The Quiet Earth (1985) movie

The 1985 New Zealand movie The Quiet Earth is based on Craig Harrison's 1981 novel The Quiet Earth. As with the 2009-2010 TV adaptation of Robert Sawyer's 1999 novel Flash Forward, which begins with the premise of a science experiment gone wrong, in The Quiet Earth its experiment causes nearly everyone who had not been on the verge of death to disappear from the world. Three survivors, possibly the last humans in their part of New Zealand, including a Maori man, emerge and try to make sense of what has happened. In the end, one of the scientists involved in the experiment sacrifices himself to try and turn the world back to its previous state. Only the consequences for him are literally out of this world.

Solar Attack (2006) TV movie

The premise of the 2006 Solar Attack TV movie is that the sun is ejecting enormous solar flares that are disrupting life and electrical equipment on and above the earth. The fear is that multiple flares reaching the Earth could ignite the vast volume of methane gas in the atmosphere, creating a gigantic overhead firestorm that would suffocate all life on the planet's surface.

The Prophet and the Astronomer (2001) book

Marcelo Gleiser's 2001 book, The Prophet and the Astronomer: A Scientific Journey to the End of Time, examines the relation between predictions of the end of the universe by cosmographers and astrophysicists and religious and philosophical revelations of the apocalypse. This work was originally published in Portuguese under the title O fim da Terra e do Céu: O apocalipse na ciência e na religião, and was translated into English by the author.

The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961) movie

The Day the Earth Caught Fire, a 1961 British movie, was co-written, directed and produced by Val Guest, better known for his movie The Quatermass Xperiment. The film's doomsday scenario has the Soviet Union and the United simultaneously exploding nuclear bombs with devastating consequences: the Earth's axis is not only tilted to produce bizarre weather patterns due to the shift of the equator, but the Earth's orbit is also changed and it's sent on a path towards the Sun. The movie, in glorious black and white, is notable for the red tinted sequences to simulate the heat of a truly scorched Earth. The film also has some great effects of a dried up Thames River in London, England.

The Drowned World (1962) novel

Science fiction authors on occasion mimic catastrophes of Biblical and scientific proportions by projecting from current conditions and imagining, as J.G. Ballard did in his 1962 novel The Drowned World, a global flood and extreme weather conditions caused by melted icecaps induced by solar radiation. The novel was expanded from a novella published in a magazine the same year.

No Morning After (1954) short story

In his darkly humorous look at doomsday, "No Morning After," Arthur C. Clarke has a telepathic race of extraterrestrials contact a man to warn him of the Earth's imminent destruction from its sun going nova. In order to save the Earth's population, the aliens will create wormholes all over the Earth and through which people can enter to instantly find themselves on a new world. All the contactee has to do is inform others of what to do. Due to his personal problems, however, things don't go as planned for the aliens, except for the part about the sun exploding just as they had calculated it.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) movie

Those Decepticon robots! They are bad. But we have the Autobots led by Optimus Prime, and his human mascot Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) on our side. If only they hadn't hidden the sun-killing device at the peak of the Great Pyramid in Egypt, I would have believed that the world was in mortal peril. Haven't there been studies of the innards of the Great Pyramid through imaging technology? It was fun though seeing this World Heritage Site being decimated by a giant vacuuming robot.