What kind of apocalypses are there

They can be all-encompassing leading to the extinction of all life, including humans, on Earth. Other scenarios can be more "minor" whereby "the cultural, technological, environmental or social world is so greatly altered it could be considered as a different world.

According to sites like nzherald. These are as follows: -. Here are 5 examples of apocalyptic events that governments around the world are at least attempting to plan for. Believe it or not but some governments have actually produced disaster plans in case of an event akin to a zombie apocalypse.

The United States' Centers for Disease Control posted tips on how to survive one should it ever occur. These tips are obviously made partly in jest but have serious real-life applications in case of more realistic events such as large hurricanes. It contains information on what should be included in your emergency provisions. This includes things like clean drinking water, food, medication, tools, and other supplies.

It's actually a very interesting read and I would recommend that you give it a quick once over. While it is humorously written to address a zombie apocalypse, it is applicable to many other disaster events in the real-world. Whatever your views on this issue, many governments around the world have been planning for the worst-case scenario.

Island governments are particularly concerned about the possibility of rising sea levels for obvious reasons. One example is the island nation of Kiribati in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

The island is barely above sea level as it is, and any major rises would completely drown the island. They have contingency plans in place to buy land from other nearby nations, like Fiji, to relocate their population of , should the worst-case ever occur. The Maldives is another island nation in potential danger. In a PR stunt back in , before the opening of the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, then-President Mohamed Nasheed held an underwater cabinet meeting to draw attention to the potential problem.

He has since been at the forefront of leading the charge to encourage other nations to reduce their emissions ASAP. The collapse of any sophisticated and mature nature, like the United States , would have very serious consequences for its inhabitants. If such an event were to occur through economic collapse, famine, war or other reasons, some governments, like the U.

Also, they're usually about exploring the dynamics within the group that's still around, showing how they fare on their own and what this reveals about them.

Sort of related to the "slow apocalypse" scenario — but it often happens a lot more quickly. Our vaunted high technology suddenly crashes, due to an EMP or failure of the electrical grid. This genre starts with the E. Stirling's Dies The Fire. These sorts of stories often highlight how dependent we are on our technology — and how quickly our social expectations revert to an earlier, somewhat more barbaric, form without it. Lacking birth control and computers, people snap back into patriarchal modes.

But there's also often a kind of nostalgia, and a sense of relief that we're returning to a simpler way of life. We can finally eat organic veggies! The living dead rampage across the land, and anyone who dies or gets bitten usually becomes one of them. And zombies can be an easy metaphor for whatever you want — but they often represent the working class, or immigrants, or the underclass. They're the faceless herd of humanity, who are mindlessly involved in consumption and labor, not like our heroes, who are true individuals.

Sometimes, zombie narratives dwell on the nasty fantasy of killing our own friends and loved ones, but often the longer they go on the more of a faceless mob the zombies tend to become. Our technology tries to kill us — not by failing, but by being too successful. Computers gain sentience and decide to wipe out the meatbags, or our gear starts malfunctioning in a homicidal fashion.

Or some hacker or bad guy turns our stuff against us. These stories are usually pretty clearly about our fear that our tech is getting too smart, and that it might outsmart us soon enough.

It's not even the dread of artificial intelligence in real life, but just the notion that computers and other tech are just too incomprehensible, and we only just learned to program the DVR, and now our toaster is trying to tell us something.

Your entire life is already controlled by Siri, and what if she turns malevolent? Etc etc. Feelings of dependence and helplessness can easily turn into paranoia. Not so much of an apocalypse as a futuristic space-colonization scenario — but it usually involves Earth being left for dead, or turned into a garbage dump.

It's often kind of an ecological collapse narrative see 2 and 9 mixed with other kinds of disasters. In the rare post-Earth story, like Firefly , we never go back to Earth at all and it's just mentioned as something in our rear-view mirror — a cautionary tale, about what happens when we humans use a planet up and suck it dry. The story of humans abandoning our homeworld usually has a clear environmentalist bent — we had to leave because we fouled our own nest — but also usually a touch of Malthusianism.

Other films, however, such as 'Outbreak,' 'Contagion' and the television adaptation of Stephen King's 'The Stand,' illustrate the severity of a world disrupted by awful sickness. It involves lots of phlegm. Sometimes you need an apocalypse and don't want to dwell on it. For those occasions, the nuclear apocalypse always provides a nice and easy answer. Whether we lead up to one, as with 'Dr. Strangelove,' show up waaaaaaay after the fact, like we do with 'Planet of the Apes,' or see one happen when it's least expected, as with the already post-apocalyptic 'Beneath the Planet of the Apes,' no one questions the severity of this apocalypse.

Don't mess with Mother Nature. Her wrath leads to apocalypses that are no laughing matter, though their execution on film could lead to a snicker or two. Such is the case with M. Night Shyamalan's silly 'The Happening,' in which plants murder us by making us murder ourselves. One could also make a case for the unintentional comedy of Roland Emmerich's ',' which illustrates an Earth that basically gets swallowed by the ocean after some major solar flares.

There aren't many vampire apocalypses out there. The 'Blade' series continuously uses it as a threat, but 'Blade' always manages to save the day before we get there.

The recent film 'Stakeland' gives it a good shot, though the vampires are more like zombies. Probably the best example is the Michael and Peter Spierig film 'Daybreakers,' which has all the stuff a good vampire apocalypse should have: ystematic farming of people for their blood, degrees of vampirism, renegade humans, and the possibility of a cure.

But even with that bright spot, this is not one of the more popular ways for filmmakers to end the world.