But What About the Astronauts?

*sigh* So much for the homecoming party...

Something really bad (Alien Invasion, The Virus, Nanomachines etc.) happens to everybody on Earth, but the survivors have forgotten that for several years now, there have always been at least three humans not on Earth. This trope is a common way to have people survive an After the End situation. It can sometimes involve experimental or accidental off-Earth time travel, where the astronauts are only gone for a brief moment, and pass right over Armageddon to come back to a ruined Earth. If something is explicitly said to affect "everyone on Earth", this may be a form of Prophecy Twist. Furthermore, in science fiction/superhero stories where Earth has been radically changed, the astronauts in space are usually unaffected and are a vital resource for the heroes to find a way to bring the planet back to normal.

This is more likely to be if the aftermath of the disaster is the main setting for the plot. One way or another, someone has to miss the apocalyptic party or you're a bit stuffed for characters. Having the characters not be on the Earth at the time is one way to make this happen. Compare After the End. To clarify, the trope is that people in space survive an After the End situation. Other survivals of After the End are not a part of this trope.

Wondering about Real Life? Well the people onboard the International Space Station rely on constant resupply from Earth so their prognosis for staying there is grim. Air, water, food, all are shipped in. Over a longer term space is currently not good for your health between higher radiation levels and the effects of zero-g. So the astronauts only have months to live. However the station has lifeboats in the form of Russian Soyuz spacecraft so they in theory could return to Earth. And other space missions could as well. Without Mission Control though it is of course more dangerous, no one can double check if your reentry plan makes sense for example. Or won't strand you in the middle of the ocean. Mechanically though its completely possible for spacecraft to return to Earth safely, so those astronauts might make it back. Assuming there's an Earth that can still support them.

Examples of But What About the Astronauts? include:

Anime and Manga

• Blue Gender - Most of humanity lives in space after being driven there by the giant nigh-invulnerable bugs, though some scattered bands of humans still survive on the surface.
• Ergo Proxy - The Creators (the last of the human race) stay aboard the Boomerang Star while the Earth recovers to become livable again.
• Also happens in Dragonball Z when the Saiyan homeworld, Vegeta, is hit by a meteor destroyed by Freeza with only the 4 Saiyans off the planet at the time (Goku (Kakarot), Raditz, Nappa and Prince Vegeta) surviving.
  • Some off-world Saiyans (notably, Goku and Raditz's father Bardock and his team) were specifically hunted down by Freeza's minions before he destroys their planet, but Vegeta is kept around because Freeza still considers him useful, and the rest probably because they were too weak to be relevant. (And Goku because Freeza didn't even know he existed.)
  • If you count in movies/OVAs, then you have Turlis, Brolly and his father Paragus, and Vegita's runt of a brother Tarble (who's 39 but looks 17, even by Saiyan standards) fitting the "missed out on" aspect of the trope, since all were thought to have either been lost, already wiped out, or not important enough to care about until they show up again.
• In Cowboy Bebop, Earth has become a wasteland due to the "Gateway Incident." It is only barely getting back on its feet when the series begins. Fortunately for humanity, basically every other object in the solar system that's solid enough for people to stand on has already been colonized.
• In the anime Freedom Project, Earth was permanently rendered uninhabitable by an abnormal climate shift. The only surviving humans were the ones living in Eden, a base built on the far side of the moon. The story starts 160 years later, where Takeru (The Hero) stumbles upon a capsule containing a picture of a brown-skinned girl, in a place not found anywhere in Eden...
• The protagonists of Beast King Golion are astronauts who were on a mission in space while Earth civilization was destroyed by World War III.
• In Gurren Lagann, an attempt is made to evacuate people from Earth so that they survive the moon crashing into it. Unfortunately, the Anti-Spiral fleet is waiting for them in space, so they need rescuing by the heroes as much as everyone else does.
• In Super Dimension Fortress Macross, the crew of the Macross -- along with some Zentradi who turned good -- find themselves making up the majority of the Earth's population after the Zentradi main force destroys it.
• In Xabungle, we eventually learn that the Innocent are the descendents of some human space travelers who managed to miss out on whatever the hell happened to turn Earth into Zora.
• Highschool of the Dead has two NASA astronauts running the International Space Station when the Zombie Apocalypse takes place. The United States decides to try launching nukes as a last ditch effort. Most of them get shot down, but one detonates in the atmosphere and blankets Asia with an EMP. The astronauts wonder what is going on down there. The worst part about their situation is that they're well aware about the zombies, and it's very unlikely that NASA will ever be able to deliver supplies or recover them up there.

Comic Books

• Marvel Zombies - The Acolytes on Asteroid M are some of the only characters to escape infection.
• Y: The Last Man: In the third arc, three astronauts (actually, one of them is a cosmonaut) are returning to Earth from the International Space Station, and two of them are men who missed the Gendercide.
  • Their capsule crash lands in a field due to a malfunction (and a rocket launcher) and the two male astronauts inside die. Thankfully, the female astronaut is pregnant with a boy.
• Doomsday 1 (later reprinted as The Doomsday Squad) - While a group is in orbit, someone sets off World War III which kills everyone on the planet, they wait for the nuclear stuff to dissipate and return to a ravaged Earth.
• Buck Rogers
• Sorta used in the 2000 AD strip Shakara. The world is destroyed at the start of the story and the only human left is an astronaut from the International Space Station. He is killed not long after.
• In the Aliens comic book continuity, Earth is overrun by Xenomorphs and the inhabitants of a space station and other colonists are the only humans who survive.
• The prequel comic series to WALL-E has an astronaut return to Earth from some mission only to find everybody left. With Wall-E's help, he's gonna try and find a way to the Axiom to reunite with his family.

Film

• Planet of the Apes: You blew it up! Damn you! Damn you all to HELL!
• The astronauts on the ISS in The Day After Tomorrow survived just fine... they even comment on how clear the skies over North America and Europe look now that all those horrid pollution producing, Dennis Quaid ignoring humans are dead via floods, tornadoes, thunderstorms, and flash freezing.
  • Of course, we never see when they realise that with the American government-in-exile now operating out of Mexico, America itself in tatters, the sheer amount of rebuilding key infrastructure... NASA isn't going to be a priority and no-one is likely coming to rescue them.
    • One of the modules of the ISS can work as an escape capsule in case of emergency, and bring the inhabitants down relatively safely. Assuming they have any kind of flight control left, in any case. Bigger Fridge Logic is the idea that the atmosphere would be that much clearer, considering how much pollution and debris must have been released into the atmosphere by the disaster itself.
• In the Syfy original movie Alien Apocalypse, Bruce Campbell's astronaut character and his shipmates were in cold sleep for forty years, and wake to a future where aliens have enslaved humanity.
• The inhabitants of a spaceship survive in The Doomsday Machine (it was Mystery Science Theater 3000'd) when the titular device destroys Earth; it turns out they were chosen specifically for an Adam and Eve Plot.
• The old 1985 B-movie Def-Con 4 was slam-bang on this trope. It was After the End, and the astronauts had to get back to Earth and then survive there.
• This is Hugo Drax's plan in Moonraker: to wipe out humanity on Earth with a nerve gas while a few selected individuals survive on his space station. The previous James Bond movie, The Spy Who Loved Me, featured the same idea, only with the intended survivors hiding in a submarine base instead of in space.
  • Not exactly; Stromberg hadn't built his underwater city yet (his Atlantis base is just a grandiose lab/ mansion). Stromberg plans to build his city After the End, which many will clamour to since after surviving the catastrophe of nuclear war, he offers them a fresh start in a new perfect society. His plan, like the one in You Only Live Twice (which this is deliberately based on), generally assumes that nuclear war will not lead to the death of nearly every living thing on the planet, which to be honest was a disturbingly widespread idea at the time, as the full power of nuclear weapons was seriously overestimated. Stromberg just thought civilization would be destroyed, not the whole world.
• In 2010: The Year We Make Contact the joint Western/Soviet expedition to the derelict Discovery nearly faces this problem as political tensions back on Earth rapidly deteriorate toward World War III.
• A group of astronauts aboard the space shuttle Atlantis are the first to be taken out (by a meteor shower) in the film Armageddon. It's up to another group of astronauts to save the day.
• WALL-E explains the lack of humans on a pollution wrecked Earth with this.
  • Of course, if the Axiom is the jewel of the spaceliner fleet... doesn't that mean there others?
• After the destruction of the planet Vulcan in Star Trek XI, Spock estimates there to be a few thousand survivors. All those people obviously couldn't have been on their planet at the time it bit the dust.
• Moscow Cassiopeia: Stuck in orbit for centuries, radioing for help.
• The whole point of Battle for Terra is a Generation Ship that holds the last of humanity from a war between Earth and its Venusian and Martian colonies that resulted in mutual destruction. The ship is literally falling apart and the survivors desperately need a new planet to settle. Unfortunately, the one they pick is already populated.
• Ditto for Pandorum, which starts with a message from Earth that the Elysium holds the remains of humanity. Luckily, it's already bound for an Earth-like planet. Unfortunately, one of the crew members goes nuts and causes a catastrophe.
• The movie Love by William Eubanks and the band Angels & Airwaves is mostly about this trope. One man is left in orbit on the ISS for 'years' after the apocalypse. The main trial for the astronaut isn't as much survival as much as it is surviving alone. He eventually risks returning to Earth only to be picked up by a fully automated alien ship modified by humans to maintain detailed records of human experience.
• To the extent that Robot Monster can be said to have a plot, part of it involves the handful of survivors of the human race on Earth trying to contact astronauts in space without drawing the attention of their diving-helmet-and-gorilla-suit robot invader.

Literature

• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Trillian escapes Earth's destruction unknowingly with Zaphod while Arthur and Ford escape by hitchhiking at the last minute.
• Nobel Laureate Harry Martinson's Aniara. An epos of a space liner Aniara being accidentally ejected into the deep space and towards Vega (main star of constellation Lyra), just before Earth had been destroyed in a nuclear holocaust, and the despair of the inhabitants locked in their ship and watching everything slowly decaying and deteriorating.
• Lucifer's Hammer has some US and Soviet astronauts in orbit unaffected. They land near the middle of the book. It's not a major part of the plot, though, as the other characters have mostly pulled themselves together without them.
• World War Z The crew of the International Space Station are unaffected by the zombie plague and aid the resistance on Earth by keeping communications satellites functioning. They also find other astronauts, from a Chinese station, who killed each other. Upon returning to earth, they immediately become heroes. Which entitles them to the best medication and treatment available as they die from radiation poisoning.
• Arthur C. Clarke's short story "If I Forget Thee, O Earth" involves the last humans living in a self-sustaining moon colony after a nuclear war leaves Earth uninhabitable.
  • Another Clarke story had nuclear missile troops stationed in high earth orbit on Orion-type ships (this was seriously proposed by the Air Force, actually) witnessing a nuclear war taking place on Earth. The story reveals that they were the final step in an escalating arms race between the USA and the USSR; previously, each new weapon was soon countered when the other side devised a means of pre-emptively destroying it, until orbital stations were put beyond the reach of any Earth-based attack. When their secret orders for what to do in the case of a nuclear war were revealed, it turns out that they and their weaponry were purely a deterrence. Instead of nuking the USA, they are to return to Earth and help rebuild.
• Time's Eye, by Stephen Baxter and Arthur C. Clarke - the whole world becomes a temporal mess-up, and a trio of cosmonauts/astronauts on the ISS are part of the handful or survivors.
• Robert A. Heinlein's Have Space Suit—Will Travel did have a part where the aliens threaten to destroy Earth and the hero does think about the Moon base and orbiting stations before deciding that they would be unlikely to last long, from grief if nothing else.
• In "Adam and No Eve" by Alfred Bester, a scientist develops a prototype spaceship using a kind of atomic engine, and poo-poos his colleagues fears that it will kill all life on Earth when he fires it up. He goes into orbit and returns to find that he's killed all life on earth. His solution is to die near some biomass and let the bacteria living in his gut start the evolution process all over again.
• In Ben Bova's Test Of Fire, a massive solar flare wipes out humanity from New Zealand to Iceland. Russian missile command misreads this as an attack and nukes the US. A moonbase protected by the bulk of the Moon is the only spark of civilisation left to rebuild the world. (South and Central America are handwaved away.)
• Vernor Vinge's Marooned in Realtime inverts this trope. It's about the few survivors of some event that removed the rest of humanity from Earth. Instead of surviving by being in space, the remnant are those who happened to be in impenetrable stasis fields known as "bobbles". (Although some of them were in bobbles in space, doing long-range space exploration, and work as straight instances of the trope.)
• In Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep, the attack that destroys Sjandra Kei completely bypasses their hired defense fleet, leaving only the fleet's crews alive:

"The Aniara Fleet." That's what some of the crews of Commercial Security were calling themselves. Aniara was the ship of an old human myth, older than Nyjora, perhaps going back to the Tuvo-Norsk cooperatives in the asteroids of Earth's solar system. In the story, Aniara was a large ship launched into interstellar depths just before the death of its parent civilization. The crew watched the death agonies of the home system, and then over the following years — as their ship fell out and out into the endless dark — died themselves, their life-support systems slowly failing.

• The 1980's After the End action series The Survivalist by Jerry Ahern has a number of shuttles launched as part of a doomsday scenario—The Eden Project—in case of nuclear war. The expedition goes into suspended animation and returns to Earth after the radiation levels have died down. Only to find the protagonist (who also went into suspended animation) staring at them through binoculars, saying "There goes the neighbourhood." As it turns out the old Cold War enemies have all survived, so everyone just starts shooting from when they left off.
• Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles involves colonists on Mars being the only ones to survive nuclear destruction of the Earth, but rather than returning, they stay to become the new Martians.
• Kind of used in Larry Niven's Fallen Angels - a radical environmentalist regime rules the Earth and the only people left with freedom and high technology are those living on a moon base or in an orbital habitat made by combining the Mir and (never actually built) Freedom space stations. However, as another ice age is fast descending upon the Earth, it looks like it could become a straight example.
  • Funny story: The ISS is basically Mir-2 merged with Space Station Freedom; module design and construction was well along for both stations before the merger...
• Stephen Baxter's Titan has a group of astronauts journeying to the titular moon. This is the space program's last gasp before being shut down. Meanwhile, tensions escalate between the U.S. and China, culminating in China diverting an asteroid to threaten the U.S. with precision fragment strikes. Unfortunately the Chinese screw it up, and when the asteroid hits Earth it wipes us all out. The astronauts, knowing that they are the last people alive, release a jar of bacteria on Titan devised as a starter kit for life. Millions of years later, when the Sun begins to expand, those bacteria have evolved into a race of sentient beetle-like creatures.
• In John Varley's Eight Worlds series, the invading aliens have knocked earthbound civilization back to the stone age, but they left the humans living in space alone.
• In Sewer, Gas and Electric: The Public Works Trilogy by Matt Ruff, a racist-engineered plague has wiped out nearly every human being of black African descent. Several years later, a TV show is on the air (with an all-aborigine cast) about a surviving space colony of black separatists, whose residents don't dare return to Earth for fear the plague will kill them too.
• Eric S. Nylund's Signal to Noise deals with events that lead up to the destruction of all but a couple of dozen humans - due to the slowing of the earth's rotation. Some survivors are on a moon base, others are at an undisclosed location. And A Signal Shattered tells the story of protagonist Jack, one of the handful of survivors.
  • It turns out that an alien gave humans the devices that slowed the earth down specifically to give Jack the shared background with another alien... to convince the alien to give up his location.
• Syne Mitchell's End in Fire deals with crew of orbital solar power station trying to survive (and later get down to Earth due to supply problem) when US and China gone into nuclear war.
• Poul Anderson's After Doomsday features two human ships—a viable population, actually, once they link up with each other—discovering that Earth was destroyed while they were out of the Solar System. One of their first thoughts is to contact bases on the Moon and in space stations, who can tell them how it happened. It turns out the killers made a clean sweep and they've been blasted, too.
• Jeff Carlson's Plague Year Series plays with this trope: a character is specifically sent to the International Space Station as the apocalypse is occurring in order to escape its effects, since they are one of the few people left who can create a cure.
• This might be one of Stephen Baxter's signature tropes; it also shows up in the story "People Came from Earth".
• From Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds, regarding the "Nanocaust" of 2077:

Some people made it through. They were the ones who'd already left the surface of the Earth, moving into space habitats and colonies. Primitive, ramshackle affairs, barely self-sufficient, but enough to keep them alive while they coped with the loss of the Earth, and the numbing psychic trauma of what had happened.

• Mortal Engines briefly mentions space stations containing "frozen astronauts." This either means the bodies of astronauts which are frozen solid or astronauts put in cryogenic sleep.
• The few offworld colonies and colony ships become this in the Spider Robinson/Robert A. Heinlein collaboration Variable Star when something makes the Sun go nova halfway through the book.
• The Strain: Global Vampire attacks prevent NASA from retrieving the three astronauts on ISS. The American astronaut provides commentary on the state of the world from above while NASA provides exposition on the state of the rest of the world.
• In William C. Heine's The Last Canadian, a NASA moon mission is on its way back when a pandemic wipes out most of the population of the Americas, including Ground Control. The Soviets won't lift a finger to help. It doesn't go so well for them.
• Norman Spinrad's characters from Riding The Torch had left the nuclear-war devastated Earth millennia ago in torchships (Bussard ramjet powered spaceships able to collect matter for their fuel from thinly spread particles in the void of space) and they expand and renew their fleet continuously while flying in search of planets which can be colonized. They find out there has never been such planet beyond original Earth.

Live Action TV

• In Battlestar Galactica, both the classic and reimagined versions, most of the known survivors of the Colonial genocide are either crew members or passengers of various spaceships.
• Odyssey 5: The crew of the titular space shuttle see the Earth explode, and are sent back in time to prevent it.
  • They were about to run out of air, when the alien arrived. So it was almost realistic.
• In an episode of The Outer Limits, two opposing sides have moon bases. As tensions rise between the sides on Earth, suspicious actions rise tensions on the moon bases. Tensions rise to a peak on Earth, causing the two sides to annihilate each other. The last message expresses gratitude that the moon bases are intact. Unfortunately, subverted as the moon bases destroyed each other.
• In speculative documentaries like Life After People, they'll sometimes talk about space stations but not any astronauts. The thought experiment is pretty much "What if all humans vanished tomorrow?" but they don't speculate how it would happen, so presumably it would affect the astronauts too.
• Carl Sagan's series Cosmos has sort of a "dream sequence" thingy where Sagan comes back to Earth from travelling somewhere elsewhere in the Universe in his spaceship, and finds radio silence because everybody else died in a nuclear war.
• The Future Is Wild miniseries adaptation had all humans on Earth wiped out, but those in space surviving and their descendants sending the occasional probe back to Earth-That-Was to see how the old neighborhood looks. For two hundred million years. The original book just had the humans die off.
  • This may have been a transatlantic difference: when shown in the UK, there wasn't any such Framing Device.
• In a Reset Button episode of Star Trek: Enterprise, the crew of the NX-01 witnesses the destruction of Earth from their ship bridge's viewscreen. The evil aliens responsible for this are Genre Savvy enough to continue hunting down all off-world humans.
• This is the source of some major Fridge Logic behind the plot of Power Rangers SPD; the bad guys start off everything by wiping out the Sirian race (Sixth Ranger Doggie Cruger's race) supposedly by just destroying their home planet, leaving Doggie as the Last of His Kind (until we find out There Is Another in the form of his thought-to-be-dead wife Aisynia). However, no mention of the baddies hunting down any Sirian colonies is made, and Aisynia's survival makes a strong argument that they captured Sirians as prisoners of war/slaves. Unfortunately, this is never explored in either the series or the comic spin-off (which redid a lot of the events of the show's final episode, anyway), meaning this trope creates an inverse Inferred Holocaust for the series.
• In Doctor Who, this is the Doctor's justification for considering to fry the minds of everyone on Earth in "The Parting of the Ways"—there will still be human colonies out there, and better a quick death than suffering at the hands of the Daleks.
• Buck Rogers experiences his "freak mishap" that sends his and his NASA spaceship out for a 500-year jog around the block, and conveniently misses the war that wrecks Earth. He comes back just as Earth is slowly rebuilding its society and helps them fend off new enemies and get their groove back.

Tabletop Games

• In Paranoia the apocalypse has happened, and every human still alive is either a genetic clone in Alpha Complex serving the Computer, or a primitive hunter-gatherer who lives Outside. Except for the Australians who live on the Moon, very comfortably. They apparently try to send down a message once in a while to see if anyone's still alive.
• In GURPS Reign of Steel, the Zoneminds who've enslaved humanity believe that Tranquility Base on the Moon has been destroyed. They're wrong.
• Rifts has the Mutants in Orbit setting, which was written for another, somewhat similar, game, but has rules for adapting it to the Rifts setting. At the time of the Coming of the Rifts, Earth had several populated satellites in Earth's orbit, as well as a Moon Base and a fledgling colony on Mars (though a mad scientist turned Mars into a world crawling with mutant Bee People). The colonies were all just barely self-sufficient enough to survive being cut off from Earth, and banded together to place defenses around the planet to keep away all the strangeness they can faintly see going on down there. They survive through trade and mining the Asteroid Belt.

Video Games

• Body Harvest - Adam Drake and the scientists aboard the space station in 2016 are some of the last humans left alive after millennia of alien attackers chowing down on humanity, and only just barely manage to escape aboard an experimental time machine to prevent this.
• In Super Robot Wars MX all the heroes manage to avoid being hit by the Third Impact because they're in space when it happens.
  • If they're in space, then what about the giant naked Rei that stretches into outer space that appears when it occurs in The End of Evangelion?
    • Actually, that's why they kick its ass; IIRC, they weren't in orbit, but on a far-off space colony (as in, a Gundam-like colony)
    • And then they go down to Earth to kick her in the teeth.
• I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream (the Video Game version) involves the evil AI trying to find this last cache of humans hidden on a moon base after everyone else on Earth except the protagonists have been eradicated.
• Ares begins with humanity's first interstellar expedition making First Contact, after a decades-long voyage. Upon talking with these aliens, you learn that Earth is under new management since you left, owing to another, rather belligerent and powerful alien race. They're also unpopular with their neighbors, so you manage to wheedle some alien equipment out of them and retrofit the expedition to fight your way back to Earth and retake it.
• Star Control II has a broadly similar plot, except that you start the game off in a flying chunk of Lost Technology you've spent the last few years unearthing from the ruins of the Precursors. Also, most of the Syreen who managed to survive the destruction of their own planet were members of the Syreen Space Patrol.
  • They were also mostly female. Of the 10,000 or so survivors, only about 500 were male.
• Millennium: Return to Earth is about a moon base whose inhabitants got to watch as an asteroid strike destroyed human life on Earth. They're now colonizing the solar system to try and fix things.
  • Then you find out about a Martian colony, which is hell-bent on destroying you for no reason in particular.
  • Also inverted at the end, after destroying the colony on Mars, you find out that there's an entire Martian battlefleet heading your way. If it's your first playthrough, then this trope will be once again played straight, as your main base on the Moon will be destroyed, requiring re-population from outlying colonies. If not, then you can prepare.
• Planet's Edge is an RPG where an alien ship appears in Earth's orbit, is fired upon, and does something that cripples it but causes the planet to vanish. The moon's doing fine, but the moonbase is not self-sufficient, so off the heroes go to the stars with a salvaged hyperdrive.
• Horribly, horribly subverted by 1213: a space station used to create clones for a different purpose altogether is saved when the human extinction event happens on Earth. The clones are retooled for exploration, but start dying of some sort of plague; the human scientists all either go insane, commit suicide, or are murdered when they discover that the world below is uninhabitable.
  • In fact, the player doesn't even find out that this scenario is in place until very late in the game, just after the very, very, very last hope for humanity is crushed. Unless you count a single human capable of surviving planetside but whose memory can't store more than a few day's worth of material as a result, who has had every possible candidate for guide or backer shot to death within the last 24 hours and who unthinkingly released a zombie apocalypse on what's left of the space station as "hope". But what's he going to do?
• The basis of Homeworld'. You spend the first several missions testing the capabilities of your shiny new Mother-ship before activating your Jump Drive for the first time. It isn't until after you finish your jump that you learn that your ancestors signed a treaty promising never to use Hyperspace. Your civilization had long forgotten their previous Ancient Astronauts Origins. The Imperial Fleet your ancestors made a deal with has not.
• Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is sort of an example; by the time the colony ship reaches Chiron all contact with Earth has been lost, and the epilogues for the Transcendence endings include recolonization of Earth. It isn't made explicit what exactly happened, but it seems to be some combination of war and environmental collapse.
  • Even if it's being metaphorical, Planet seems to fear that it's let in what amounts to a new pathogen vector during its pre-ascendance "childhood." Given how some gamers play, that might not be so unreasonable.

You are the children of a dead planet, earthdeirdre, and this death we do not comprehend. We shall take you in, but may we ask this question--will we too catch the planetdeath disease?

• • The intro actually shows multiple nuclear explosions, implying a nuclear war.
• Radiant Silvergun stars the only survivors of a planet-wide cataclysm that had occurred only a year prior. They had enough sense to stay off the surface after the fact, considering the entity that did it was still actively patrolling it. Unfortunately, they only had finite supplies to survive on, and the game picks up when that supply runs out.
• In the distant past of the X Universe humanity was engaged in a fight for survival against the Grey Goo it had created. One Nathan R Gunne led a feint intended to trick the "terraformers" into leaving Sol, then destroying the wormgate behind them. Gunne survived the engagement, but his ship was disabled and crashed on a habitable planet. The surviving crew assumed the gambit had failed and they were the only remaining humans. They attempted to rebuild society, renaming themselves "Argon" in honor of their commander after his death.
• The backstory of Alien Legacy is that Earth is losing a war against the Centaurians and is sending out colony ships to remote systems with orders to maintain communication silence and assume Earth and all other ships are lost. The last message indicates the destruction of the last Earth fleet and preparations for the Last Stand.
• All of the Ronso in Final Fantasy X were killed except for the ones not at their homeland. (Like the Blitzball Team)

Web Original

• In the Ed stories on Everything2, the only things to survive in the Andromeda Galaxy were those making a hyperspace jump the instant things went wrong.
• Valuable Humans in Transit, also on E2, mentions extracting the plane travellers and spacemen along with the rest.
• SCP Foundation: The only people who survive in the world accessed through SCP-093 are the higher ups who go into space. They're now waiting for the world to be purified.
• Jehovah's Witnesses, doing whatever it takes.

Web Comics

• Happens big time in Sluggy Freelance, when Torg and Aylee visit another dimension. The entire face of the planet has been overrun by "wraiths." The only people left alive are those aboard space stations at the time. Luckily, that universe had a far more extensive space program than our own.
• The reader finds out that not all humans died when World War IV changed the world of the Blade of Toshubi. There are four arks of humans in orbit waiting for the nano-virus to reach safe levels to return.
• Happens in this The Perry Bible Fellowship comic.
• TGSA has a Black Comedy strip on this. Not much about them.
• Homestuck averts this. The trolls' home planet has been destroyed by meteors, but there are vast troll armies all around the galaxy. But an Eldritch Abomination that happens to live on the homeworld is killed, and its dying scream sends out a psychic shockwave that finishes the job.
  • Would've been justified otherwise; the trolls can't reproduce without the help of a mother grub, all of which were killed when Alternia was destroyed.
  • There is one exception. One troll, Her Imperious Condescension, who is off in a spaceship conquering distant civilizations, survives the psychic attack due to being the only one with the same blood color as said eldritch abomination.
  • Averted rather spectacularly with humanity too; the newly prototyped Bec blows up Jade's meteor, which causes a massive explosion that eradicates basically everything except some shells of structures.
• Averted in Rework the Dead the astronauts manning a Kill Sat ran out of oxygen a week after the Zombie Apocalypse started and the horde swarms all the spaceports. Though there are some survivors still on the surface.

Western Animation

• The Futurama episode "In-A-Gadda-Da-Leela" combines this with a twist on the classic Adam and Eve plot...but seems to forget its own canon that humans have colonized numerous other planets in the universe, such as Mars.
  • Could lead to Fridge Brilliance when you take into account that Leela was dehydrated and gullible at the time and Zapp actually rigged the whole thing to make it seem like they were Adam and Eve in a strange planet and their world was destroyed (truth is it was Earth All Along) so she could even think about having sex with him.
• In one Superfriends episode, a villain managed to take over the world by turning it into a stone-age version of itself, but it didn't affect Skylab. Skylab's technology becomes pivotal in foiling the villain's plans.
• In the first season finale of Justice League, Vandal Savage changes history by sending information to himself in the past, and the only people unaffected when the Delayed Ripple Effect kicks in are a group of the Leaguers in Earth orbit. (Although it's not being out in space that protects them—the ripple reaches them and keeps going—they're all travelling in a bubble projected by Green Lantern's ring, which protects them somehow.)
• The history series Once Upon A Time Man ends with a possible dystopic future of Earth that descends into environmental collapse, massive world hunger and is finally devastated by nuclear war. However, this time also has considerable advances in space travel to have off planet self-sustaining orbital settlements and while they regret having to wait for potentially generations before Earth is habitable again, they are happy enough in space in the meantime.