Asimov’s Nightfall.
There is a planet that has 3 suns, so configured that there is never any darkness. Except once every 1,000 years. Panic (to say the least) ensues.
Heat Death and/or Ragnarok.
Mythology always has the best apocalypses. The one in Christianity’s Book of Revelation is particularly spectacular.
Yeah, I was thinking a Toba style event and Yellowstone is a good contender. If I’m going to be off’d my last moments on Earth might as well be focused on my field of study.
Heat Death? Pfft. Gimme the Big Crunch anyday. Hey, we might even get a new Universe out of it! (Too bad about the expansion acceleration, though.)
Would probably be my favorite, but not gonna happen. I voted for the ET possibility but the half of me who didn’t get to vote wanted the Totalitarian government option. In reality, DNA won’t let us be totally wiped out.
I chose 'Collapse of Society" but via extraterrestrial means. Extraterrestrial as in asteroid. A big one that we know is going to hit Earth for years beforehand. There is no way we can stop it. It devastates our planet and the ensuing ecological catastrophes collapse all sense of society. The few lucky, brave, smart, tough survivors get to rebuild it anyway they please.
Like the show Revolution?
I’m sort of partial towards crashing things into the Earth.
Collapse of Society (warn, financial ruin, etc.)
Because that’s how it’s actually going to happen. Mostly the financial ruin part, with a bit of war thrown in after the fact.
As much as the idea behind that show appeals to me, I’ve never gotten around to watching it. I was thinking Dies the Fire when I responded.
I’m kind of partial to the asteroid hitting the earth apocalypse, too. The aspect of that one that I like is when you get some early warning, but there’s nothing you can do about it - in, say, six months, the asteroid is going to hit, we’ll all be wiped out, too bad, so sad. I like exploring the idea of what humans do in those six months (first thing - everyone stops going to work).
I tried to watch the show; as a post-apocalyptic fan, I really wanted to like it, but I don’t. Too stupid.
I voted extraterrestrial, though I was thinking more of alien creatures than meteor or comet impacts. Depending on the aliens, we might get wiped out or enslaved or absorbed into their culture or kept as zoo animals or treated like backwards/uncivilized/untrustworthy children (if they know us very well) or any combination of the above or something entirely other. They’re aliens, by definition we can’t think like they think. I’d be interested in seeing what they want.
Which is probably why it still appeals to you.
Seriously, my wife and I watch it to see how seriously stupid it will get. my favorite is the recent “time jump” with the start of the new season. You know, basically where they pick up from last season’s cliffhanger “1 year later” and the story has changed so much it’s effectively an entirely new show. But I digress.
Not in the current global situation but there’s no reason why a new Cold War style arms couldn’t happen in the future, it’d probably be multipolar as well which would make it even more dangerous!
One of the better alien apocalypse scenarios I’ve read was the one featured in Greg Bears ‘The Forge of God’, as much as I enjoy reading about/watching the plucky humans fighting against the bloodthirsty alien invaders there really isn’t anything we as a species could do against an attack like the one described.
As well as some apparently sadistic psychological games the aliens drop two pieces of exotic material, one positive and one negative, into the Earth’s interior which will cause a cataclysmic eruption when they meet in the core of the planet, no matter how much ‘can do’ attitude humanity may have its not going to help
Hah, ‘Ripley’s Rescue’ by James Horner (from the Aliens movie) came on my playlist as I was typing that, pretty appropriate.
I was going to say zombie but when I watch the Walking Dead I can’t help but think that everything must smell really bad.
I’ll go with aliens.
The Hamster King already beat me to collapse of the false vacuum, so I’ll go with my second choice, the Big Rip. Basically, the dark energy or cosmological constant or whatever the Heaven it is increases in strength with time until it’s eventually strong enough to rip apart planets, atoms, and subatomic particles. It has the virtue, compared with the Crunch, that current data are consistent with it happening as soon as a few million years from now.
It’s really not a proper Apocalypse if it’s restricted to just one planet, or (worse yet) just one species on one planet.
Yeah, it really would. That’s the problem with the disease apocalypse, too - first order of business is getting all the corpses rounded up and burnt or something like that, to get them out of the places the immune are trying to live.
Gotta go with zombies.
Must be an Aussie thing but I was going to say the same thing!
Remember being scared shitless when this came out in about 1981 as a BBC mini series.
“We’ve been mentioned on 'telly!”
We will be buried by an avalanche of Monty Python quotes.