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Truman: It's an asteroid, sir.
The President: How big are we talking?...
Truman: It's the size of Texas, Mr. President. …
The President: What kind of damage will this do?
Truman: Damage? Total, sir. It's what we call a global killer. The end of mankind. Doesn't matter where it hits, nothing would survive, not even bacteria.

Planetary-scale Total Extinction of all life of any kind. The planet is still physically there, but is left as a lifeless husk.


Examples:

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    Anime & Manga 
  • In Astra Lost in Space, a meteorite hit Earth, causing it to wipe out all life on the planet. The debris from that impact shaded sunlight to the point where the planet became completely encased in ice, sometime before the start of the story.
  • In Bleach, Yamamoto's Zanka no Tachi is indicated to be a Class 6; both Yamamoto and Unohana state that Soul Society would be destroyed by the former's Bankai if it was left activated for too long.
  • Dragon Ball Super:
    • It's revealed this was the fate of Earth in the Sixth Universe as the whole planet was rendered uninhabitable by strife and petty warfare. However in an ironic twist, after obtaining the Super Dragon Balls, God of Destruction Beerus instructs his attendant Whis to wish that the Earth of Universe 6 and its inhabitants be restored, giving his brother Champa an Earth of his own, though in order to protect his reputation as a God of Destruction, Beerus hides the nature of his wish.
    • Near the end of the Future Trunks Arc, Zamasu, now having transcended into a multiversal Eldritch Abomination proceeds to unleash a devastating wave of destruction upon the entire world, when the heroes awaken after it has transpired, the whole planet, along with its inhabitants, have been reduced to a desolate barren wasteland.
  • In HeartCatch Pretty Cure!, the main Big Bad Dune does this after defeating the heroines, restoring his full powers, reducing the Great Heart Tree to a withered husk and unleashing his Desert Devils on the Earth, reducing it to a lifeless desert. Thankfully, the people purified by the Precures during the course of the series give the girls the strength to fight back and they reverse this in the end.
  • The Mystical Laws: Tathagata Killer has used his intellect and skills in science to create the "Ultimate Destruction Weapon," which creates a fireball 400,000 times as hot as the sun's core and throws it behind enemy lines. Leika Chan tried to object by explaining such a weapon could severely affect the Earth's core, extinguishing all life on Earth. However, Tathagata jokingly asks her if she's speaking from experience. As it turns out later on, she is.
  • This is what's going to happen to the Magical World (population: 1.2 billion) unless the heroes prevent it in Negima! Magister Negi Magi. Specifically, when the magic sustaining the world (which is on Mars in Another Dimension) fails, the entire population will be dropped onto the very much uninhabitable surface of Mars. Did I say entire population? I meant 67 million because all of the natives of the Magical World are part of the same spell and don't actually exist apart from it.
  • The great fear of humanity in Neon Genesis Evangelion is Third Impact, which will complete the devastation of the Class 4 Second Impact. End of Evangelion ended with Third Impact and the resulting extinction of all Lilim (i.e. humanity and all other Earth species) via an Assimilation Plot, but it is outright stated to be reversible, and humans can exist as individuals again, if they really want to.
  • In Puella Magi Madoka Magica, this is how Kriemhild Gretchen, the witch form of Madoka, would have destroyed the world in one timeline, or really, any timeline after the point at which the collective despair of all the iterations of her in alternate timelines built up to a sort of critical mass.
  • Space Battleship Yamato begins with an alien army attempting to wipe out humanity with planetary bombs that wreak havoc on the Earth's ecosystem, driving humanity into underground shelters. By the time the eponymous battleship disembarks from Earth to seek the means to undo the damage, it is estimated that in one year, the contamination from the bombs would become so severe that the shelters would not be able to protect humanity, thus resulting in the extinction of all life.
  • In Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, the Anti-Spiral's defense system sets the Moon on a collision course with the Earth. Our heroes calculate that the impact will strip away the earth's crust, causing everything to die: if not from the impact, then from the superheated gasses released. It would cause the earth to become completely uninhabitable for at least a full year. Our heroes save the day, of course.
  • This is what ultimately happens to the world in Wolf's Rain. That is, before Kiba dies and Cheza's seeds create paradise to press the reset button for life on Earth.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! The Movie: Pyramid of Light: If Anubis' Evil Gloating when he's Storyboarding the Apocalypse is to be believed word-for-word, he'll "erase all traces of life on Earth" with an army of Fantastic Nuke and city-destroying monsters if he wins.

    Audio Plays 
  • In Guiders of Our Dreams, Eclipse, the villain destroys the atmosphere of Earth, and creates a new planet called Skiya.

    Comic Books 
  • Giantkiller: It is believed that Rroar, the Daikaiju Monster Lord has the potential to end all life on Earth.
    Jack: Jill, you said it yourself in the guide. If Rroar ever got loose, we'd all be in big trouble.
    Jill: Actually, Jack, what I said was could all kiss our rear ends goodbye, but Selkirk made me edit that out.
  • X-Men: The ultimate consequences of Bishop's actions in the bad future in Cable and X-Force. He stole a number of WMDs. One of them nuked Australia. Another turned South America into a perpetual conflagration. Nerve gas or something like it released in Beijing depopulated Asia. Africa's fate is uncertain. The fifth of them destroyed Europe's fresh water. The sixth was used against Cyclops when X-Force captured him. In response to one or more of the first five (they all happened in different years), the remains of future-UN declared open colonization on North America. In retaliation, the remains of future-US's government and military turned themselves into roach-people. Cue genocidal war in Cable (Volume 2) Issue #9. North America was ruined. It had recovered a little by the end of the 30th Century, at least around NYC and up into the Adirondacks a little (Cable and X-Force crossover Messiah War, when Hope was about 9). But, by the 3120s, even there, the planet was dying (storms of blood). And what did Bishop have done to him? Cable or Hope (who was by that time about 16) scrambled his time-travel device and sent him to 6900 AD or so in that timeline. That possible future Earth was basically utterly dead.
  • Maelstrom's aim in his initial clash with The Avengers. Halting Earth’s rotation entirely would freeze one side and superheat the other.
  • Commander Blanx did this to Mars in the 1969 Justice League of America and Martian Manhunter story "And So My World Ends," setting the entire planet on fire with an ever-burning Blue Flame that consumed everything down to the bed rock.
  • Supergirl:
    • In The Death of Luthor, Supergirl visits a planet which was destroyed during a space war eons ago. Its atmosphere was frozen into crystal, killing all lifeforms.
    • Supergirl Adventures Girl Of Steel: Krypton's destruction sends shockwaves which knock nearby planet Argo out of orbit, dooming those who survived the shockwave to an endless ice age.
    • In The Supergirl Saga, the Phantom Zone criminals accidentally let loose on the Pocket Universe Earth by its Lex Luthor decide that humanity is too troublesome to rule over when they build a La Résistance powerful enough to resist the Kryptonians, and so the criminals destroy the Earth by destabilizing the Earth's core, causing hot gases to erupt and burn away the atmosphere, stripping the planet to a lifeless husk except for the Smallville citadel of Lex Luthor. Eventually, though, that gets destroyed along with the remaining humans before Superman from the mainstream DC Universe puts an end to their threat for good by using the universe's native Gold and Green Kryptonite on them.
  • Superman:
    • In The Immortal Superman, a million years of pollution, war, and untold environmental abuses have turned Earth into a toxic, lifeless rock.
    • "Brainiac Rebirth": When the inhabitants of Systus 2 revolt, Brainiac burns their world to ashes to force the survivors to work for him.

    Comic Strips 
  • This strip from Argentinian cartoonist Quino creates a pseudo-Biblical "Genesis of the End" regarding mankind performing a planetary ecocide.
  • One Sunday story in Calvin and Hobbes has Calvin writing a story as a homework assignment in which aliens invade Earth and suck up all of the atmosphere. They're fast enough to do this in the time it takes for them to finish explaining what they're doing. In practice, this would near-instantly kill everything except tardigrades and some extremophiles, but with no other biosphere, their time would be short too

    Fan Works 
  • Examples from the Calvinverse:
    • The worst way Yellowstone's volcano can destroy the world by blotting out the sun for a long while is this, according to Calvin & Hobbes: The Series.
    • Calvin's duplicate in The Pez Dispenser and the Reign of Terror mentions thinking about pulling one of these:
      "I took the remains and modified it into a weapon so powerful, I could wipe every sign of life off this crummy planet. I'm seriously considering that."
  • Ultimately Earth in A History of Magic ends up here, thanks to a combination of one man finding a way for people to become Puella/Puer Magi without contracting with the Incubators, wars between Magi and anti-Magi groups, an increase in Demons attacking after the death of Kaname Tatsuya, because the Demons are the familiars of Madoka's witch form Kremhild Gretchen, and finally humanity dying faster than they can repopulate. The interesting thing is seeing it go through Focused Destruction, Societal Disruption, and Societal Collapse first.
  • A Knight's Tale as Inquisitor has an odd example of one be comparable to another, which decided its place here on the scale. The Breach is presented as on an equal (or perhaps even greater) footing to the Eldritch Abomination horror summoned from Prelati's Spellbook: R'lyeh Text, which itself counts for this page.
  • "In Crisis" from The Desert Storm series sees the moon of Rilor 4 literally ripped apart from the destruction caused by all three of the moon's supervolcanoes erupting together. Even with the Jedi mobilizing everything they've got, they can only rescue a small portion of the moon's populace.

    Film — Live-Action 
  • The worst case scenario in Armageddon (1998) involved this, if the asteroid "the size of Texas" would have hit, killing everything including bacteria.
  • The final prediction in Knowing. A massive solar flare incinerates the planet, instantly vaporizing everybody on it to a crisp,note  evaporating the oceans, reducing the surface to lava, and basically just ending all life on Earth, and ensuring it will never rise again for a few million years. Good thing the Sufficiently Advanced Aliens had spares.
  • Marvel Cinematic Universe:
    • Guardians of the Galaxy: The Collector's video shows the Power Stone being used in the past to raze an entire inhabited planet to this extent with a World-Wrecking Wave, the devastation being only a few degrees short of making a Class X. It's implicit that this wasn't the only time the Stone was used in such a way. Ronan intends to use the Stone to destroy Xandar this way.
    • Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2: Ego the Living Planet's Assimilation Plot to remake every inhabited world into an extension of himself would likely spell a series of universe-wide Class 6's. The seeds of himself that he's planted on the "thousands of worlds" he's visited (which include Earth) are shown aggressively turning into very fast-spreading Blob Monsters which consume everything in their path, and they're specifically intended by Ego to cover every inch of those planets.
  • Midnight Sky features a vaguely described disaster simply referred to as "The Event", which is spreading radiation across the planet, killing all human and animal life, apart from the movie's central cast, most of whom are astronauts in space. There is also a mention of underground shelters in a few locations, but they are said to be temporary, meaning the planet will eventually be devoid of life.
  • Star Trek films:
    • When V‘Ger fails to receive a response to its signal at the climax of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, it deploys a series of plasma weapons that will devastate the surface of the Earth, effectively eradicating the “carbon units” (humans) it sees as the problem, and likely all other life along with them.
    • This is why everyone is so upset about the Genesis device in Star Trek II, III and IV. Not only will it annihilate everything on the planet’s surface, it will create a new biosphere over the old one leaving the planet ripe for colonization.
    • This is the reason behind the plot of Star Trek: Insurrection: the act of harvesting the lifegiving radiation from the Ba'ku planet’s rings will kill every living thing on the planet. Thus the Federation secretly attempts to relocate the Ba'ku people; when that fails, Ru'afo tries to trigger the process while they’re still on the planet.
    • This was Shinzon’s plan in Star Trek: Nemesis — use the Scimitar’s thalaron ray on Earth, which would have destroyed all organic life at the molecular level

    Literature 
  • In Poul Anderson's After Doomsday, Earth. This proves to be a clue. The culprits were not biochemically compatible with Earth, and would have had to slag it down to reseed it anyway, after they disposed of humanity.
  • In Animorphs #28 The Experiment, the titular characters are speculating on what the invading parasitic Yeerks are planning to do with a meatpacking plant; Cassie suggests poisoning the food supply, but Ax, the resident alien, corrects her by pointing out that if the Yeerks wanted to kill many people, they could simply use their Dracon Beams to ignite the atmosphere, incinerating it completely and wiping out all life on Earth. An uncomfortable silence ensues.
  • As The Curtain Falls is set billions of years in the future, during one of these. Due to the Sun's expansion into a Red Giant (which will later lead to a Class X2), Earth's atmosphere has boiled away and life can only exist on the beds of dried up oceans. Soon, everything will be dead. Also, much of Earth's surface is covered with deserts made of tiny bits of degraded plastic.
  • Hinted at in The Body Snatchers, by Jack Finney, when a Body Snatcher who's taken over the body of a friend states that the Body Snatchers only live five years, cannot reproduce and pretty much copy everything living, thereby turning whatever planet they invade (Mars and the Moon are mentioned) to lifeless blobs before launching off to seek out other living planets.
  • Iar Elterrus' Burden Of The Emperor describes the summoning of an Eldritch Abomination roughly described as the embodiment of void or nothing. A successful summoning would wipe out all life, and there is no way to know if the planet would survive the ordeal, placing this on top of Class 6 bordering Class X-1. As of the third book, there is either more than one inhabited planet in the universe or more than one universe with human life, reducing this to Class 0 bordering Class 1, as the planet in question is fairly unique.
  • In Alastair Reynolds' Century Rain the Earth has been taken over by nanotechnology gone amok, and the remaining humans live in space.
  • Planet Earth in Chrysalis (Beaver Fur) was completely scoured to lifelessness by the multiplanetary Xunvir Republic a few hundred years before the start of the story, an event which sets off the once-human Terran's plot to avenge humanity for the future it was robbed of.
  • Deadworld Isekai: The titular Deadworld, described in the story blurb as "a sterilized, featureless wasteland" and as described in Chapter 3:
    Somehow, all life on Gaia was eliminated. All of it. Fish? Birds? Gone. All the bacteria is dead. It’s debatable whether or not viruses are alive, but they are gone too. But not you, somehow. You live on. The system isn’t supposed to ask you questions, but if it could, they’d try to figure out how you somehow survived.
  • In Doom: Endgame, Fredworld experiences a planetary desolation at the hands of the Newbies. It takes Fly and Arlene half a day to find a corpse to resurrect and Arlene is the first to notice the planet is completely silent and still.
  • Dragonlance has one of its characters, Raistlin, try to become a god. After succeeding, he proceeds to dethrone others to get rid of competition, however after he's done kicking all the other gods out of their seats the world is pretty much dead.
  • In H. P. Lovecraft's sonnet "Fungi From Yuggoth", Nyarlathotep brings about the end of the world, descibed as "crushing what he chansed to mould in play, the Idiot Chaos blew Earth's dust away". That's pretty vague, but seeing as "Idiot Chaos" probably refers to Azathoth, it likely refers to atleast Class 6, possibly Class X.
    • You greatly underestimate the ensuing destruction. All of existence is Azathoth's dream. When he wakes up, it will be over. No Earth-Shattering Kaboom, all reality will just be gone.
  • One of Alan Dean Foster's Humanx Commonwealth universe novels, Bloodhype, features the Vom, an Eldritch Abomination of possibly extragalactic origin that travels through space by enslaving sentient species and devours all life on planets it encounters down to the last microbe. Other novels in the series upped the ante — see the X-2 and X-4 entries.
  • Hyperion CantosThe Pax orders this being done to the Ousters. A Hegemony officer predicts the Ousters are going to do this to a planet, although there is no evidence they ever did.
  • In Masters of the Vortex, a peripheral novel in the Lensman universe, humanity is dealing with loose atomic vortices, malevolent balls of energy that arise out of mysterious nuclear powerplant explosions. These have two major properties; they grow slowly, and they suck in atmosphere and spew out toxic gases. The opening premise is that there's no safe way to destroy or remove them, and Earth and all other affected planets will either be consumed or have their atmospheres rendered toxic and unbreathable, which puts it into this category. Our hero, a mathematical savant, is the only entity in all Civilization capable of blowing them out; and what's at stake is hammered home when extinguishing the first one nearly kills him.
  • The Locked Tomb: A major concept in the setting's metaphysics is thalergy and thanergy. Thalergy is life energy, which planets and stars naturally emanate; thanergy, the power source of necromancy, usually requires the planet to be losing its ability to sustain life. The Nine Houses' war against external human colonies typically opens with a kind of attack that starts the planet's death and thus gives its necromancers a source of thanergy; in the long term, this renders the planet uninhabitable, with life on it becoming sterile and eventually fading.
  • David Drake's The Lord of the Isles series has several examples of this. In "The Gods Return" we get a glimpse of the The Worm's, a giant slug-like monster's, home planet. All life, including all other members of the Worm's species, has been consumed by the monster leaving only a barren grey wasteland behind. Another novel features the Pack, a trio of life-consuming monsters from another plane of existence who have turned their whole universe into a barren desert. In "Mistress of the Catacombs" the main characters eventually wind up in an alternate-universe version of their own world where the Ragnarok apocalypse from Viking myth has occurred. While some humans still survive, one character from the doomed planet, makes it clear there are only months left until the final human is killed by a rampaging giant or other monster and the whole world is covered with ice.
  • In the backstory of The Magician's Nephew, Jadis' Deplorable Word killed every single living thing on the planet except her. She put herself into stasis later.
  • Vadim Kazakov's Measure of Chaos series features a "Well of Chaos" corrupting the land. The corrupted area is quarantined by mages and special multinational armies. A breach in the quarantine will wipe out life, replacing it with chaos-spawned things.
  • Peter F. Hamilton's The Night's Dawn Trilogy contains a planet called Garissa. Or rather, did. It was sterilised with antimatter-fueled "planet busters". In effect, they caused planet-wide radioactive hurricanes that would rage for centuries.
  • The Road by Cormac McCarthy has lone bands of dying humans roaming the cold, gray, ash covered America, barren of all animal, insect or plant life. It is implied that once the last few survivors have cannibalized each other, there will be no life on Earth.
  • Star Wars Legends:
    • The Republic, Separatist, and Imperial Order Base Delta Zero, an orbital bombardment which comes in two main flavors. The quick and dirty version is a Class 3 that involves destroying all cities, industrial assets, infrastructure and people, with droids potentially being captured instead, and can be executed by a handful of Star Destroyers in a matter of hours barring resistance and may include surface landings to conduct mop-up operations. The second variant is Class 6, frequently cited as calling for a fleet of ships to melt the planet's crust to a depth of 1 meter. Ultimately, how much it falls between these two categories depends on how many fleet assets are available, how pressed for time the commander in charge is, and how vindictive he is feeling when carrying out the order.
    • Though the Death Star's superlaser is obviously far above this point, smaller ships can also employ superlasers, with the Eclipse's axial gun being strong enough to melt through the crust of a planet in a single shot. It's noted that this will render the planet uninhabitable for a very long time.
  • In Sweet Story, a children’s book world slowly deteriorates into lifelessness after a girl wishes for it to rain candy. By the end of the novel, the girl and her admirer are the only living things left on the planet, thanks to a wish the latter made.
  • If the F'dor of the Symphony of Ages succeed, the entire world will be reduced to lifeless, molten slag. This isn't just supposition by characters, either; Meridion's story bits take place After the End.
  • In Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next novel Lost in a Good Book, Thursday Next and her time-traveling father work to avert the nanomachine apocalypse that turns everything on Earth into strawberry Dream Topping on most of the timelines.
  • Valentin Ivashchenko's Warrior and Mage series feature the Fallen God seeking for a way to reenter the world. Said reentry would possibly destroy the world and surely wipe out life, placing this between Class 6 and Class X-1. Mages in danger of becoming one of those reentry points (usually necromancers under great stress and catastrophic circumstances) are handled with extreme prejudice.
  • In the Wing Commander novel Fleet Action, the Kilrathi on the warpath use Strontium-90 clad thermonuclear weapons to render several planets incapable of sustaining any life, and threaten to do so to Earth until Max Krueger's Big Damn Heroes moment.
  • In Xandri Corelel, Admiral losTavina orders the surface of Halcyon, a mining planet that has been taken over by the Zechak, destroyed. His decision protects the Starsystems Alliance from the threat of Zechak invasion, but it also kills the millions of innocent slaves working in the mines.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Babylon 5 has the Shadow Planet Killers aka Death Clouds. They use thousands of high-yield thermonuclear missiles which burrow into the planet's core and detonate in unison, reducing the entire crust of a planet to slag while Nanotech sucks away all useful energy in the process. While this is arguably more psychologically horrific and excruciating, its Vorlon counterpart actually sits higher up the scale at Class X.
  • Doctor Who:
    • "The Daleks' Master Plan": The jungle planet Kembel is reduced to a lifeless dustball by the effects of the Time Destructor.
    • "Inferno": Professor Stahlman's project unleashed a volcano that (reportedly) wiped out all life on Earth.
    • "Planet of the Dead": The City Planet San Helios was reduced to a desert by a Horde of Alien Locusts who devoured everything on the planet (the dominant species, wildlife, vegetation, etc.). Said Locusts then create a wormhole to another world — Earth — to repeat the cycle there.
    • "Pyramids of Mars": If Sutekh gets loose, he'll cause this level of destruction to Earth. The Doctor shows Sarah the result a Bad Future.
    The Doctor: A desolate planet circling a dead sun.
  • This is what essentially happened to Mal's homeworld of Shadow during the Unification War in the backstory of Firefly.
    • And Earth itself, really the catalyst for the entire series universe, albeit via pollution, and over a very, very long time.
  • Ohsama Sentai King-Ohger: The Galactinsects are the villains of the show's Time Skip: a roving band of Eldritch Abominations that have already scoured numerous off-screen planets of life For the Evulz, infiltrating species' social hierarchies and goading-slash-blackmailing them into civil wars that kill everything; leaving behind lifeless husks with the occasional structure standing. The show's second half is about the heroes standing up to these creatures to prevent their planet from becoming the newest casualty.
  • Primeval: In the Bad Future of the final two seasons, the Earth is apparently condemned to this after a severe Class 4, which has reduced the future Earth's surface to a complete Death World with few future creatures and humans struggling to survive. In Matt's words, everything is either dead or dying.
  • Stargate SG-1 has the Dakara Superweapon, a wave that can reduce targeted matter (like organic life) to its basic components, effectively eliminating all such targets on the planet. If fired through the Stargate while it's active, it can affect another planet. If the entire network is active, the wave can affect the entire galaxy.
  • Star Trek presents several examples:
    • In Star Trek: The Original Series, there's Starfleet General Order 24, which allows a captain to effectively blast a planet clean of life. Kirk invokes this in the episode "A Taste of Armageddon" when the people of Eminiar attempt to force him and his landing party into a suicide chamber of sorts as part of a treaty towards a neighboring planet in a disturbing alternative to war. The Eminiar leader, Anan 7, is forced to rein on this idea when he realizes Kirk ain't bluffing and, thankfully, Kirk doesn't go through with it.
    • In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, "Datalore", the Crystalline Entity was an interstellar entity that absorbed all organic life as it traveled through space. The crew determines that Omicron Theta (the planet Data's creator, Dr. Soong, settled with his scientific staff) was attacked by the entity and "nothing survived, not even soil bacteria". The crew visit it and find a dead world, with only the remnants of Soong's base still functioning (along with Data's deactivated and disassembled brother.
    • The planned bombardment of the Founder homeworld in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "The Die Is Cast" had it not been a trap apparently would have involved destroying the planet's crust and mantle. Well, at least the core would have still been there.
    • In Star Trek: Voyager, there was a weapon that could eliminate a civilization from history. Any planet that would have been terraformed by said civilizations in the original timeline would not have been terraformed (at least by the civilizations that terraformed them) so they would no longer have ever had life on them.
    • The Short Treks episode "Children of Mars", as well as the Star Trek: Picard premiere episode "Remembrance" indicate that Mars suffered an Orbital Bombardment in the mid-2380s at the hands of rogue "synths". The attack resulted in over 92,000 civilians and Starfleet personnel dead, either on the surface of the planet or in the Utopia Planitia shipyards, which were also destroyed. The bombing was sufficiently severe that it ignited the Martian atmosphere, leaving it still burning and uninhabitable over a decade later by the time that Picard begins.

    Music 

    Mythology and Religion 

    Tabletop Games 
  • In the Dungeons & Dragons Splat book Elder Evils, this is the most likely worst case scenario for Atropus, the World Born Dead. Should the players lose, his evil necromantic influence would turn the game world into a lifeless husk overrun with the undead.
  • In F.A.T.A.L., this is the result of casting the titular spell. It usually takes a full week to cast, but can also happen as a form of Magic Misfire if any other spell is cast.
  • The "Crucible Of God" scenario in Vampire: The Masquerade's final supplement ends in this if the PCs lose; thanks to the war between humanity, vampires, and the Antediluvians, all life has been scoured from the face of earth, leaving it completely barren and devoid of even the most basic forms of life. Appropriately, the only survivors are the unliving vampire player characters, who either drain each other dry in a futile attempt to survive, lapse into a torpor that will never end, or kill themselves via sunlight.
  • Par for the course in Warhammer 40,000:
    • Some of the more extreme forms of Exterminatus, including the most nasty virus bombs (the attack on Tallarn not only killed and disintegrated everything, it killed the microorganisms needed to break down and recycle the resulting horrible sludge of life. People in virus-proof bunkers survived, but the same thing happening to a place without those would be a definite Class 5).
    • Another variant essentially blows the entire crust open and turns the entire planet into a ball of lava. Ouch.
    • When the Tyranids finish with a planet, not only is it left a lifeless, airless, barren rock, but it's also significantly smaller than it was before the Tyranids started — the bugs eat everything organic or consumable on the planet, down to the bedrock, and drain the heat from its core.
    • Necrons kill everything. Everything. Down to bacteria. Specifically, we have the World Engine, a Death Star-like capable of turning every single living thing on a planet into a cloud of atoms with a single shot.
    • The so-called "Tombworlds" are planets stripped of all life by the Necrons in ancient times to make them suitable for long-term Necron occupation/hibernation. Some of them were unknowingly terraformed by humans millions of years later.

    Video Games 
  • In AdventureQuest Worlds, this was the ultimate plan of Chaos Lord Ledgermayne, the Big Bad of the Arcangrove saga, by cutting off the Para-Elemental Plane of Magic from Lore. Since magic is tied to life itself, this would have resulted in the end of all life in the world of Lore. Ledgermayne was stopped by The Hero and Drakath himself before he could bring this plan to pass.
  • ANNO: Mutationem: A Class 6 occurs in the bad ending once Amok completely takes over Ann's body and proceeds to unleash her Mechanical Abominations across the planet, bringing total destruction and creating a miniature sun as everything is shrouded in devastation.
  • The world of Armored Core 4 is gradually being poisoned by the massive amounts of radiation being released into the planet's atmosphere beceause of the wanton overuse of Kojima weapons, which are weapons that utilize Kojima Particles, a newly discovered particle which allows for a practically limitless source of energy, at the cost of tremendous ecological impact.
    • By the time the sequel, Armored Core 4 Answer, finally rolls around, most of the world is already barren desert, entire regions have been abandoned because of Kojima contamination and over half of humanity now lives in Cradles, huge flying cities cruising at an elevation where the atmosphere is still safe enough to breathe, at least for now.
      • The Corporations even know full well that the Cradle System is just a stop gap measure, and that the entire atmosphere will eventually succumb to irradiation. But even before that, the Cradles will eventually be pushed to a high enough elevation that the automatic Kill Sats they placed earlier will eventually detect the cities as a threat and fire at them with their cannons.
  • In the ending of Chimera Beast achieved by defeating the Final Boss, the Eaters completely depopulate their homeworld, and spread out across the galaxy to do the same to other planets, with Earth in their crosshairs. Nice Job Breaking It, Player.
  • Tiberium does this rather slowly, but extremely effectively. As of the third game, 30% of the Earth's surface is already at this level, 50% is getting there and the remaining 20% is being held at bay with sonic technology that requires so much energy that Tiberium is the only thing that can power it.
    • It actually almost happened twice. At the beginning of the GDI campaign of Firestorm, a scientist mentions that if they won't do anything, Tiberium biosynthesis will make the planet inhospitable to carbon-based life in less than a year. Fortunately for everyone, GDI got their hands on the Tacitus and figured out the effect of sonic weapons on Tiberium. Then after the third game, the planet was once again heading towards this... until Kane decided to give the Tacitus' copy to GDI and helped them build the Tiberium Control Network.
    • The Scrin's modus operandi is somewhat similar to the Tyranids from Warhammer 40k: drop Tiberium onto an inhabited planet, wait a few decades until the whole surface is consumed including native life then swoop down and harvest, leaving a barren rock behind.
  • In Dawn of War: Dark Crusade the Necrons do this if they win, Kronus is made a barren dead planet, and they're very thorough with it, all plant life die, the waters disappear, even microscopic bacteria are killed from the energies the Necrons emit from their structures.
  • In the Dark Souls 3 DLC The Ringed City, the titular city is held in time at the end of the world, and the world outside the City is dying as well. When your player character undoes the enchantment holding the city in place, everything in it besides your character, final boss Slave Knight Gael, Shira, a Pygmy Lord, and humorously an unnamed Ringed Knight die instantly, and the Lord dies moments after you approach him. Once Gael and Shira are dispatched, you and said Knight (who respawns) are the only living beings left in creation, everything else having been aged to dust.
  • Fate/Grand Order: The Prologue features an event known as "The Incineration of Humanity". This is not an exaggeration, if anything it's an understatement: the entire human race is wiped from existence and the Earth's surface is so scorched it glows orange 100 years later...and this process repeats 7 more times, going from the present into the past. The player and the supporting cast are only still alive because their organization's unique status in the timestream created a paradox that is sustaining their existence... but it will only last two years before the paradox resolves itself and they get wiped out too. The first part of the game is spent investigating several other paradoxes left behind through history to figure out what the hell just happened.
    • The reason for such a massive overkill? Humanity is being used as fuel. The souls of every human are powering a spell that would bring the villain over 4 billion years into the past, to the precise time the Earth formed. Simply killing humanity once doesn't yield enough power, however. This is why the villain repeats the process progressively deeper into the past — past humanity isn't dead yet and can yield more power.
    • It happens AGAIN in Arc 2, with the Alien God wiping out all life and reducing the surface of the Earth to a barren white plain. Again you go into various other planes called Lostbelts to resolve the situation, but with a cruel twist this time. you’re not visiting periods in YOUR planet’s past, your visiting pocket realities based on alternate Earths attempting to REPLACE your Earth and it’s history. The only way to get your world back is to destroy the Fantasy Trees tethering these alternate worlds to Earth and condemn them to being erased...
    • Some of the Lostbelts in Part 2 also have gone through or will go through apocalypses, as well. For example, the Indian Lostbelt is doomed to eventually become a Class 6 because the Big Bad there is so determined to erase whatever he deems "evil" every ten days, and his standards (which include temporary and physical imperfections- skinning your knee would make you qualify as 'evil' in his book) are simply too high for humans (and other kinds of life, as demonstrated with Asha's dog) to ever possibly meet.
  • Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker reveals this to be the fate of several other worlds as learned by Meteion, who was driven so mad by this realization that she became an Omnicidal Maniac. Her domain, Ultima Thule, has shades of these worlds, which sheds light on how they each met their end:
    • The dragons, a long-lived and learned race, met their end when they were invaded by machine lifeforms. In the ensuing war, the dragons' homeworld became so polluted that life could no longer thrive, and the dragons' young would die in infancy. A small handful of dragons took clutches of eggs into space in search of a new world to resettle, among which only one is known to have succeeded: Midgardsormr, who resettled on Hydaelyn. For the rest, their end did not come quick, their long lifespans becoming a curse rather than a blessing.
    • The Ea, a race of scholars so dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge that they shed their corporeal forms and existed as energy beings in the hopes of being unshackled by age. That pursuit led them to discover the Natural End of Time, with no way to avert it. They fell into despair so profound that they began to research a way to regain their corporeal bodies for no reason other than to commit suicide. By the time Meteoin found them, most of the Ea had fallen completely catatonic due to untold eons of dormancy.
    • The Omicrons, the selfsame machine lifeforms that invaded the dragons' homeworld and created Omega. So fearful were the Omicrons of being invaded that they sought to become the invaders instead, converting their entire population into robots and machines for the sole purpose of invading other worlds, and taking what they learned from their victims to improve themselves further. Unfortunately, they did not account for what they would do ''after'' becoming the most powerful beings in the universe. Realizing this, the machines that directed the Omicrons shut down, and the population entered a permanent state of standby.
    • The Grebuloff, a race of sea-dwellers that had gone to war with surface dwellers. As a result of this war, the planet became a polluted, disease-ridden hellscape.
    • The Karellians, a race of humanoids whose planet was engulfed in civil war between the Global Community, a unified government determined to unite the world under their singular rule; and the Freedom Fighters, anarchists that strove for absolute freedom. The war eventually came to an end with the deployment of superweapons that razed the world, leaving none alive in their wake.
    • The Nibirun, a race not dissimilar to the Ancients, who strove to solve all of their world's problems. They succeeded in exactly that, but soon found themselves so lacking in purpose and direction that they came to welcome death.
  • Happens to Vasuda Prime in FreeSpace, due to orbital bombardment with Shivan beams. The Vasudan species survived due to a number of colonized systems and a massive evacuation of the planet beforehand (though around 4 billion still died during the bombardment). Also happened to the Ancients' home system in the backstory, and the game ends with the player's squadron just barely stopping the same thing from happening to Earth.
  • Halo: Glassing — bombarding a planet with plasma until the whole surface turns into "glass" — is capable of this, but it takes a lot of time and energy to do, so the Covenant mostly just do partial glassings (which are still often enough to pull off a Class 6).
  • In Homeworld, the planet of Kharak is bombarded with Low Orbit Atmosphere Deprivation weapons shortly after the Mothership makes its first hyperspace jump. From what we see, these weapons ignite a planet's atmosphere, setting the whole surface on fire. The bombardment is so thorough that anything living on Kharak was sure to have perished, if not from the massive conflagration then from the lack of a breathable atmosphere left in its wake. This prompts the Kushan to press onward with their journey to search for their home.
    Karan S'Jet: [shocked and horrified] Kharak is burning...
  • The world of Horizon Zero Dawn seems at first to be the results of a Class 2 apocalypse; there are primitive tribes of humans as well as natural flora and fauna, but the world has actually gone through a full Class 6. The Robot War completely destroyed all life on earth, and only after said robots were shut down was life re-seeded across the globe.
  • Islands of Wakfu: : At the end of the game, Nora inflicts a World-Wrecking Wave on the World of Twelve to stop Orgonax, wiping out all life on the planet for the next several millennia.
  • The moon in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask has enough force to completely envelop the world in a sea of fire if it crashes into Termina (most likely due to a magical influence). The result of the destruction would likely wipe out all forms of life.
  • In the Mass Effect franchise there are a number of former garden worlds where all life has been wiped out, usually as the result of orbital bombardment most likely carried out by Reapers.
  • In A New Beginning, Earth's future, which is presently in Class 2, will soon become Class 6 thanks to a depleted atmosphere and an imminent solar flare.
  • Nobody Saves the World: The Calamity brings about a total planetary extinction, judging by how it overtook nearly everyone else by the end and Astrolabus felt that the only option he and Nobody have is to jump to another dimension to try and start over.
  • The Bad Ending of Persona 3. The Fall occurs unopposed, and the "maternal" entity on the Moon descends on the planet to devour the Shadows of all living things, leaving them as Empty Shells. Specific types of entities such as Aigis remain active, but all organic life are extinct and the Collective Consciousness ceases to exist.
  • Radiant Silvergun starts with a stone monolith known as the Stone-Like awakening and releasing a blast of energy that kills absolutely everything on the planet. Four humans aboard the ship Tetra escape into orbit and return a year later due to running out of supplies. These remaining humans die too.
  • In Runescape, Goblins used to live peacefully on a colorful swamp world called Yu'biusk. Then the war god, Bandos, found it. After thousands of years under Bandos' rule, the ground is black and scorched, the sky is smoky and dark, and the water looks like it could kill you just by you touching it. The entire world has been deserted, desolate, and ravaged. It's a bit depressing.
  • In Star Control II, The Shofixti race use their own sun as a kamikaze bomb, killing all but 18 Shofixti (2 male, 16 female) and utterly ruining their solar system (but hey, they destroy a third of the Ur-Quan fleet!). Amusingly, those 18 Shofixti were able to repopulate their species in three months. Not nearly as amusing are the Mycon Deep Children, which take Earth-like worlds and turn their crust inside out, transforming it into a "Shattered World" uninhabitable to all but the Mycon.
  • In Starfield, Earth's magnetosphere was destroyed by research into the Grav-Drive. By the time they figured out it was happening, it was too late, and humanity had 50 years to escape Earth before the planet was stripped of its water and much of its atmosphere. Enough humans were evacuated to permit the species to survive, but billions of humans—along with the rest of Earth's species—ultimately were doomed to perish. In the present reality of the game, Earth is very similar to Mars in terms of atmosphere, and is a chilly, barren world with few artifacts of humanity remaining.
  • Visas, in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords is from a world that was cleansed of life by Darth Nihilus, who used The Force to consume every living thing on the planet except her. One of the last story missions in the game is centered around stopping him from doing it to Telos as well.
    • In Star Wars: The Old Republic and its tie-in novel Revan, it's revealed that the Sith Emperor once did the same thing to his homeworld, on an even more thorough level. To the point that the entire planet is akin to a void in the Force, which is said to be deeply disturbing to any Force-sensitive that visits it. The Emperor intends to someday repeat the process on a universal scale, absorbing all life everywhere and effectively becoming the Force in the process.
    • Malachor V was subjected to something between this and a Class X at the end of the Mandalorian Wars. The Exile, Meetra Surik, was forced to activate a superweapon known as the Mass Shadow Generator. The Generator proceeded to crush not only the enemy fleet, but nearly every object in orbit and Malachor V into itself, creating a massive wound in the force. Eventually Malachor V's remains are finally blown up in a clear Class X.
  • In Stellaris:
    • Primitive species in the Atomic or Early Space Age may eventually evolve into full-fledged starfaring empires. Sadly, it's much more likely they'll instigate a nuclear world war instead that can have different outcomes, the most common of which results in the total annihilation of their planet's biosphere. The same can also happen through alien-made global warming. Both cases come with a depressing message from your observing scientists that they're dismantling their orbital observation post because there's nothing left to observe. Since the devs seemingly want to make sure absolutely nobody misses this particular hint, a pre-FTL Earth appears to have an even higher chance to suffer this fate than generic alien planets.
    • But of course, you still can do it yourself. One of the DLC's added a "Colossus" ship class, giant but unarmed except for one weapon, that takes a while to charge and can only be commanded to fire on planets. Effects span a range, from humane solution (encasing the planet in an unbreakable shield to cut it off from the rest of the galaxy or simply brainwashing everybody into spiritualist seekers) to Class 6 extermination (Neutron Beam simply wipes out most of the life on it leaving it open to colonization while Nanomachine Diffuser turns all biological population of the planet into cyborgs loyal to your empire for The Assimilator types). And finally World Cracker inches into Class X by breaking the planet open — though it isn't entirely gone and the pieces float together, the most you can do is put a mining station on it, as colonization is rendered impossible.
    • One of the endgame crises, Prethoryn Scourge, infests planetary biospheres to such degrees that you have to completely scour it clean in order to take the planet back. You don't need the aforementioned Colossus ships, a normal fleet can do, given enough time. It leaves the planet as a barren rock that can be terraformed back to habitability. Essentially, the planet suffers Class 5 followed by infestation and Class 6 if you take it back.
    • Lastly, another endgame crisis, the Extradimensional Invaders, turn any planet they successfully invade with ground forces into a Shrouded World, and there's no coming back from this one — the planet is so utterly corrupted with Shroud energies that not even the most advanced terraforming technologies in the galaxy can make it habitable to corporeal beings ever again. Needless to say that anyone still on the planet when it's transformed is killed instantly, their souls and bodies used to feed the invaders' endless hunger.
  • In Ultima VI you can learn the 8th-level spell "Armageddon" — indeed, you must learn it if you wish to be able to learn any other 8th-level spells. If you ever cast it, everything in the world dies instantly, including you. The incorporeal creatures you learn this from mention having traded it to another world once before, and contact with that world was lost shortly afterwards. They don't quite understand why, but hypothesise that someone may have "misused" the knowledge.
  • The Bad Ending of Undertale has the Fallen Child, now hugely empowered by slaughtering everything in the Underground and able to escape to the surface, annihilate the entire world. They ask if you, the player, want to do it — either way, they stab you to death and do it. But trying to refuse makes it significantly more terrifying. Achieving this ending also taints every other playthrough, including the Golden Ending, by implying that the Fallen Child's soul will still make this happen no matter how many times you reset.
    • Just before the final boss fight of the Neutral Route, Photoshop Flowey reduces the setting to a black void containing just himself, the six SOULs and you, as the first show of his newfound power.
  • This is the goal of the Old Gods in World of Warcraft, bar themselves and their minions (although they arguably don't count as alive anyway, being said to be "outside the cycle"). The dungeon End Time takes players to a Bad Future where this has happened, where the Old Gods' Dragon (pardon the pun) Deathwing has even killed himself. It's implied that this is the best possible end of the world for Azeroth!
    Murozond: I have witnessed the true End Time. THIS? This is a blessing you simply cannot comprehend!

    Web Comics 
  • At the conclusion of the Revenge of the Sith arc in Darths & Droids it was discovered that the Trade Federation had begun construction of the "Peace Moon" by forging the entirety of Naboo. The biosphere was completely destroyed while the planet's surface was transformed into a volcanic wasteland.
  • Spacetrawler: The unclamped Eebs melt the surface of planet Carpsellon to slag. They do the same to several other planets, off-screen.
  • In the scifi webcomic Star Trip, a freak solar flare hits Earth and destroys human civilization. It's unlikely any humans or any other life survived.

    Web Original 
  • In The Gungan Council, a rogue moon crashes into Taris in "The Galactic Crusade". Everything dies.
  • In The Last Angel, both superpowers are capable of this. The Compact is seen glassing Earth and the Askaji have the Rains of Oshanta. And then Nemesis goes and invents the starbreak.
  • Object Invasion takes many years after a mass radiation annihilated the Earth and wiped out all the species at the time. However, some time after the catastrophe, and before the events of the show itself, a race of sentient objects rise up via evolution and restore the planet.
  • SCP Foundation:
    • The duplicate Earth that SCP-2935 leads to has already undergone a Class 6. Even supposedly unkillable SCPs like 173 and 682 are dead. And if you go back through the portal, it happens to the Earth you came from as well. (Word of God implies that this is actually Universal-scale.)
    • The canon Ad Astra Per Aspera talks about SCP-3841, an K-class event that destroys all life in the planet Luyten B.
    • SCP-6002 shows an in-progress Class 6, thanks to a scientist who, in the process of trying to find a way to slow down or cure human aging, accidentally infects the World Tree with an anomalous blight and then covers up his mistakes (including murdering a researcher who notices the developing infection) until it's far too late to keep the blight from spreading progressively throughout the tree and wiping out species after species. By the time the infection is revealed, not even radically excising whole infected sections of the crown (up to and including an entire kingdom of life) can prevent the infection from eventually reaching 6002's trunk, and, as of the time of writing, the blight is projected to completely destroy 6002's crown (presumably wiping out all life on Earth) within 300 years.
  • Over 255 million years after being terraformed, the moon of Serina gradually ceases geological activity and cools completely, entering a permanent ice age that eventually grows too severe for any life to survive.

    Western Animation 
  • In Amphibia, this was The Core's contingency plan in case of being defeated, the Final Gambit, use Amphibia's moon to crash into the planet's surface and wipe out all life on it.
  • On Ben 10: Alien Force, Paradox shows the heroes a possible future where a time-warping entity has caused everything on Earth to age into dust. He claims it's their best possible future if the entity isn't stopped.
  • In the Futurama episode "The Late Philip J. Fry", Fry, Bender and the Professor end up in the year 1 billion, where all life on Earth is extinct and only an empty, desolate plain remains.
  • Might have happened on Gargoyles, when Jackal became host to the death-godly power of Anubis, had his "Purge" not been stopped.
  • Rick and Morty: The Episode Solaricks features Mr. Frundles, which has a cute appearence. However, once Season 2 Jerry accidentally unleashes it, it assimilates the entire planet Earth within minutes, with Earth itself becoming Mr. Frundles and swallowing the oceans.
  • Steven Universe showcased Gem Colonies as being highly detrimental to the host planet itself. The Earth has local spots drained of all life-supporting resources to create more gems (which seem to keep draining whatever is put there). Should the colony become successfully established, the result would be an Earth fit for Gems to live on, but the planet no longer hosts organic life — it wouldn't even have any water. Even worse, when considering the murals of the Diamonds, this event must have happened many times to other life-bearing planets, potentially including Homeworld itself.
  • Played for Laughs and exaggerated in Spongebob Squarepants when Patrick tells the story of The Ugly Barnacle, "He was so ugly that everyone died. The end." Though Patrick could have easily been an Unreliable Narrator when telling the story, or telling a fictional story.
  • In the fourth season of Teen Titans, Trigon arrives and turns every organism on the planet into stone. Until the heroes hit the Reset Button.
  • Transformers: Prime: In the second and third seasons respectively, the Decepticons' plot involves inflicting this on Earth, by cyberforming the planet's surface into a metal world using the Omega Lock's power.
  • Wakfu: The Shushus who are naturally destructive by nature have more or less inflicted this on their home dimension Shukrute — the fact there's now nothing left for them to destroy there is the reason why Rushu wants to invade the World of Twelve.

    Real Life 
  • Scientists predict that the Sun's luminosity gradually increases; in about a billion years, Earth will become too hot to sustain lifenote .
    • Possible example of what the future may hold for Earth: our nearest neighbour, Venus.
      • Venus is hotter than it should be though, due to the cloud cover. Scientists have actually hypothesized that if they could blow off enough of the atmosphere, the poles would be able to sustain human life.
      • And it could be worse than Venus. In about 3.5-4 billion years, the Sun's increasing luminosity may induce a greenhouse effect so powerful that Earth's surface temperature may rise enough to melt rocks. And this is still a billion years before the Sun becomes a Red Giant.
      • Perhaps there's some hope for life; while Earth's surface may be too hot to sustain life, there's a lot of water in the deep crust and mantle, that brought to the surface or to the underground by outgassing could maintain it (albeit at a very simple level; i.e. bacteria and very little, if any, more complex) there. Also, the future Venus-like Earth and the hellish Earth depicted above respectively depends of the level of tectonic activity and the amount of water in Earth's atmosphere. If tectonic activity is low enough (or stops) and there's little water remaining these two scenarios could be avoided, so life could still be around until the Sun started its path to become a Red Giant.
  • In about three billion years, our galaxy will collide with the Andromeda Galaxy. That could destroy our planet in two possible ways, even though most likely the sun itself will escape intact. One way is that colliding nebulae will generate new rounds of star-formation nearby, leading to frequent supernova explosions. The other way is that our stellar orbit around the galaxy will be altered. This could destroy the solar system if the sun is sent into either the galactic nucleus, or into a globular cluster.
  • This scenario has often been suggested to have already happened on Earth in the distant past (billions of years ago), as the most powerful asteroid/comet/planetesimal impactsnote  suffered by the young planet are thought to have been powerful enough to vaporize all the oceans and envelope Earth for up to months if not more in an atmosphere of vaporized rock, killing most if not all life (ie, bacteria and the like) just for abiogenesis to take place again when conditions returned to hospitality. Had life appeared underground, however, it could have endured such ordeals and it even seems we got lucky.


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