Comparison of various wars

[SilverDragonRed]

There are a multitude of settings that contain human conflicts. Out of all the various settings, which ones were the most devastating for the central human faction? Doesn't matter if it is fought against other humans or alien civilizations.


As a principle I'm not going to count the IoM since I don't think anything else can really compete against of 10,000 years of endless war.

[Borgholio]

Well if you consider Aliens to be a war, then I'd have to say that some of the Aliens novels had it pretty bad, where humanity was nearly exterminated by a Xenomorph infestation of Earth. If you want to look at armed conflict between two civilizations, then Titan A.E is a bad one where Earth is destroyed and humanity are reduced to being nomads.

[Batman]

Both iterations of BSG humanity didn't fare all that well either.

[Borgholio]

I wonder if you would consider Wall-E as well. The basis of the movie is that Earth is a polluted wasteland which is uninhabitable by humanity, and humans have evolved into gastropods that are almost physically incapable of simple tasks such as walking. Granted, everything began to improve by the end of the movie, but prior to that conditions were fairly dismal. Granted, this isn't a war or anything, but it's still a form of conflict - unrestricted consumerism vs the environment...and the environment lost.

[Imperial528]

I'd say The Killing Star is pretty high up there as far as % of human civilization destroyed.

[Jub]

Hitchhiker's guide reduced humanity to a single human, IIRC.

[Terralthra]

Hitchhiker's guide reduced humanity to a single human, IIRC.

At least two. Trillian was also a human from Earth.

[Crazedwraith]

That wasn't a war. It was just construction.

[Parallax]

B5 had Earth getting its ass kicked severely by the Minbari, though over in Macross ... well, Earth got pretty much levelled by the Zentradi amarda with the most of the survivors being the ones in deep shelters and on the Macross itself.

[U.P. Cinnabar]

That wasn't a war. It was just construction.

I thought it was pest control.

[Eternal_Freedom]

If we're going by percentage of humans killed, then I kinda have to bring up the Daleks (or else my avatar will exterminate me). They've made at least five conquests of Earth in varying eras, ranging from "wiping out whole continents" with virus bombs and enslaving the rest (Dalek Invasion of Earth/Day of the Daleks) to "bomb the planet with enough force to re-arrange the landmasses" (Parting of the Ways) and a general invasion/extermination/enslavement/experimentation in Stolen Earth/Journey's End.

Plus various raids and appearances that kill people from a handful (Remembrance, Victory of the Daleks) to a lot (Doomsday). So year, while humans always survive gainst Daleks it's usually close and we usually have help.

[U.P. Cinnabar]

There's also the Homecoming War from the 2013 CGI film Space Pirate Captain Harlock, in which this version of Harlock kills the entire Earth with a release of dark matter at the end of said war.

Then you have the ruinous century-long Alliance-Syndicate Worlds War from The Lost Fleet novels, during which the Alliance and the Syndics were racing each other to the bottom in terms of atrocities committed mainly against each other's civilian populations. Plus, the end of that war saw the Syndics destroying at least one star system by blowing up its hypernet gate.

There's also the Gamilas' meteor-bombing of Earth in Space Battleship Yamato, in the original cartoon, the 2010 live-action movie, and the reimagined animé.

I would figure the Thousand-Yahren War from the original Battlestar Galactica was ruinous to the Colonials, enough to drive them to the peace table, before the Cylons eradicated the majority of the Colonists in "Saga Of a Star World."

And, of course, the Kilrathi carved a huge bloody hole in the Confed during the three(?)decades of the Kilrathi War, before Blair destroyed Kilrah with a temblor bomb.

And, moving away from Earth, there was the Thal-Kaled War on Skarro which reduced both sides to fighting with a hodgepodge of modern and primitive technologies, before Davros' scheming led to the extermination of all Kaleds but his mutated Daleks, Nider and himself, and the Daleks wiped out everyone else(well, almost everyone else).

[Borgholio]

I would think that Mutineer's moon would qualify as well. Even though Earth managed to survive mostly intact, the Achuultani murdered countless whole civilizations, then the bio-plague afterward killed all who were left. So we're talking easily trillions of humans dead and the only survivors living on two remote worlds (Earth and one Imperium colony).

[NecronLord]

If we're going by percentage of humans killed, then I kinda have to bring up the Daleks (or else my avatar will exterminate me). They've made at least five conquests of Earth in varying eras, ranging from "wiping out whole continents" with virus bombs and enslaving the rest (Dalek Invasion of Earth/Day of the Daleks) to "bomb the planet with enough force to re-arrange the landmasses" (Parting of the Ways) and a general invasion/extermination/enslavement/experimentation in Stolen Earth/Journey's End.

Plus various raids and appearances that kill people from a handful (Remembrance, Victory of the Daleks) to a lot (Doomsday). So year, while humans always survive gainst Daleks it's usually close and we usually have help.

Specific mention should be made of the Dalek Empire series by Big Finish. It may not be indisputable 'canon' but that hardly matters as it is assuredly sci-fi.

In the end of Dalek Empire II the humans, in order to defeat the daleks, have to implant a self-destruct command in the Emperor Dalek's mind, which causes it to order all daleks in the Milky Way and Seriphia galaxies to self-destruct (A group survives to rebuild, of course). Mass planetary destruction and widespread depopulation of the galaxies - then with all spacegoing planets under dalek occupation - follows as the daleks overload their power supplies. It's not just humans this affects, mind you, but humans are widespread and a galactic scale 'Earth Alliance' around at the start of the war.

Millions upon millions of worlds are destroyed and entire nebulas formed out of destroyed stars.

Thousands of years later there is still a galactic dark age and interstellar civilization is just recovering.

It also makes human deaths in the 40k setting look like a picnic.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Damn. Maybe that's the Age of Strife then (heh).

[Simon_Jester]

I would think that Mutineer's moon would qualify as well. Even though Earth managed to survive mostly intact, the Achuultani murdered countless whole civilizations, then the bio-plague afterward killed all who were left. So we're talking easily trillions of humans dead and the only survivors living on two remote worlds (Earth and one Imperium colony).

In the backstory, the evidence indicates that the Achuultani have wiped out humanity save for single isolated remnant worlds at least three times.

So in this setting, humanity has suffered close to 300% casualties due to Achuultani attacks, in the same sense that a WWII infantry division might suffer 300% casualties in a year of combat (that is, the number of times a soldier in the division gets killed or wounded equals three times the total number of men in the division, with replacements constantly being rotated in to replace losses).

The Daleks are also a contender here, in terms of wiping out supermajorities of humanity on multiple separate occasions.

[Crazedwraith]

There's also the Culture verse. The Idirian-Culture War ended up with "Total casualties amounted to 851.4 ± 2.55 (0.3%) billion sentient creatures, including Medjel (slaves of the Idirans), sentient machines and non-combatants, and wiped out various smaller species, including the Changers. The war resulted in the destruction of 91,215,660 (±200) starships above interplanetary, 14,334 orbitals, 53 planets and major moons, 1 ring and 3 spheres, as well as the significant mass-loss or sequence-position alteration of 6 stars"

And the historical perspective of this was that it was a small short war that had disproportionate affect.

Though this does seem small potatoes to some of the other's mentioned already.

[Eternal_Freedom]

I suppose I should also bring up the Human-Covenant War from Halo, lastin 26 years it saw dozens of humans worlds (with populations in the millions if Sigma Octanus IV is a reasonable example) glassed, as in, all life forms on the surface exterminated.

There is also the Human/Prophet-Forerunner War in the backstory that saw an earlier Human Empire completely destroyed and the survivors forced to regress to stone-age levels of technology as punishment.

[Lord of the Abyss]

Another nasty one would be the Concordiat/Melconian "Final War" from the Bolo setting. A mutually genocidal war that extinguished both civilizations, destroying most life across an entire spiral arm of the galaxy.

For sheer deaths there's the Human/Xeelee war, with tens of trillions of casualties (almost all human) over something like twenty thousand years of war (the Interim Human Coalition makes the 40k Imperium of Man look moderate and pacifistic).

[Cykeisme]

Are there any settings where humanity is completely destroyed and driven to extinction (not a single one left), never to return?

[TithonusSyndrome]

The animated movie "9" is all that comes to mind.

[Batman]

Given the audience/readers are by default human I suspect settings where humans are extinct aren't going to be all that popular.

[NecronLord]

Are there any settings where humanity is completely destroyed and driven to extinction (not a single one left), never to return?

AI. But it's implied to be by ecological disaster or possibly robot revolt.

[The Romulan Republic]

What about science fiction that doesn't have a central human faction?

I mean, take Star Wars: it has humans in abundance, but their is no all-human faction (although the society as a whole appears to be human-dominated, particularly the Galactic Empire). That one would have to be high up if it counts though, for the Galactic Civil War and Clone Wars. They weren't civilization-destroying or anything, but given how big the galaxy is, the scope and the death toll must have been gigantic.

Or for a still-less human-centric example, its damn hard to top the Last Great Time War from Doctor Who. Humans were certainly affected, greatly, by the conflict and its aftermath, as well, but the primary combatants were aliens (the Time Lords and the Daleks).

[hunter5]

After War Gundam X the colony drop worked and killed all but 98 million people on Earth