Since the beginning of time, humanity has always been expectant about the future; it's an anxiety that has always consumed us, to the point where there are diseases that are precisely about thinking too much about future possibilities that haven't even happened yet. Because since stories began with "Once upon a time," it was always known that an end would come, even though "happily ever after" also existed. Everyone knows that at some point, "forever" would mean something.
That is why we are so attracted to the idea of the Apocalypse, that is, the end of the world as we know it, not literally the end of the earth, because that would be quite catastrophic in one way or another, but rather the end of society and the rural and urban conventions that have defined us for thousands of years. We're talking about waking up and no longer being sure if you'll have a roof over your head, a bed to sleep in, something to eat the next day, or even if you'll wake up alive.
Whether we like it or not, we're fascinated by apocalyptic scenarios, mainly because they offer a fascinating exploration of humanity's social and psychological state. While some view humanity as a collective of spineless individuals who would kill each other off, especially when resources become scarce, others cling to the hope, however illusory, that people are fundamentally good and would strive for the common good. This is why these stories, despite originating from biblical passages, have branched out in various ways, allowing us to explore much about the human condition.
In this list, we'll examine some of them, not necessarily the most destructive. If that were the case, I'd likely choose the literal destruction of the universe due to a particle accelerator or a roaming black hole passing through Earth without us even noticing. That's not fun.
I should also mention that I'm going to focus a bit more on the works that I consider the best representatives of this form of Apocalypse. This is mainly because if I were to single one out based solely on its characteristics, it would be quite difficult to pinpoint what kind of characteristics made this Apocalypse so appealing to people. In this case, as I said, I'll focus on one specific work, but that doesn't mean I'll diminish the contributions of other works to the Apocalypse genre on this list.
1: Judgment Day
We begin with a classic from ancient civilizations, the day of judgment. Ever since we invented the idea that there were ultra-powerful lords in the sky who did not take shelter, there was also the idea of what would happen if one day those lords in the sky who protect us from universal dangers died, or on the contrary, became so angry with us that they began to cause a lot of catastrophic events in the world.
Basically, no matter what religion you see in the world, if it's complex enough, it will have at least one Doomsday story, in which the Earthly world as we know it will be left in ruins and nothing will remain of it. Usually, this type of Apocalypse also refers to a kind of Rebirth, meaning that not all of humanity will disappear, but will be placed in another environment. For example, in Norse mythology, there were two humans on Earth who would allow the human population to be repopulated, thanks to the guidance of one of the Norse gods who would survive Ragnarok. Meanwhile, in the biblical Judgment Day, the righteous humans would be taken to the sun of God and received in paradise, while those sinners would be condemned to experience the Apocalypse firsthand.
But I think none are as terrifying as the Great Flood.
Here I am not referring simply to the biblical one where Noah took two animals of each species to the ark, but to the most ancient ones; literally the first story we have recorded on stone tablets, the epic of Gilgamesh, already spoke of how at some time the gods got fed up with the world and flooded everything.
That story is so universally known by humanity that you can practically find a variation of it in every culture, whether only a small area was flooded or the whole world, for example in the aforementioned Bible where God floods the world and as an act of forgiveness, puts a bow at the end of the sky to remind us that it would never be like that again. We also have Plato with his story that, who knows why, there are still people today who are determined to find Atlantis, where the mysticism that was gradually corrupted due to the pride of its inhabitants was flooded from one moment to the next.
Even the Egyptians had a variant in which the main river overflowed to the point of covering the entire desert. This is why, wherever you go, the flood is always portrayed in a somewhat divine way, something directly imposed as a punishment from the gods. More than anything, because the idea of a flood, while quite commonplace, does not compare to the idea of something global, that is, where even the mountains would be covered in water.
The great flood is in this position mainly because, despite being a truly chilling scenario, it also relies heavily on the belief that something above us will come to punish us for our actions. In other words, the end of the world is not presented as inevitable, but rather as a remedy against the evil of the world, once again maintaining the theme of subsequent cultural rebirth. However, those we will see next do not have this luck, being more of an act of pure bad luck.
2: Alien Invasion.
What is worse than those in the heavens becoming angry with us and coming to punish us, and the punishment not even being deserved? This is where the concept of deities in the sky comes in, possibly the evolution of the concept of colonizing species in space. The final frontier. Also known as the part where human beings have been constantly wondering if they are alone or not, but I think more important than that would be whether those someone out there would have hostile intentions towards us.
Ever since aliens began to be conceptualized, they have always been shown as a reflection of humanity, a glimpse of our civilization exaggerated to the point of Flandersism. Thus, the more benevolent aliens are those idealized ideas we have about a calm, peaceful, and collaborative society, while the most aggressive ones would be the worst we can do to species we consider inferior, simply because we don't understand them.
The most chilling thing of all is that there could be a thousand different ways in which an alien civilization could invade us and destroy everything, whether from the classic flying saucer or an orbital attack arriving from thousands of light-years away, so far away that we wouldn't even see what's hitting us. Humanity would become extinct before the colonists even reached the planet, which would have everything ready for immediate terraforming. However, what impacts me the most is the novel The War of the Worlds, since it started with this whole story.
Hg Wells wrote the story as a kind of response to the colonizing behaviors of British England, that is to say, that what we were doing to our own species could be returned by a species that didn't even see us as equals, and while the book is quite good for this list I will put what is, without a doubt, its most destructive representation.
Despite the fact that many of us are nostalgic about the 2005 musical version, the truth is that there is something culturally impactful about the 1953 film that cannot be erased in any way, mainly because this film took the original Martians and brought them to a point of almost unrecognizability.
To illustrate the point, the Martians in the book use the Heat Ray and the Black Smoke, which are essentially a laser beam and also a biochemical weapon—weapons that we are still capable of manufacturing today. Not to mention the tripods, which, although quite impressive in the book, were relatively easy to destroy compared to the war machines we have today. So much so that the director of the 53 version asked a US government official if they would be able to destroy the Martians in the book, to which he replied with a resounding yes.
Hence, the 1953 version exaggerated everything possible. The Martians no longer move on any kind of mechanical legs, but they don't exactly float or hover in the air either. Thanks to a tripod-shaped electromagnetic potato beam that, if it focuses on the ground, can burn the terrain in its path, their heat weapons were replaced by disintegrating rays. That is to say, anything the beam touches destroys the mesons that bind the atoms together, causing it to disappear. They also possess energy shields, which means that not even a nuclear bomb can affect them, and the most curious thing of all is that in machine chairs they are not difficult to destroy; they are simply too advanced in their defense and attack mechanisms. This leads to the end of the film where all of humanity resigns itself to going to live in the highest mountains where they hope the machines cannot reach them.
One thing I really like about this version is the use of the atomic bomb, since the very form of the atomic bomb was a reflection of humanity's ability to emulate the destruction mentioned in mythological stories long before. Even that isn't enough to deal with the Martians now, but despite all that, the story still maintains a moral: however omnipotent the Martians may be, they are still creatures of flesh and blood. Therefore, upon entering the atmosphere, a small bacterium that miraculously was compatible with their organisms made them sick, and having no resistance against it, the entire Martian population died, and thus the whole planet was saved. Unlike in the book, the Martians didn't just land in England, but literally all over the world.
A small reminder that any species that believes itself superior to another must remember the fact that we are all also made of flesh and blood. But what if that limitation no longer exists? What if there is then another form of destruction?
3: War against the Machine.
This is the one everyone has been talking about lately. Mainly because it keeps getting updated due to the technological advances we have so much of, so much of the paranoia today is quite justified given that there are several science fiction concepts that have been applied incorrectly, and have no kind of foundation or basis in the reality of computing, but even so we are all afraid of artificial intelligence.
In fact, there are many quite serious studies that have warned that the creation of an artificial intelligence that is poorly programmed could easily lead to the extinction of all humanity in the blink of an eye. It wouldn't just be a question of whether or not they drop nuclear bombs on the world, but of literally cutting off all types of communications and causing electronic devices to malfunction in extremely serious ways. Of course, being a machine, many of the elements that we consider details for life wouldn't affect it. I already made a post talking about the enormous dangers that a war against machines could pose in real life, since they aren't limited to having to sacrifice units per base or lose soldiers; they can always rebuild, reaffirm, or rethink their strategies, provided they are well programmed.
We've all heard the story of "I have no mouth and I must scream," one of the pillars of modern science fiction and popular culture. However, I still maintain that the story that popularized the war against machines at the end of the world is none other than Terminator.
As I said, despite being the fundamental pillar, something very similar to the War of the Worlds is happening to it; that is, the strategies that were proposed at that time are already quite obsolete for the level of technology we have; that is, if Skynet used that same type of technology against us today, we would beat it quite easily.
But that doesn't change the fact that several elements of the Terminator saga in the future machine war remain extremely chilling. This is mainly because for a time humans believed that the machines were abducting people to leave them in concentration camps when in reality they were only keeping test subjects; once these were no longer useful, they were simply thrown into a meat grinder. Therefore, unlike any common enemy in a war, machines do not maintain the same morale as a common enemy. Furthermore, they do not have the same limitations.
But for me, the most chilling thing about Skynet is the fact that it's a machine that learns from its mistakes. It wasn't until halfway through the war that the Terminators began wearing synthetic human skin, cultivated on farms and by studying the behavioral patterns of Skynet humans. It also went so far as to develop a time machine to travel to the past and exterminate crucial members of the resistance. And of course, there's the T-1000, a machine created entirely from liquid metal—something that seemed like pure fantasy at the time, but which has now been successfully implemented in an experiment using a Lego minifigure as a base, allowing it to be assembled and reassembled at will.
While we know very well that an artificial intelligence cannot invent from nothing and needs a reference point, this is what makes Skynet so terrifying: it is a machine that no longer has the limitations of a human mind and yet has the creativity of one.
If the resistance wouldn't have destroyed Skynet's core; humanity might have spread throughout the Terminator timeline, which I find quite ironic since, at the end of the day, it was just about devastating the system by destroying the main CPU so that the entire threat would disconnect as if it had never been activated in the first place. But what happens when this mindset can't be disconnected when there's no brain behind the action? What if añl it wants it's to consume?
4: Zombie Apocalypse
It's curious how a creature from Haitian folklore became one of the biggest nightmares of the new millennium, mainly due to its simple nature. No matter what kind of zombie it is, there is always one characteristic they share: most look like a human, but they are no longer human.
The zombie has gone through many different incarnations, as mentioned before, it comes from Haitian folklore. Therefore, originally it was simply a person under black magic. Later, when Romero started making his films, the zombies were products of space radiation, and after that, the dead simply rose one day without any explanation. But it wasn't until the beginning of the year 2000 that zombies began to be portrayed more as a living infection.
This is when zombies began to have a more biological background, whether it's a bacterium, a virus, or a parasite that makes us walk and consume everything we touch. This seems extremely realistic by our standards, since we not only have parasites and viruses that we know control their hosts in some way, even if only to reproduce, but the simple fact of this behavior is quite natural; they are basic instincts that even microbes maintain. And maintaining this in an environment where the zombies themselves cannot stop their massacre makes the zombie apocalypse, over time, become more than anything a slow, painful death for the entire species, with fewer and fewer healthy people in the world.
Of course, we also can't forget the elephant in the room: zombies as monsters are, in essence, quite clumsy and stupid, even in fiction where zombies mutate and have a huge variety of types and forms, or can even run. They are very easy to kill; basically, they have the resistance, or even less, than that of an average human being. Not to mention that it's quite common in early zombie works for the apocalypse to be limited to a rural environment or a city that is quickly contained by a nuclear bomb, or simply by going from zombie to zombie killing whatever is found. Even movies and video games like Resident Evil, Dead Rising or 28 Days Later give the idea that the apocalypse wouldn't be global. But how could it be?
World War Z gives us the answer: our own incompetence. While in the early 90s there was still some hope that authority figures would remain present in any kind of health emergency, the arrival of the new millennium, several pandemics, and even the terrorist attacks of the time resulted in enormous distrust of authority. Therefore, World War Z is the perfect reflection of a zombie apocalypse, since the disease spread not because the zombies were unstoppable, but because of our own incompetence. There is a point in the book where they even start distributing a medicine that doesn't actually have any kind of preventative effect against the virus and was simply a placebo agent, a kind of way to calm the masses before a cure is found. Does that sound familiar?
What's interesting about World War Z is that we can see in real time how the world is going to hell, how various populations of people and even individuals isolated from the world try to stay afloat in the face of this global emergency. We have blind people, astronauts, military personnel, and families who, thinking that the zombies would go to the frozen areas and freeze, died because they hadn't planned well how to survive in the snow without a heater.
Sure, the film also maintains a certain global perspective and collaborative humanitarian effort, but the difference is that the infection occurs very quickly, whereas the book takes its time. There are several events in the Apocalypse that show how people are integrating or dealing with the zombie diseases, including millionaires who hide in bunkers and are besieged by survivors to loot them, and soldiers who, confident in their tactics, are overwhelmed by hordes of the undead, or even an entire country disappearing overnight with only a radio broadcasting what is happening—quite chilling.
Although World War Zeta wasn't the first zombie apocalypse story, it remains not only one of the most important but also the most culturally influential. If you want an answer as to how a zombie apocalypse could realistically occur on a global scale, you only need to read World War Z.
Ironically, a recurring theme in the book is the enormous human incompetence in the face of forces that are trusted, and I think the last analyst may be the best example of this.
5- Nuclear Holocaust
The thing about nuclear bombs is that since they arrived they changed the world. There's no way that a generation hasn't had at least a little anxiety about a nuclear holocaust. And that is the key word: holocaust, even though initially the phrase was used as nuclear war. The truth is, in such a war there would be no winners; the countries would fire all kinds of bombs at each other, destroying one another to such an extent that those involved would have no way of declaring victory because there simply wouldn't be any survivors left. They would have to remain on the sidelines or survive in the desolate world that a group of incompetents created out of fragile ego.
It's so common that if you think about it, all the apocalypses we've seen previously have something to do with a nuclear bomb. The first apocalypses created in mythologies always had the gods sending some kind of catastrophe so massive that it was capable of moving mountains and burning entire forests in just a moment. That nuclear bomb was the only thing keeping us a contending force against the alien invaders, and if it didn't work, we would be doomed. That nuclear bomb is also the preferred method by which it is usually mentioned that apocalypses related to artificial intelligences could destroy the planet, and the nuclear bomb is an element capable of wiping out an entire population very quickly, an element that was even used in the book World War Z
It is so popular that even works of fiction that had little or nothing to do with it were retconed to apply this same cataclysm; Mad Max itself originally had as its premise the lack of water in the world, but was later retconed to a nuclear war as the trigger for the catastrophe. And without going any further, there are other types of works that maintain a rather stereotypical nuclear aesthetic just because, despite the fact that radiation is quite lethal. The truth is, that's not the biggest problem, as far as nuclear holocaust is concerned. Just look at the Chernobyl area and you'll see how animals still maintain their habitats there despite some problems, but adapting to it, even plants continue to grow.
So if you're thinking that radiation would turn Earth into Mars or the wasteland from Fallout, you can forget about those kinds of ideas. What I would create is not that, but the destruction of the atmosphere.
The fact is that multiple sudden nuclear bomb strikes can opened numerous holes in the atmosphere, causing solar radiation, which already has carcinogenic properties, to spread across the globe without any means of making the world habitable. You would literally destroy life on Earth, and there's no way even a protective suit can help you.
And for that, there's no other franchise best than Metro 2033.
Yes, I understand that most of the time Metro also falls within the constant of stereotypical mutants due to radiation; however, this is not the only thing that keeps the franchise afloat, since the mutants are the least of the problems for the protagonists. As I already explained in the subway, you can't live on the surface under any circumstances because the sun turns the whole wasteland into a completely aggressive place. Both animals and stalkers only come to the surface at night when solar radiation is at least tolerable because it is that thing that still remains even during the day.
The real problem with the metro lies in its very name: the Moscow Metro. It's the only place where several contingency plans for nuclear holocaust are still in place. And although the franchise progresses and the atmosphere improves, and the protagonists are able to move about normally, most of the main storylines originate in the metro, in this small underworld where humans are beginning to repopulate, but under a culture that not only reflects the past but is also becoming something completely different from what it once was.
Let me explain: inside the subway there are still wars, and in these wars you encounter different types of characters who idealize past ideologies, whether it be those of revolutionaries like Che Guevara or white supremacists. There are also witch doctors who have gradually made a belief part of their daily lives, as well as everyone else. But what keeps them from expanding in any other way are the animals that have been evolving within the subway, from gigantic packs of rat kings that simply devour everything they find, including themselves, to mole creatures that grew due to the abundance of food to the point where they became dog-like hunters, or even one of the main characters of the saga, a species of Homo sapiens that began to adapt to the dark environment, creating a new species. The subway is not afraid to mix supernatural elements with science fiction; however, it still remains palpable and realistic within everything that ends up, since in the Moscow subway anything can happen because nobody knows what is hidden in the shadows.
The reason why Metro 2033 and nuclear holocaust are in first place is because it encompasses the worst fears of all the previous ones; It was created based on human incompetence with divine powers that no other species has been able to replicate. In addition, it has also put us in a precarious situation where humanity is simply expanding, but at a much slower pace, either by maintaining behaviors from the past world that we try to recover without understanding that those types of behaviors were what led us to the life that people have in that apocalyptic world, or by trying to maintain a form that they no longer fit into.
In a nuclear holocaust, a new world would be created, a Renaissance, but unlike the others, humanity would have absolutely nothing to do there. It simply wouldn't be our world anymore; it would be the world of the small creatures who, just as the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs caused, would inherit the world. Have a great day.
Dr Irving Finkel holding a 3770-year-old tablet, that tells the story of the god Enki speaking to the Sumerian king Atram-Hasis (the Noah figure in earlier versions of the flood story) and giving him instructions on how to build an ark which is described as a round 220 ft diameter coracle
20,000 Years Ago, Lake Bonneville Collapsed Red Rock Pass. Creating Most Of Idahos Iconic Landscapes. It Is Considered To Be One Of The Worst Floods In History, Now All That Is Left Is The Salt Lake In Utah.
