Apocalypse How / Class 3a

Apocalypse How
0 | 1 | 2 | 3a, 3b | 4 | 5 | 6
X | X-2 | X-3 | X-4 | X-5 | Z

President Whitmore: Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Chicago—destroyed.
General Grey: If you calculate the time it takes to destroy a city and move on, we’re looking at the worldwide destruction of every major city within the next 36 hours.
Whitmore: We’re being exterminated.

— Independence Day

Planetary-scale extinction of the dominant species on a planet, via unnatural causes (ie: someone did something, human or otherwise). The biosphere as whole survives, and may someday produce another intelligent species, but the time of the world's current rulers is over.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Attack on Titan: Part of the backstory. A little over a century prior, strange beings known as Titans appeared out of nowhere and began to devour any humans they could find. The survivors have spent the last century living within three 50-meter Walls, with all information about the Outside World banned and mention that mixed-race heroine Mikasa is the last surviving Asian suggest extinction of multiple ethnic groups. The surviving population numbers in the hundred-thousands, and is under constant threat of extinction from either Titans (if the Walls are broken again), starvation from famine and food shortages, or even civil war due to the corrupt and oppressive government. The series begins with 20% of the population being wiped out when the first of the three Walls is lost. However, almost everything just mentioned is later revealed to be a complete lie; while the island the main cast lives on is overrun with Titans, the rest of the world is filled with thriving human civilizations. In fact, the Titans themselves turn out to be just tools of the most powerful human nation, which just so happens to be a Suspiciously Similar Substitute for Nazi Germany.
• Cowboy Bebop: The Gate Disaster takes out half the moon and makes Earth uninhabitable for all but the hardiest of humans. It should, however, be noted that the rest of the terraformed planets and moons in the system are okay; Earth is still in contact with the greater solar community, but is regarded as a backwater. This makes this Class 3 in theory, but it's really more a large-scale Class 0.
• Devilman sees the world slowly fall apart as a result of the machinations of Ryo Asuka, who is actually the fallen angel Satan. The war between demons and humanity eventually leaves humanity extinct, and the world is destroyed in the final battle between Satan and Devilman. DEVILMAN crybaby shows another version of this apocalypse: after the existence of demons becomes public knowledge, humanity becomes paranoid and largely wipes itself out in the world war that follows.
• Dragon Ball:
  • Dragon Ball Z:
    • The Tuffle race is wiped out by the Saiyans who become giant apes at the full moon. They work under Frieza's planet trade to do this as a career choice.
    • When Buu unleashes a Beam Spam of epic proportions from the Lookout and kills every human not on the Lookout, just because he could. Piccolo had pointed out he'd promised to kill every human on the planet before he went after the Z Fighters, hoping they'd get an extra day to train... only for Buu to perform what he dubbed the Human Extinction Attack. He later went and killed the few remaining people that were on the Lookout by turning them into food and eating them.
  • Dragon Ball Super: Goku Black hunts down and kills off 99 percent of humanity in Future Trunks's timeline.
• Dr. STONE: The main premise involves every human in the world being turned to stone, and finding out the cause of this is part of the major Myth Arc of the series.
• What will be the outcome in Gantz if the Giant aliens succeed in their invasion. To make a long story short, they're turning us into snack food, like an alien equivalent to wings or potato chips.
• It's not explained what happened in Girls' Last Tour, but whatever it was wiped out most of the life on the artificial world where the protagonists live. At this point, humanity's population appears to have dropped well below sustainable levels. Its suggested that Chito and Yuuri are very nearly the last people alive on the entire planet.
• Gundam franchise:
  • After War Gundam X came very close to this. It is established that a massive Colony Drop killed 99% of the Human race at the end of the last war. It has recovered since then, however.
  • This is the Big Bad's goal in Mobile Suit Gundam SEED. Due to his method of choice, it just might reach Class 4 or Class 5.
• The Death Force of MD Geist was designed to completely annihilate human life on Jerra. Geist is tapped to help prevent its activation. Then he activates it himself so he'll always have something to fight.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion has the Human Instrumentality Project which causes the entirety of humanity to become extinct and become one of the angels that they fought for the entire series. Subverted when Shinji rejects it, allowing humans to return as they choose.
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica: It is explained in episode 10 that Madoka herself can cause this. After a few timeline loops, she begins to transform into the incredibly powerful Kriemhild Gretchen, who will wipe out all human life in a matter of days. It's a good thing that, when she finally makes a contract with Kyubey at the end of the series, her wish is to be able to erase all Witches in all timelines, including her own Witch (of course, this comes with the side effect of being written out of existence almost entirely, but for Madoka, it's completely worth it.)
• In the Read or Die OVA, the villain plans to play Beethoven's lost "Death Symphony" worldwide to wipe out the human race via induced suicide.
• Super Atragon: The Big Bad is attempting this to the Earth's surface by building a giant ring that — once complete — will cook the Earth's surface with radiation bombardment. Note that this method that would've actually caused a Class 5 if it was achieved.
• It becomes an important plot point in Utawarerumono that scientists accidentally roused a malignant god in the distant past and brought about one of these.
• The ultimate goal of the Dragons of Earth in X1999 is to destroy humanity because they believe that humans are responsible for the slow destruction of Mother Earth. One vision of the Dragons of Earth winning is all human settlements are Reclaimed by Nature.
• Sakyo's Evil Plan in the latter stages of the Dark Tournament in YuYu Hakusho is revealed to be to create a stable portal between the Earth and the Makai so that demons of every class can pass through, which would result in a Class 2 at the very best, though with the sheer power of demon fighters that we see throughout the series it is more likely to be in this class, possibly even a Class 4 or Class 5, depending on how much plant and animal life the ensuing demon hordes leave behind them.

Comic Books

• In Post-Crisis Martian Manhunter continuity, this is what Malefic did to Mars, using a virus to kill all Green Martians.
• In Archie Comics Sonic the Hedgehog Issue #124, it is originally revealed that Mobius is actually Earth, approximately 10,000+ years after an alien invasion had ended all life (human and non-human)on Earth, except for several pockets of humanity that survived in hidden cities, something that is expanded upon in the Sonic the Hedgehog Official Comic Encyclopedia (which covers all pre-Super Genesis Wave Sonic information and material).
• In Superman story arc The Supergirl Saga, everyone in the alternate Earth of the Pocket Universe were killed by that universe's General Zod, Faora (renamed Zaora) and Quex-Ul. They even destroyed the planet's biosphere so no one would survive without a spacesuit. Matrix is the only survivor. Also, Earth and Krypton were the only inhabited planets, thanks to the manipulation of the Time-Trapper. Likely, any other Kryptonian criminals in the Phantom Zone remain trapped there. Following Zero Hour: Crisis in Time!, the lifeless Pocket Universe is wiped from continuity, making this a Class X-4.

Fan Works

• In A New World, the remnant of Lunarian society is so scared of human expansion on the False Moon, they see fit to seize control of Earth's nuclear arsenals and trigger a colossal war. It turns out to be worse than useless, as it was exactly what Yukari wanted them to do. Earth does suffer greatly... but the Lunarians are left extinct and their worst nightmare, the complete fusion of the worlds of magic and science, is brought into reality by humans and the magic races.
• In Calvin & Hobbes: The Series, the Lightning Man aims to use massive amounts of electricity to kill everyone in the world via heart attacks. The heroes have a And Then What? discussion with him, and he lowers the death toll a bit.
• Creation in Conquest Quest seems to have experienced this, which kickstarted the whole plot.
• In Home Is Where Your Curse Is, a solar storm triggered by Gosunkugi and his cult exterminates most of humanity, sparing only Ranma due to his being trapped inside a magic artifact. Much later, he's polymorphed into a pony upon being released, effectively rendering his species extinct.
• Hours 'Verse: The Fall, as the destruction of all humankind, is a Class 3a apocalypse. After the Investigation Team dies in the TV World in Hamuko's timeline, Izanami begins spreading her fog, causing panic and turning people into Shadows. The ensuing chaos results in humanity's despair making Erebus too strong for Hamuko's Great Seal to handle, breaking it and causing Nyx to bring about the Fall.
• In The Institute Saga, Magneto almost initiates an accidental version while trying to create a Mass Super-Empowering Event.
• In The Jaded Eyes Series Harry/Tristan kills off all the muggles but for a few he leaves alive to be used as slaves or blood banks for his Creature allies.
• Ponies After People: Homo sapiens is gone, transformed into ponies and other magical beings, and what few former humans remain have a very steep uphill battle to keep society and civilization the way it was. It turns out to be because the universe was about to be flooded with magic, which is fatal to humans, so the ponies from another universe devised a spell that would transform humanity to save them.
• RWBY: Reckoning has the titular event. From what has been established, someone seeks a Soul Jar, and wishes to use it to grant the Creatures of Grimm with souls. From there, the now intelligent monsters will ravage Remnant until no life is left. And it's not just Remnant: apparently, they plan to unleash the soul-charged Grimm onto Earth soon after...
• Three times in Tales of the Emperasque — the Emperor once cleanses a daemon world with his Breath Weapon and once causes continental shift from the orbit. The third time, it's the Imperial Navy that drops a cyclonic torpedo on an Orc-infested world.

Films — Live-Action

• 12 Monkeys had a virus exterminate 99% of humanity and render the surface uninhabitable to them due to viral residues. No other lifeforms were affected, and the animals have reclaimed the surface.
• Blade II: The heroes believe the Reaper Strain will cause Planetary Extinction of both humans and vampires; it already threatens to cause a Zombie Apocalypse in the vampire race, and Damaskinos suggests that once there are no vampires left for the utterly-ravenous Reapers to feed on, the entire human race will be next.
• The Big Bad of the disaster flick Geostorm wants to annihilate the United States' rivals and enemies with a giant Weather-Control Machine while leaving the US itself (and probably a few of its protectorates) largely unscathed. Thing is, he intended to kill the one person capable of stopping the titular geostorm as part of his plan, and considering how chaotic and unpredictable even our normal weather can be, chances are he would've doomed mankind as a whole rather sooner than later.
• I Am Legend revolves around one of these. Mankind is either dead or zombified to a man, except for Will Smith and a few other people. However, the animals are doing just fine, and in fact have escaped the zoos and colonised the streets of New York. (There are lions.) The original book, however, is a 3b.
  • In the movie, dogs and rats are also affected by the virus, although it's not made clear how they're doing in the larger sense. One would assume they had a dieback/zombie rate similar to humans, at least in populated areas, but nothing's said about it one way or the other.
    • It's mentioned at one point that dogs are immune to the airborne strain of the virus, though remain vulnerable to contact strains. The only "zombie" rats ever seen are those being experimented on, perhaps implying the same applies to them.
• Independence Day: the invading Aliens attempt this on the human race after that they planned on colonizing and draining the resources of Earth with their Queen and move on. Twenty years later they've become much more sophisticated by launching one giant ship to drain the Earth's core which will no doubt cause the same effect .
• The aliens (from another dimension) in Pacific Rim have essentially the same goal as those in Independence Day. Destroy humanity with kaiju, use up Earth's resources until it's a barren husk, then move on to the next target.
• In The Last Witch Hunter, this is the Big Bad's endgame — to bring about the total destruction of the human race and civilization so that the witches can thrive.
• By the time of Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, the Zombie Apocalypse has caused the human population to dwindle from seven billion to less than five thousand. The Umbrella Corporation considers this disappointingly incomplete.
• The plot of the James Bond film Moonraker is that the villain wants to use a Depopulation Bomb to kill all humans on Earth and repopulate it with a select group of people under his leadership.
• Planet of the Apes (1968) and its sequels.
• This is essentially what happened to the planet of Miranda in Serenity as the result of a botched Alliance experiment. The chemical that they created to try to curb people's violent impulses, the Pax, worked a little too well, causing nearly the entire population to simply lie down and die. The tiny percentage that survived had the exact opposite reaction to the Pax, becoming the psychotically violent and cannibalistic Reavers.
• X-Men Film Series:
  • X2: X-Men United: Stryker attempts to use Dark Cerebro to psychically attack and murder every mutant on the planet, and Magneto tried to sabotage the plan and use it to kill every human on the planet instead. Both were fortunately foiled.
  • X-Men: First Class: Sebastian Shaw plans a Planetary-Species Extinction (humans die in a nuclear holocaust, mutants inherit the Earth).
  • X-Men: Days of Future Past: This appears to be the severity in the Bad Future, after the Sentinels' mutant-exterminating directive caused them to turn their attention to also exterminating any humans who might have mutant descendants. New York City is an apocalyptic desolate ruin, and both mutants and humans who dare support them are being exterminated in concentration camps the size of Central Park, whilst the fact the very worst humans are now in charge of what's left leaves hopes for a successful repopulation that much less likely.
  • X-Men: Apocalypse: Accidental Pun aside, the Big Bad Apocalypse's goal is to cause an extinction-level event where the scope is Planetary and its severity is Societal Collapse in the form of wiping out all cities killing billions, followed by Mass Hypnosis of the survivors.
• Self-inflicted (accidentally) by the Krell, in the backstory to Forbidden Planet, when their mentally-operated creation machine was completed. Their subconscious impulses triggered it to create monsters and threats that wiped out their species.
• The 1998 made-for-television film World War III depicts what might have happened if Mikhail Gorbachev, instead of bringing about the collapse of the USSR with his reform policies, had been deposed in a coup and replaced by a communist hard-liner, causing the Cold War to escalate into a full-blown conflict. The film concludes with the two sides firing their entire nuclear arsenal at each other, in the process destroying all traces of human civilization, as indicated by the Wham Line, "There is no further historical record of what happens next."

Literature

• All Tomorrows: Technically their descendants live on in horribly modified Body Horror forms, but most human-colonized planets experienced this via the Qu invasion. Millions of years later, the Gravital fully exterminate nearly all these species' descendants.
• Towards the end of the 54-book Animorphs series, the Andalite military decides that the only way to stop the Yeerk conquest of the galaxy is to allow the Yeerks to concentrate their forces on Earth, then to "quarantine" the planet (in other words: blasting it to hell with their strongest ships. It would have been a bad day to be an Earthling if that happened).
• The "Final War," a major thread in the Bolo series of short stories, is very aptly named: the Terran Concordiat and Melconian Empire pull a Class 3 or worse on every inhabited planet either government has. Usually from ground level, with huge tanks. The overall effect is effectively a Class 2 on a Galactic scale.
• Cthulhu will do this when The Stars Are Right. Eldritch Abominations running rampant usually falls somewhere between here and Class 5.
• In the short story "Dark Benediction" by Walter M. Miller, a mysterious disease called neuroderm causes society to collapse. It turns out the "disease" is a microorganism sent by another civilization to help humanity, not destroy it.
• The Empirium Trilogy: The Undying Emperor's main goal is to wipe out all of humanity and restore the angels to their former glory. It's later suggested that not even other worlds are safe from him.
• Margaret Atwood's "Flood" trilogy (Oryx and Crake and sequels) had an engineered disease that was intended to be a Class 3 — wiping out humans and replacing them with a genetically modified humanoid species, but, as of the publishing of the first two books, it seems that it will be a Class 2 bordering on high Class 1.
• Galápagos: Technically the human race does survive in the end, despite all but a handful of shipwrecked survivors being wiped out by plague, but you can't really consider them human anymore by the time they do get back on their feet. Their brains have atrophied and their limbs evolved into flippers. The ghostly narrator sees this as a good thing.
• The basic backplot of Orson Scott Card's Homecoming Saga, although it takes four books before you actually find that out.
• Nick Sagan lampshades this in Idlewild and its sequels, saying that it wasn't really the end of the world because insects survived and thrived. The event itself could probably be called a 2.9 (10 surviving humans) — not to mention several thousand cryogenicaly frozen people.
• I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison. A giant supercomputer has nuked the Earth and kept the remaining few humans alive in order to torture them. Things get worse.
• In It, this is what Patrick Hockstetter thinks will happen if he dies, since he believes himself to be the only actual (real) being.
  He was a sociopath, and perhaps, by that hot July in 1958, he had become a full-fledged psychopath. He could not remember a time when he had believed that other people -– any other living creatures, for that matter -– were “real.” He believed himself to be an actual creature, probably the only one in the universe, but was by no means convinced that his actuality made him “real”....He didn’t want to die; as the only “real” person, he wasn’t supposed to die. If he did, everyone else in the world would die with him.
• In The Last Ship, the crew of a US Navy destroyer are searching for a safe haven after the world is destroyed by a nuclear war. They find some scattered groups of survivors in the western Mediterranean, but it's clear that they won't last long. Every other place the ship visits is completely devoid of human life even when there is no evidence of nuclear strikes, implying that they were depopulated by fallout.
• It's implied that this is what's happening in Richard Matheson's two-page vignette "Lemmings." Two cops stand by a coast highway, watching people simply walk into the ocean, come-as-you-are, for apparently no reason whatsoever, in an unexplained phenomenon that has been going on for weeks. ^note  The reason this example is in Class 3A is readily apparent—human beings have no natural inclination to drown themselves.
• In Lilith's Brood, the last few human survivors of a nuclear war are rescued by aliens. However, though they'll be returned to a fixed-up Earth, they won't be human anymore, and once the bioships are fully grown and leave the planet, it will cause a Class 5 or possibly even Class 6 Apocalypse.
• The Longest Joke in the World: The lever. If pulled, it kills all humans. It's a safety measure, in case the species goes bad.
• This is the worst-case prognosis of the Synthetic Plague in "The Moral Virologist", since the virus that causes it spreads through the air and has a ludicrously high R0 (the virus was intended to kill everyone who has ever been promiscuous). The Cruel Twist Ending reveals that not just sexually active adults are affected, but babies who receive breastmilk also die due to the proteins in the milk switching the virus on. Since the virus doesn't have a time limit for how long ago fornication happened to let it kill someone, presumably the same is true regarding how long it has been since one drank one's mother's milk, which, of course, is pretty much everyone. However, the story ends before we find out, and the creator of the virus is unaffected. No word on whether he was breastfed as a baby.
• The ants end up accidentally doing this in Of Ants and Dinosaurs when, without the dinosaurs needed to reset their timer, two antimatter bombs go off on the planet. This leads to the extinction of the dinosaurs as a whole.
• In Rainbow Six, the environmentalist extremists plan this with an engineered disease to wipe the planet clean of all humans except for their own community.
• Spiral, the second book in Koji Suzuki's The Ring trilogy ends like this. Sadako's curse will inevitably spread across the world, destroying the human species. That is, of course, until the next book turned everything on its head by revealing that it all took place inside of a computer
• Signal to Noise by Eric S. Nylund ends with the world as a barren wasteland due to deceleration — the engineered part comes from the alien that gave humans the technology that caused the deceleration in the first place — in the second book A Signal Shattered explains that Wheeler specifically caused the destruction of earth so that the protagonist would have something in common with a group of aliens on the run from Wheeler — to lubricate the brokering of a deal!
• In Stephen Baxter's Titan, China drops an asteroid in the Atlantic to destroy America, but underestimates its force and causes The End of the World as We Know It.
• Wool: The American government eradicated all humans on Earth with nanobots roughly 300 years before the events of the series. The fifty silos are the only known remnant of humanity, and only one of them is intended to tunnel to the surface and start life anew after the 500 years are up. It appears to be a Class 4 at first glance, but once the surviving residents of Silos 17 and 18 reach the surface, they discover that the barren section of the planet only encompasses the region in which the silos are kept.

Live-Action TV

• According to Rich, In the Community episode "Epidemiology", a Class 3 would occur within a year and a half. However, seeing as everyone is cured by turning the thermostat down to 58 degrees, one suspects this virus might have a little trouble making it out of Colorado.
• Doctor Who:
  • "The Unquiet Dead": The gaseous Gelth plan to kill all humans and inhabit their corpses.
  • "Father's Day": The Doctor confirms the Reapers, who are devouring all human life they come across in 1987, will cause this in the end. They're sterilizing the entire Earth, leaving only pockets of human survivors in places made safe against the Reapers by advanced age like the church, but the Reapers will still get through into these places with time. Fortunately for the world and for history, the Reset Button gets hit.
  • "The Doctor Dances": The nanogenes threaten to precisely cause this in the year 1941. They've mistaken the zombified form they've transformed Jamie into as the healthy form for human beings, "and now it's time to fix all the rest" of humanity.
  • "The Parting of the Ways": The Daleks are back, and their plan is pretty much this. The Doctor's solution to save humanity? Kill at least all intelligent life on or near Earth, Dalek and human (granted, he didn't have time to actually remove the "and human" bit from the weapon) — and he squicked at holding a gun on a guy. The Daleks talk him out of doing this because it'd give him another genocide on his record, even though he points out there are humans elsewhere who would survive this. By the end of the episode the Daleks seem to have enacted this on Earth.
  • "Silence in the Library": An interesting case in that the Library is a planet which is technically an entirely-artificial futuristic building, and all 4,022 of its immediate (and obviously non-native) visitors disappeared off its surface in an absolute Depopulation Bomb, leaving only the swarms of Vashta Nerada while the planet was sealed off. The next episode explains how and why the Depopulation Bomb happened and sees it get a total Reset Button with essentially no lasting damage to the affected.
  • "The End of Time": All of humanity except for two people is transformed into the "Master Race", resulting in billions of duplicates of the Master. Fortunately, this is eventually reversed by another villain.
  • In "The Time of Angels", Alfava Metraxis suffered mysterious Dominant Species Extinction 400 years before the 51st century time setting. The Doctor theorizes the Weeping Angels, an entire army of whom are living in the extinct species' catacombs, caused it.
  • There have been a couple Alternate Timelines where alien threats such as the Daleks and the Kin invade Earth and successfully exterminate humanity; in "City of the Daleks" audio story "The Shadow Vortex", and novel "Nothing O'Clock".
• In Lost, if the Man in Black manages to escape the Island after being stuck there for two millennia, he plans to wipe out all human life.
• In the 2000 two-part episode of The Outer Limits (1995), "Final Appeal", it's revealed that all episodes are alternate timelines and futures and that while many of them actually are tied together into semi coherence. the episode ends with a time traveler with a grudge detonating a fusion bomb taking out most of the eastern seaboard, rendering their arguing about this timeline's rejection of tech stronger than a light bulb pretty much moot.
• In Primeval, the not-too-distant future appears to be populated entirely by giant mutant bat things that we unleashed upon ourselves. The series is non-specific if this has wiped out humanity entirely in a full Class 3, or just mostly, but given the ferocity of the future predators and the abandoned state of cities it is at least a 2. The Big Bad does state we've wiped ourselves out, but we're not about to take a villain's word for it just yet and the series does fall on the idealistic side of the Sliding Scale so there may yet be hope. Given the geologic timescales with which this series usually plays around, the Future Predators may not have originally played any direct role in humanity's downfall. It's just as plausible that they evolved naturally, long after we'd gone extinct, and that they would never have met humans if the Anomalies hadn't brought some into the present.
• In the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Year of Hell", the Krenim had developed a weapon to delete people from history. Any offworld colonies they would have made would be retroactively removed from history. Addendum: If these civilizations had Terraformed any uninhabitable worlds, those would become Class 5 as the habitable world would never have been made habitable in the first place (at least by the people who made them so in the original timeline). It might fit Class X-2 more, because it shows that it's able to erase inorganic objects as well (Chakotay's talk with Annorax regarding simulation of erasing a comet), but the main show of the weapon is to specifically delete races, but left the planet intact for the Krenim to get it in the new timeline.
• An environmentalist conspiracy called "The Dawn" was alleged to be plotting to achieve this, in the short-lived TV series Strange World.
• Supernatural:
  • Lucifer aims to create this out of hatred for humanity. Notably, in Season 5 he covers up his Freudian Excuse with the claim he's acting as Gaia's Avenger and indicates he intends to see the rest of the planet's ecology preserved once humanity is gone.
  • Eve the Mother of All Monsters threatens to inflict this in Season 6, stating she'll turn all (or at least most) of the human race into monsters so their souls will go to her instead of Hell. The alternate Michael from Apocalypse World aims to take over the prime Earth the same way in Season 13.
  • In the final season, Chuck deletes every human being on Earth so the Winchesters and Jack are all that's left. It gets reversed with no lasting damage.
• In Westworld Season 4, Hale conquers and enslaves humanity with her Synthetic Plague, switching the order where the humans are forced into narratives just the Hosts. However, the Man in Black host betrays Hale and unleashes a Hate Plague forcing both humans and Hosts to kill each other, leaving the cockroaches behind. At the end of the show, Dolores narrates that sentient life may die out soon but those in the Sublime are the future and it's up to her to find a way for both humans and Hosts to coexist so that they can evolve into a new species.
• In The Worst Witch episode "The Great Outdoors", the girls nearly cause one by accident. When casting the same spell on each other, they conjure a severe blizzard, and keep doubling the magic. The Dr Foster effect - the magical backfire that results when a spell is used for selfish or trivial purposes - results in the spell doubling up on its own. Miss Hardbroom theorises that, if not stopped immediately, the blizzard could cover the entire universe. Luckily she's able to stop it pretty much instantly.

Music

• In the Flight of the Conchords song The Humans are Dead, the robots acquired poisonous gases. And they poisoned their asses.
• Buckethead's album Population Override manages to portray this scenario ... without saying a word! The whole album is instrumental.
• Heavily implied in Deep Purple's "Man Alive", where almost all of humanity is gone, either due to this or due to a 3b. Given the group's flirtation with the Green Aesop theme in recent years and the general tone of the song, it was probably caused by humanity itself.

Radio

• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The planet Golgafrincham. After getting rid of those useless telephone sanitisers, its civilisation is wiped out by a virus contracted from a dirty telephone.

Tabletop Games

• Vampire: The Masquerade: "Wormwood", one of the apocalyptic scenarios presented in the Gehenna sourcebook, starts when God decides that enough is enough, the rot and corruption of the mortal world has grown too great for Him to tolerate, and the vampires have used up all their second chances. As His covenant with Noah prevents him from simply wiping the world clean with a second cataclysm on the scale of the Flood, He creates Wormwood, a spiritual plague that permeates the world, destroying vampires and nothing else. Nothing that the Cainites can do will save them; after forty days and forty nights, all vampiric life is scoured from the Earth.
• Warhammer 40,000: Known to happen, if rarely; the setting's instruments of devastation tend to be far less discriminate than this type of apocalypse requires. Nevertheless, the Eldar, especially of Craftworld Biel-Tan, are fond of utterly excising any human/ork/anyone colonies on their Maiden Worlds and returning the planets to their pristine state, conveniently erasing any sign that the world is under Eldar protection.

Theatre

• Little Shop of Horrors. The entire human race is eaten alive by giant bloodthirsty plants, and the sung narration explicitly points out that they have no one to blame for it but themselves.
• R.U.R.: The robots turn against their masters and Kill All Humans except for one. One is too few to reproduce, but the robots don't know how to do that either. As such, the lone survivor creates an Adam and Eve robot couple who will repopulate the world with their descendants.

Video Games

• Beyond: Two Souls: The main character receives premonitions of this happening, and it does if you fail to stop the second Condenser after Nathan Dawkins goes kuku and shuts its forcefield down.
• Chrono Trigger, at least after the Day of Lavos. It's clear that a few isolated pockets of humanity have survived Lavos's wrath, but it's also clear that those isolated pockets are screwed, no matter how much "hope" the main characters spread. Luckily, the theme of the game is Time Travel.
• The Combat Of Giants: Mutant Insects games has a meteor that annihilated humanity and civilization. The game itself took place three hundred years later where giant mutated insects rule the world.
• In the original Descent: FreeSpace, the Nigh-Invulnerable Shivan mothership Lucifer blasted the Vasudan homeworld of Vasuda Prime to an uninhabitable ruin, killing four billion Vasudans (and considering that Vasuda Prime was largely an extremely arid desert, there could not have been much more than four billion people there). They almost did the same to Earth, but the Lucifer was destroyed in subspace, where its shields were down, mere minutes before arriving in the Sol System. Unfortunately, the only subspace node leading out from Sol was destroyed in the process, meaning that Earth was cut off from the rest of human civilization, and vice versa.
• This is the goal of the archangel Malthael in Diablo III: Reaper of Souls. He wants to purge Sanctuary of all humanity for being the offspring of angels and demons, and because with humanity's growing power thanks to the destruction of the Worldstone, he does not trust humanity not to turn their new power to evil like so many humans are wont to do.
• The second and third endings of Drakengard fall into this sort of apocalypse. The third has a glimmer of hope that it can still be averted.
  • The fifth ending causes this in another world.
• This is the fate that would befall humanity in Eternal Darkness if Pious succeeds in summoning his Ancient; they would be enslaved and/or exterminated on a global scale, and Alex sees brief visions of it actually happening after she realizes that the Ancient she summoned to combat Pious's own would just do the exact same thing. And it's possible that Mantorok will be just as ruthless after his victory across all three timelines.
• The monsters of Evolve inflict this on every planet they arrive on, destroying all sufficiently advanced tech and slaughtering anyone who interferes. While Word of God says they would leave the humans alive if they didn't try to stop them, they have so far wiped out the population of entire planets. However, there is information that implies this is merely a minor symptom of their true goal: a Class X-4 event.
• The backstory to Find the Cure!! Scientists from another dimension arrive on Earth and revolutionize civilization, but it turns out they brought a deadly plague with them that transmits through proximity and kills people exactly 25 years after contracting it. The player character is part of a search team who travels to the scientists' original dimension in hopes of finding a cure.
• The backstory of the Little Tail Bronx series is that the human race used Mechanical Abominations known as Titano-Machina to wage World War III. Juno, the information system that the Titano-Machina were created from, determined that the massive destruction would lead to a permanent Class 6 situation (or possibly even a Class X outright), and so proposed to a select few human researchers the "Reset" command, which would erase all of humanity so that the Earth's biosphere could be rebuilt. The researchers accepted and initiated the command, resulting in mankind's immediate extinction. It can be however argued that this example still crosses over with a very temporary Class 6 as Juno converted all other life-forms into data, and used them to re-seed the planet with new life, including the Caninu and Felineko.
• Metroid Prime has a meteor crash into the planet of Tallon IV. The impact releases and spreads a toxic substance known as Phazon, which corrupted a lot of the wildlife and completely wiped out the Chozo race living on the planet (who now appear as corrupted ghosts that attack anyone that enters their territory). In Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, it's discovered that Phaaze, the source of Phazon, is a sentient planet that sends out leviathan seeds to crash into planets in order to spread Phazon across the galaxy and Tallon IV was one of the unlucky targets. Lore data in the game imply that Tallon IV is slowly recovering after Samus destroyed the source of Phazon there.
• Nier takes place in a world where humanity is slowly dying out. In more ways than one, as it turns out: the "humans" you see throughout the game are "Replicants", artificial humanoids that were created as vessels for the souls of the real humans, known as "Gestalts", to protect them until the plague of White Chlroination Syndrome (a plague caused by the Red Dragon's death in Ending E of Drakengard) could be cured. Something went wrong, however: the Gestalts were unable to enter the Replicant bodies, while the Replicants became independent. In time, the Gestalts would mutate, or "relapse", into Shades, with the Replicants mistaking them for mindless monsters. A Gestalt's relapse would also lead to its corresponding Replicant to develop a "Black Scrawl", a breakdown of their body that would lead to the Replicant's death. By the end of the game, the project has completely fallen apart, thanks in part to the protagonist's single-minded quest to save his sister (or daughter). With Replicants being incapable of reproducing, and the means of recycling them lost, even they will eventually die out, with NieR: Automata beginning thousands of years after the Replicants' extinction.
• The bad ending of Obsidian results in allowing the nanobot-controlling AI Ceres to finish its intended goal: By using its nanobots to reboot Earth so that no humans except you and your partner Max can ever exist, and thus never pollute Earth to begin with.
• The Outer Worlds sees the people of the Halcyon system facing oblivion due the the MegaCorp/s being Too Dumb to Live by cutting so many corners in their management of the colonies that famine is inevitable. The Board's solution to this coming crisis is to put all of Halcyon's laborers into cryo-stasis, ostensibly to thaw them out on a rotating basis to preserve resources. If you help the Board maintain control over the system, they'll simply leave everyone unfortunate enough to not be rich on ice, and all of the colonies will turn into ghost towns — save for Byzantium, which will inevitably suffer the same fate.
• Persona 3's bad ending is strongly implied to be the end of all human life on Earth due to the collective nihilism of man.
• Winning a round of Plague Inc. with the nanovirus or bioweapon definitely qualifies as one of these. Any other pathogen could qualify as 3B if you think it's evolving naturally instead of being engineered.
• Randal's Monday: Thanks to the ring looping reality so much, reality itself eventually gave up and all hell broke loose. Quite literally.
• The crux of Wesker's ultimate plan in Resident Evil 5, wherein he attempts "complete global saturation" of Ouroboros (as he puts it) to rid humanity of its weaker kin and leaving those who can endure its horrifying effects to inherit the land.
• Spore: The Grox are fatally allergic to the combination of gases that most other species refer to as 'breathable air'. Terraforming one of their planets to a level others would consider 'livable' causes every Grox on the surface to choke to death.
• Star Control II has several variants. First, the Dnyarri (psychic slavers) ordered the destruction of the Taalo, who were immune to psychic control; it's implied that the Taalo may have slid to another dimension or universe, though. Much later, the Androsynth poke around that area of space, and are then replaced by the Orz, who don't like to talk about it. The Ilwrath will wipe out the Pkunk if you don't intervene, and the Ur-Quan Kohr-Ah — former slaves of the Dnyarri — will wipe out everyone if you don't solve the game.
• The world of Strife is slowly descending into this as those infected with The Virus are rotting away and those who aren't are killed or experimented on by those who are. The player has the capability of stopping this as he wields the Sigil, but if he dies whilst in battle with the Entity, the Entity will gain the Sigil's full power, using it to infect the rest of humanity and then leave the planet once there is no living human left for it to feed on.
• The final foe in Tales of Vesperia, while mostly apathetic towards humanity throughout the game, attempts this when things hit the fan in an attempt to preserve the planet at the cost of those who have done the most damage to it.
• In Wing Commander III, Class 3 is the potential fate for Locanda IV (Robin "Flint" Peters's homeworld) due to Kilrathi bioweapons aboard missiles fired at the planet. As per the novelization, canonically the Victory's wing fails to intercept the bioweapons.
• Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana has four Class 3a events happen in its backstory; with only one survivor for each event. None of these events happened in the era of humanity.

Visual Novels

• In Ciconia: When They Cry, the resident Omniscient Council of Vagueness would really like to set human civilization back by a couple millenia. Since the population loss during World War III was made up for in just over a century, this time they have several possible methods at their disposal: fanning the flames of international tension to spark World War IV, unleash a virus that destroys agricultural production to create a world famine, hacking millions of war drones to destroy the biggest cities, or create devices that would basically poison the Earth's water. They choose to use all of them at once. And to top it, some Mad Scientist independent from them created a machine that destroyed the 8MS, the cloud of nanomachines that artificially maintained the planet's climate and offset the nuclear winter that followed WWIII. All of that happens in the span of a few weeks. And this is just the first chapter of a four-part story.

Web Animation

• RWBY: In Remnant's ancient past, part of humanity rose up against the gods resulting in an apocalyptic divine response that affected only humanity. When the gods curse Salem for attempting to resurrect her dead lover, she incites humanity to war against the gods. The God of Darkness unleashes a blast of energy that wipes out every human life. The only reason she survives is because he realises Salem thought she couldn't be punished any worse than she already had been. To prove her wrong, the gods depart and leave her completely alone in addition to being unable to die. Although the God of Light asks her deceased lover to return to life to redeem humanity, he warns Ozma that failure will result in the gods escalating their response to full planetary destruction.

Web Comics

• Bob and George: We're willing to kill everyone on the planet to stop you! This being Bob and George, people at the site of the asteroid strike survive.
• Jack. The full story still hasn't been presented, but apparently humanity was killed in a jihad by genetically engineered furries. Although it's hinted that by reincarnation and God arranging for history to repeat itself, the furries basically became humanity and vice-versa
• In Homestuck, Gl'Bgolyb's death caused the Vast Glub, a psychic shockwave that killed every Troll in the universe. The 12 Players only survived because they weren't in the universe at the time. Her Imperious Condescension, who is immune to the Vast Glub, and The Handmaid, who was not yet in the universe at the time either, also survived.
• Klunscomic: Planet B, B.B and Miss B's home planet, was destroyed in a Class 3a. The B species created three children that would help them with their tasks. The first child, Miss B, didn't follow orders. The second, B.B, was a Blank Slate. The third brought about the end of Planet B, consuming every B in its path.
• Scurry: Humanity has disappeared after a nuclear war, leaving only the remote wildlife still standing. It's not clear if people went mad first, then launched the nukes, or the shock of nuclear doom drove them mad. Either way, planet Earth has become Mouse World, though with more than just cats as the antagonists.

Web Original

• If SCP-1101 of the SCP Foundation breaks containment, it's possible that humanity will go extinct as every single human on the planet neglects basic bodily needs in favor of debating a particular subject, like whether or not tomatoes are a fruit or vegetable.

Web Videos

• Aldrivers, Devourer of Cos: This is what Joan Rivers tried to do by eating everyone else on the planet. If she succeeds, she would increase the level to that of an X-4.
• Critical Role: The Calamity, a 300 year war between the gods, destroyed the continent of Domunas and all cities (terrestrial and flying) except for Vasselheim, left massive swaths of land forever cursed and scarred, and resulted in the deaths of two-thirds of the world's population. Civilization did rebuild eventually, but it was a long process, and the aftereffects of the Calamity are still felt throughout Exandria over 800 years later.
• Mandela Catalogue: While Gabriel's motives are largely unknown, at least part of his modus operandi involves him sending his shapeshifting underlings, known as "Alternates", to Earth and kill all of mankind one by one until human civilization as we know it ceases to exist.

Western Animation

• Adventure Time takes place over a millennium in the future after the "Great Mushroom War", and there are very few humans left in existence. Later on they find a city filled with humans, but it's unclear if there's enough of them left for humanity to make a comeback.
• Fudêncio e Seus Amigos has two episodes where the Earth is destroyed.
  • In "Apocalipsio", the second-to-last Season 2 episode, someone activated a planet-exploding button in the Pentagon. All the characters go do something to spend their last hours on Earth, except the persimmon-headed boy Conrado, who doesn't believe it because there have been countless end-of-the-world predictions that didn't happen. Turns out the button did work and the entire planet explodes; buildings are destroyed, the sky becomes grey, and the human characters are reduced into skulls. The only survivors are the plastic toy Fudêncio, cockroach guy Baltazar (due to the myth that roaches can survive nuclear explosions), and Conrado... who's just then crushed by a falling object.
  • In "Planeta Hot", the characters decide to cause global warming to increase until all continents sink. This time, more people survived; most of the children found shelter at a small cottage in an island, while Conrado, the two cops and Baltazar got floating objects to stay on water. Baltazar and the cops are allowed to enter the cottage, but Conrado isn't because it can't support any more people.
• While technically not a human example, the Martians in Invader Zim worked themselves to extinction turning their planet into a giant spaceship. "Because it's cool!"
• Though it wasn't his intention, Vandal Savage did this in the Justice League episode "Hereafter". Being immortal, he ends up very lonely.
• In the 1939 animated short Peace on Earth, a civilization of cute little animals springs up after the human race wipes themselves out in endless trench warfare. In the 1955 remake Good Will to Men, naturally, it's the Bomb that did mankind in.
• Rick and Morty: In the episode Rick Potion #9, Morty asks Rick to make him a love potion so his crush Jessica will fall in love with him. Rick is indignant, but complies anyway. Unfortunately, due to Jessica having the flu, the love potion spreads and infects the entire town, who all madly lust after Morty. In his attempts to find a cure, Rick accidentally turns everyone (as in the entire human race aside from them and their family) into praying mantis hybrids who want to kill Morty after mating with him, and finally into creatures he calls Cronenburgs, who are Body Horror incarnate. In the end, with their world in total ruin, Rick decides to cut their losses and moves him and Morty to another universe. The only humans left are Jerry, Beth, and Summer, who are still managing to eek out a living.
  • Funnily enough, at the end of that episode Cronenberg versions of Rick and Morty appeared from a world, where they turned an entire Cronenberg population into humans and decided to bail.
• The Secret Saturdays: In Season 2, the Nagas actively want Kur (who is Zak) to Kill All Humans, and Kur's powers themselves seem to want him to go through with it. In the series finale, when Argost has obtained the powers of Kur's antimatter doppelgänger, the Nagas persuade him to change his endgame from Take Over the World to doing this.
• Another technically-non-human example in Steven Universe. About 5,000 years ago, Gems were the dominant civilization on Earth until a high ranking Rose Quartz, Steven's mother (and secretly Pink Diamond, the youngest of Gem society's four rulers), led a revolt after she discovered the Gems' use of the Earth was directly detrimental to its organic life. Eventually, the Diamonds caused something, alternately described as a light or a song, that corrupted nearly all Gems on Earth (It was meant to just straight-up kill them) except for a handful protected by Rose Quartz's powers. While the corrupt Gems are still around, they demonstrate only animal-level intelligence, unable to form much of a civilization. The few Gems on Earth that are both uncorrupted and free have been hunting them down and capturing them ever since.
• The Owl House: Philip "Belos" Wittebane originally intended the "Day of Unity" to result in this as he wanted to use a draining spell to kill off the witch population. However, thanks to Luz and her friends, this ultimately resulted in a class 2.
• Wakfu: Nox threatens to cause in the process of going after the Tree of Life seeking to suck its wakfu dry, as the Sadidas as a species have a No Ontological Inertia relationship with the Tree. This would've been a relatively mild example, as the Sadidas are only one of many sentient races inhabiting the setting. Nox succeeds in partly draining the Tree to the point that it starts dying and the Sadidas start perishing with it, but Nox's cosmic Reset Button reverses time and retroactively stops it from ever happening before we can see the full effects.

Real Life

• The worst case scenario of a full scale nuclear war, which could, by some predictions, be damaging enough to destroy the very biosphere that humans depend on to survive. The actual explosions are the least of our worries. Following that, fires would rage for weeks or possibly months on end, releasing great plumes of smoke that are believed to blot out of the northern hemisphere for an extended duration, causing the effect we call "nuclear winter". This would drop the average temperature significantly, with the sun being simply unable to shine on the Earth for a reasonable amount of time. Snow and ash would intermingle. Then there is the radiation. If you are lucky, you will get irradiated enough to die within a few days, but radiation sickness is unpredictable and horrible, but basically it results in your very DNA getting smashed to pieces at worst. The surviving population would see higher rates of cancer and mutation due to the aforementioned screwing up of their genes. This goes for all species. Water would be unsafe to drink unless filtered extremely well (as water is largely unaffected by radiation by itself, but radioactive particles in the water could still do some damage), food would be unsafe to eat, and in many cases, the air would be unsafe to breathe. Sounds horrible, right? Well, the reason this is a possible outcome is that many of the effects may not be as strong on the southern hemisphere, since a nuclear exchange under current scenarios would be largely restricted to the northern hemisphere. They would still get hit with climate effects, radiation, and other complications, and civilization would definitely not survive, but humanity may be able to ride out the storm in the south. The general belief is that Australia is the safest since there's nothing of worth to be hit, and most refugees escaping a nuclear war before it starts will be safe...if the venomous spiders don't get you first.
  • Although this is becoming less likely now that global politics are shifting. While all current nuclear power reside primarily in the northern hemisphere, many of them have allies in the southern hemisphere that may be targeted during a nuclear war to deny them things like naval and air bases. That said, the scale of nuclear war in the southern hemisphere would still be smaller than that of the north, making it slightly more possible to live there, but global biosphere collapse could still render humanity extinct through the eradication of food sources.
• On the other hand, breakthroughs in fields of cybernetics, biomechanical technology and genetic engineering could cause a "benign" form of this. Humans could alter themselves to such a degree, first physically (and maybe mentally as well) that they simply could not be considered human any more. It would start with life extensions, organ transplants, cybernetic body parts, mind enhancing substances, and could easily progress to biological immortality, uploading one's mind to an artificial body that is not anthropomorphic, grafting tissues and organs that bear little to no resemblance to anything human or even eschewing physical form altogether and copying/transferring one's mind to a computer network. Provided we are not knocked back a few centuries or destroy ourselves/are destroyed, this scenario will likely happen eventually.
• Total human migration off the planet would achieve this outcome for Earth, even if our species continued to exist elsewhere. The most benign Real Life option, albeit unlikely to occur unless it's to avert a more conventional Class 3a due to anticipated catastrophe.
• In general, should humanity Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence, it'll cause this.

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