"; the [[CulturalTranslation Americanized]] version of the film added stock footage of New York City to the scene where they finally discover the planet, changing the ending from TheEndOfTheBeginning to Earth All Along.
82* The 1975 Soviet children's film ''The Great Space Voyage'', the young crew is forced to abandon their space capsule through a narrow escape hatch, which ends up leading back, through a manhole to the academy where they trained. One of the crew reveals that only he knew all along that [[AssPull they were only taking part in a training exercise and had never left Earth]].
83* Parodied in the mockumentary ''The Independent'' starring Jerry Stiller: one of the films Morty Fineman creates is entitled ''What Planet is This (Oh My God it's Earth)''.
84* In ''Film/LogansRun'', Logan and Jessica make it to the surface only to find the ruins of Washington, D.C. In [[Literature/LogansRun the book]], it was made very clear where they were to begin with -- Washington was not in ruins; it was not AfterTheEnd, but just in a Brave New World-like pleasure culture. This is why they wind up safe not on Earth but on a space station orbiting Mars.
85* Combined with BreakingTheFourthWall in the Soviet film ''Per Aspera ad Astra''. The plot revolves around helping the planet Dessa to recover from a self-inflicted ecological disaster. In the end the film stops being sci-fi and becomes surrealistic, then ends with the note "All images of the dying world Dessa were filmed on Earth".
86* The original film ''Film/PlanetOfTheApes1968'' ends with the revelation that protagonist George Taylor is back home on Earth after a nuclear war devastated the planet, which comes when he comes across the ruins of the Statue of Liberty, which acts as TheConstant. Reportedly, the writer who introduced this twist to an early draft of the script was none other than Creator/RodSerling, hence the multiple variations that ''Series/TheTwilightZone1959'' offered on this twist.
87%%* Similarly inverted in ''The Signal (2014)''
88* ''Film/RobotWorld'': Over the course of the film, the astronaut discovers that the planet he's on is Earth after a robot uprising wiped out all the organic life... at least in Britain.
89* {{Parodied|Trope}} in ''Film/{{Spaceballs}}''. Spaceball One/Megamaid is blown up, and the head and arms fall on the Planet of the Apes, resembling the Statue of Liberty. The implication, of course, is that maybe it wasn't really Earth all along after all.
90-->'''Ape:''' [[PrecisionFStrike Oh shit]]. There goes the planet.
91* ''Film/TheVillage2004'' appears to be set in a rural 19th century village. Beyond the woods surrounding the village, however, is present-day America; the village was founded by people who wanted to recreate 19th century society, and their children don't know what year it really is.
92* ''Film/WorldWithoutEnd'', the first sci-fi movie filmed in Technicolor [=CinemaScope=], told the story of a group of astronauts on a space mission who crash land on an unknown, Earth-like planet. They know it can't be Earth because there are no radio signals and the radiation count is too high. They learn the truth when they encounter a graveyard. In an interview, the film's director Ed Bernds said, "If anybody could sue anybody, I could sue Rod Serling for ''Planet of the Apes'', because they definitely used my ideas about space travel and time travel in making that picture."
93* At the end of ''Film/AVHAlienVsHunter'' [[note]][[Creator/TheAsylum The Asylum's]] [[TheMockbuster Mockbuster]] of ''Film/AliensVsPredatorRequiem''[[/note]] the PredatorPastiche removes his helmet, revealing himself to be human and makes a video call back to Earth.
94* ''Film/{{Predators}}'' starts with several people waking up being parachuted into a jungle. They realize they aren't on Earth anymore when the sun hasn't moved after several hours.
95* In ''Film/StrangeBrew's'' film-within-a-film, ''Mutants of 2051 A.D.'', hero Bob [=McKenzie=], after establishing that it's AfterTheEnd, finds a little broken figurine of the Statue of Liberty, parodying this trope.
96* The original ending to ''Film/TheIcePirates'' was going to have the Lost World they were trying to find turn out to be Earth.
97[[/folder]]
98
99[[folder:Literature]]
100* ''...And All the Stars a Stage'', by James Blish, makes an interesting use of this trope. The protagonists escape their Doomed Homeworld just before their sun (a big blue-white one) goes nova, and wander the Galaxy looking for a replacement. Two previous tries turn out to be deathtraps, and just as they are running out of time and hope and everything, they stumble across a system with a little pipsqueak yellow star and decide it's their last chance. Yeah. The twist on the twist is that they arrive in Predynastic Egypt and just miss the coronation of "Earth's first king". It is very strongly implied that the survivors fade quietly into the human population.
101* ''Literature/TheBooksOfEmber'': In ''The City of Ember'', the city turns out to be ''underground'' on Earth. Human beings lived there for centuries; the idea was to protect them from nuclear war, but they lost the evacuation instructions years ago, and no one was around to tell them that the apocalypse was over and they could all go home now.
102* Creator/MarkLawrence's ''Literature/TheBrokenEmpireTrilogy'' starts out seeming like your typical gritty medieval fantasy setting, until you realize there's quite a lot in common with our own world, such as famous philosophers and holy figures and other hints sprinkled here and there, all building up to some very obvious implications more than halfway through the first book that all but outright tell the reader that the setting takes place in a post-apocalyptic Europe an uncertain number of centuries after a nuclear holocaust.
103* In Christian Cantrell's "Containment", the protagonist lives in a colony on Venus, and is trying to solve various environmental problems but it turns out the colony is actually on an apocalyptic wasteland Earth, and the problems he has been assigned are actually to make money for the colony / control the air supply.
104* ''Literature/DespoilersOfTheGoldenEmpire'' lives on this trope. It presents itself as a science fiction story about a military expedition to another planet, and is written in very scientific-sounding prose, but the story is actually about our planet only. Bonus Points for it being not just a fictional tale set on Earth, but a highly accurate (if deliberately misleading) account of an historical event that actually happened (the conquest of Peru by Spaniards in 1500s). In this case, it is only the reader who is fooled; the characters in the story all know full well what planet they're on. Hints are given to this fact throughout the story, though:
105-->The sun, a yellow G-O star, hung hotly just above the towering mountains to the East.
106* "Series/DoctorWho and the Hell Planet", a short story by Terrence Dicks in which the titular Hell Planet (full of volcanoes and dinos) turns out to be prehistoric Earth. ''The Completely Useless Encyclopedia'' [[DeadpanSnarker acerbically]] suggests it would have been a much better surprise to reveal it ''wasn't'' prehistoric Earth.
107* ''Lightbringer'', a story featured in ''Literature/TheDreamEatersAndOtherStories'', uses this trope. Indeed, the main character ends up being the inspiration for [[spoiler:Lucifer]].
108* "The Green Marauder", a tale of Literature/TheDracoTavern by Creator/LarryNiven: the chirpsithtra remember a civilization they met millions of years ago, whose planet was undergoing geological upheaval, and a green blight was taking over the oceans, converting much of their atmosphere into oxygen. This killed them off in the end, but created the conditions necessary for us and (almost) everything else we know.
109* Ea of David Zindell's ''Literature/EaCycle'' turns out to be Earth millions of years into the future.
110* The children's novel ''Galax-Arena'' by Gillian Rubinstein is about children who are abducted by a man named Hythe and seemingly taken to another planet and forced to perform high risk acrobatics as entertainment for aliens. This scenario turns out to be a ruse designed to quash all hope of escape; the "alien" spectators are humans in disguise, the "planet" is a secret facility in the desert and the children are not entertainment, but lab rats. The reveal comes when one of the kids notices [[JustOneLittleMistake a fly]] and realizes there's no other logical explanation for how it got there.
111* ''Literature/TheHelmsmanSaga''[='s=] first books contained some references and allusions implying it occurs in the very distant future. Then, in Book 8, the protagonist's ship is lost, and his EscapePod lands on Earth in the 60s.
112* ''Literature/TheHomewardBounders'' is a slight subversion: instead of planets, you get Homes. Still an absolutely unexpected TearJerker.
113* The short story ''The Hunters'' has an invasion by ferocious aliens who destroy the civilization of the planet. At the end it is revealed that the invaders are humans.
114* The fantasy world of ''Literature/ImInLoveWithTheVillainess'', a.k.a. ''Revolution'', is revealed to be taking place on Earth in the late 21st Century. It was created by nanomachines through the [[EternalRecurrence Eternal Loop System]] by Rei Ohashi and the original Claire and Lene, largely due to Earth being so badly damaged by environmental crises of its time that creating a magic-based civilization permanently is the only way, with modern humans going into dormancy. The fact that Rae Taylor, a clone of Rei, was not TrappedInAnotherWorld after all this time makes more sense.
115* In ''Literature/TheInvertedWorld'', the city which is apparently TrappedInAnotherWorld turns out to have been on Earth all along.
116* Creator/HBeamPiper:
117** An odd variation in ''Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen''. Hero Calvin Morrison assumes that he's been thrust forward in time to a post-apocalyptic Earth, until he sees the outline of a familiar mountain range, and realizes it shows no sign of strip-mining. Since the amount of erosion necessary to eliminate the evidence of man's work would also make the mountain's silhouette unrecognizable, this makes him realize that he must be in a parallel universe instead.
118** In the short story "The Keeper", the protagonist is told that the planet where he lives is actually Earth. He finds this difficult to believe, expecting that the original homeworld of humanity would be a wealthy and important hub of the Fifth Empire, not a minor backwater world.
119* In ''Literature/ManyWaters,'' Sandy and Dennys spend the first third of the book assuming that they've been transported to some [[SingleBiomePlanet desert planet]] with HumanAliens. They're actually having AdventuresInTheBible, specifically a few months before TheGreatFlood.
120* "Merlin's Gun" by Creator/AlastairReynolds has a variation: it is obvious to the reader that part of the story takes place in our (long-abandoned) solar system, but the characters never realise where they are.
121* ''The Nitrogen Fix'' by Creator/HalClement kicks this up a notch by making Earth ''actively uninhabitable'' to human beings (as in, survival domes and oxygen masks), and introducing an alien race that thrives in the new environment.
122* In Creator/JRRTolkien's unfinished story ''The Notion Club Papers'', a man learns to astrally project himself and so visit distant alien planets. After describing several of them, he then came across a world where he watched what looked like a teeming anthill spread disgustingly across a verdant countryside. He then realised it was Earth All Along, and he was watching a sped-up history of his own hometown of Oxford.
123* In Creator/MichaelMarshallSmith's typically {{Mind Screw}}y debut novel, ''Only Forward'', The City was mistaken by the protagonist for a parallel dimension but turns out to be a future Earth. TheConstant here is Nelson's Column.
124* Subverted in ''The Psalms of Isaak''. The world the series takes place in is AfterTheEnd, heavily uses {{magitek}} (some bits of which are recognizable analogues to present-day technology), and is heavily implied to be Earth. The fourth book reveals that the planet's name is Lasthome, and it's actually a LostColony of a spacefaring human civilization, presumably from Earth.
125* In Grant Naylor's ''Literature/RedDwarf'' novels (not the TV series), Lister is trapped on Garbage World, where humanity has dumped centuries' worth of its waste, for 30+ years. Early on, he finds the oil- and acid-rain-soaked, but still recognisable, shape of Mount Rushmore with its five presidents' heads (don't ask).
126* ''Literature/TheSearchForWondla'', though if you squint, Rovender ''does'' give some foreshadowing. Also, [[FridgeHorror the water bears]].
127* Surprisingly, ''Literature/SeptimusHeap''. In one of the final scenes of the final book, ''Fyre'', Septimus writes the current date on the snow outside the House of Foryx. It reads: ''July 4, 12,004''.
128** Implied earlier on, when they reference the few remaining technological miracles from the "Days of Beyond", which you can guess are supposed to be the present/not-as-far future.
129* ''The Shattered Sea Trilogy'' (by Joe Abercrombie of ''Literature/TheFirstLaw'' fame) takes place in a Viking-like society which is actually in the far future Baltic Sea after a nuclear war, where Finland appears to have sunk. The fist clues are the geography matching too well, the names of elf ruins being corrupted versions of present-day cities, and a tribeswoman wearing a circuit board as an amulet.
130* In Creator/AndreNorton's ''Star Rangers'', a decrepit patrol ship from a decaying human-dominated [[TheEmpire galactic empire]] finally breaks down for good far from the galactic core and its civilizations. The faraway fringe world on which our heroes are stranded seems almost too perfect to the human crew members, though...
131* Inverted in ''Literature/TerminalWorld'', another Creator/AlastairReynolds novel. The world is always referred to as Earth, but a museum (with a panorama of [[{{Heavyworlder}} strangely short men]] in clumsy space suits) and a crashed ship in the Bane reveals that the world is a terraformed Mars.
132%%* Gary Paulsen's SF novel ''Literature/TheTransallSaga''.
133* A variation: Creator/LarryNiven's ''Literature/AWorldOutOfTime'' has a [[YearInsideHourOutside relativistic]] spaceship pilot trying to return to Earth millions of years after he set out, and since the solar system has undergone extensive remodeling since he left and his computer has gone crazy, he can't ''tell'' whether it's Earth or not. And since the launching system he needs to get back up to ramscoop speed is long gone, he has to figure out which is true before he stops-- because once he does, he can't go anywhere ever again.
134* German writer Wolfgang Hohlbein wrote ''Nach dem großen Feuer'' (After the huge fire). 20 teens are prepped for an extraterrestrial mission but after something goes wrong are forced to make an emergency landing on a desolate planet. It later turns out they were taken forward in time to AfterTheEnd by people from that era since they would become the politicians who caused the third world war.
135* In Stefano Benni's ''Terra'', after the nuclear fallout of World War III [[SerialEscalation (and IV, V and VI)]], Earth is left a cold and sunless shell. Without an energy source, civilization is doomed to die out eventually. A space mission is organized after a space explorer, in his last transmission before going cold, seemed to have discovered a habitable planet. At the same time, another scientific team attempts to discover the source of an unknown energy signal beneath the Inca ruins of Cusco. Eventually, the space team falls into a black hole and is presumed MIA. At the end of the book, it's revealed that the space team had actually been [[TimeTravel transported to past Earth]], where they used their scientific knowledge and advanced technology to make themselves rulers/gods of the Incan empire, and [[FlingALightIntoTheFuture prepared an energy source]] by irradiating giant metal slabs with Sun rays and keeping them stored within the earth. Then they put the slabs beyond a booby-trapped underground maze that only their friends in the scientific team would know how to solve.
136* The ''Literature/{{Spooksville}}'' book ''Aliens in the Sky'' has the protagonists being kidnapped by aliens and taken to a space station that orbits a deserted planet. It turns out that that planet is Earth and they were actually taken to the far future, where humans have evolved to look like fat-headed beings and Earth got so polluted that they had to abandon it.
137* ''Literature/WiedergeburtLegendOfTheReincarnatedWarrior'' is set up as being set in a ConstructedWorld, but then volume 9 reveals completely in passing that one of the ruined cities in the Demon Beast Mountain Range is Bucharest, Romania several dozen millennia AfterTheEnd, which by extension makes the mountain range itself the Carpathians. This has no significance at all to the characters, who are all from the work's present day.
138[[/folder]]
139
140[[folder:Live-Action TV]]
141* ''Series/AgentsOfSHIELD'': The end of season 4 and beginning of season 5 appear to take place in space. As it turns out, what they thought was a spaceship is actually an ElaborateUndergroundBase -- now minus the ground. Going all the way to the top floor takes you to (what's left of) Earth's surface.
142* ''Series/DoctorWho'':
143** [[InvertedTrope Inverted]] in [[Recap/DoctorWhoS6E7TheWarGames "The War Games"]]. What at first appears to be Earth in the year [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarI 1917]] turns out to be part of an elaborate simulation by an alien race, with soldiers from various points in Earth's history made to believe they are still fighting the wars they were taken from.
144** [[Recap/DoctorWhoS23E1TheMysteriousPlanet "The Mysterious Planet"]] features the discovery (due to a Tube sign) that the planet the Doctor and Peri are on is actually Earth, after it had been shoved halfway across the galaxy.
145** [[Recap/DoctorWhoS38E3Orphan55 "Orphan 55"]]: The titular planet is eventually discovered to be a far-future Earth that has been turned into a DeathWorld due to a combination of climate catastrophe and nuclear war, although as the Doctor points out at the end, it's only one ''possible'' future and may never happen.
146* ''Series/TheOuterLimits1995'':
147** In the episode "[[Recap/TheOuterLimits1995S2E18TheLightBrigade The Light Brigade]]", the crew of a stricken ship must launch a [[DoomsdayDevice Doomsday weapon]] on an enemy planet in order to save humanity. However, in one of the {{Cruel Twist Ending}}s the revival series became infamous for, the aliens had tricked the crew into believing that that they were in orbit above the enemy planet, when in actuality they were above Earth, and our heroes end up nuking our own planet.
148** Also happens in "[[Recap/TheOuterLimits1995S4E20Nightmare Nightmare]]": A team for special mission is captured and interrogated on their mission to place a Doomsday Device on their foe's home planet. The aliens are interrogating them about the mission and the device and attempting to reverse engineer the device. The creator is one of the persons being interrogated, and in going over how the device is triggered activates it with an override to prevent it from being disarmed. At this point it's revealed it's all been an elaborate simulation to see how they would stand up under stress and they've been on Earth the entire time after one them is killed by another. Since they've trained so hard with the bomb they had to use the real bomb with an inactive trigger to simulate it correctly. The creator noticed and fixed it as part of her manual override thus leading to half of the earth being blown away within minutes.
149** In "[[Recap/TheOuterLimits1995S4E23TheOriginOfSpecies The Origin of Species]]", Hope and the six students realize that they are on Earth in the future when they come across the ruins of the half-collapsed Golden Gate Bridge.
150* In the ''Series/MetalHeroes'' series ''Series/JikuuSenshiSpielban'', it is revealed that the planet Klin, the once-beautiful now-ravaged home of our protagonists, is Earth in the future, and they were sent to Earth through time rather than space.
151* ''Series/StargateSG1'': In "[[Recap/StargateSG1S1E17Solitudes Solitudes]]", two members of the team seem to have been shunted to the wrong planet due to an overloaded Stargate. Turns out it's a second Earth gate, buried under the ice in [[MysteriousAntarctica Antarctica]]. This also serves as a great big {{lampshade|Hanging}} for the whole SingleBiomePlanet thing.
152* Played with in a fascinating way in ''Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries'', where the Enterprise encounters multiple duplicates of Earth that were not actually Earth. The specific case of the world of the Yangs and Kohms in "[[Recap/StarTrekS2E23TheOmegaGlory The Omega Glory]]" is mentioned below, but "[[Recap/StarTrekS1E8Miri Miri]]" and "[[Recap/StarTrekS2E25BreadAndCircuses Bread and Circuses]]" also feature similar planets. This use of "Parallel Worlds" was part of Creator/GeneRoddenberry's initial pitch as something practical for budget purposes, while also making the locations relatable for the audience. In-universe, the closest thing given by the characters as an explanation was a reference to "Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planetary Development".
153* ''Series/TheTwilightZone1959'': The episode "[[Recap/TheTwilightZone1959S1E15IShotAnArrowIntoTheAir I Shot an Arrow Into the Air]]" features three astronauts crash landing on what they think is an unknown desert planet. At the end, it is revealed that the "desert planet" is actually a stretch of Nevadan desert about 97 miles from Reno. Only one astronaut survives the infighting over water and supplies to discover this.
154[[/folder]]
155
156[[folder:Music]]
157* Appears in the MusicVideo for "Sing For Absolution" by Muse. After flying a spaceship across the galaxy, Matt Bellamy and his crew collide with an asteroid and plunge onto a desolate desert planet. They step out... and find themselves on the ruins of Westminster Bridge, London, with the smoking remains of the Houses of Parliament behind them.
158* A kitschy Leonard Nimoy track called "Visit to a Sad Planet" ends with an unsurprising revelation.
159[[/folder]]
160
161[[folder:Radio]]
162* The ''AudioPlay/BigFinishDoctorWho'' audio drama "Terror Firma" has the reveal that the setting of the story is a Dalek-conquered Earth.
163* A hybridization of this trope, the AdamAndEvePlot, and an ''anti-''Earth All Along occurs in the '80s BBC RadioDrama ''Radio/{{Earthsearch}}'': The crew of the colony-ship ''Challenger'' tries to return to their home planet, Earth, to find it missing, and finally decides to settle on the new planet Paradise. Paradise is a lot like Earth, but it has saltwater oceans, and a heavily cratered moon. They eventually start referring to the planet as "their" Earth. There are a number of clues and red herrings -- the other planets in Earth's solar system have different names, but we're told that the planets were renamed centuries earlier, for example. Just in case you didn't work out the original "Earth" wasn't Earth at all, the sequel begins with a global flood.
164** The {{prequel}}, ''Earthsearch: Mindwarp'' takes place in an underground complex thought to be surrounded by rock infinitely in all directions, but when the main characters escape they find themselves on the original "Earth", but this happens early on.
165* The ending of the first season of ''Radio/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy1978'' radio series, as well as ''Literature/TheRestaurantAtTheEndOfTheUniverse'' in its novelization adaptation, features the main characters unexpectedly once more on Earth, with a rather unflattering secret about mankind unveiled in the process. We're apparently descended from a race of aliens who're all TooDumbToLive.
166[[/folder]]
167
168[[folder:Tabletop Games]]
169* The ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons'' setting of ''TabletopGame/{{Mystara}}''.The [[http://pandius.com/master-outer-world-colour.png global map of Mystara]] bears a suspicious resemblance to that of [[http://geomaps.wr.usgs.gov/parks/pltec/sc152ma.html Earth 152 million years ago.]] (It also features a solar system with an additional planet instead of an asteroid belt. A planet named ''[[MeaningfulName Damocles]]''...)
170* The Roleplaying Game ''TabletopGame/{{Earthdawn}}'' has a metagame aspect of this trope: the setting takes place A Long Time Ago on Earth, but there is no time travel, and the inhabitants naturally aren't affected by this. However, the clues were few (with only very small maps available), so most players actually never figured it out.
171** Note, by the way, that the RPG ''TabletopGame/{{Shadowrun}}'' is in contrast one of the most successful [=RPGs=] on the market, while being the same universe as ''Earthdawn'', just TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture rather than a long time ago.
172[[/folder]]
173
174[[folder:Video Games]]
175* The True Freedom Ending of ''VideoGame/{{Catherine}}'' shows the unnamed American looking city of the game's setting is actually on another planet.
176* ''VideoGame/CityOfHeroes'' has a weird version of this: much of the game's plot revolves around an alien invasion from a world in a parallel dimension. Which turns out to be an alternate version of Earth, where humans have been heavily modified into killing machines.
177* In ''VideoGame/{{Drakengard}}'' 's bonus ending, Caim and his dragon chase the queen beast into another dimension, but that dimension happens to be modern-day Tokyo. It's still an alien dimension to Caim, and this is illustrated by the fact that Tokyo is entirely in black and white. Supplementary materials ultimately reveal that the Drakengard trilogy takes place in an alternate Middle Age Europe [[AfterTheEnd after a mysterious modern-looking city appears in Medieval Spain, bringing forth magic and supernatural creatures, resulting in the collapse of Christianity and the European countries formed at this time]].
178* ''VideoGame/EtrianOdysseyI'' is set up as taking place AfterTheEnd and leaving a more fantasy-medieval world, but it's not until the fifth stratum -- Lost Shinjuku -- that it's revealed the games take place after Earth suffered a massive ecological disaster. It turns out that [[ScienceIsBad recklessly advancing science and technology]] brought about global warming and miscellaneous environmental calamities to the point that Earth was an uninhabitable wasteland, killing off almost everyone. The few survivors started something called the [[MeaningfulName Yggdrasil Project]] to try to restore the environment, eventually leading to the low-population, completely lush greenery-everywhere medieval fantasy-looking world you're used to. The subsequent games, most of which take place on the same planet, subtly expand on how the rest of the world responded to the disaster.
179* ''VideoGame/AHintOfATint'' has an interesting take on this, as it turns out the fantasy land with [[TitleDrop strangely tinted water]] and populated by [[CuteMonsterGirl Cute Monster Girls]] that the protagonist was unwittingly teleported to was actually the Earth's ''past'', before a spell changed it to normal, which resulted in the extinction of most of the monster races.
180* ''VideoGame/IllusionOfGaia'': The ending reveals that the game took place on Earth all along, but the cause of evolution had been altered by Dark Gaia. Once Dark Gaia's been defeated, Earth reverts to its actual modern-day setting before it was altered into a era of 16th century exploration that the entire game took place in.
181* ''VideoGame/{{Pikmin}}'': The first game suggests the Pikmin's homeworld to be a far-future earth, due to the presence of artificial detritus scattered about and of the remains of buildings as major environmental elements, and ''VideoGame/Pikmin2'' confirms it. ''VideoGame/Pikmin3'' has an interesting twist: it's indeed Earth, but it looks like Pangea Ultima (which is what the Earth is assumed to look like 250 million years in the future).
182* ''VideoGame/RabiRibi'': the game at first seems to be set in a fantasy world, with Erina seemingly transported to "another world" (modern day Earth) by magic at several points. Late in the game, though, it's revealed that Rabi Rabi Island is in fact on Earth, but there's a magical barrier separating it from the rest of the planet, such that nobody knows it exists. Erina's visits to "the other world" were actually her getting teleported outside the barrier.
183* ''Franchise/{{Splatoon}}'': It's revealed by [[http://i.imgur.com/b1HUyAn.jpg one of the Sunken Scrolls]] in the [[VideoGame/Splatoon1 first game]] that the world the Inklings and Octarians are fighting over is actually a post-apocalyptic Earth. 12,000 years ago, the sea levels rose dramatically and the human race was pushed to extinction. A myriad of sea creatures evolved and reclaimed the land, building their cities over the ruins of Earth's old infrastructure. Later games would continue to expand on this, turning it into a major plot point.
184* The TwistEnding of ''VideoGame/TheStation'' reveals that the planet the hostile HumanAliens are from is actually Earth and the protagonist and the station crew were the real HumanAliens.
185* ''VideoGame/SuperRobotWarsUX'': The game reveals that the moon contains a Tokyo from the previous universe.
186* ''VideoGame/XCOM2'': In the final mission, you assault an alien base using a portal you previously stole from them. At first it is implied that the base is located on an entirely different planet, but it later turns out that it's actually on Earth, at the bottom of the ocean. [[InterfaceSpoiler The game foreshadows this by putting the map marker showing the aliens' progress out in the middle of the ocean.]]
187* ''VideoGame/XenobladeChronicles2'' pulls a variant on the twist in that the surprising part isn't that it takes place AfterTheEnd up in the sky above Earth. The surprising part is ''which'' Earth it is: the one that was originally thought to have been erased from existence in the first ''VideoGame/XenobladeChronicles1'', thus revealing that the franchise isn't copying ''Final Fantasy'''s position on the SlidingScaleOfContinuity.
188[[/folder]]
189
190[[folder:Webcomics]]
191* This is reversed in ''[[http://www.dawnoftimecomics.com/index.php Dawn of Time]]''. At first it appears to take place in the past, with the addition of the [[ArtisticLicensePaleontology cavegirl-alongside-dinosaurs]] Flintstones device. However, as more of the world is shown through the story it's revealed that there are large cities, more advanced technology, and trading routes, showing that the world is more of an alternate universe. It's just Dawn who's incredibly primitive and possibly not even human.
192* Double-subverted by ''Webcomic/{{Homestuck}}''. On [[https://www.homestuck.com/story/5132 this page]], we are shown the Cherub world, which has the Statue of Liberty (in crappy jpeg form, no less). The view then zooms out, revealing ''several'' identical Statues of Liberty, leading many readers to suspect that it isn't actually Earth. Then Andrew Hussie's AuthorAvatar tells Caliborn outright that the planet is Earth--specifically the Earth from the Alpha kids timeline, moved into the new universe by at-the-time unknown means. Hussie even lampshades the use of the Statue of Liberty:
193-->Weren't all the Statues of Liberty a dead giveaway? \
194If you see one or more shitty old Statues of Liberty on any post-apocalyptic wasteland planet, that automatically means it was Earth all along, as a rule. \
195Then when you realize that, you're supposed to have a mental breakdown.
196** As for who put the statues there, post-scratch Dave created them because [[https://www.homestuck.com/story/4536 objects made of three dimensional jpeg artifacts]] had a [[https://www.homestuck.com/story/1845 negative production cost]].
197* Inverted in [[http://nedroid.com/2007/03/beartato-107/ this]] ''Webcomic/{{Nedroid}}'' strip, where the setting is suddenly revealed to be Mars. Subverted later, where it's revealed that Reginald just has "[[MemeticMutation brain problems" and hallucinated the whole thing.]]
198[[/folder]]
199
200[[folder:Western Animation]]
201* ''WesternAnimation/AdventureTime'' is set in the bizarre fantasy world of Ooo. However, over the course of the show it slowly goes from "subtly hinted" to "explicitly said" that Ooo is in fact our world a millennium after [[BizarroApocalypse the devastating return of magic]] during a global nuclear war. This was seen subtle background hints for the first few seasons, but [[ItWasHisSled is now common knowledge among the fandom]].
202* ''WesternAnimation/{{Futurama}}'':
203** Lampshaded: "The next day, Billy's planet was destroyed by aliens. Have you guessed the name of Billy's planet? It was Earth! [[FantasticAesop Don't date robots]]!"
204** Then exaggerated in a season seven episode, where, 6,990 years into the future, humans, apes, birds, cows, and a slug-like race have all rose to power, destroyed themselves, and then subsequently conquered the weakened race. And each one making its own Statue of Liberty. Right next to the others.
205** The title of the episode "Leela's Homeworld" refers to this trope. It's an unusually upbeat version, as this is the episode that reveals that Leela isn't an alien but a sewer mutant, and she meets her real parents for the first time.
206** Played straight in "[[Recap/FuturamaS6E2InAGaddaDaLeela In-A-Gadda-Da-Leela]]" where Leela and Zapp crash land on a planet that turns out to be a Hawaiian island. With Zapp not letting on because he'd been hoping to sleep with her.
207** The romantic retreat Fry and Leela visit in "[[Recap/FuturamaS7E15FryAndLeelasBigFling Fry and Leela's Big Fling]]" turns out to be in an alien zoo on the planet the rest of the crew are delivering to. With people paying to watch them through two-way glass.
208* In the ''WesternAnimation/JusticeLeague'' episode "[[Recap/JusticeLeagueS2E19And20Hereafter Hereafter]]", Superman wakes on a planet with a red sun and a moon with debris ring after being blasted by Toyman and presumed dead. He makes his way across the wasteland to a jungle area, dealing with strange local creatures along the way. Considering the page this is on, you can guess what he learns when he meets up with his old 'friend' [[Characters/DCComicsVandalSavage Vandal Savage]]. The AlienSky was not only caused by it being the future, but because Savage invented a gravity machine to TakeOverTheWorld, only it had GoneHorriblyRight and altered the planetary orbits, killing everyone on Earth except him.
209* Parodied in ''WesternAnimation/TheMask'' when he and Peggie find themselves on a planet inhabited by pigs. They find the ruins of the Coco Bongo.
210-->'''Mask''': "It was Earth all along, [[LampshadeHanging don't you get it?]]"
211:: Made even funnier by how they all call the planet Earth throughout the episode, and the title itself is "When pigs ruled the Earth".
212* In addition to the Homer quote above, ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'' episode "A Fish Called Selma" includes [[AllMusicalsAreAdaptations a musical]] [[ShowWithinAShow stage version]] of ''Franchise/PlanetOfTheApes'' called "Stop the Planet of the Apes, I Want to Get Off". The song that Troy [=McClure=], as Taylor, performs during the final scene literally names the trope in its lyrics:
213-->''I hate every ape I see\
214From chimpan-A to chimpan-Zee\
215No, you'll never make a monkey out of me!\
216\
217Oh, my God! I was wrong!\
218It was Earth All Along!\
219You've finally made a monkey,\
220(Yes, we finally made a monkey!)\
221Yes, you've finally made a monkey\
222Out of me!''\
223'''I love you, Dr. Zaius!'''
224* The punchline of the first season of ''Franchise/{{Transformers}}: WesternAnimation/BeastWars'' was that it ''doubles'' as both a sequel '''and''' prequel to ''WesternAnimation/TheTransformers'': the primitive planet on which they found themselves was, indeed, Earth all along, millions of years in the past, and the entire series was set during the period of dormancy while the Autobots and Decepticons were unconscious in their crashed ships halfway through the first episode. However, all the characters were from long after the original series, winding up on prehistoric Earth due to time travel. There are some dead giveaways (Stonehenge was made by aliens!), but enough red herrings to make them look like they aren't dead giveaways. Speaking of red herrings, the second moon turns out to not be a moon at all. TheReveal is handled nicely, bringing the plot together for the second and third seasons with episodes far more connected than those of the first.
225** Particularly well handled considering that Megatron believes it is Earth from the first episode, though Dinobot does not, given the two moons and lack of civilization. Audiences were given conflicting evidence to support either a primitive Earth or an Earth-look-alike until discs came into play.
226** Hell, the ''writers'' [[SchrodingersGun weren't sure if the planet was going to be Earth or not when they started]]; they basically figured "Throw in a second moon and if we finally decide this is Earth, we'll [[DetonationMoon blow it up.]]"
227* According to the show's series bible, this was the case for ''WesternAnimation/SonicTheHedgehogSatAM'', with Mobius being a post-Apocalyptic version of Earth. It explained Robotnik and Snively's presence as them having been in a space colony when the Apocalypse happened, resulting in them being among the few humans still alive. This was backed by an episode featuring a third human in the form of an old wizard who had been in slumber for centuries.
228* ''WesternAnimation/ReturnToThePlanetOfTheApes'': In "The Unearthly Prophecy", the astronauts discover that they are on Earth in the far future.
229[[/folder]]
230
231----
232[[AC:It Was Our Homeworld All Along]]
233
234[[folder:Anime and Manga]]
235* The 2011 ''Franchise/DragonBall'' special ''[[Anime/DragonBallEpisodeOfBardock Episode of Bardock]]'' shows that Goku's father Bardock survived his death at the hands of Freeza and was somehow blasted back into the distant past, waking up on Planet Vegeta back when it was called Planet Plant (and before it was inhabited by either the Saiyans or their enemies the Tsufuru). In addition to discovering that the ancient Plantians invented the liquid used in Freeza's {{Healing Vat}}s, Bardock battles Freeza's ancestor Chilled and goes Super Saiyan, meaning ''he's'' the legendary Super Saiyan that drove Freeza to kill off the Saiyans. The [[WebVideo/DragonBallAbridged Abridged]] version had a RunningGag where Bardock is on the verge of figuring out this incredibly obvious plot twist, only for something to interrupt and derail his train of thought -- and when he finally gets it, his anger at how stupid it is is what triggers his Super Saiyan transformation.
236* In ''Manga/NegimaMagisterNegiMagi'' the magical world is in another dimension, but metaphysically tied into Mars. Remember how Chao said she was from Mars?
237[[/folder]]
238
239[[folder:Comic Books]]
240* The {{Elseworld}} mini-series/graphic novel ''ComicBook/SupermanRedSon'' ends with a twist: Krypton is actually a far future Earth, a utopia created by Jor-L's famous ancestor Lex Luthor, who founded it [[StableTimeLoop after defeating]] the Comrade of Steel (see TemporalParadox).
241[[/folder]]
242
243[[folder:Films -- Live-Action]]
244* ''Film/{{Pandorum}}'': The audience is led to believe the spaceship has been drifting in space, but it is revealed at the very end that they had crash landed on the destination planet hundreds of years ago. If they had ejected themselves and the rest of the passengers at the beginning, they would have been saved.
245[[/folder]]
246
247[[folder:Literature]]
248* The ''ComicBook/TwoThousandAD'' short story ''The Last Rumble of the Platinum Horde'', by Creator/AlanMoore, has a gang of space age barbarian warriors deciding to leave their home planet and set off in a straight line across the universe raping, pillaging and killing everything in their path. It turns out that the universe is curved, and they end up coming back to their homeworld from the opposite direction and inadvertently sacking it.
249* Done in the ''Literature/CaptainFuture'' novel ''Planets in Peril'' by Creator/EdmondHamilton. The protagonist goes to help a human looking race in a dying universe (a short time away from being reborn in a new Big Bang), impersonating an ancient hero of that race. In the end, it is revealed that the universe is actually our own some 20 billion years in the future. What was the ancient hero's name? '''Kaffr'''!
250* The early Creator/ArthurCClarke short story "Encounter in the Dawn" depicts FirstContact between a technologically advanced galaxy-spanning empire and a primitive caveman tribe on a backwater planet. The description of the explorers is humans in the StandardScifiSetting, however when the survey team is recalled, it is revealed that the cavemen they interacted with would eventually found the city of Babylon.
251* In ''Literature/ThePendragonAdventure'''s eighth book, ''The Pilgrims of Rayne'', Ibara is revealed to be an island on Veelox a few miles off the shore of Rubic City. 300 years in the future. Upon visiting Rubic City, Bobby finds the place a ghost town, with the [[LotusEaterMachine Lifelight Pyramids]] now being tombs, and the only humans around are crazed pirate-like scavengers. It's rather terrifying.
252* An award-winning ''Franchise/{{Star Trek|ExpandedUniverse}}'' short story called "Our Million-Year Mission" had an ''Uber-Enterprise'' (comprised completely of holograms from the galaxy's best minds, including the crews of all the ''Enterprises''...and a very real Data; no one but him knows any of that until TheReveal, however) that finds a replica of the Milky Way galaxy devoid of life billions of light-years from where it should be. Only it's not a replica...it ''is'' the Milky Way, and all of its life-forms have ascended to a higher plane of existence, making it a sentient ''galaxy''.
253[[/folder]]
254
255[[folder:Live-Action TV]]
256* The twist ending to the fifth season premiere of ''Series/{{Andromeda}}'' was that the dystopian Seefra-1 was really Tarn Vedra, the captain's home planet and former seat of the Commonwealth.
257[[/folder]]
258
259[[folder:Tabletop Games]]
260* ''TabletopGame/MagicTheGathering'': [[WordOfGod Mark Rosewater]] says the initial planning for the ''Mirrodin Besieged'' block would have had the first set be ''New Phyrexia'' (rather than that being the last set in the block), with clues to eventually reveal that the plane they were on was Mirrodin. Instead they decided to chronicle the plane turning into New Phyrexia, and do a marketing HopeSpot that perhaps the last set in the block would be "Mirrodin Pure".
261* In the Hollow World inside TabletopGame/{{Mystara}}, sections of doomed surface-world civilizations have been transplanted and preserved by the Immortals. Most such cultures traditionally believed that their patron Immortals actually ''rebuilt'' their native worlds to protect them, rather than re-located them en masse; however, the recent arrival of surface-world explorers and traders has proven to many that they'd been moved to the planet's interior.
262[[/folder]]
263
264[[folder:Video Games]]
265* ''VideoGame/CreeperWorld'': Most of the planets in Creeper World 4's campaign are actually Mars, where millions of years between the rift lab's visits allow it to look like a different planet each time.
266* ''VideoGame/DragonQuestIII'' (''Dragon Warrior III'' in America) had the protagonist fall into the Dark World, where he/she must defeat the demonlord Zoma. After defeating him, the locals celebrate by giving the Hero the title of Loto (or Erdrick, in American NES versions). This reveals that the "Dark World" is actually Alefgard, the kingdom the first game takes place in (which also appears in the second), and that III was a prequel (though anyone who played both games would likely come to this conclusion almost as soon as they arrived there, what with the almost identical geography and town names). This game also plays with the trope in the first part, as the main world of [=DQ3=] is modeled after Earth itself.
267* A variation occurs in ''VideoGame/{{Iji}}'' in that while the setting is on Earth, the enemy alien invaders realize that Earth was ''their'' birth planet (which they call Origin). But they don't realize this until ''after'' they hit it with an AlphaStrike.
268* ''VideoGame/JakIIRenegade''; upon discovering the ruins of Samos's house partway through the game, Jak says, "This horrible place... is our world!"
269* ''Zork Zero'', prequel to the seminal ''VideoGame/{{Zork}}'' text adventures, makes its setting in the timeline fairly clear from the start. The twist comes at the end of the game, when you inadvertently transform the castle in the story into the little white house from the opening of the original game.
270[[/folder]]
271
272[[folder:Western Animation]]
273* In ''WesternAnimation/StarVsTheForcesOfEvil'', Ludo realizes after ninety days stranded on a seemingly random planet that he's been in the wilderness of Mewni all along.
274[[/folder]]
275
276----
277[[AC:Starting Earth from Scratch]]
278
279[[folder:Anime and Manga]]
280* ''Anime/GallForce: Eternal Story'' had a variation where the MacGuffin world being fought over was a {{terraform|ing}}ed version of Earth's moon. The story ends with the moon left lifeless and [[AdamAndEvePlot two of the cast stranded on a prehistoric Earth]].
281[[/folder]]
282
283[[folder:Comic Books]]
284* A [[UsefulNotes/TheSilverAgeOfComicBooks Silver Age]] ''ComicBook/{{Superman}}'' story (which hasn't been in continuity for decades), "A Name Is Born", had two astronauts from other worlds land on prehistoric Krypton, fight, save each other's lives, and get stranded. Naturally, when they took off their helmets, one was male and the other was female -- and they were named Kryp and Tonn.
285[[/folder]]
286
287[[folder:Films -- Animation]]
288* The "Bolero" segment of ''WesternAnimation/AllegroNonTroppo'' has an astronaut leave a coke bottle behind on a planet. Microbes then evolve into life on what turns out to be Earth.
289* The deleted "[[https://youtu.be/miar5eKG4uY Neverwhere Land]]" segment from ''WesternAnimation/HeavyMetal'' would have had the [[GreenRocks Loc-Nar]] crashing on a nearby planet that turns out to be Earth and starting life after being ThrownOutTheAirlock in the previous "Captain Sternn" short.
290[[/folder]]
291
292[[folder:Films -- Live-Action]]
293* In a popular ''[[Series/MysteryScienceTheater3000 MST3K]]'' episode, ''Film/WomenOfThePrehistoricPlanet'', the captain of the ship leaves his illegitimate daughter Linda behind on said planet with NatureHero Tang, the son of the survivors of the ship they were trying to rescue. He accepts that they'll be happier together on their new world, then pronounces (in the cheesiest way possible), "The third planet will henceforth be known as... 'Earth'."
294[[/folder]]
295
296[[folder:Literature]]
297* ''Literature/TheRestaurantAtTheEndOfTheUniverse'' dumps Arthur on a ship transporting Golgafrinchans, HumanAliens who perform useless jobs towards a mass genocide. They land on a beautiful planet, settle it, and set about ruining it with their bureaucratic and stupid ways of performing basic tasks. Arthur realises that the Golgafrinchans were the ancestors of humans, not the ape-like beings native to Earth. However, the book ends with Arthur sitting by a stream, watching the trees burning on the horizon (the Golgafrinchans had adopted the leaf as their currency and were fighting inflation by reducing the supply), feeling glad to be alive.
298* ''Literature/{{Strata}}'' seems to be set in a future where humans have colonized the galaxy and built duplicates of primitive Earth so the descendants of colonists can repopulate the galaxy in a few millennia if the current civilization collapses. Gradual snippets reveal that the Earth humanity comes from isn't ours and the ending strongly implies that the next Earth they build will be ours.
299[[/folder]]
300
301[[folder:Video Games]]
302* The ending of ''VideoGame/LightningReturnsFinalFantasyXIII'' implies this; while the souls of humanity are travelling to the New World, we catch glimpses of what seems to be our solar system, along with a few distinctive geographical features of Earth. Lightning steps off a modern train into what looks like the French countryside, with French signs and 21st century cars. WordOfGod has stated that this is up to player interpretation, as it does create a few problems (such as the New World having no history).
303* ''VideoGame/OdinSphere'' features the chipper, happy ending of almost every human being on Earth dying horribly. However, two people survive, who presumably go on to become that world's [[AdamAndEvePlot equivalent of Adam and Eve]]. The game proper ends, followed by the FramingDevice (a little girl reading a storybook) complaining that it ended like that before noticing a coin on the cover very similar to one of the {{MacGuffin}}s in the book. As she walks away, a character from the stories appears and takes the coin, implying that the de facto Adam and Eve actually are.
304[[/folder]]
305
306[[folder:Web Original]]
307** The conclusion of the ''WebVideo/CriticalRole'' one-shot ''The Nautilus Ark'' ends with a more positive riff on ''[[Film/PlanetOfTheApes1968 Planet of the Apes]]'''s twist ending, with Taliesin Jaffe's Dr Wiser landing his escape pod on the shores of a planet which is to be the new home for a ColonyShip of human refugees from a dying world after a cataclysmic event destroyed their moon... only to discover the Statue of Liberty, half buried in the coastline. Taliesin even references Charlton Heston's final lines of the movie, but with a less cynical, more hopeful subtext, as he observes the ship landing on humanity's new home, and the text of Emma Lazarus' ''The New Collossus'' is read by the GM.
308-->'''Taliesin:''' [[SincerityMode They did it. Damn.]]
309[[/folder]]
310
311----
312[[AC:Before the Beginning or AfterTheEnd]]
313
314[[folder:Anime and Manga]]
315* An interesting manga variant with an {{Anvilicious}} [[AnAesop Aesop]], delivered by mangaka Creator/RumikoTakahashi in the early 1970's. A time vortex opens up in a classroom and starving primitive peasants spill out. Clues lead the class to assume that these are time-travelers from a historical famine centuries in the past. Since the class had been discussing the world's declining resources, they give huge amounts of food to the starving peasants before sending them home. "Home" turns out to be ''thirty years in the future'' - evidently the people in the past would end up sending so much food through the time portal to help "the past" that they would end up collapsing civilization.
316* "Manga/EdensZero": Throughout the series, the main goal of the crew of the Edens Zero is to find Mother, a space goddess, in order to have their wishes granted. Later in the series, the crew of the Edens One also want to find Mother, only they wish to kill her so non machine lifeforms will cease to exist without her Ether. When the heroes finally meet Mother, she eventually reveals the truth in Chapter 272 to Shiki, Rebecca, Happy and EM Pino that she used to be the planet Earth, the home world of the Four Shining Stars and the Four Dark Stars back when they were human before disaster struck the planet in the year 2025 when it's Ether was dying. It's also revealed to have happened 20,000 years in the past from the present day.
317* ''Literature/ScrappedPrincess'' does this to the viewer, with a small hint that something might not be as it seems being at the beginning of the very first episode, and nothing more said about it until partway through the series. Everyone in the show is seen to be living in a catchall generic Middle Ages fantasy setting, and to the viewer, it looks like just another ''Literature/{{Slayers}}''-esque[=/=]''Roleplay/RecordOfLodossWar''-type anime based in some nondescript magic world that is kind of like our world, but not. However, the truth is that they're in the far future in "our" world, and their conquerors have regressed everyone back to the Middle Ages in order to prevent them from even wanting to mount a resistance. The "magic" seen in the series is actually MagicFromTechnology, based on the tech maintaining their "prison", which is actually a tiny piece of the world suspended in the sky. Then again, the very beginning of the show has a bit of AstronomicZoom that reveals the setting to be Korea.
318* ''Manga/SorcererHunters'' does the same thing as ''Literature/ScrappedPrincess'', abet less effectively (or more, considering that the above twist was an important part of the story in SP, but in SH, even if you suspected it somehow, it doesn't really matter until the end, and isn't even mentioned until the end). Long story short, in the final battle between Zaha and the Sorcerer Hunters, Zaha prepares a spell to unleash Carrot's power as the God of Destruction. Doing this requires them to be in the world that came before the world that the characters are now in, a world of death and destruction. The characters are transported to what looks to be present day [[BigApplesauce New York City, destroyed by some kind of apocalypse or war. Also, flashbacks of the characters are shown living their present day lives as the actions of the present and future converge]].
319* ''Anime/TurnAGundam'' has a variation. The series takes place in a pre-industrial world, which makes it rather shocking when [[HumongousMecha mobile suits]] show up from the Moon. Partway into the series, it's hinted that some disaster (dubbed the Dark History) is the reason Earth is backwards while the Moon is advanced. The final act of the series is kicked off when we finally see what the Dark History was: all of the ''Franchise/{{Gundam}}'' universes made prior to ''Turn A'', including those not helmed by creator Creator/YoshiyukiTomino, [[WordOfGod who later said]] that the series was meant to put all of ''Gundam'' into a single timeline (hence the name, "Turn A", from the mathematical symbol meaning "all items in a set").
320* ''Anime/TenchiMuyo'' and ''Anime/DualParallelTroubleAdventure'' both seem to be set on modern day Earth but their CanonWelding in the ''Anime/TenchiMuyoGXP'' novels reveals that they're set on two different Earths billions of years apart. The ''Dual'' Earth created a massive space empire, seeding all the HumanAliens' home planets in Tenchi's series including a duplicate of Earth where he was born.
321[[/folder]]
322
323[[folder:Comic Books]]
324* In the alternate-reality comic ''ComicBook/SupermanRedSon'', it is revealed that Superman is the distant descendant of Lex Luthor sent [[TimeTravel back in time]], and Krypton is actually Earth, destroyed by the death of the Sun.
325* Very weird variation in ''ComicBook/Timestorm20092099''. The place where ComicBook/SpiderMan2099's adventures take place is confirmed to be an Earth After The End, but the question is whether it's actually in the future at all. It's noted that the people of 2099 don't know for sure WhatYearIsThis - 2099 is just their best guess, and events in the story appear to strangely resonate with events we know happened in our earth, such as Spider-Man becoming fast friends with a cocky hot-headed [[Characters/FantasticFourTheFantasticFour Human Torch]]. It's entirely possible the year is, in fact, 2009 - the same time period as the story segments taking place in the present. You're just led to assume it's the future because it looks like [[ComicBook/Marvel2099 that other]] BadFuture Marvel published back in the day.
326* It turns out the [[OurFairiesAreDifferent Sheeda]] in ''ComicBook/SevenSoldiers'' aren't TheFairFolk, they're humans from the far future who go back in time to steal resources and technology.
327* [[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Into_the_Great_Unknown A non-canonical comic]] based on ''Franchise/StarWars'' has the ''Millennium Falcon'' crash on a distant planet; Han is killed by the natives. Years later, the ''Falcon''[='s=] wreck and Han's corpse are discovered by the famous archeologist... Franchise/IndianaJones. Who was trying to discover the Sasquatch, previously known as Chewbacca.
328* ''ComicBook/{{Druuna}}'': The setting of ''Clone'' may or may not be Earth, eons after humans have gone extinct on the planet.
329* ''ComicBook/{{Supreme}}'' featured a group of superheroes being sent by a demon to a grim planet, where they help humans fight off the violent alien natives. In the end, it's revealed the humans are HumanoidAliens, and the aliens, humans from the future, having mutated into monsters after WorldWarIII.
330[[/folder]]
331
332[[folder:Comic Strips]]
333* ''ComicStrip/{{BC}}'' eventually implied that the strip was set AfterTheEnd complete with a cache of books from our time including Literature/TheBible.
334* In ''ComicStrip/BrewsterRockitSpaceGuy,'' the titular character is on a visit to the planet Troglodonia, home of the Space Cavemen. One cave has a mural on its wall that depicts a visual history. It starts with a caveman, progresses through history (a gladiator, a car, etc.) before concluding with a mushroom cloud and another caveman.
335-->'''Space-Caveman:''' Maybe planet older than we thought.
336[[/folder]]
337
338[[folder:Films -- Live-Action]]
339%%This is just a planet named after Earth. It's in orbit of a larger planet which our Earth clearly is'nt* ''Film/FantasticPlanet''. The planet the Traags were inhabiting is left to the humans -- and it becomes Earth.
340* ''Film/TeenageCaveman'': The TwistEnding is that it's AfterTheEnd, and not prehistory. Although it may well be both; the one character who knows this suspects it isn't the first or last cycle, and his technology looks nothing like ours despite having similar function. The movie was based on ''By the Waters of Babylon'' -- see Literature, below.
341* ''Film/TheVillage2004'' is actually set in the present day instead of the past. This is a variation in that it is the time period that the viewer is being deceived about, not the location.
342* ''Film/WomenOfThePrehistoricPlanet'', which you may remember from ''Series/MysteryScienceTheater3000'', features the accidental colonisation of Earth as a result from one of the few fictional vehicles ''ever'' to [[ShownTheirWork take relativity into account]].
343* ''Film/YorTheHunterFromTheFuture'' starts out as a HollywoodPrehistory movie with cavemen, a BarbarianHero fighting dinosaurs and strange creatures. It is only in the last third of the movie that they end up on an island run by a cybernetic EvilOverlord and his robotic minions that is revealed that this is really a posthistoric world after a nuclear holocaust. This is the film's excuse to include SpaceClothes, [[FamilyFriendlyFirearms laser guns]], and MechaMooks in the last act. Although the film's American title kind of gives it away; the original Italian version is titled ''Il mondo di Yor'' (The World of Yor), which makes the final act much more of a twist.
344[[/folder]]
345
346[[folder:Literature]]
347* In Creator/AlfredBester's short story ''Adam and No Eve'', an experimental space flight sets off a chain reaction that devastates and sterilized the world, leaving the pilot of the spaceship as the last survivor. The story ends with the reveal that the planet will be reoccupied by life evolved from the pilot's gut microbes, and that present-day Earth is the result.
348* The ''Ardneh Sequence'' by Fred Saberhagen, made up of the ''Literature/EmpireOfTheEast'' and ''Literature/BookOfSwords'' series, is fantasy set more than 50,000 years AfterTheEnd. Magic exists and the nuclear weapons that caused TheEnd have transformed into demons.
349* The early Creator/PiersAnthony trilogy ''Battle Circle'' is set in a post-Apocalyptic world with various cultures ("nomads" and "crazies") living in the ruins.
350* The narrator John of ''Literature/ByTheWatersOfBabylon'', the son of a priest who is "immune" to a certain kind of metal that can kill everyone else in his tribe, narrates in such a way that you think he is a member of a primitive tribe that may or may not possess magic of some kind. By the end it is clear that while there may be magic involved (specifically the flashback sequence), they most definitely are in the future, close to Washington DC. The holy metal spoken of is most likely radioactive, and John, like his father, has inherited his radioactive immunity (this was quite prescient, because little public knowledge of radioactive material, let alone bombs, existed at the time). Its title is a reference to the Biblical prophecy that Babylon would be destroyed as a result of the Babylonians' sins (like the protagonist believes [[FromCataclysmToMyth the people in the past were]]).
351* The final book of ''Literature/TheDarkAngelTrilogy'' revealed that the setting, a fantastical alien world with month-long days, was Luna, terraformed ages ago. Earth's was incinerated in a global nuclear holocaust, and Luna had a civilization collapse to medieval fantasy levels.
352* ''Literature/TheDeathGateCycle'' reveals towards the end of the series that it takes place after both a nuclear apocalypse and a magical one (which resulted in TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt, hence the vastly different setting from our current planet).
353* ''Literature/TheAtrocityArchive'' has a variant in which a portal to another universe leads to a frozen, atmosphere-less planet with a sky of red stars. While the protagonists naturally assume this is some alien world, it turns out it's what's left of an alternate Earth in which the Nazis summoned an EldritchAbomination. It's nearly done eating that universe, and it's looking for a fresh buffet...
354* The world of ''The Runestaff'', by Creator/MichaelMoorcock, is Earth in a distant future, where all technology is lost.
355* The ''Literature/{{Shannara}}'' series is seemingly a [[HeroicFantasy medieval fantasy]] setting with the usual StandardFantasyRaces, but it's revealed pretty early on to be an AfterTheEnd future, and those races are human offshoots created due to mutations from radiation poisoning caused by nuclear blasts.
356* A ''Time Team'' story from ''3-2-1 Contact'' appears to be set in the distant past, but at the end bulldozers show up and the Time Team realizes that they are actually in the present, in the middle of the Brazilian rain forest.
357* It's subtly hinted several times that the setting of ''Literature/TheWheelOfTime'' is our planet [[AfterTheEnd after not one but two world-changing catastrophes]]. Also the distant prehistory of our world, given the whole "cyclical time" thing.
358* In ''Literature/ManyWaters,'' Sandy and Dennys are transplanted ''somewhere'' in time and space, and initially assume that it's some distant planet with very short HumanAliens. Eventually they realize they're actually in BibleTimes, specifically a few months before TheGreatFlood.
359[[/folder]]
360
361[[folder:Live-Action TV]]
362* ''Series/BattlestarGalactica2003'' manages to touch all common versions of this trope:
363** The ending of the first episode, when they revealed that the lost 13th colony that they were going to search for was called "Earth".
364** AfterTheEnd: When they finally reach Earth, it's a desolate wasteland, devastated thousands of years earlier by a war between human-form Cylons and the Centurions they'd built.
365** It Was Our Homeworld All Along: The "final five" Cylons turn out to be the last survivors of Earth, which makes the long-sought thirteenth colony ''their'' homeworld.
366** It (Wasn't) Earth All Along: The thirteenth colony was called Earth, but wasn't ''our'' home planet: our Earth is named after the earlier planet.
367** Before The Beginning: The human and Cylon survivors decide to go native on a primitive but hospitable planet, which they decide to name "Earth" because after four years looking for a planet called Earth, they'll be damned if they're gonna settle. When we revisit the fate of this Earth 150,000 years later, we see New York City and [[CreatorCameo a man reading ''National Geographic'' -- as it turns out, the story is before our modern age, and we are all human-Cylon hybrids. BSG gets those double points mentioned at the top of the page, because of the Adama family name]].
368* ''Series/LandOfTheLost1974'': Not Earth, but a similar situation; an advanced, civilized Sleestak arrives in the Land of the Lost by TimeTravel, only to discover that the primitive Sleestaks aren't from his past, they're from his ''future'', AfterTheEnd.
369* The planet Omega-IV in the ''Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries'' episode "[[Recap/StarTrekS2E23TheOmegaGlory The Omega Glory]]" is a bizarre case. The "[[{{Eagleland}} Yang]]" and the "[[DirtyCommunists Kohm]]" tribes are all that's left of their civilization after a UsefulNotes/ColdWar turned nuclear, and the resemblance to Earth comes to a head when the tattered, ancient American flag and U.S. Constitution put in appearances that leave the heroes stunned. But it's all the setup for a massive [[TheUnreveal unreveal]]. While a deleted scene would have suggested that the inhabitants are the human descendants of a LostColony, the mysteries are never resolved onscreen and Omega-IV is apparently just an alien planet that coincidentally reinvented America, the Soviet Union, China and the Cold War. (There were at least two other worlds in ''TOS'' that have cultures identical to Earth -- five, if you count the [[Recap/StarTrekS2E21PatternsOfForce Space Nazis]] who were explicitly given that information by an Earthman, the [[Recap/StarTrekS2E17APieceOfTheAction Space Gangsters]] who got it from an Earth book, and the [[Recap/StarTrekS3E3TheParadiseSyndrome Space Indians]] whose ancestors were actually from Earth.)
370[[/folder]]
371
372[[folder:Video Games]]
373* The Konami arcade game ''VideoGame/{{Gaiapolis}}'' starts out looking like an alternate reality but reveals itself pretty late in the game to be an AfterTheEnd. TheReveal location? A massive graveyard watched over by mysterious robots.
374* Quintet's ''Heaven And Earth'' series, which involves ''VideoGame/SoulBlazer'', ''VideoGame/IllusionOfGaia'', and ''VideoGame/{{Terranigma}}''. Although the first of those games doesn't explicitly claim to occur on Earth, it's a direct prequel to ''Illusion of Gaia'', which does (the ending reveals that Will's world eventually gave rise to modern civilization.) ''Terranigma'' is set long AfterTheEnd, but the player isn't clued into this until after the end of the first act.
375* After defeating the God King in ''VideoGame/InfinityBlade'' and sitting through the credits, the Warrior accidentally triggers a holographic map of the world and its literally shattered moon. At first, the landmasses aren't instantly recognizable, but after a while Australia, Eurasia, and Africa rotate into view.
376* The ''VideoGame/LittleTailBronx'' series comprised of ''VideoGame/TailConcerto'' and ''VideoGame/SolatoroboRedTheHunter'' is set in a SteamPunk universe featuring [[FunnyAnimal dog and cat people]] (known in the localizations as "Caninu" and "Felineko") who live on [[WorldInTheSky floating islands in the sky]]. Halfway through ''Solatorobo'', however, human-looking characters begin to show up, and a major supporting character reveals that there exists an "Old World" hidden below the clouds known as Earth. When the heroes finally reach the surface of the planet (stated to be what was once Australia), it's revealed that the game is set in the far future after humankind nearly destroyed the planet's biosphere with their [[MechanicalAbomination Titano-Machina]] super-weapons during WorldWarIII. The Juno-- hyper-intelligent machines making up a collective information system-- activated the "Reset" command with the formal permission of some esteemed human researchers, instantly terraforming the planet and allowing for a new generation of life to thrive on it. Additional info on the fall of humanity has been [[https://archive.org/details/solatorobo-supplemental-material-translation-english/Reset%20Information%20From%20Artbook described in a Japan-only artbook]] for ''Solatorobo'', prior to some of it being made available internationally through [[https://littletail.wiki/index.php/Jeanne_Archives unlockable reports]] in the series' distant prequel ''VideoGame/FugaMelodiesOfSteel''.
377* ''VideoGame/LunarSilverStarStory'' seems to keep this aspect in the background and players barely notice it as the issue never comes up in the story proper. The planet Lunar is actually the moon of the Blue Star, the celestial object that is seen in the sky. According to legend, the Blue Star is where the Goddess Althena transplanted Lunar's residents from. It is mentioned that Lunar had to be terraformed by Althena. It doesn't take much to notice that the Blue Star is not a star but a blue planet. The most visible continents on the planet resemble Africa and Europe. Alex and the adventurers do visit the Frontier which appears as Lunar did pre-terraforming, which looks like the surface of the Moon.
378* Indie-game ''VideoGame/OracleOfTao'' has this lampshaded from the ''very beginning'' of the game, along with a second world due to WorldSundering. The PlayableEpilogue omits the extra section, since the gate to this other world was presumably sealed.
379* At the end of ''VideoGame/{{Scrapland}}'' the titular Scrapland is revealed to be the Earth during the BigBad's AsYouKnow speech.
380* ''VideoGame/ShinMegamiTenseiIV'' starts out in the Eastern Kingdom of Mikado, a Middle Ages setting with the only apparent technology being the gauntlets that the Samurai run the series staple Demon Summoning Program on (as well as the odd "artifact"). However, the setting starts to unravel as delving into the demon-infested Naraku Passage reveals that the kingdom was actually built upon a dome that's covering [[TokyoIsTheCenterOfTheUniverse modern Tokyo]], ravaged by demons and demon summoners. It's later explained the dome was conjured in order to protect the city from a nuke, and Mikado was founded due to the influence of the angels, who wanted to build a kingdom filled with their chosen and then kill everyone else left in Tokyo.
381* Most of the plot in ''VideoGame/SigmaStarSaga'' revolves around searching for a series of six planets which will ultimately lead to a DoomsdayDevice. Earth is the "seventh" planet, which had already been destroyed by said device.
382* Creator/{{Square|Enix}}soft loved to hint at this trope during their later SNES to early [=PlayStation=] years. ''VideoGame/SecretOfMana'' has a scene late in the game when the heroes find recordings of their world from its [[FromCataclysmToMyth olden days]], before the Mana Beast destroyed civilization and brought about [[TheMagicComesBack the return of magic]]. The recordings include country music, an episode of Jeopardy, news channel debates on the dangers of [[MagicFromTechnology mana energy]], and then a final broadcast of the Mana Beast attacking a city and then turning on the news crew that's filming the destruction. The implication is that the world of ''Secret of Mana'' is really Earth's distant future.
383** Then in ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyVII'', we have an archeological dig that's uncovered what appears the ancient remains of a recognizable, real-world fighter jet. Fans debated the implications of that scene for years, though after the release of ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyX2'', WordOfGod has half-jokingly said that, rather than our world, the game actually takes place in [[VideoGame/FinalFantasyX Spira's]] far future.
384** And in ''VideoGame/{{Xenogears}}'', the heroes find an underground city near the end of the game that looks like a modern metropolis and, within it, they find ancient newspapers making references to everything from Elvis Presley to the Wimbledon Cup (not to mention that the origins of the AncientConspiracy fueling the game's story bears a FauxSymbolism resemblance to the book of Genesis). WordOfGod later stepped in again to say that it's not Earth, but another planet far in Earth's future (though Earth does play an important, if unseen, role in that planet's backstory).
385*** Not only that, but the game gives a more subtle hint that it might be our world: The chronology. The game takes place ten thousand years after the first humans began populating the planet. If one assumes Zeboim is modern or near-future Earth (given the technology it is clearly supposed to resemble it), and Zeboim died out 4000 years before the events of the game, then the game would take place circa 6,000 A.D., and the world's genesis story would have taken place circa 4,000 B.C, which is pretty much (23 Oct, 4,004 B.C.) when Bishop James Ussher calculated to be the date God got rolling on creating the world. WordOfGod may say it's not our world and of course that makes it true, but there are so many coincidences!
386*** Using the Perfect Works chronology, Xenogears actually takes place in A.D. 17276-17277.
387* ''VideoGame/{{Utawarerumono}}'' is set at a time where the descendants of genetic experiments made during an apocalyptic period have repopulated Earth. This is a variation where you are led to believe that it is an alternate fantasy world. A pretty big clue comes when you see a strategic map view of the area and the area around it is identical to the west coast of Japan, as seen from the East.
388* ''VideoGame/BrainLord'' is a fantasy puzzler RPG set in and around the ancient, lost city of Toronto.
389[[/folder]]
390
391[[folder:Visual Novels]]
392* ''VisualNovel/KajiriKamuiKagura'' pulls the historical variant. It initially appears that the story is set in a slightly supernatural version of ancient Japan or China before the cast stumble upon the ruins of Suwahara City frozen in time and it is revealed that the story is actually set thousands of years after ''VisualNovel/DiesIrae'' but has been reset to more ancient times due to a new ruling God. Note that this was also before the greater cosmology in the series was firmly established as it was this entry that fully explored the series mythology, meaning that entries that were though of as standalone are revealed to actually be part of a [[VisualNovel/ShinzaBanshoSeries much grander story.]]
393[[/folder]]
394
395[[folder:Web Original]]
396* In the {{Creepypasta}} [[http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/Mutant_Future "Mutant Future"]], it turns out that the Pokémon world is actually Earth in the future. In the year 2033, a disaster from a matter-energy transference experiment in Japan causes the annihilation of Japan and the mutation of Japan's wildlife. The once normal wildlife mutate into Pokémon. While the nation of Japan ceases to exist due to its destruction, anarchy, and war, decades after the catastrophe civilisation returns, but instead the Japanese home islands are divided up into the Kanto, Johto, Hoenn, and Sinnoh regions, populated by the mutated wildlife/Pokémon.
397[[/folder]]
398
399[[folder:Western Animation]]
400* The last episode of ''WesternAnimation/AeonFlux'' had the reveal that the odd, fragile-looking aliens on whose planet Aeon and Trevor were stranded were actually highly evolved (?) humans.
401* ''WesternAnimation/{{Futurama}}'':
402** Parodied in the episode "The Cryonic Woman", where Fry thinks that he is in New [[BigApplesauce New York]] AfterTheEnd, but [[HellishLA it turns out to be normal 31st-century Los Angeles]].
403--->'''Fry:''' But there was this gang of 10-year-olds with guns.\
404'''Leela:''' Exactly, you're in L.A.\
405'''Fry:''' But everyone is driving around in cars shooting at each other.\
406'''Bender:''' That's L.A. for you.\
407'''Fry:''' But the air is green and there's no sign of civilization whatsoever!\
408'''Bender:''' He just won't stop with the social commentary.
409** Parodied again in "The Late Philip J. Fry", when Fry is transported to the year 10,000 CE and reenacts the ''Film/{{Planet of the Apes|1968}}'' scene with the ruined Statue of Liberty...which is next to a ruined ape Statue of Liberty, a bird Statue of Liberty, a cow Statue of Liberty and a slug Statue of Liberty.
410* Parodied in ''WesternAnimation/ReBoot''. In one game, the landscape is that of a desolate wasteland. A single 1-binome walks onto the screen and utters the phrase, "You finally really did it. You maniacs! You BLEW IT UP!"
411[[/folder]]
412
413----
414
415''[[Recap/TheSimpsonsS7E19AFishCalledSelma I love you, Dr. Zaius!]]''
416

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