The End of the World as We Know It



"''"It's the end of the world as we know it

''It's the end of the world as we know it

''It's the end of the world as we know it

And I feel fine""

- REM, "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)"

This is what will happen if the heroes don't stop the Big Bad or the Omnicidal Maniac from doing its nasty work. It can be either supernatural or superscience, depending on the villain, but in either case the bad guy must be beaten down and his toys broken in order to save the planet, or the universe, depending on the focus of the story.

Usually it's figurative -- expressed as "merely" the death of humankind, the obliteration of Civilization, or its subjugation to aliens, for example -- rather than the literal rendering of the planet down to gravel.

This is a common trope in Speculative Fiction, horror and over-the-top espionage shows, as well as many Anime series. It may serve as a prequel to an After the End series, or the culmination of a Just Before the End story. May also include Cosy Catastrophe and/or Scavenger World elements. It's also very common in video games, where it's occasionally unavoidable, sometimes occurring halfway through the game; in other cases, poor play may result in the world coming to a bad end.

If the heroes are slated to succeed in preventing the End, they (and the audience) may be treated to a detailed preview of what's coming.

Inevitably draws the suitably heroic into a Saving the World plot. See Apocalypse How for various types of End Of the World. For when Take Our Word for It simply won't do, Apocalypse Wow is this trope given dramatic form. When asked just why they want to destroy the world as we know it, villains usually say something from the "Why You Should Destroy the Planet Earth" list. That is, if they even have one. May be preceded by Signs of the End Times.

It is a common source of Enemy Mine if another villain wants to Take Over the World, because after The End of the World as We Know It, there's nothing left to take over.

Advertising

 * In many political ads, this is the implied consequence of voting for anyone other than the person who paid for the commercial. The most famous example, and perhaps the trend setter, is the 1964 presidential election "Daisy" commercial, which essentially said that not voting for Lyndon Johnson would cause The End of the World as We Know It. See it for yourself here.

Anime & Manga
"Misae: For Sunohara to have such a cute sister, and for Okazaki to have such a cute girlfriend... If it were the end of the world, it'd be bad for the sister and Furukawa-san, but... I'll say it. It's the end of the world."
 * Society collapsing in bizarre ways seems to be a running theme in the works of Junji Ito. The most extreme example of this can be seen in Hellstar Remina, in which all of earth is attacked by a giant living planet.
 * The Digimon multiverse, which shares similarities with the Pretty Cure worlds except for the whole shounen mon series thing, has the exact same looming threat every time.
 * Magic Knight Rayearth's plot begins with trying to prevent this from happening to Cephiro.
 * Mai-HiME threatens the end of the world with the approaching of the HiME Star precipitating natural disasters and.
 * Is what threatens to happen in Kannazuki no Miko.
 * Johan Liebert of Monster tries to become last standing at the end of the world by having insane supporters cause destruction until he has them kill each other.
 * While Elfen Lied starts as a story about two cousins hiding an abused and escaped mutant from an evil covernment agency, it is later revealed that said mutants may very well destroy all human life on earth and it becomes a very close call near the end. It is absent in the Anime.
 * Michio Yuki of MW tries to take the world with him by using the titular chemical warfare.
 * The first two seasons of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha involved unstable Lost Logia and the heroes trying to prevent the destruction of a few worlds, including the one they call home. The third season, however, had a Big Bad who knew how to handle Lost Logia, and thus would have only ended with The Federation obliterated and the entire multiverse effectively taken hostage should the heroes fail. Jail's an Evilutionary Biologist, not an Omnicidal Maniac, after all.
 * All of the Slayers continuities, especially the anime, dealt with this trope in some way.
 * The final Story Arc in Magical Project S revolves around saving Earth.
 * Neon Genesis Evangelion seems to be about preventing The End of the World as We Know It at first, but apparently this outcome had been clear from the very beginning.
 * While the main cast of Prétear eventually succeeds in preventing The End of the World as We Know It (the standard Big Bad's goal), the manga gives a nice description of the world drained of Life Energy -- not only without living beings, but without wind, sounds, temperature, light. The anime version further illustrates the possible outcome by having the Big Bad destroy the local Magical Land.
 * Anyone living in the world of any Pretty Cure series should try not to get too attached to the universe. It was already one lost fight away from total destruction in the very first episode, with multiple near-misses along the way; in particular, almost all life was wiped out near the end of Futari wa Pretty Cure Splash Star, though the heroines managed to reverse it by defeating the bad guy.
 * The main goal of the Ancient Conspiracy from RahXephon is to Unusual in that
 * Sailor Moon comes close to this here and there. The Moon Kingdom was completely destroyed in the past; the Earth is constantly in danger, as one villainous group invades it after another. In the manga, the world (along with the Big Bad) is destroyed at the end of the third story arc by Sailor Saturn... only to be immediately restored by Princess Serenity. The last season's Big Bad has already rendered most of the Galaxy dead before attacking the Earth.
 * The Earth too, during the Grand Finale, at least in the anime. In fact,
 * In Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, in addition to the destruction of the Moon Kingdom in the past,.
 * The Haruhi Suzumiya franchise has a rather unusual condition for The End Of The World as We Know It to happen: . Not only that, the rest of the SOS-dan suspects that at least once before -- but obviously no-one can tell.
 * Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is set After the End, when most of humanity was wiped out . When they start making a comeback thanks to the protagonists,  . And on top of that,
 * In Tokyo Mew Mew, the aliens want to cause this by accelerating humans' destruction of the environment, just so the Muggles can see what they've done to the Earth and actually care about it.
 * In the anime X 1999, both sides actually believe they are fighting to prevent the end of the world. The Dragons of Earth are attempting to destroy all humans to prevent humans from destroying the Earth, while the Dragons of Heaven are trying to save humanity from the Dragons of Earth. It was revealed near the end that
 * The second and third season of Yu-Gi-Oh! (dub version only), emphasized with a mantra frequently repeated by Yugi to the point of exasperation: "The fate of the world depends on it!"
 * Season 4 plays this completely straight. Dartz believes that.
 * This is also the goal of the Big Bad in The Movie. This motive is questioned (and lampshaded) by Yami in Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Abridged Movie, where he asks the Big Bad what he hopes to gain from the destruction of the world. Receiving an unsatisfactory answer, he dismisses the Big Bad as "the most disappointing movie villain since General Grievous."
 * Carried over in the second season of Yu-Gi-Oh! GX but with the pressure upped even more, when Jaden is told, "The fate of the universe now rests with you."
 * The Pokémon films typically leave preventing The End of the World as We Know It to Ash Ketchum and his friends.
 * Standard thing the heroes of Dragonball Z are trying to prevent, although the ante was upped in the Buu saga, where the Big Bad could easily have wiped out the entire universe had he not been stopped.
 * Bokurano takes this trope to a whole new level of cruelty by adding a twist:
 * In the end of Saikano
 * Parodied in the Clannad game with this quote:


 * In Super Dimension Fortress Macross, the SDF-1, after a year of fighting, returns to Earth only to, however, . The remnants of humanity and the Zentradi are then shown to be co-existing on what remains of the planet, but because of some of the bored Zentradi, their alliance quickly turns to crap.
 * This is Friend's ultimate goal in Twentieth Century Boys.
 * It is feared that this is what will happen if there should ever be a "Second Summer Of Love" in Eureka Seven.
 * In The Lucifer and Biscuit Hammer this is the goal of the Big Bad, and also the main characters, Sami and Yuuhi. (The aim is to smash the planet to rubble, too.)
 * Fullmetal Alchemist,.
 * In the Manga,
 * The intent of King and Lucia in Rave Master
 * Fitting its bleak overall tone, Texhnolyze ends with Ichise as the only sane person in the dying Lux who hasn't been turned into a cyber-tree. Oh, the people on the surface are still alive, but lacking any will or initiative they are already counted as living dead.
 * In Mirai Nikki,
 * At the end of the Tokko manga's main storyline, Ranmaru has a monologue where he reveals that  two years after the end of the story.
 * Okusama wa Mahou Shoujo has the majority of the plot focusing on how Cruje will erase Wonderland and recreate it when she inherits the Manager position from Ureshiko..

Comic Books
"Wonder Woman: "They're saying that it's the end of the world as we know it, but they feel fine... It's a song? If you say so...""
 * This happens in the DCU every other week. It's amazing they even send journalists to cover it any more. "Oh look, it's Darkseid again. Wanna get some coffee while we wait for the superheroes to turn up?"
 * The Lucifer comic books, somewhat ironically, involved the Devil's efforts to prevent this. He was leaving the Creation before the world was starting to end. When the ending did start it threatened his second Creation as well as Yahweh's, so he pretty much had to help, or be destroyed. Though his principles kept him from saving the world the easiest way, by taking God's place, instead going through a Xanatos Roulette to put someone else in the role.
 * Many a comic book Crisis Crossover has this as its premise, the archetype being Crisis on Infinite Earths (see below).
 * Parodied in a Gahan Wilson comic showing a prophet of doom, his sign about the imminent end of the world under one arm, about to push down a dynamite plunger with its attached wires running off-panel. Apparently, the end of somebody's world is imminent!
 * Is a favorite ending to many What-If? stories from Marvel.
 * Korvac uses the ultimate nullifier to destroy reality in issue #32 (vol.1)
 * Jean Grey goes nuts as the Dark Phoenix and destroys many many galaxies in issue #27 (vol.1)
 * The Serpent God Set's children were successfully born in issue #25 (vol.2), they then in turn wipe out all life on Earth before moving on to conquer other planets and other dimensions.
 * The R.E.M. song is referenced in Final Night.

Film
"Kevin: "Evil's got the Map!"
 * Time Bandits...

Randall: "Too right, and the last thing we want to do is see Him again...Come on"

(The Bandits start to walk off)

Kevin: "But don't you understand?...If we don't stop Him, He'll destroy the World!""


 * Happens at the end of Dr. Strangelove. After the US recalls all other nuclear bombers, and the Russians damage (but don't destroy) the last one, the final bomber drops a bomb, which triggers Russia's Doomsday Device to end the world. Since it is a Dark Comedy, we see a large number of nuclear explosions with "Until We Meet Again" as the background music.
 * In Armageddon, a large asteroid is coming with enough force to blow every last bit of life into oblivion, and two teams are sent with a very large amount of explosives to split the asteroid in half just at the right moment before it's too late, so the two halves fly over and under the earth.
 * The Day The Earth Caught Fire (1961). Massive nuclear testing at the poles throw the Earth out of orbit towards the Sun, but a series of massive nuclear detonations in Siberia may avert the catastrophe. The last scene shows the sweating journalists waiting in the print room with two next editions ready for printing; the camera pans to one that says "WORLD SAVED", but just as it seems that everything is going to be okay the camera continues panning, and we see the alternative cover, "WORLD DOOMED."
 * In Kevin Smith's Dogma, the continued correct functioning of the laws that govern the universe are all dependent on/derived from one truth: that God is infallible. The heroes have to stop the "villains," angels cast out of Heaven, from exploiting a loophole in some obscure Catholic canon to get themselves re-admitted to Heaven, thereby contradicting God and unmaking the whole of Creation.
 * Fallen (1998), with Denzel Washington. The demons of the film are said to desire the destruction of human civilization, which they call "the fall of Babylon" and pursue this by possessing people. Though not said, this would presumably account for much of the evil in the world. Also not said but speculated is that true believer Christians will be immune to demonic possession.
 * The film (and book) of Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy puts a comedic twist on this -- the world is destroyed to make way for an interstellar bypass. The joke is that the protagonist was trying to stop his house from being demolished for much the same reason... This becomes even more of a Shoot the Shaggy Dog moment when it is revealed that the destruction of Earth took place mere moments before the unveiling of the Heart of Gold and Infinite Improbability Drive, which render hyperspace bypasses completely obsolete. And that five minutes later the job the Earth was created for would have been done and (presumably) everyone could've left.
 * Playfully subverted in Men in Black -- the universe is inches away from Armageddon due to alien interference all the time. The Men in Black casually erase the memories of anyone who catches wind of these impending disasters to prevent a general panic. Very similar to The World Is Always Doomed.
 * Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow (2004). The distant-planet-colonizing rocket seems benign, until it's revealed that the rocket's afterburners will ignite the Earth's atmosphere.
 * The sun is dying in the sci-fi movie Sunshine and has to be reignited with a nuclear bomb the size of Manhattan Island.
 * The B-movie Solar Crisis features a similar premise, but the earth is directly threatened by a massive solar flare that Our Heroes must trigger prematurely.
 * Godzilla Final Wars not only has the titular monster saving the world from an asteroid, but also dozens of other monsters as well.
 * The British film Threads and its American counterpart The Day After both deal with this trope in a very grim and realistic way. In both, nuclear war breaks out between The U.S. and the Soviet Union, resulting in a dark Scavenger World inhabited by the hapless victims of the catastrophe. Both were Anvilicious in the sense that they resorted to scare tactics to show people what the world would be like if they allowed political tensions to get the better of them, but at a time when some people thought nuclear war was survivable and a handful even cried out for war, this may have been a good thing.
 * Cthulhu (2007). Although loosely based on "A Shadow Over Innsmouth" by H.P. Lovecraft, the movie also works in elements of "The Call of Cthulhu" in that humanity is beginning to descend into chaos as a prelude to the return of the Old Ones from the sea, with scenes of rioting, madness and murder.
 * Remember how in the Transformers cartoons and the first movie the Decepticons were merely after energy sources and planned to use them to power their armies? Well, Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen tops it all. In that film, they plan to use a Weaponized Landmark to blow up the sun, thus blowing up the Earth and harvesting the raw energy output created by it. Thankfully Optimus Prime blew up the machine, so it's all good.
 * An independent movie called Last Night deals with this. It takes place on the very last day before the end of existence and it focuses on how different people are dealing with their impending demise. What's strange is that everyone knows that the world is ending at midnight, but what it is that's causing the world to end is never explained or mentioned.
 * In Independence Day, the world is about to be blown up, settlement by settlement, by aliens in giant spaceships. But, as always, America saves the day. Which was pretty much predictable from the moment you found out the film was about hostile alien attack. Funnily enough, the Trope Namer song by R.E.M was playing in the background of one of the first scenes, where the UFO on the moon is detected by the radar.
 * Roland Emmerich is this trope. Just look at The Day After Tomorrow and 2012.
 * Lori Petty's opening narration for Tank Girl uses the trope name exactly -- hear it here, at about 2:48 -- to describe the cause of the film's After the End setting.
 * In The Golden Child, the titular child is a Cosmic Keystone keeping the forces of evil at bay by his very existence. Should he be killed, which is only possible if he succumbs to evil, The Legions of Hell would be free to conquer Earth. The heroes' mission is to rescue him before that happens.

Literature

 * Spider Robinson's novel Callahan's Key is based on the notion that if the heroes do not accomplish the save-the-day task, the entire universe not only will cease to exist, but will retroactively cease ever to have existed.
 * Every couple of books, the Discworld is threatened with The End of the World as We Know It. In The Light Fantastic, it nearly collided with a red star; in Sourcery, the birth of a sourcerer nearly brings about a second Mage War and the Apocralypse [sic]; in The Last Hero, Cohen the Barbarian's scheme to get revenge on the gods threatens to destroy the magic that holds the Discworld together; and in Thief of Time, the Auditors trick a human with unusual abilities into building a clock that will leave the Discworld, and possibly the universe, frozen in time forever.
 * Double Subversion in Weis and Hickman's novel series The Sword of Joram, in which
 * Weiss' and Hickman's Dragonlance series has had quite a few of these. There's the main Cataclysm, in which a "mountain of fire" (Word of God says it was a meteor) which annihilated the Kingdom of Istar and killed millions outside of it with fire, earthquakes, etc. On the same day, Taladas, the continent to the northeast of Ansalon, suffered the "Great Destruction," in which an earthquake wiped out the mighty Aurim empire and filled the interior of the continent with molten lava. In Adlatum, the third continent the Cataclysm came in the form of the Great Drowning in which massive tidal waves flooded large parts of the land and never receded. And then, in more recent times Chaos showed up...
 * An angel and a demon team up to prevent the scheduled Biblical Apocalypse in Good Omens. Hilarity Ensues.
 * Subverted in an old Ray Bradbury short story titled The End of the Beginning. The narrator describes people all over the world staring at the sky waiting for the world to end because they know the exact date, time and place that it will begin. Eventually a searing white light appears in the sky and ends the world. The twist is... I'll give you a second to guess...
 * Victorian-set fantasy Darkness Visible is all about the protagonists' attempts to prevent the End Of The World, though this does not become clear until quite a long way through (because Lewis, the narrator, hasn't realised how serious things are). At first, we think it's only London which is at risk. It isn't.
 * Many of the Dragonriders of Pern novels concern the heroes' struggle to avert the End Of The World As The Pernese Know It, by defending human civilization against Threadfall. Granted, it's not the same world as this trope normally concerns itself with, but it still ought to count...
 * The Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind, where Richard and Kahlan save the World as we Know it... again... and again... and again. One can only assume that, since the world was just fine before they met, it's them knowing each other that's the ultimate cause for all the trouble they have to go through.
 * Some time before the beginning of Hyperion, the Earth is destroyed by an experiment with black holes conducted in Kiev.
 * S.M. Stirling's Dies the Fire and its various sequels are set in a world where every kind of "energy-dense" technology stops working, plunging the human race back in The Dung Ages... forever. Not the end of the world, but certainly the end of the world we know. (And, for the overwhelming majority of people, the end of them: try feeding seven billion people with twelfth-century technology.)
 * In Fragment, scientists and the military must act fast to eradicate the hyper-lethal, hyper-invasive wildlife of Henders Island, before it can spread to other landmasses and spell The End Of The Biosphere As We Know It.
 * A recurrent theme in China Mieville's Kraken. London's supernatural community runs betting pools and street parties in honour of various cults' prophesied apocalypses.
 * Early in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Earth gets destroyed by the Vogons to make way for a hyperspace bypass.
 * The Nightside novels feature one possible end of the world in a Timeslip
 * Most of the Skulduggery Pleasant novels have this theme. For the first three books, Skulduggery and Valkyrie must prevent religious fanatics from releasing a race of Eldritch Abominations called the Faceless Ones who used to rule the world until they were banished into another dimension. If they return, they will inhabit human bodies, tear down man's cities, destroy the countryside, destroy half the human race, enslave the rest and work them until they die before moving onto another world. In the fourth book, a madman named Dreylan Scarab tries to provoke a war between the "mortal" and magical communities that will almost certainly result in the end of civilisation. In the fifth, a race of evil spirits are released who are looking for an evil sorceress named Darquesse who will raze the world.
 * This ironic and somewhat disturbing poem by Archibald Mac Leish, titled -- appropriately enough -- "The End of the World" (which, come to think of it, might also work as an example of the Nothing Is Scarier trope):

"Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot

The armless ambidextrian was lighting

A match between his great and second toe,

And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting

The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum

Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough

In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb---

Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:"

"And there, there overhead, there, there hung over

Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,

There in the starless dark the poise, the hover,

There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,

There in the sudden blackness the black pall

Of nothing, nothing, nothing --- nothing at all."


 * Orson Scott Card's novel Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus takes place in an After the End world, where humanity (now numbering less than a billion) struggles to restore the ecology and reverse the effects of global warming. By all accounts, the results are promising. Except, as it turns out, the politicians are lying. The Amazon rainforest replanting project is failing due to the top-soil erosion, as is the Sahara restoration project. The Carolina dykes fail, allowing the rising ocean to sweep through the farmland. Humans around the world are using 100% of the arable land in all the world with less and less crops each year due to the increasing cloud cover (a result of the rising ocean levels). Without public knowledge, the politicians are keeping people ignorant of this, while dipping into the grain reserves to maintain the illusion. The weather satellites will eventually malfunction, but with more people being reassigned from factories to farms, they will not be replaced. The person who tells (and shows) all this to the protagonists sounds hopeful (although ironic) that Earth will, eventually, restore itself naturally. It's just that we, as a civilization, won't be around to appreciate it. Humanity is predicted to be thrown back to the Stone Age without the hope of recovery. Which is why the project meant to alter history has received every political support it can. Changing history means that this is still the case. The previous world is indeed gone.
 * The goal of Lord of the Rings is to prevent the One Ring from falling into the hands of the Dark Lord Sauron who will use it to restore himself to full power, conquer the world and turn it into a living Hell.
 * In The Silmarillion, Sauron's master, Morgoth takes this to the next level, seeking to completely destroy the entire universe because he's jealous that God created it and not him. Tolkien says that if Morgoth could, he would smash all of creation into dust and then hate the dust.
 * In ''Harry Potter', the plot of the first three books is to prevent Voldemort from returning to Take Over the World. He eventually does return in book four and the rest of the books are dedicated to stopping his plans and finding a way to destroy him for good.
 * In Ishmael, this is stated to be the ultimate consequence of the story the Takers are acting out.

Live Action TV

 * In Tin Man, a Steampunk adaptation of the Wizard of Oz, the evil queen of the OZ Azkadellia seeks the Emerald of the Eclipse so that she can use it to power a device called the Anti-Sun Seeder that will fix the two moons of the OZ in a permanent eclipse, plunging the land into eternal darkness which removing photo-synthesis will result in as the Mystic Man aptly predicts, the complete destruction of the OZ. It's not entirely clear what Azkadellia hopes to achieve by this but she is after all insane as a result of being possessed by the Evil Witch of the Dark. It's implied that this is the Wicked Witch from the original story, coming back to take revenge on Dorothy's descendants.
 * Jack Bauer and his allies have 24 hours to stop the End of the World As We Know It.
 * Buffy the Vampire Slayer built each season around a Big Bad whose plans usually threatened the End of Everything if he wasn't stopped by late Spring. At one point, when Giles proclaimed the Big Bad was about to cause the end of the world, everyone present groaned, "Again?" One of Buffy's boyfriends once lamented that hanging around her had caused him to need to know "the plural of apocalypse." In one episode, averting the apocalypse was the B-plot.
 * When Angel spun-off, the world was often facing two ends at once, one L.A.-based in the form of Wolfram & Hart's ongoing plans for Armageddon, the other Sunnydale-based with a different villain threatening the world each season. It even reached the point where, in the Buffy Grand Finale, . With the alarmingly frequent amounts of Apocalypses going on, it's pretty safe to assume there are several happening all at the same time. Wolfram and Hart has an archive specifically devoted to upcoming Apocalypses for Christ's sake!
 * There's no secret made of the fact that The World Is Always Doomed, in the Buffyverse.
 * The aliens in the 1980s miniseries V intended to harvest the human race for use as snack food and were turning the planet into a thinly disguised version of Nazi Germany to make it easier.
 * The destruction of all life on Earth happened, then un-happened, at least once a season on Seven Days.
 * The series The Dead Zone has a recurring Arc about Greg Stillson somehow being responsible for The End of the World as We Know It in the near future, and Johnny Smith has to find a way to stop him.
 * Star Trek, repeatedly and in many different ways. Most notably, the third season of Star Trek: Enterprise features the ship in a race against time to save not only the World, but the Universe As We Know It. If a group of genocidal aliens succeed in destroying the Earth, it will alter history and the Federation will never exist. An episode called Twilight showed what might happen if they succeeded.
 * Supernatural has a demon apocalypse progress through Signs of the End Times to a truncated Apocalypse.
 * Subverted in the Doctor Who episode 'The End of the World'. The Doctor takes Rose to see planet Earth finally bite the dust billions of years in the future, but it's a natural event that's supposed to happen. When asked if he's going to swoop in at the last moment and save the planet, he replies that there's no point because everyone has moved to greener pastures already.
 * Played straight several other times, though. Menaces such as the Slitheen, the Daleks, the Cybermen, or the Master are all the time trying to cause The End of the World as We Know It.
 * The Master actually succeeds towards the end of "The Sound of Drums," but then
 * And then, of course, we can't skip over a mention of and  attempting to
 * Or, in "The End of Time", the trying to achieve the eponymous "end of time", which would
 * And then there's "The Big Bang", where
 * The premise of Battlestar Galactica is that this has already happened, and now the Colonials are on the run in search of a new home. When they get there.
 * In the sci-fi series Lexx, the main characters go through much of the second season unaware that an enemy they defeated earlier is still alive. The villain, Mantrid, rebuilds himself, takes an army of simple-minded floating robot drones, and destroys much of the "Light Zone," one of two parallel universes. The heroes eventually stop him, but soon afterwards, the entire universe collapses in on itself. The main characters (and their ship, the Lexx) are spit out as interstellar debris into the "Dark Zone," the second universe.
 * One episode of Big Wolf on Campus has hero Tommy Dawkins prevent the end of the world by winning a wrestling match against a demon.
 * Occurs during the Time Skip between seasons 16 and 17 of Power Rangers. The entire biosphere has been destroyed globally, except for a single city fighting for survival.
 * The History Channel ran the "documentary," Life After People, which speculates on what would happen to the Earth if humans suddenly disappeared...
 * A series of sketches in That Mitchell and Webb Look featured "The Quiz Broadcast" (Remain Indoors!), filmed by and starring the last huddling remnants of humanity after "the Event" destroyed civilization. The Event was apparently so horrible that it seems to have imposed a near-universal amnesia about life before it, and anyone who tries to think about it is reduced to hysterics. There's also the live broadcast of the Invasion of the Earth by an unknown but vastly powerful extraterrestrial aggressor.
 * Odyssey 5 begins with the destruction of Earth; our heroes are then sent back in time to try and stop it.
 * In Stargate SG-1, The World Is Always Doomed. A few notable examples follow.
 * If the Goa'uld had ever attacked Earth with ships in orbit, at least before Season Five or so, they could have used orbital bombardment to conquer or destroy Earth civilization with impunity. The SGC prevented that with guerrilla tactics, alliances with other enemies of the Goa'uld, and sheer luck.
 * The Replicators, a Grey Goo made up of Lego-sized pieces that acted like a Horde of Alien Locusts, could have consumed and overrun Earth if they ever got a foothold on it, but they never did.
 * Throughout the series, numerous Goa'uld plots or other misused alien technology could have caused Earth Shattering Kabooms all by themselves. The SGC generally prevented those by Reversing The Polarity, digging up the right Applied Phlebotinum, or, again, guerrilla tactics and luck.
 * The Top Gear special, Top Gear Apocalypse showed what would happen to motoring after the end of the world via a nuclear holocaust.

Music
"There was thunder
 * We will all go together when we go...
 * The Trope Namer: "It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" by REM.
 * They don't accurately reflect ANY title, let alone this one. To the point that even Michael Stipe isn't entirely sure of the official lyrics, and he wrote them.
 * Happens in Food for the Gods. Twice.
 * The 1982 hardcore punk wave was also called "no future" punk, as the fear of an imminent nuclear holocaust, or environmental destruction was a common theme.
 * From the Tom Waits album Bone Machine, we have aptly named And the Earth Died Screaming. The primitive-sounding percussion(implying it's being sung After the End), weird lyrics and Tom Waits's voice make for one very creepy song.

There was lightning

Then the stars went out

And the moon fell from the sky

It rained mackerel

It rained trout

And the great day of wrath has come

And here's mud in your big red eye

The poker's in the fire

And the locusts take the sky

And the earth died screaming"

"When they went to bed that night no one would have believed
 * The Ayreon Rock Opera depicts the world ending around 2084-2085 despite warnings from the prophet who foresaw it's end the end comes thanks to technology and the like.
 * This happens twice in Fireaxe's Food for the Gods album. Once with the earth itself being destroyed by warring ideologies and their prophets. The second comes when Satan faces down God himself and enrages him to the point of destroying all creation. This leaves only him and the darkness in what the song describes as "cold and dark infinity"
 * "It's all over, and I'm standing pretty / In this dust that was a city..."
 * The Insane Clown Posse song "It's All Over" posits everything ending in one massive, chaotic rush. However, it presents the end of the world as a positive thing -- you have no worry of Dying Alone, for all others will die with you... and isn't it glorious, to know that you're witnessing the very end of the world itself?
 * The Genesis song "The Day The Light Went Out" is about something that arrives here and puts out the light... and then, it prepares to feed...

That in the morning, light would not be there

The dark hung heavy on the air like the grip of a jealous man

No place was there known to have been spared

Then panic took control of minds and fear hit everyone

The day the light went out of the daytime sky."

"Giant projectiles surging through the air
 * Front Line Assembly's "Armageddon":

Clouds of radiation, no time to spare

A new sense of terror attacks our creation

Final destination, Western civilization

Eins zwei drei, wir marchen forbei

Heads held high as they stare at the sky

A new sort of power won us over

Another country testing its nuclear power

Severe penetration

Face of human transformation

Severe penetration

Faced with human annihilation"

"I believe the world is burnin' to the ground
 * Matchbox 20 - How Far We've Come:

Oh well, I guess we're gonna find out

Let's see how far we've come

Let's see how far we've come"

"Do unto others as they've done to you
 * Metallica - Fight Fire With Fire

But what all hell is this world coming to?

Turn the universe into nothingness

Nuclear warfare shall lay us to rest

Fight fire with fire

Ending is near

Fight fire with fire

Bursting with fear

All shall die"

"It's the end of the world as we know it
 * "Blackened" too, though it's more about Earth After the End.
 * Armageddon by Gamma Ray:

and it's only just begun

the eyes of the world are closin' forever

when the day of the judgement will come"


 * Outkast's song "Da Art of Da Storytellin' Part 2" is this in spades, although it has one of the strangest plots of a Endofthe World As We Know It that I'm currently aware of.

Mythology and Religion

 * The Book of Revelation from The Bible, which serves as the inspiration for the Left Behind books and pretty much any Christian end-times related fiction.
 * The Ragnarök from Norse Mythology.
 * The infamous 2012 phenomenon (which inspired the film of the same name), in which according to some, the world will actually end on December 21, 2012, as that's when the Mayan calendar's supposed to end, even though the Mayans themselves actually didn't.

Play-by-Post Games

 * Shadowside: Resulting from a Mass Super-Empowering Event and the Fantastic Racism it inevitably started.

Tabletop Games

 * From Bliss Stage: "The effects of the Bliss were sinister and immediate: every human above the age of 18 were struck with a sudden weariness, and when they fell asleep, they did not awaken... ...Society, particularly industrialized society, begins to collapse one month later, as food production and utilities break down."
 * Dominaria, the central world of Magic: The Gathering, has suffered no less than several apocalypses:
 * The Brothers' War (the entire face of the planet shattered, two thousand years of ice and snow).
 * The Phyrexian Invasion (the greater part of the world's population slaughtered by demonic invaders).
 * Karona's apocalypse (all magic in the world briefly extinguished).
 * The "Time Spiral" crisis was an attempt to keep the entire plane from folding in on itself in the wake of these and various other huge magical events- an apocalypse caused by having too many apocalypses, and this doesn't count near-apocalypses like the end of the Thran War. It's a wonder the old rock's still holding together.
 * The Melting of the Iceage was its own apocalypse, and the world exploded at least three times during the Invasion Cycle. And that's to say nothing of the other planes we've visited since Invasion, where each one has had at the very least one world-ending event, if not two or three, in addition to the general world-wide-war situation most of them are in.
 * Mirrodin features a Zombie Apocalypse in the Scars of Mirrodin block wherein all the people of Mirrodin are slowly infected with The Virus and become the aforementioned demonic invaders' descendants.
 * Rise of the Eldrazi.
 * In artificial planes, the lack of someone to focus on keeping the plane stable causes the plane to collapse. This happened to Serra's Realm, when coupled with the presence of a Phyrexian in a white-mana realm.
 * There are actually cards that let you "destroy all X". These cards tend to have names like Armageddon, Wrath of God, Global Ruin, Catastrophe, Planar Collapse...
 * Quite a few Dungeons and Dragons game-settings have a World-Shattering Kaboom in their backstory, such as Krynn's Cataclysm or Mystara's Great Rain of Fire. When you get to a high enough level, you can kill gods and wipe out entire planes of existence....
 * Warhammer 40000's universe is entering the eleventh millennium of the ongoing end of the Universe. The only reason its lasted this long is because most of the bringers of the end are as happy to fight each other as humanity. The End of a World As We Know It happens all the time. But what's the loss of one planet when there are billions more out there?
 * This what mostly likely will happen if the Titans win in Scion
 * The Crapsack World of BattleTech ends and restarts (just to meet another horrible end) several times, including the fall of the Terran Alliance, the fall of the Star League (the closest thing to a golden age Battletech has ever had), the Word of Blake Jihad, and the destruction of the HPG communications network and subsequent "Dark Age." This is because the universe of Battletech is a horrible place populated by horrible people that do horrible things on a daily basis.
 * Which Endofthe World As We Know It are we talking about when we talk about the Old World of Darkness?
 * Well, there's Gehenna from Vampire: The Masquerade, when the Antediluvians rise from their slumber, run roughshod over the earth and devour their vampiric children.
 * And then there's the Ba'ali, who believe a different set of Eldritch Abominations will rise, the so-called 'Children' who existed before God created light and who will surely destroy all of mankind should they ever wake up. To prevent this, the Ba'ali commit as many utterly depraved acts as possible in the name of the Children, in an attempt to ensure they don't realise how relatively nice the World of Darkness is and come to remake things in their image.
 * And then there's the Apocalypse from (duh) Werewolf: The Apocalypse, the final battle against the Wyrm and his corruptive forces.
 * Mage: The Ascension featured a somewhat optimistic end of the world in its endgame,.
 * Unless the fourth apocalyptic scenario is used, where the Nephandi win and bring hell on earth.
 * Changeling: The Dreaming has the overhanging threat of Endless Winter, a time when imagination, belief and hope are all but gone and the world of the fae slowly withers and dies.
 * Wraith: The Oblivion ended the line with the Sixth Great Maelstrom, where a harrowing wind tore through the Shadowlands as Oblivion ran roughshod and Stygia fell. Orpheus let the players explore the aftermath... while, incidentally,.
 * Exalted has several factions planning their own, most notably The Fair Folk (who don't like order very much) and the Neverborn (who don't like anything very much).
 * The "Return Of The Scarlett Empress" book details the actual bringing about of The End of the World as We Know It at the hands of the Yozi, (who actually like lots of things, but prefer them crushed under their rule), particularly the Ebon Dragon (who deeply hates absolutely everything on a personal basis).
 * Unknown Armies has an interesting take on this. The world will end when ; once it ends,   It's insinuated that this has happened several times before;
 * The Shadowrun setting may or may not be wiped out by the Horrors, depending on how soon they break through into reality and whether technology gives more of an advantage to them or us. Oh, and whether or not your game master acknowledges that Earthdawn ever happened.
 * In the backstory of the Towers of Hanoi puzzle a legend is told of a temple with 64 golden disks; when the priests manage to relocate the tower in accordance with the rules of the puzzle, the world will cease to exist. (Even if it took a single second to make one move, this will take 2^64-1 moves, or about 585 billion years.)
 * As for the authenticity of the legend, The Other Wiki cautiously states that "it is not clear whether Lucas invented this legend or was inspired by it."
 * The angels and demons of In Nomine face this possibility in The Final Trumpet, when it appears that the prophesied signs of Armageddon are beginning to arrive.

Video Games
""And then they ate the entire universe. THE END.""
 * Command and Conquer Tiberian Sun was unique in that its last missions were essentially a race against time before everything changed. Kane has completed his World Altering Missile, which will turn all life into Tiberium based life, and there is only three hours left till it is fired. As Nod, you have to set up the ICBM launchers in Hammerfest which will destroy the Philadelphia as it passes overhead, thus assuring the WAM goes off. As GDI, you have to prevent the launch of the missile and the ICBMs.
 * The Super Robot Wars Alpha sub-series's finale had several endings that involved trying to stop the death of all sentient life in the universe. The worst one involved the embodiment of life and rebirth going nuts and using its Wave Motion Gun at the party... which kills everyone in the quadrant.
 * City of Heroes... if there were a time when the world isn't imperilled by callous villains, giant robots, aliens from Another Dimension, Experiments Gone Horribly Wrong and so forth, it was probably removed in beta. Even the villains get a few cracks at saving the world in a bit of Destiny subversion
 * Treasure of the Rudras pretty much followed this pattern of extinction of races about 5 times before the game actually begins; Every 4,000 years, a being called Rudra kills off the current race and creates a new one.
 * In Star Ocean the Second Story the main antagonist plans on erasing the universe by causing the Big Crunch.
 * And in Star Ocean: Till the End of Time, the Big Bad intends to delete the Universe.
 * In Novalogic's F-22 Lightning II, the last campaign has a collection of military and political extremist groups contesting the last Ukrainian election, with the intended result of re-creating the USSR. In the second to last mission US, Russian, Israeli, British and such intelligence have assured that even if they take a nuclear silo, they cannot reconfigure a new launch code. Now, not only have they taken one, but they have reconfigured the launch codes. Russian attempts to initiate self-destruct have failed. Their KGB sources no longer answer their phones. The world is only minutes from a nuclear holocaust.
 * The Halos in the Halo video game series are weapons designed to wipe out all sentient life in the galaxy, i.e. The End Of The Galaxy As We Know It, to prevent the Flood from spreading; naturally enough, when such an outbreak occurs in the first game, the Player Character has to stop the weapon from firing.
 * Commander Keen had to prevent this a couple of times in the classic platform-game series by Apogee. His first game-series was titled The Earth Explodes, and he had to prevent the mind controlled Vorticons -- who were being manipulated by his Evil Counterpart -- from doing just that. The sequel, 'Goodbye Galaxy', upped the ante as suggested. The next series was supposed to be about him preventing the end of the entire universe, but at that point, Apogee was running out of money, and he only got enough funding to save his babysitter.
 * In the second game.
 * This is the main goal of the Big Bad in the Chains of Promathia expansion in Final Fantasy XI. It really doesn't help that the avatar Bahamut.
 * In The Legend of Zelda Majora's Mask, a falling moon threatens to wipe out the world of Termina. In most other games in the series, the villain's only trying to rule the world.
 * A Similar event occurs in Dark Cloud 2:.
 * Would have been the fate of the world in three of Drakengard's Multiple Endings if not for the intervention of the protagonists.
 * In Kingdom Hearts, The Darkness is attempting to extinguish the Heart of reality itself. The protagonists get a glimpse what will happen to the multiverse if they fail when they visit a place literally called "The End of the World." It's the center of all Darkness -- a bleak, mostly formless mess made up of the stuff of worlds devoured by The Heartless, who themselves are made up of the stuff of people devoured by The Heartless or devolved by their own descent into evil.
 * In Super Paper Mario, Count Bleck  wish to destroy ALL worlds via the Dark Prognosticus.
 * In Live a Live
 * Every Shin Megami Tensei game (including the spinoffs) deals with this in some fashion or another.
 * In one of those spinoffs, Persona 3, the Main Character is explicitly told pretty much from the start that "the End" is coming soon.
 * In Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne (or And the "true" ending
 * In Digital Devil Saga, another spinoff, not only does, but
 * In Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey the Schwarzwelt swallows Earth in a few seconds if you die.
 * There's a free online flash game Pandemic in which the player assumes control over a virus by spending evolution points on symptoms like fever or making the virus transmitted by air. The goal is to kill every single human on earth.
 * This is at least part of the villain's plan in almost every Final Fantasy game.
 * Subverted in Final Fantasy VI, wherein the Big Bad, Kefka, actually succeeds in destroying the world, despite your best efforts otherwise. You watch as countless NPCs are killed as their land is ripped apart, and the world map is left permanently scarred. The rest of the game is spent trying to get revenge because you failed the first time around and trying to break his tyrannical grip on what'¨s left of society.
 * In Final Fantasy X In Final Fantasy X 2,
 * Serah and Noel attempt to avert this trope in Final Fantasy XIII-2 by changing the future. They ultimately do change the future...
 * In Chrono Trigger, the driving point of the game is to prevent Lavos from destroying the world in 1999 AD. (The 'present' year in the game is 1000.) And that one of the time periods you eventually find yourself is 2300 AD, thus providing the player a playable Post-Apocalypse.
 * Also, after a boss battle, does a Colony Drop where the entire floating continent falls from the sky. The resulting destruction (including a huge tidal wave) destroys just about everything, leaving a small handful of survivors in the world.  This apocalypse is also  caused by Lavos.
 * In Mass Effect, Shepard's mission is to prevent the End of the Galaxy As We Know it at the hands of Saren, whose
 * In Mass Effect 3, this happens in the first TEN MINUTES of the game.
 * At the end of Mass Effect 3
 * Terranigma kinda reversed it. The world has already ended from the start of the game and it's then the job of the Hero to starts the world again.
 * All four games in the Guild Wars series involve a looming threat that will destroy the world if the player characters don't stop it. The first game (Prophecies) twists the trope by having you discover at the end (just in time to be able to do something about it) that The next two (Factions and Nightfall) play the trope straight. The fourth (Eye of the North) subverts it at the end, when a cutscene seen by the players (but not the characters) hints that  Word of God has confirmed this interpretation in pre-release information about Guild Wars 2.
 * In World of Goo -- and this meets the original definition of sheer -- the world.
 * Super Mario Galaxy has one, but purely by accident and is not a part of Bowser's plan, but ignoring the programming of the game, it would have happened anyway whether he defeats Mario or not, because he unwittingly puts his plan above his own safety. After beating Bowser for the final time,.
 * Avalon Code has this as its premise. The world is going to get destroyed, and your job is to collect (well, scan them by hitting them with the book...) anything worth being recreated into the next world.
 * Mother 3's Dark Dragon would easily destroy the world if  minions managed to pull at least four of the Seven Needles.
 * Several of these in the Wing Commander series.
 * In Wing Commander III, one of the missions is to shoot down missiles carrying biowarfare warheads that would render a planet uninhabitable by humans for centuries. Also the fate of Earth in the losing scenarios of the game, though just hinted at with a Terminator-esque scene of a Kilrathi boot crushing a human skull. From the same game there's also the more literal world-enders of the Behemoth and the Temblor Bomb.
 * Believed to be the fate of humanity by Tolwyn in Wing Commander IV, without his plan to shape humanity into a race focused on killing, as enacted by the Black Lance.
 * The novel Fleet Action, by William Forstchen, not only has the Earth threatened with orbital bombardment by "dirty" nukes (averted by a Big Damn Heroes moment), but actually kills off two colonies in orbit around Sirius by that manner, on the way to Earth.
 * In Armored Core for Answer, it's implied that the main character wiped out the rest of humanity on ending C. Other paths to humankind's extinction exist in the game as well...
 * The Resistance series on the PlayStation 3 features The Virus systematically conquering and assimilating humanity in an alternate history setting.
 * This is the goal of pretty much everyone in Ar Tonelico 2.
 * In The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, the demonic lord Mehrunes Dagon seeks to destroy the mortal world, so the Player Character & Friends have to stop him. In the expansion pack, the player must save another world...from its own creator, who is insane and has an irresistible urge to destroy his creations every once in a while.
 * In the sequel, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the Dragonborn must prevent the evil Alduin the World-Eater from resurrecting the long-extinct dragons and then eating the world and everyone in it.
 * Touhou, in its eleventh game, finally featured a Big Bad who was actually willing to pull one of these off. She just happened to be a crow who was powered by nuclear fusion, and turning the underworld into a new Sun.
 * Skarin from Viking: Battle for Asgard brings this about. Granted it's more the extremely uncomfortable variety but it still counts.
 * In Fallout, The World As We Know It Ends on October 23, 2077.
 * In Fahrenheit (2005 video game), if you, the world ends in eternal winter.
 * In Pokémon Diamond and Pearl, The Big Bad of the game wants to get rid of the world and create a new "perfect" one using Palkia and Dialga.
 * In Pokémon Platinum, it gets worse. After being defeated, and after the player defeats/captures Giratina in the Distortion World, Cyrus says:
 * The End of the World level in Sonic the Hedgehog 2006.
 * Magic Planet Snack has this a couple of times:
 * There is a wizard in the middle of every planet. You have to tunnel through the planets.
 * More obvious in the good ending:
 * More obvious in the good ending:


 * This is the theme of World of Warcraft's next expansion pack, appropriately titled Cataclysm.
 * In the first two Space Quest games, Big Bad Vohaul plots to destroy Xenon. Roger must save Xenon from an Earthshattering Kaboom in the first game, and from insurance salesmen in the second.
 * Missile Command. Only you can prevent the nuclear destruction of Earth's last remaining cities. And you will lose.
 * In Champions Online, the fallen angel Therakiel is destined to bring about the Apocalypse in the city of Vibora Bay. Two mortals, Robert Caliburn and Valerian Scarlet, shall be the key players of this final conflict, though no one knows which side they shall take.
 * Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker's climax (of Chapter 4, at least) dealt with trying to stop Peace Walker from both launching a nuke to Cuba and transmitting false trajectory data to NORAD after Coldman, in his dying breaths, activated Peace Walker.
 * All of the Star Fox games deal with this trope on a more galactic scale; however, Star Fox Adventures plays this straighter with the potential end of only Dinosaur Planet (renamed Sauria in later games).
 * Since Odin Sphere is based on the Norse legend of Ragnarök, the world ends no matter what path you take. The fate of the world, however (whether it stays destroyed or reborn), depends on whether or not the player correctly chooses who faces the final bosses.
 * In the fourth installment of the Heroes of Might and Magic series, the world that the previous games take place in is destroyed when two incredibly powerful magical swords that were featured in expansions of the previous game clash. Fortunately, portals start appearing all over the place that take the lucky survivors to the new world of Axoth.
 * The planet of Tales of Symphonia and Tales of Phantasia suffers from this like a recurring rash. It happened for sure 4000 years before Symphonia at the conclusion of a devastating war, when the planet was split in two and taken over by a malicious racial supremacist theocracy, and then again between Symphonia and Phantasia when another devastating war set the planet up to be nuked back to the dark ages by a meteor strike. Also, there were several during the 4000 years of theocratic rule due to a resource conservation scheme, but we only know of one for certain . It comes close to happening again in Phantasia but the heroes stop it that time.
 * In In Famous, Kessler and the First Sons have, in the name of human advancement, developed a device that can activate superpowers in the user... and it kills everyone else in a six-block radius in the process. It turns out that only some people with a specific genetic trait can even use it, and others who meet this criteria in the blast radius will also receive powers. It doesn't take long for most of the cast to come to the obvious conclusion: whoever can get their hands on this device will be able to make their own super-powered soldiers with plenty of collateral damage they can blame on terrorists, ushering in a new era of warfare that will irrevocably change the world for the worse.
 * In inFamous 2 we learn that
 * In Rift, Defiant player characters are sent back in time from a Bad Future in order to avert the Class 5 or 6 apocalypse that's the result of Regulos winning.
 * In Arc the Lad the final boss's first sentient act after being released from imprisonment is to rip the world a new one. He seems to learn to prioritize better in the sequel, since when he is released that time he then decides to have fun after he kills those pesky heroes.
 * In Xenosaga
 * Assassin's Creed II reveals that the main plot, Assassins versus Templars fighting over ancient artifacts that can control the fate of mankind, is actually part of a larger plot by Those Who Came Before. Assassin's Creed Revelations details how their First Civilization, countless millennia ago, was destroyed by a solar flare, nearly wiping mankind off the face of the Earth. The Pieces of Eden and the genetic legacy they left in certain human bloodlines were all designed to converge in 2012 and communicate the information necessary so that the modern-day Assassins can avert a repetition of this catastrophe.
 * This is what Galactus plans to do in Marvel vs. Capcom 3. Should you lose to him in the final battle, he succeeds.

Visual Novels

 * Shikkoku no Sharnoth nearly has an end of the world situation when
 * In Fate/stay night,

Webcomics

 * College Roomies from Hell. Don't be fooled by the early years; the "from Hell" part is quite literal.
 * In The Wotch, Anne actually laughs at Xaos when he reveals that he wants to use her to destroy all worlds, claiming she is "not sure [he] thought this diabolical plan all the way through."
 * This is the threat K'Z'K poses in Sluggy Freelance. Other dimensions shown in the series have visited have faced similar threats. On a couple occasions the main characters have helped save these other worlds; on a couple other occasions, they're actually the ones responsible (directly or indirectly) for the destruction of the human race. Oops.
 * Tom Siddell described City Face (a Gunnerkrigg Court interim comic) as "a story of how love can save the world." It turns out to be literal: a fairy informs City Face that if he doesn't win the heart of his dream girl, the world could be destroyed, prompting the quote at the top of the page.
 * Averting this trope is the main reason Order of the Stick have been struggling to foil Xykon and Redcloak.
 * In Irregular Webcomic the various temporal paradoxes eventually destroyed the whole universe. It got better.
 * Homestuck features a benign-looking computer game that turns out to summon the end of the world. In a unique variation, this is how the story begins, and rather than being the result of a villain's meddling,  Not that that makes it any less disconcerting to see messages from the people left behind on Earth.
 * The Earth Explodes is the name of a web comic where after each strip the world explodes, well, the final comic in the collection is always a picture of the planet exploding. Exactly What It Says on the Tin, can be read here.
 * Far Out There opens with Trigger being trained from birth to prevent this. (It turns out to be completely unnecessary)
 * Avatar was also created with this in mind.
 * In Endstone, Jon tried to do this. Given the hints of a Lotus Eater Machine, this may not mean he's a complete monster.

Web Original
"39. Not allowed to ask for the day off due to religious purposes, on the basis that the world is going to end, more than once."
 * If the Dimensional Guardians from Dimension Heroes don't find the seven cybaspheres and fix the rip the space/time continuum, both their world and Creturia will destroy one another.
 * In the animated Urban Fantasy Broken Saints, the Evil Plan of The Omniscient Council of Vagueness involves
 * In the Giant in the Playground Freeform Roleplaying section, this has apparently been threatened three times, and a fourth is planned. Although this one's going to be a conquer, not destroy, the world.
 * SCP Foundation catalogs these as "XK-class end-of-the-world scenarios," and has many Artifacts Of Doom capable of triggering them.
 * This video. You've probably seen it, it's the one with the nuclear holocaust and the fucking kangaroos.
 * In the Orion's Arm universe, the Grey Goo plague of the "Nanoswarm Era" destroys the original Terran civilization (although many humans, robots, and A Is sruvive to create new civilizations from the ashes). The Amalgamation is threatening to do it again, and more completely.
 * In the flash game Mastermind, this is your ultimate goal; the titular Mastermind forgets to tell his henchmen this rather important fact. When it comes time to push the button and end the world, they're understandably freaked out. Then hilariously parodied when the Mastermind, having made his escape into space, looks back on the debris of Earth and muses "Now what do I do? Hm, maybe I should've thought this out more."
 * The Demented Cartoon Movie ends the world many times in a thirty minute stretch of time. Sometimes a series of worldwide nuclear explosions demolishes the planet itself. Sometimes the planet falls into the sun. Once, somebody just has to say a word that triggers the explosion of the planet.
 * Each story of a Global Guardians campaign was set up like a season of a television series. Specifically, the finale of each season was an end of the world scenario. Notable examples were the Xorn invasion, the near-miss of an asteroid, the release of a horde of elder gods on the planet, impending nuclear holocaust, drastic historical revision by way of a time-traveling bad guy, an invasion by Mirror Universe versions of the various superheroes, and quite a few other threats to the entire planet.
 * At the end of the Chaos Timeline, World War III between the superpowers Germany and China breaks out, and although it doesn't last long (less than one day, in fact), the world will never be again as it was before.
 * Skippys List has examples:

Western Animation
"Gentlemen, this could very well lead to the end of the World... of Warcraft."
 * In Avatar: The Last Airbender, in the first episode of the four-part series finale Aang learns that if he doesn't stop the Firelord before Sozin's Comet, that . And the worst part is that he's more than capable of doing that.
 * This sort of thing happens a lot, to any number of planets, at various points in the assorted Transformers cartoons, comics, etc. Some planets make it, some don't.
 * The end of the world was threatened so many times by so many different villains of Xiaolin Showdown that it was eventually Lampshaded.
 * Used in Futurama, when the Professor and his crew must prevent a giant ball of 20th century New York garbage from returning to Earth and destroying the planet.
 * Then there was the What If episode where Fry destroyed the universe by never coming to the future, causing a Temporal Paradox.
 * And again when the Brainspawn plan to destroy the Universe after learning every piece of data in it.
 * And again when a box containing our Universe is about to be destroyed because  Try to sort that out.
 * The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy enjoyed doing this in as many ways as possible: Martian Zombies, all-powerful demons, everyone being turned into Cthulu-esque monsters, everyone being turned into demons, everyone being turned into a different TYPE of monster...
 * Then there's the time Mandy grabbed a genie's lamp and wished everyone in the world would just go away. For her, that was a happy ending.
 * The Grand Finale of Danny Phantom does this with.
 * The Season 4 3-part finale on Teen Titans to conclude the big Raven arc.
 * Justice League faced these several times.
 * The Pilot had the formation of the League to stop an invasion by the aliens that destroyed all life on Mars.
 * In Twilight Darkseid gets the League to help him save his own world, Apokolips, from being destroyed by Brainiac. However,
 * War World forced Superman to choose between death and letting this happen to an innocent planet.
 * The second season finale, Starcrossed, has the Earth invaded by the Thanagarians. They say they're building a giant shield generator to protect us from even more hostile invading aliens.
 * The Return has the super-android Amazo come streaking back in from wherever he's been, destroying Oa on his way back.
 * Two of these occur in The Greatest Story Never Told, in which Booster Gold is relegated to traffic duty while the rest of the League- the entire League, consisting of dozens of heroes-, battle against the Dark Lord Mordru, who will bring this about if he is not stopped. Instead Booster becomes a Hero of Another Story when a Hot Scientist needs his help to stop a black hole consuming the planet.
 * Dark Heart had a gray goo scenario, with fairly large goo.
 * The Once and Future Thing culminated with the unraveling of reality due to the injudicious use of time travel.
 * Divided We Fall, the second season finale of Justice League Unlimited, brought back.
 * And finally, in the two-part Grand Finale Destroyer and Alive!,
 * Parodied in the South Park episode "Make Love, not Warcraft." A player in the game has become so powerful that even the admins can't stop him from killing other players, and the fear is that everyone will become frustrated and stop playing:


 * The Movie had this happen when Satan rises at the climax and starts two thousand years of darkness.. Thank you, Sheila.
 * In Turtles Forever, the 2003 Shredder plans to set out on a conquest of the Turtles Multiverse, until he learns that there will be a team of Ninja Turtles that would be waiting to stop him in each and every dimension. He decides to destroy all of them at once by going after the source, Turtle "Prime", blind to the fact that destroying the multiverse would mean the end for him, as well. And he almost won, too.
 * Princess Luna's Super-Powered Evil Side, Nightmare Moon, in My Little Pony trying to bring The Night That Never Ends, which, as Word of God says, would have turned all of Equestria into an icy hell.
 * Anyone else up for Pony Popsicles?
 * Stuff like this occurring is pretty much the norm in Regular Show.

Real Life
"Dr. Ian Malcolm: God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs...
 * Well, in a few billion years, the Sun will become a Red Giant, which will mean the end of the world. Hopefully, we'll have found a better place to live. Maybe by the year 2525?
 * If man is still alive...
 * If woman can survive...
 * They may find...
 * Won't someone please Think of the Children?
 * Look on the bright side! Only 61 years to go until we can go to any planet we want!
 * But wait a minute! Without constant monitoring, that line will always say..... Oh, I get it....
 * In about 450 million years, increased solar emissivity will make earth too hot for C4 photosynthesis to occur, making terrestrial life impossible. Shortly after, the oceans will partially evaporate, increasing the atmospheric pressure to Venus-like levels, and making things even hotter. Earth is well past her prime.
 * Various theories in modern physics predict that baryons have a limited lifetime. Considering that pretty much everything is made a baryons this would mean that given enough time the whole universe will simply fall apart no matter what happens.
 * There's always that threat that Mankind will stuff up something before any of the above "Real Life" Tropes even come close to coming true. There is even rumour of a small cult of people who believe that Mankind will push their "playing God" role too far and rather spectacularly fail, thus killing themselves. A wonderful quote from Jurassic Park which is much worth mentioning:

Dr. Ellie Sattler: Dinosaurs eat man. Woman inherits the earth..."


 * Never fear though; it'll be years before some corporate giant realises that it's only a simple task of some genetic mutation and they'll be making millions out of Raptor-thigh cutlets.
 * Isaac Asimov did that in a short...
 * The Permian Extinction, which occurred on the Permian-Triassic Boundary, was very nearly the End of the World as We Know It. At least, it was very nearly the end of life as we know it. 95% of all species went extinct. The extinction that killed the dinosaurs (the KT Extinction) wiped out "only" 60% of all species. Somewhat interesting, the Permian extinction killed large numbers of individual species, but kept many groups intact. The KT Extinction killed whole groups (such as the dinosaurs, ammonites, etc.), but saved more groups of individual species.
 * Did we mention that it might have been caused by Siberia exploding? No, not a single volcano in Siberia...the entire region exploded, sending massive amounts of dust and volcanic ash into the air, causing acid rain to fall virtually nonstop.
 * As far as the "as we know it" goes, this has happened periodically throughout human history in both small scale (see: the fall of the civilization on Easter Island), and large scale (see: the fall of the Roman Empire). Society utterly collapses, economies revert to sustinence agriculture and some hunter-gatherer-ing from more complex dynastic and mercantile ones, and cultural development and arts get tossed to the wayside as survival becomes more crucial and difficult for most of the people. The world is still there afterwards, but it isn't as people knew it anymore.
 * The fall of the Roman Empire was far less damaging to European society than was once thought. Renaissance writers invented the decay of early medieval Europe in order to make their own accomplishments look better.
 * Somebody's world ends every second, when they die. But the rest of us don't notice. And when the world ends for you it will carry on for everybody else.
 * There are a number of proposals that super-advanced extraterrestrials might construct massive, astronomical-scale objects for their own purposes. If that's so, it's not so hard to imagine that future humanity might decide to do something similar (for example, building a Dyson Sphere). It would required an enormous amount of building material, which might lead to the human race deliberately deconstructing Earth itself to use as raw material. Same might so for the Sun too (by far the largest single object, and thus source of matter, in the Solar System).
 * The smallpox pandemic in the Americas pretty much makes a perfect example, except that it affected only half of the planet. Within a century it reduced the population down to about 5% and then strangers from unknown lands with superior technology arrived in huge numbers, often killing or displacing what little islands of civilizations had survived.

I feel fine, though.