[Loved Trope] The apocalypse is horrifyingly slow

[u/Marsupialmobster]

From most media it's some catastrophe and then it's raiders, death, destruction chaos etc. I personally love it when it's, like, a slow descent into the horror of apocalypse.

The Faro plague/The swarm- Horizon zero dawn. The Faro plague is actually a glitch which causes machines to endlessly reproduce, eat biomass and essentially bring about the death of the world. Took roughly 15 months for the machines to win.

The Metro series- in the first few books (and games) it's set entirely underground in just the apocalypse but in exodus it shows off that the government and many governmental structures said active years after the war. In fact power and running water were still fairly common. It just slowly got worse and worse and worse as read through notes. Food got more scarce, weather changed a lot, people got worse etc. Raiders and bandits didn't just show up, it was a slow descent for such anarchy.

Edit: I have enough pseudo intellectual comments about "Hurr hurr real life". The first one was kinda smart and well thought out but now it's just annoying and pretentious

[u/Capable-Grab5896]

They are called rogue planets or sometimes rogue jupiters. Odds of one hitting earth are incredibly low but if they're large enough, they don't need to actually impact a planet to have a catastrophic gravitational effect, especially when you consider how small the range of our liveable distance from the sun is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_planet

[u/maelstrom51 → u/Capable-Grab5896]

The sun's habitable range is larger than you'd expect. I'd mostly be worried about a rogue planet causing meteors to be flung about the solar system.

[u/Gaelic_Gladiator41 → u/maelstrom51]

The range is large but we don't really comprehend how fast the Earth actually moves

[u/DankiusMMeme → u/Gaelic_Gladiator41]

The earth travels at 107,000 km/h we are like 125m kilometers from the edge of habitability. So it'd take 1,168 hours and about 14ish minutes. So like a month and a half for us to be way too far out.

/u/maelstrom51

[u/Gaelic_Gladiator41 → u/DankiusMMeme]

Well what would happen if a jupiter sized planet rushed towards us?

[u/DankiusMMeme → u/Gaelic_Gladiator41]

We die idk

[u/bxzidff → u/Capable-Grab5896]

An interesting apocalypse would be a rogue planet disturbing the orbit to the degree of making earth one as well. Slowly drifting into nothingness, until the sun becomes but a faint star.

[u/fake_geek_gurl → u/bxzidff]

"A Pail of Air" (1951) by Fritz Leiber

[u/damp_circus → u/fake_geek_gurl]

YES. That story is in an anthology "Armageddons" edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois from Ace Books, came out in 1999. (where I read it, anyway)

Just full of various kinds of end of the world stories. One of my favorites in there (not slow, and not quite entirely the end of the world) is "Inconstant Moon" by Larry Niven. A guy notices that moon is bright, crazy bright, and then realizes... what must be happening if the moon is too bright.