History Main / FlingALightIntoTheFuture

** Several inmates at Nazi concentration camps wrote and buried diaries to let the world know what happened.
*** The history and life of the Warsaw Ghetto were extensively documented by Jewish scholars and buried. Most but not all of the document caches have been recovered.

* The ''VideoGame/OuterWilds: Echoes of the Eye'' DLC recontextualizes the game's overarching story into this. [[spoiler:The inhabitants of [[RingWorldPlanet the Stranger]] came to your system hundreds of thousands of years ago after receiving a signal from the Eye of the Universe. But when one of them had an apocalyptic vision that seemed to show the Eye destroying the universe, the aliens built a satellite to block the Eye's signal so that no one else could find it. However, one alien disagreed with that assessment, and believed the Eye could be used to [[ResetTheWorld create a new universe after the end of the current one.]] They were able to briefly deactivate the satellite before being apprehended and imprisoned, and this is the signal that the Nomai received an interminable time later. The Nomai came to your system, settled there, and eventually set up the Ash Twin Project to help find the Eye, only to be wiped out by a cosmic accident before they could succeed. But eventually the Hearthians developed spaceflight, and you were able to finish the Nomai's search and find the Eye, completing a quest that spanned hundreds of millennia and took three different species to complete. In the GoldenEnding, the Prisoner declares it is "Time to send our spark out into the darkness" when they and your fellow travelers make a new universe.]]

* Inverted in a profoundly dark and disturbing way by the [[{{Cthulhumanoid}} Illithid]] [[BrainFood race]] in ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons'' ([[RetCon at least before]] [[TheyWastedAPerfectlyGoodPlot 4th Edition]]). The Mind Flayers were - [[TimeTravelTenseTrouble or will be]] - the overlords of the multiverse at the literal end of time, when most if not all the stars have burnt out. But after facing defeat at the hands of a trans-planar rebellion (not that there's much to fight over at this point), the Illithids sacrificed unbelievable numbers of their Elder Brains to create a psionic maelstrom that sent the surviving members of their race into the distant past - that is, shortly before the ''D&D'' setting. This way they can get a head start on forging their empire while avoiding that pesky slave uprising altogether. It also explains their tremendous egos; after all, they ''know'' [[YouCantFightFate their victory is inevitable]].
** One more disturbing note about the Illithids - it's possible for characters to take feats representing having [[HalfHumanHybrid monstrous non-human ancestors]], like a bit of dragon blood in your family tree or something. If you apply them to the Illithids, it doesn't mean you have an inhuman ancestor, it means that the squid-faced, brain-eating monsters with the parasitoidic life cycle are your ''descendants''.

* ''Outpost'', the failed predecessor of ''VideoGame/{{Outpost 2}}'' starts with the construction of a colony ship in case attempts to divert an asteroid from hitting Earth fail. The asteroid is broken apart, but its chunks are still expected to kill all life on Earth. The expedition leaves before the impact, doesn't receive any messages from Earth, and assumes everybody is dead.
** ''VideoGame/Outpost2'' starts well after the colony ship's arrival, but preserves the same origin story. As the opening cinematic bluntly puts it in the opening lines:
--->''Historical overview: the Earth is dead.''

* ''Franchise/SailorMoon'': The premise, with the dying Queen sending the senshi's souls forward from the utopian moon kingdom as it collapses, in order to reincarnate in the modern era so they can defeat the dark kingdom as it reawakens.

* In ''Series/BattlestarGalactica2003'', [[spoiler:the Final Five Cylons arranged to be reborn following the destruction of the Earth by Paleo-Centurions. Using a sublight ship, they headed to the Twelve Colonies of Kobol to attempt to warn the human tribes of similar dangers. In vain.]]
* The Andromeda Ascendant on ''Gene Roddenberry's Series/{{Andromeda}}''. It's initially set up as if the ship was thrown into the future by accident, but later episodes revealed that it wasn't so accidental. It turns out that in the original timeline, Gaheris Rhade killed Dylan Hunt and ended up in the future. He tried to follow the same path as Dylan but realized he'd fail, so he used some AppliedPhlebotinum to go back to that moment. He shot his past self, put on the same uniform, then threw the fight with Dylan as a HeroicSacrifice. He also made sure to shoot Dawn and prolong the fight in order to prevent the ship from being successfully piloted out of the event horizon, thus ensuring Dylan's trip into the future.
* ''Series/BuckRogersInTheTwentyFifthCentury''. Although it was completely an accident. The civilization ''he'' knew was destroyed, but a brand new society took its place.
* ''Series/TheOuterLimits1995'':
** In "[[Recap/TheOuterLimits1995S3E14MusicOfTheSpheres The Music of the Spheres]]", the world is bombarded by alien broadcasts that anyone under the age of 21 or so believe to be the most beautiful music they've ever heard. When the broadcasts prove addictive and cause those who listen to them to mutate, the world governments declare martial law, until scientists succeed in decoding the message. The signals originated on a world whose sun had turned ultraviolet 40 years ago. The signal warned that Earth's sun was about to undergo a similar change and that the broadcasts would genetically alter those who heard them into a new golden-skinned form that could survive under the new sun. Fortunately, it had a rare good ending with no twist involved: [[spoiler: the powers that be actually realize the importance of letting that music play, specifically rebroadcast it across the world, including using mobile vehicles to get the sound out to third world countries and to the non-human life on the planet, and in the end, it's insinuated humanity will be just fine. Even those who are too old/decide not to mutate will live... indoors and underground.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheOuterLimits1995S4E23TheOriginOfSpecies The Origin of Species]]", a group of students is brought to the future [[spoiler:where they find that humanity, in the interim, got heavily into genetic manipulation, basically dooming the human race. When they realize the small group of them isn't enough to sustain humanity for more than a generation or two, they later find enough babies of different genetic mixes, in the ship that brought them to the future, to give the human race a second chance.]]
* The basis of the plot in ''Series/PowerRangersWildForce''. The Animarians were losing a war against the Orgs. Both sides were ''mostly'' destroyed the Orgs leaving behind some SealedEvilInACan, and the Animarians leaving behind a FloatingContinent, a princess in stasis, and a few giant robot animals scattered around.

* ''Series/JikuuSenshiSpielban'''s heroes serve this purpose, as they were sent to Earth [[spoiler: which turns out to be what their planet was in the past]] after their civilization was attacked.
* In ''Series/{{Supernatural}}'' Sam and Dean have to go to the past and retrieve the ashes of a Phoenix to destroy Eve. They succeed in killing the Phoenix but can't get to the ashes in time due to their limited time frame. Samuel Colt, yes that Samuel Colt, sends the ashes to them via Western Union with instructions to wait like 100 years so that they get them in the present. It's not technically the future but it was Samuel Colt's future.
* A variation in the first season finale of ''Series/LegendOfTheSeeker''. After Cara's interference sends her and Richard into the BadFuture, while everyone else thinks they're dead, Kahlan is told by the witch Shota that Richard is alive in the future and that she needs to survive that long in order to tell him how to return and SetRightWhatOnceWentWrong. This is why Kahlan agrees to marry Darken Rahl and bear his child. Unfortunately, the plan fails, as the child turns out to be a male Confessor (with Rahl's magical powers to boot), and Kahlan is executed in an attempt to kill him. Rahl himself is killed by his son Nicolas, who becomes an even greater tyrant. Fortunately, there is a backup plan. Shota manages to survive this long and lets Richard know what to do.
* An episode of ''Series/{{Fringe}}'' has a Flight a Light into the Past version, with Peter seemingly finding himself in a BadFuture, where the other world has been completely destroyed, and this one is in its final throes as well. Then Walternate kills his wife Olivia and plots to speed up this world's destruction as revenge for letting his world die. Walter realizes that the only way to prevent this is to somehow send a vision to Peter in the past and tells Peter that this might just be exactly what he's experiencing right now. He's right. Peter wakes up in the present with this knowledge.
* In ''Series/PrisonBreak'', Lincoln jr shoves Company agent Quinn into a well. Quinn is then left to die by Kellerman and Hale. Lincoln comes back some time later to retrieve Quinn's phone and finds that Quinn has written Kellerman's real name on the stone.
* ''Series/TheTwilightZone1985'': In "The Star", the survey ship ''Magellan'' discovers a vault on the outermost planet of a solar system that was destroyed by its sun going nova. It was created by a civilization that lived on one of the other planets in order to preserve their history, scientific knowledge, art, literature, and music. They did this so that their legacy could survive even if they themselves could not. It's based on the Creator/ArthurCClarke short story of the same name, and it largely follows the same plot beats, including the fact that [[spoiler:the star went nova in 3120 BCE, making it the same Star of Bethlehem seen at birth of Jesus,]] though it [[AdaptationalAlternateEnding ends on a happier note]]: [[spoiler: after the head of the expedition reveals that he's having a HeroicBSOD after realizing they've encountered the Star of Bethlehem, one of the crew members comforts him by reciting a poem from the vault asking future listeners not to mourn their civilization, instead urging them to better the lives of others.]]
* ''Series/TheBarrier'': In the DistantPrologue, on the DayOfTheJackboot and a time of various newly emerging diseases, a scientist implants each of his twin daughters with a subcutaneous chip before being taken away by the army because he's considered an enemy of the new government. Twenty-five years later, the chips turn out to be [[spoiler:perfectly functional vaccines for the disease that has become the most problematic by that point]].
* ''Series/ResidentEvil2022'': In 2036, Jade is a member of the University, a collective of scientists and scholars seeking to not just find a counter to the ZombieApocalypse, but also to preserve as much of pre-apocalypse culture as possible so that things can be rebuilt when things are finally over.

* ''TabletopGame/BattleTech'' has the Helm Memory Core, which was originally designated as "Star League Field Library Facility, Helm, DE890-2699" and was a massive computer facility and data archive built into an enlarged system of natural caves underneath a mountain range, with built-in {{Ragnarok Proofing}} to keep it safe. On the eve of the humanity-spanning, apocalyptic 1st Succession War, the idealistic officer of an engineering battalion foresaw what was coming and had his men construct a huge data archive to preserve the advanced knowledge of the Star League, basically humanity's Golden Age. That long-ago officer would have been very happy to know that his plan ended up being massively successful; three centuries later, after unrelenting wars that blasted humanity back to the Stone Age (or at least from the 28th Century back to the 21st) a mercenary outfit discovered the data archive and made myriad copies of it before any one faction could claim it, and handed out those copies to every passing merchant, courier, and random JumpShip they came across so as to get it disseminated as far and as wide as they could. This lead to a technological renaissance across the Inner Sphere of human space, the discovery of the Helm Memory Core being a universe-shaking event which actually moved the entire setting ''away'' from its original "Medieval Warlords In Space with Mecha Knights" interstallar {{Scavenger World}} scenario toward a more standard {{Military Science Fiction}} setting.

* In ''Webcomic/TheLastCowboy,'' the human race is dying due to a plague. They have recently made contact with an alliance of alien races, so they use their remaining resources to set up a series of schools to teach the aliens everything they can about humanity before it's gone forever.

--->'''Prerecorded message broadcasted from earth:''' ***Secure. Contain. Protect***
---> We've been waiting for you, SCP-4100. We're not here anymore. We've long since left. We don't die in the darkness anymore. We've won.
---> We're living in stellar light. Humanity has fled you. The Protectorate will thrive

* Princess Tekla in ''WesternAnimation/ShadowRaiders'' was a PursuedProtagonist warning of the coming of the Beast planet.
* In the old 60s ''[[WesternAnimation/SpiderMan1967 Spider-Man]]'' cartoon, the planet of Gorth launched its library into space to avoid [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGl9yYvkEbY destruction by a giant lobster from Dementia 5]].
* Subverted and parodied in ''WesternAnimation/{{Sealab 2021}}'', where the crew leave a capsule for future generations to find. It contains toxic gas and a note reading "Eat it, future bastards!"
* An inversion of this is the premise of ''WesternAnimation/SamuraiJack''. Aku, the BigBad, is not strong enough to defeat the eponymous hero, so instead flings him into the future. Jack arrives in an era where Aku is the unquestioned ruler.
** The origin story plays it straight. When Aku attacks Jack's homeland, Jack is safely evacuated and spends the next 20 years traveling the world and training. He returns too late to save his people, but [[spoiler:eventually makes it back and saves them after 50 years in the future.]]

* When the Iacon Hall of Records was sieged during the last days of the war on Cybertron, Alpha Trion of ''WesternAnimation/TransformersPrime'' had the hall's powerful relics and weapons sent to Earth because he had foreseen that Optimus Prime would eventually come to engage the Decepticons there during one of the war's most important chapters.

* In ''WesternAnimation/TheVentureBrothers'' episode "Twenty Years To Midnight", Jonas Sr. receives a message that the fate of the universe depends on him building a machine and getting it to Times Square in [[TitleDrop 20 years]]. He dies before then but leaves a message to his son with all the details and where he hid the pieces. It's one of the few times Rusty actually does something good successfully (despite several obstacles, obviously).

* Part of the conflict in ''WesternAnimation/{{Gargoyles}}'' episode "The Green" stems from the interaction between humankind and the rainforest: the rainforest and the creatures within absolutely need to be preserved and protected, but people don't destroy it just ForTheEvulz; there is a purpose and livelihood behind it that can't just be arbitrarily thrown away. In the end, Elisa proposes a compromise by transplanting some Guatemalan flora back to the mystical island of Avalon, letting it thrive out of humanity's reach.

* TheReveal of ''Literature/Thud!'' is a message recorded by [[spoiler:rival kings who were thought to have killed each other, but their corpses are found sitting over a makeshift board game together]].
** [[Spoiler: “‘And yet we say this. Here, in this cave at the end of the world, peace is made between dwarf and troll, and we will march beyond the hand of Death together. For the enemy is not Troll, nor it is Dwarf, but it is the baleful, the malign, the cowardly, the vessels of hatred, those who do a bad thing and call it good. Those we fought today, but the willful fool is eternal and will say this is a trick, and so we implore: come to the caves under this valley, where you will find us sharing the peace that cannot be braken.”]]

* The eponymous hero of ''Film/{{Willow}}'' does this to TheChosenOne in the climax, sending her somewhere "where evil cannot touch her!" [[spoiler: Not really. He just used sleight of hand to hide the baby and make Bavmorda ''think'' she was gone. It worked so well even the [[GoodWitchVersusBadWitch good witch fell for it]].]]

* In ''Film/IronMan2'', [[spoiler: limited by the technology of his time, Howard Stark leaves a film recording and a model of the first Stark Expo so that Tony can synthesise the element needed to perfect the Arc Reactor.]]
* ''Film/MissionToMars'' reveals that [[spoiler: the Martians did this after Mars was struck by an asteroid turning it into the lifeless rock we know, although some members of their species did survive and flee to another galaxy. This "light" is the primordial seed that kick-started life on Earth, eventually resulting in humans, all so we can get to Mars and find out the truth]].
* ''Franchise/StarWars'':
** This happens to Luke, Leia, Yoda, Obi-Wan, and the whole proto-rebellion at the end of ''Film/RevengeOfTheSith''. Obi-Wan and Yoda go into exile, the twins are sent to adoptive families in secret, and the rebellious senators vote FOR the newly christened Emperor.
** We [[ForegoneConclusion all know]] [[Film/ANewHope they succeed in getting the Death Star plans]], but ''Film/RogueOne'' shows us the nightmare it took to accomplish that. By the end of the film, [[spoiler:''everyone'' except for those SavedByCanon are dead, dying only with the knowledge that their efforts have brought the plans into the right hands and that there is hope for the galaxy.]]
* In the 1997 film of ''ComicStrip/PrinceValiant'', when Thule was conquered by the Vikings, some survivors managed to escape with the baby prince and dropped him off at an orphanage in England, confident that he would one day grow up and retake the throne.

* In TheStinger to ''Film/AvengersInfinityWar'', [[spoiler: before Nick Fury is one of the victims of Thanos's first usage of the Infinity Gauntlet, he's able to get in one last call... to Film/{{Captain Marvel|2019}}.]]
* In ''Film/BackToTheFuturePartIII'', Doc is trapped in 1885. Since he can't repair the [=DeLorean=] with the technology from that time, he arranges for Marty to return to his own time from 1955 by carefully storing his [=DeLorean=] in a cave, with instructions for his 1955 counterpart on how to restore the machine to working condition.
* ''Film/StillAlice'' has a non-genre example that it plays with slightly. The title character is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease early in the film, and, knowing she will reach a point where she will still be alive and self-aware yet increasingly unable to remember anything important to her, secretes a video on her laptop with instructions to her own future self when she has [[DespairEventHorizon reached that point]] as to where to find a bottle of pills she has hidden away for that possibility, along with instructions on [[DrivenToSuicide how to use them]]. She eventually has to take the laptop with her to remember what to do. [[spoiler: However, it's ultimately subverted: Her caretaker arrives, [[InterruptedSuicide startling her into dropping the pills all over the floor and can't remember what she was supposed to do with them]]]]

** One person from the second time-line [[spoiler:refers to the time-travel project as the only chance to make a better a world for "our children", when someone starts to correct him on how the time-travel won't work like that, he explains that he was referring to all the people of the third time-line, not his flesh and blood offspring.]]

* In ''Literature/ACanticleForLeibowitz'', the world is destroyed by a second nuclear war at the end. However, this time humanity will survive because the [[SaintlyChurch Church has worked hard to]] [[BittersweetEnding send out a ship to colonize other planets]].
* In a Creator/StephenBaxter's short story "The Quagma Datum," a species in the ''very'' early universe creates a lithium 7 nova as a signal to the later universe that they were there.
** In ''Literature/ManifoldSpace'', a coalition of aliens [[spoiler:are working on a mammoth solar sail designed to prevent two neutron stars from colliding and sterilizing the galaxy... except there's another collision—too late to prevent—that's going to occur first, killing the current generation. The sail they're working on is leftover from a previous cycle]].
* This was the avowed intent of Winston's diary in ''Literature/NineteenEightyFour'', at least at one point. He knew it wouldn't work and mostly did it for catharsis. That didn't work either.

* The Xunca in Creator/AlanDeanFoster's ''Literature/HumanxCommonwealth'' universe did a version of this. They were unable to find a way to confront a galaxy-devouring UnseenEvil, and so they fled into AnotherDimension, but they left behind an [[LostSuperweapon enormously powerful weapon]] that, half a billion years later, a new sentient species might find and possibly use against it.
* Creator/ArthurCClarke
** [[http://faculty.winthrop.edu/kosterj/WRIT510/readings/The%20Star.pdf The Star]] features an alien civilization that, upon realizing that their star is about go out in a supernova, decides to create a monument to their culture for future civilizations to find. The protagonist, a Jesuit astronomer whose crew discovered the monument, has a major crisis of faith when he realizes that [[spoiler:the star in question was the Star of Bethlehem, meaning God caused a supernova and destroyed a civilization in order to announce Jesus's birth.]] This was later adapted into an episode of ''Series/TheTwilightZone1985'', with a different ending (because they knew all about the TwistEnding in that version).
** Also in Clarke's second ''A Time Odyssey'' book, ''Sunstorm'', where a dying alien civilization (only few peoples left) and 2 Human-made AI decide to use their last strength to send the third AI back to Earth to give humans more information on the Firstborn.
* {{Inverted|Trope}} in the ''Literature/FightingFantasy'' book ''Black Vein Prophecy'': [[spoiler:Bezenvial, tyrannical king of the Isles of the Dawn, faces death within a few hours and so has his sons entombed in order that his evil legacy can live on. One son becomes the BigBad of the story - the other is the player, who may or may not succeed in overcoming the legacy of the black blood flowing within his veins]].
* Creator/IsaacAsimov's "Literature/ThePsychohistorians": Dr Seldon convinces Chief Commissioner Linge Chen that the project his people are working on is to produce an encyclopedia and publish it across the galaxy before the fall of the [[GalacticSuperpower Galactic Empire]], so that the collapse would not mean the loss of scientific knowledge, giving humanity a headstart on putting things back in order. During "Literature/TheEncyclopedists", however, Seldon [[TheReveal reveals]] that [[spoiler:it was a lie used to trick everyone into being moved to Terminus so that they can form [[RisingEmpire the core of a second galactic empire]]]].
* [[spoiler: Richard]] is revealed to be that in the later books of the ''Literature/SwordOfTruth'' series.
** Prophecy in general, thought YMMV on that one. In fact, in-universe YMMV.
** Several of the tests that Richard has to face. Justified, since the Wizards from the Great War knew that Subtractive Magic was locked away from future generations in the Temple of the Winds before War Wizards started to die out.
* In Creator/StephenBaxter's ''Last Contact'', the Big Rip happens much earlier than expected. There's a throwaway line about how they're discovering new alien stars daily because those aliens are doing very noisy artificial things (like throwing a huge pile of exotic atoms into their sun) simply as a "The universe is ending, but I'm here!" [[spoiler: Or as one of the human characters put it "they were saying goodbye". At the end, there was a device that had been designed by humans to record data about the Rip, in the hope that some of it ''might'' survive and ''might'' be found by and be of use to a hypothetical race in the next universe.]]
* This is the direct origin story of one of the {{Sufficiently Advanced Alien}}s of ''Literature/PerryRhodan''. A highly advanced species faced with a slow decline into extinction embarks on a long-term project to send all of their accumulated knowledge out into the universe in a self-sustaining "Prior Wave". It takes long years and much difficulty until the wave is finally ''sent'', and it travels through the universe for rather longer, touching the ancestors of at least one known civilization along the way...until it gets absorbed, purely by chance, by a cloud of cosmic dust that is going to collapse and form a solar system. Fast forward to the actual formation of the planets, and one of them in the new star's habitable zone is featuring a super-intelligent crystal shell englobing much of it (and eventually its atmosphere) -- the future Empress of Therm. (A poignant scene shows how the last survivors of an expedition launched by the Empress much later, after intelligent organic life has finally evolved on her world and she's gone about building the actual empire she takes her name from, ''discover'' that planet of origin...a dead world with no signs of the original civilization left at all. Even the ruins have long since crumbled into dust.)

* ''Franchise/StarWarsExpandedUniverse'':
** In the ShortStory ''[[Literature/StarWarsTheEndOfHistory The End of History]]'', Jedi Purge survivor Master Uvell entrusts a large collection of Jedi artifacts to antiques dealer Antron Bach, who keeps them safe on an abandoned moon with the hope of one day using them to rebuild the Jedi Order once the Empire falls or simply inspire others with the heroic stories and deeds contained within them.
* In ''Literature/CityOfBones1995'', the Krismen (humanoid marsupials resistant to poison, drought, and desert sun) were created so that at least something ''mostly'' human would be able to survive in the wasteland consuming the known world. (And then it turned out that normal humans could live on the fringes of it just fine, so now the Krismen are a hated underclass whenever they leave the desert to do business in the cities.)
* The ''Franchise/StarTrekExpandedUniverse'' novel ''Eyes of the Beholders'' features the Enterprise encountering an art museum built by a now-extinct race for this purpose.
* ''Literature/TheBookOfMormon'' purports to be a collection of prophetic writings abridged by Mormon, one of the last of a persecuted line of Christians in the ancient Americas. Mormon wrote this abridgement on golden plates that would be hidden in a hillside for centuries, in hopes that the fall of his people would serve as a warning to future inhabitants of the Americas.
* ''Entropy'' by Andrew Galvan features several occurrences of this. First, the numerous 'ambassadors' who were sent out in cryogenic suspension pods on the off chance one of them might meet a SufficientlyAdvancedAlien in time to save humanity from a plague. There was also the incident where a scientist launched a pod containing an artificial intelligence and much of humanity's remaining knowledge. That artificial intelligence would be the first in a line of AIs until Noah, the hovering ball of energy we come to know and distrust in the present, at the end of the Universe. By the end of the book, he has proven that even super-advanced AIIsACrapshoot.
* ''Literature/ApollosGrove'' is the story of the last Oracle of Delphi, who knows she is the last Oracle and whose mentor gave her the task of writing a chronicle of her temple and her faith so that people in the future would know both existed. She succeeds.

* Creator/KarlSchroeder's ''Permanence'' involves this, as ancient aliens realise that [[spoiler: species eventually evolve away from intelligence, and that the only thing that lasts are the ecological niches that give rise to intelligence.]]
* In Creator/DavidBrin's ''Literature/{{Existence}}'' it turns out that the alien personalities in the Artifact are all from extinct species, and they want humans to join them before we become extinct. While the other Artifact that is calling them "liars" is from one species that decided [[spoiler: the expense of building and launching millions of Artifacts is what killed off all the others, and they're trying to convince the few extant species not to do it.]]
* As a pandemic rages in ''Literature/{{Idlewild}}'', available resources are split between desperate treatment and the Gedaechtnis project, [[spoiler: which genetically engineers children who will be immune to the disease and builds life-support systems to raise them to adulthood sans caretakers.]]
* Motie civilisation is stuck in a cycle of this in ''Literature/TheMoteInGodsEye''. Since Moties must reproduce regularly or die, their population inevitably increases until overpopulation results in the collapse of their civilisation, usually through war over resources. At some point in the past, they came up with the idea of building museums storing as much of their science and technology as possible, so that they will be able to rebuild faster after the collapses and hopefully have time to find a way to break the cycle before the next one occurs.
* An unintentional example in ''Literature/TheHistoryOfTheGalaxy''. Millions of years ago, our corner of the galaxy underwent a devastating cataclysm in the form of a HordeOfAlienLocusts called Forerunners moving through space, attracted to starlight, [[PlanetEater eating all matter]] in their path. Three of the ancient races in the region manage to save themselves by hiding inside a globular star cluster and using powerful gravity generators to cloak it from outside view (the gravity generators kept light from escaping the cluster; thus the Forerunners couldn't see it). A race of FishPeople called Delphons chose to stay and fight. Their only means of fighting the Forerunners was their own stars, which they used as beacons to attract the swarm and then set off a nova reaction. By the time the swarm was destroyed, the Delphons were extinct. Three million years later, a human archaeological team finds a group of frozen Delphons and several inactive Forerunners. A CorruptCorporateExecutive downloads the memories of one of the dead Delphons and puts them into the brain of a human soldier. At the same time, he experiments with the Forerunners, not realizing the danger they represent. In the end, it's the memories of the dead Delphon that allow the soldier to figure out a way to stop the Forerunners (a handful of them rip apart a human fleet just before).
** One of the memories experienced by the soldier has him looking at a hominid, implying that the Delphons had a [[AncientAstronauts colony on Earth]] and pulled a species-wide HeroicSacrifice to allow younger races to evolve.
* The eponymous character of ''Mere'', a ''Literature/GreatShip'' story, is the only survivor of the alien Tila civilization. Mere, a TransHuman, spent millennia in interstellar space, entombed in the half-dead hulk of a starship before crashing down on the Tila's world, alternating between being worshiped and killed ([[HealingFactor she gets better]]). The Tila eventually realize their BinarySuns are in doomed to collide with each other, destroying their world in the process. They salvage the remains of her ship, seal an unwilling Mere into it along with their racial history, as only she can [[TimeAbyss survive the long journey]], and then shoot the ship towards the only transmission they've detected; faint messages advertising the [[PlanetSpaceship Greatship]]'s journey through the galaxy.
* A humorous example with [[Series/TheDailyShow Jon Stewart]]'s ''Literature/EarthTheBook''. The book itself is styled as a guide to an alien race that would someday visit Earth AfterTheEnd. Early in the book, he tells his readers (or non-readers for audiobook listeners) to mail a DNA sample (e.g. hair) to one of two vaults: the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and [[ChurchOfHappyology Trementina Base]]. At the end of the book, he tells the aliens to go look in those two places and suggests they use their advanced technology to "reconstitute" the human race and, perhaps, use them as slaves ("frankly, those bastards should be glad to be alive"). He then suggests that maybe working ''with'' humanity might a better use of the clones. The book has a BittersweetEnding, with the Future Alien Questions telling humanity that it's time for us to go. Jon sadly replies "We know."
* Part of TheReveal at the end of ''Space Engineers'' by Creator/CliffordSimak. [[spoiler:The dust cloud that later formed Solar system was created when two stars collided. One of those stars had a planet inhabited by HumanoidAliens -- Pluto. Plutonians managed to move their planet away from the impact, then put it in orbit around Sun, albeit too far. They built Space Engineers to find an inhabitable planet for them, but the wait was too long and they started to die out. Then they seeded Earth with life and pre-programmed evolution so that eventually there would be humanoids who would rightfully inherit everything.]]
* The ancient Atlanteans in ''Decipher'' by Stel Pavlou. They couldn't save their civilization from [[spoiler:a periodic solar matter ejection]], but they started building a machine that could save future civilizations. The machine would continue the construction on its own. To make sure that their instructions could be understood in the future, they [[spoiler:created religions]].
* In ''Literature/TheArtsOfDarkAndLight'', [[EvilOverlord Witchking Mauragh]] left a villainous one behind when the elves destroyed his remnant of the old Witchking kingdom, in the form of [[spoiler: his hidden son]].
* In ''Literature/StarpilotsGrave'', it is revealed that the rogue Magelord that murdered the titular craft's crew and set it adrift did so with the intent of it coming into the hands of a student that would help bring true peace to the galaxy after he had departed the land of the living. He may have also [[ThanatosGambit arraigned his demise]] to transfer another heirloom to the same student in the form of his staff, unthinkingly thrust [[ReallySevenHundredYearsOld minutes after his death]] by a less metaphysically inclined student into the hands of a near-catatonic Adept traumatized by the loss of her own to the Void.
* In ''Literature/BewareOfChicken'', the last [[spoiler:Azure Emperor]], after the near-total destruction of his territory and death or brainwashing of its citizens, pours all his experiences into a memory crystal along with a spirit tasked with finding him a worthy successor. The crystal remains hidden in a cave for thousands of years, but is eventually found. In a subversion, however, none of the people who find it are interested in becoming the [[spoiler:Azure Emperor's]] successor, and the isolation of the territory when the apocalypse happened means that there was a whole world outside that was largely unaffected. The area was some time ago incorporated into a larger empire, and the standard of living, while not the near-utopia enjoyed by the ancients, is pretty decent all things considered, meaning "the future" doesn't need the "light" it was flung nearly as much as its creator thought it would.
* TheReveal of ''Literature/Thud!'' is a message recorded by [[spoiler:rival kings who were thought to have killed each other, but their corpses are found sitting over a makeshift board game together.]]
** [[Spoiler: “‘And yet we say this. Here, in this cave at the end of the world, peace is made between dwarf and troll, and we will march beyond the hand of Death together. For the enemy is not Troll, nor it is Dwarf, but it is the baleful, the malign, the cowardly, the vessels of hatred, those who do a bad thing and call it good. Those we fought today, but the willful fool is eternal and will say this is a trick, and so we implore: come to the caves under this valley, where you will find us sharing the peace that cannot be braken.”]]
* ''Literature/ShipCore'' starts with one. In the prologue, an AI known as The Entity is losing the fight with Humanity and launches 5 torpedoes. Four of them go to FTL and flee to unknown stars. The fifth winds up in orbit around a gas giant, in a debris field, leading to MixAndMatchMan Alex waking up, by her estimates, 176 years later, with a life-support system about to fail, in a ship that's falling apart, and having to run around fixing everything before she keels over, dead.
* Parodied in Creator/KurtVonnegut's short satire "The Big Space Fuck", where Earth has become such a CrapsackWorld from pollution that a rocket is packed with eight-hundred pounds of freeze dried jizzum and launched at Andromeda in the faint hope that it might restart humanity there.

* While doing so wasn't ''necessary'' in ''[[https://archiveofourown.org/works/13663506?view_full_work=true Collateral]]'', it was the safer option. [[WesternAnimation/MiraculousLadybug Marinette and Cat Noir]], the former having become a [[Anime/PuellaMagiMadokaMagica Magical Girl]] due to desperation after Hawk Moth stole her Miraculous, could have used the Miraculous Wish to fix things, but the resulting wish would have had disastrous consequences even worse than making a deal with Kyubey. Wishing a solution into the future, on the other hand, reduces the damage considerably. And so she and Cat use the Miraculous wish to wish up a solution to the Incubators. [[spoiler: Within the year in Japan, Madoka and Homura are born]].

*** Which is subverted in the [[SeasonalRot sequel]] ''Last Men in London'' when they realize that their method of distribution was actually [[DownerEnding destroying the seeds it was supposed to disseminate]]. And by the time they realized this, [[FromBadToWorse their civilization was too poisoned by radiation to fix the problem]].

** And in ''Literature/ManifoldSpace'', a coalition of aliens [[spoiler:are working on a mammoth solar sail designed to prevent two neutron stars from colliding and sterilizing the galaxy... except there's another collision—too late to prevent—that's going to occur first, killing the current generation. And the sail they're working on is leftover from a previous cycle]].

* ''Series/BuckRogersInTheTwentyFifthCentury''. Although it was completely an accident. And the fact that although the civilization ''he'' knew was destroyed, a brand new society took its place.

** It's the whole premise of ''VideoGame/HaloReach'', [[DoomedByCanon as you already know]] that the entire planet will be destroyed with barely any survivors, and that the UNSC ''Pillar of Autumn'' will be able to escape with the coordinates to the first Halo. The last parts of the game are all about retrieving the coordinates from an ancient Forerunner ruin before it's overrun by enemies and taking the data to the ''Autumn'' in the hope that it will find something at the coordinates to help save humanity from total extinction. At this point, you're one of the last humans left alive on the entire planet, and then the ''Autumn'' takes off as you stay behind to cover its escape, watching it disappear into the sky. [[spoiler:And then you're completely alone, with an infinite wave of enemies crashing down on you.]]

** When Vichy France was invaded, all the French warships stationed at Toulon were sunk by their crew to prevent their capture by the Nazis. All except for the submarine Casabianca, which escaped the harbor to fight for the allies. In order for this to happen, dock crews had to risk their lives by helping and the other submarines of the fleet had [[HeroicSacrifice sacrifice themselves to draw fire]]. They did this under the promise that Casabianca make her survival count.

* This is the exact definition of and reason why art and culture are made. Humans crystallise little pieces of their own souls in their artistic creations and fling them out into the world so that something of themselves will live on when they are gone. It’s sometimes argued that people never truly die, as long as people are aware of and/or remember them - while there’s obviously no one alive who directly remembers the great artists and writers of the 1600s, the fact so many people are still aware of their efforts and go out of their way to learn about or see their works in person is this trope in spades.

* [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gutenberg Project Gutenberg]], a volunteer-run digital library, was created by Michael S. Hart to preserve public domain stories for future generations could easily access culture and literacy.
* One consequence of modern copyright laws is [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_work orphan works]]: intellectual property with no verifiable owner who can be contacted. People who want to preserve and digitize these works don't out of fear of being sued or fined heavily under copyright violation statutes.
* In the realm of theoretical physics speculating about multiverses, it has been proposed that a doomed civilization in a dying Universe could send some sort of message or even some sort of Ark-like capsule that contained its knowledge, cultural legacy, etc. up to the possibility of it rebuilding its builders to any of the new Universes being born in such scenarios However it has been shown it's far more likely they'd be either swallowed by a black hole, which would also be formed in such types of multiverses, or drowned in countless fake messages and capsules formed by natural processes as [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain Boltzmann brains]] would too, with the only solution being to build ''a whole lot'' of them ([[https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9909143 Source 1]], [[https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0102010 Source 2]]).

* An inversion of this was the premise of ''WesternAnimation/SamuraiJack''. Aku, the BigBad, was not strong enough to defeat the eponymous hero, so instead flings him into the future. Jack arrives in an era where Aku is the unquestioned ruler.
** The origin story plays it straight. When Aku attacked Jack's homeland, Jack was safely evacuated and spent the next 20 years traveling the world and training. He returned too late to save his people, but [[spoiler:eventually made it back and saved them after 50 years in the future.]]

* Villainous example in ''WesternAnimation/BeastWars'', where [[spoiler:the [[Franchise/TransformersGeneration1 original Megatron]] hijacked the Voyager space probe to hide a message for his descendants to use the developing Transwarp technology to travel back to the past and defeat the Autobots[[note]]Although the Voyager space probes were both launched in 1977, years before the Decepticons woke up after crashing onto Earth[[/note]]. His descendent Megatron stole the disk and used it to travel to Earth's distant past [[MakeWrongWhatOnceWentRight and destroy any chances of Autobot victory over the decepticons]]]].

** In the Wano arc, it's revealed [[spoiler:that Kozuki Toki LITERALLY did this with Momonosuke, Kin'emon, Kanjuro, Raizo, and Okiku, using her Time-Time Fruit power to send them 20 years to the future, where they could find allies and raise up a rebellion to defeat Orochi and Kaido.]]

* ''Manga/DragonBall'' does an inversion of this trope, at least from Bulma's perspective: she builds a time machine and sends her son Trunks 20 years back in time to prevent their apocalyptic future. Due to the way time travel works in ''Dragon Ball'' this doesn't affect her future whatsoever, but it does mean that there is one NOT ravaged by Androids, and that's enough for her. Similarly, Future Trunks goes out of his way to destroy Cell as an embryo in the past: again this is of no benefit to him, but it means that Cell can't hijack a time machine once he's fully grown to terrorize another timeline.

Whether it's [[LastOfHisKind your last son]], a [[MacGuffin powerful artifact]], [[LostSuperweapon a weapon]], or even a simple [[ApocalypticLog warning]], you send other people in danger a means to recognize and hopefully avert it. Sending this shining beacon can involve an escape (space) ship, TimeTravel, being put in [[HumanPopsicle suspended animation]], [[SealedGoodInACan Sealing forces of good away for a rainy day]], or a SubspaceAnsible of some kind. This trope is common in SpeculativeFiction and {{Fantasy}}, so the means of delivery can vary considerably.

** In the Wano arc, its revealed [[spoiler:that Kozuki Toki LITERALLY did this with Momonosuke, Kin'emon, Kanjuro, Raizo, and Okiku, using her Time-Time Fruit power to send them 20 years to the future, where they could find allies and raise up a rebellion to defeat Orochi and Kaido.]]
** A OnceMoreWithClarity moment in the Egghead arc reveals that [[spoiler:Bartholomew Kuma's true intention in saving the Straw Hat Pirates during the Sabaody Archipelago arc was to ensure they would be able to train and fulfill their full potential so they could one day save the world. Their actions during that arc, particularly Luffy attacking a World Noble in order to defend Hachi, a fish-man, reminded Kuma of the legends of Sun God Nika he grew up with as a child and convinced him that if there ''is'' someone meant to carry on Nika's will, it must be Luffy. As the readers know by that point, Kuma was correct -- Luffy doesn't just carry Nika's will, he ''is'' the Sun God Nika, as the second person to awaken his devil fruit]].

* ''Literature/Thud!'' features a message recorded by [[Spoiler: rival kings who were thought to have killed each other, but are found sitting over a makeshift board game together:]]