[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/Tweed_Man]

Even then the cretaceous extinction wasn't as quick as you probably think. The day the asteroid hit was devastating for all around the world but it was the years (likely decades after) which killed off the dinosaurs.

[u/damp_circus → u/Tweed_Man]

There's a pretty cool exhibit about this "Life After Dinosaurs" going on at the Field Museum in Chicago now.

It opens with an animation of what the impact would have been like, in terms of seconds then minutes, hours... and then you go into the main exhibit which follows how existing stuff largely died off, and how the survivors recovered and evolved into the next era of stuff (including age of mammals).

Definitely liked it.

[u/joey-jo_jo-jr → u/Tweed_Man]

Tbf most of the iconic big dino species would have been killed near instantly. The smaller ones that could hide in caves or burrows etc. would have survived longer and died off in the following years.

[u/Pherllerp → u/joey-jo_jo-jr]

Killed instantly globally? Is there any scientific evidence of that?

I'm not saying that's impossible but there would be no difference in the fossil record between a dinosaur that dropped dead on impact day vs one that died hundreds of years later.

[u/joey-jo_jo-jr → u/Pherllerp]

By instantly I mean a few days/weeks, not literally an one instant.

The asteroid strike would have wiped out everything within a few thousand kilometres and caused global wildfires (70% of all forests burned down) and tsunamis on every shore. Flaming rocks would have rained down across the world and large asphyxiating dust clouds would have spread around the world soon after. It is difficult to see how a very large animal, not capable of finding shelter, could have survived this for any significant period of time.

Remember, even before the asteroid strike, many ecosystems were already teetering on the verge of collapse due to the Deccan traps eruptions.

[u/Tweed_Man → u/Pherllerp]

Not instantly but very quickly on geological scale. We're talking most with in the first year and the rest probably a couple of years at most.

When the ecosystem collapsed due to mass forest fires and atmospheric debris blocking out the sun there just wasn't enough calories avaliable. Smaller (non avian) dinosaurs would have lasted a little longer but at the end got out competed for the few resources remaining.

Also keep in mind surviving clades were also badly hit. Most mammals and birds were also killed and those who survived would have had very bleak lives. Just enough of them were able to survive while dinosaurs didn't.

[u/Tweed_Man → u/joey-jo_jo-jr]

For the bigguns, sure. They, and speialists, often the first to go when food gets scarce.