"Yesterday afternoon, they gave me the order to send more than 20,000 Jews out of the ghetto, and if not — "We will do it!" [...] I must perform this difficult and bloody operation — I must cut off limbs in order to save the body itself. I must take children because, if not, others may be taken as well — God forbid."
— Chaim Rumkovsky, Judenrat Leader of the Łódź Ghetto, Speech of 4/9/1942 explaining decision to deport
all members under 10 and over 65 to Treblinka
all members under 10 and over 65 to Treblinka
Contemplating killing people so that others can live longer.
In Science Fiction, the Ur-Example is that of a spaceship or Escape Pod which is Almost Out of Oxygen (or food or fuel). But then someone calculates that if they had one fewer crewmember, they just might make it back safely...
Many incidents of this trope have occurred in real life, such as sailors in lifeboats running out of food or freeboard. These seldom involved any fine calculations, just desperate people willing to do anything to live a bit longer. Those who travel on spaceships are presumed to be a different breed, or perhaps they're just more educated; therefore expect a Lottery of Doom, Drawing Straws or Heroic Sacrifice.
See also The Needs of the Many, Emergency Cargo Dump (the non-lethal version), No Party Like a Donner Party, Cut the Safety Rope, Trial by Friendly Fire, We Have Reserves, and Restricted Rescue Operation. See Someone Has to Die for the voluntary variant of this trope.
Sub-Trope of Fixing the Resource Scarcity.
Note: Please do not include discussions on the short story "The Cold Equations", the novel trilogy Star Trek: Cold Equations, or the Big Finish Doctor Who story "The Cold Equations". Post them on the discussion page for those stories.
As this is a Death Trope, unmarked spoilers abound. Beware.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Anime & Manga
- Attack on Titan:
- Humanity's attempt at reclaiming Wall Maria by sending out 250,000 drafted citizens, many of whom came from the recently-fallen ward of Shiganshina, was done knowing that the operation would likely fail so that humanity would not starve from overpopulation.
- Jean also performs one during the Battle of Trost, using several cornered comrades as a distraction so that the rest of the soldiers following him may escape safely.
Marco: I want you to listen to me without getting angry. You're not strong, Jean. That's why you understand how the weak feel. And you're adept at properly assessing a situation, so you know exactly what has to be done at any given time.
- A Certain Magical Index: The New Testament novels introduce Kakeru Kamisato, a reluctant hero. Whenever a disaster happens, he only saves one or a few, almost always pretty girls, and leaves the rest to die. He cynically says trying to save everyone is utter foolishness and will only lead to everyone getting killed. However, when Touma Kamijou consistently manages to save everybody by never giving up and using methods Kakeru never though of, Kakeru eventually admits he was wrong.
- Dragon Ball Super: Broly: When Broly, Paragus, and Beets were stranded on Planet Vampa due to a broken spaceship, Paragus coldly murdered Beets so that their food would last longer.
- Fate Series:
- Fate/Grand Carnival: Parodied when Ritsuka is informed that Chaldea has too many Servants and it is straining resources. Rather than accept a dock in pay to support them, she puts her Servants in a tournament where the losers are killed, and before the tournament even starts, she eliminates all the 3-Star or less Servants, plus all incarnations of Cú Chulainn.
- Fate/Zero: Towards the end of the Fourth Grail War, Kiritsugu Emiya — a cynical and pragmatic assassin — is doused in Grail Mud and comes into contact with Aŋra Mainiiu, who asks him a series of philosophical questions wherein Kiritsugu must choose between two groups of people, one of which is slightly larger than the other, and the group he chooses to save is divided before the experiment repeats. Kiritsugu consistently chooses the larger number of people in accordance with his Well-Intentioned Extremist philosophy, only for Aŋra Mainiiu to mockingly point out that in the end he's killed far more people than he saved.
- Played for Laughs in Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu. A viral agent is released in the school resulting in Crowd Panic until Kaname dresses down the class. Everyone starts hugging each other, determined to Face Death with Dignity... until Sousake reveals he has enough vaccine for one person. Hilarity Ensues with send-ups of the requisite Lottery of Doom, Heroic Sacrifice and Must Not Die a Virgin tropes. And then they discover that the virus only eats clothing.
- The reason for a series of murders in The Kindaichi Case Files. The victims are all survivors of a crashed ship, with the same initials. One of them had worked out this equation and pushed a girl off who was trying to climb aboard a full lifeboat; in falling, she managed to grab their keychain with their initials.
- Lampshaded in the Martian Successor Nadesico episode "The Lukewarm 'Cold Equation'", where Anti-Hero Akito gets stranded without fuel after piloting his Humongous Mecha out of range of the Cool Starship, and the two leading contenders in the Love Dodecahedron get stranded with him when their rescue attempts fail due to enemy attacks. Akito ejects the mecha's limbs to get it moving, but the oxygen issue comes up again. Akito finally decides to Take a Third Option before they discover that they'd drifted back in range of their starship.
- One Piece: One of Garp's many lessons to his students is that, if you have to choose between saving a young boy and an old man, save the boy and leave the man to die because the boy has greater potential than someone with one foot in the grave. He practices what he preaches too, ordering his forces to abandon him to the Blackbeard Pirates so they can ensure his protege, Koby, can escape and become the face of the next generation of Marines.
- Planetes:
- Subverted when the exact situation comes up. The testees are placed in a situation where they do not have enough oxygen to outlast the test, either they give up or kill someone to preserve the oxygen they have. Instead, they lower the temperature of the room to reduce their metabolism and oxygen consumption.
- Also Love Freak, Wide-Eyed Idealist Ai debating whether to steal a terrorists' air tank to save herself. Ultimately, is unable to bring herself to steal the air tank and begins suffocating. She suffers enough neurological damage from the oxygen-deprivation before they're rescued that she is left in a wheelchair, though it's suggested that she may recover with time and physical therapy.
- Pokémon 2000: Lugia carries Ash, Pikachu, and the Team Rocket trio to safety from the Legendary Birds, but their combined weight is slowing Lugia down. Realizing that if nothing is done, then they'll all die, Team Rocket jumps off Lugia into the sea, fully expecting to die. Of course, they survive.
- In the second season of Vandread, The Stoic Meia has to take care of Ezra's baby daughter when a space battle breaks out and in the confusion, they accidentally launch in an escape pod. When oxygen begins to run out, Meia has no choice but to throw herself out of the airlock with a smile to make sure Karu lasts until the pod is picked up by Nirvana. It turns out, the pod has just been picked up, and Meia didn't notice until she walked out.
- Yu-Gi-Oh!:
- A variation of this comes up in an episode of Yu-Gi-Oh!. Grandpa tells the main protagonists - via flashback - how he and his colleague Arthur were on an archaeology dig when a cave-in trapped them in an isolated pocket, separated from the others, with limited supplies. Eventually, they decided to play cards to pass the time, and Sugoroku suggested wagering the last of the water, knowing that there wasn't enough to share, and without it, one of them might die of thirst before they were rescued - if they ever were. Eventually, Sugoroku realized Arthur was about to pass out from fatigue, and forfeited the game in order to give it to him, even though he could have won on his next move. Fortunate, too, as the rescue team found them soon after.
- Yu-Gi-Oh! GX: When Austin O'Brien was a child, his parents were knocked out when their van crashed in the jungle and caught fire. O'Brien was struck with indecision on who to save, but ultimately decided to save his father, reasoning that since his father was an expert mercenary that they would have a higher chance of survival in the wilderness together. Fortunately, his father woke up and was able to save his mother before the van exploded. Afterwards, O'Brien was filled with self-loathing over the fact that if it wasn't for that stroke of luck, he basically condemned his mother to death. When O'Brien duels Trueman, Trueman reads his mind and taunts him about his past decision. Trueman forces him to relive his trauma by playing a card called The Unchosen One, which forces the opponent to pick one Monster they control and the others get destroyed, then Trueman will get to revive one of the destroyed Monsters on his side of the field. At the time, O'Brien controlled Volcanic Doomfire, which represents his father, and Volcanic Queen, which represents his mother. Though it tears him up inside, he chooses to save Volcanic Doomfire, reasoning that if he saved Volcanic Queen, then Trueman would attack it with the stronger Volcanic Doomfire. Trueman mocks him for choosing to save his father again and ultimately defeats him. Right before Trueman traps him in the World of Darkness as a penalty for losing, O'Brien hits the Despair Event Horizon and says he should have just let all three of them die.
Comic Books
- Echoed and possibly referenced by Mark Verheiden and Mark A. Nelson's follow-on graphic novel set ten years after Aliens. Hicks smuggles Newt aboard a weight-critical ("gravity-balanced") ship on its way to the alien homeworld. The situation is averted on this occasion, as he took pains to dump stores equivalent to her weight before takeoff.
- It is alleged that Godwin (author of The Cold Equations) essentially took the story from a story published in EC Comics' Weird Science #13, May-June 1952, called "A Weighty Decision," scripted by Al Feldstein. In that story there are three astronauts who are intended to be on the flight, not one, and the additional passenger, a girl that one of the astronauts has fallen in love with, is trapped aboard by a mistake rather than stowing away. As in The Cold Equations, various measures are proposed but the only one which will not lead to worse disaster is for the unwitting passenger to be jettisoned. Other sources note that the theme of Feldstein's story is itself strikingly similarly to the story "Precedent", published by E.C. Tubb in 1949; in that story, as in the others, a stowaway must be ejected from a spaceship because the fuel aboard is only enough for the planned passengers. These sources argue that neither Feldstein nor Godwin intentionally "swiped" from the stories that came before, but merely produced similar variations on an ancient theme, that of an individual being sacrificed so that the rest may survive.
- Empowered: After Willie Pete badly damages the D10, the space station begins to de-orbit. Empowered gets an injured Mindf[]k to the emergency portal that offers the only way off of the station, but the portal will only work once and can only transport one of them. Emp tries to convince Mindf[]k to use the portal while she depends on her super suit to allow her to survive re-entry. Mindf[]k's telepathy reveals that Emp (or rather her semi-sapient costume) knows this won't work. Tired of reading the minds of slimy supervillains and living alone on a space station just to keep away from the constant mental roar of humanity, Mindf[]k chooses a Heroic Sacrifice and telepathically puppets Emp through the portal.
- Rick Random: Space Detective, a comic of the 1950s. In "Kidnappers from Mars!" Space Pirates get caught in a space tide and realise the only means of escape is the two-man space shuttle. The Big Bad and his Femme Fatale girlfriend hide until all the other pirates have killed each other fighting over the shuttle, then take off in it.
- Robin (1993): After being stuck in the back of an armored truck that's been buried in cement with the Cluemaster for about five hours, Robin finds himself thinking that the only way to keep himself alive much longer is to kill Brown to conserve what oxygen remains. He's immediately ashamed of himself and feels Bruce would be disappointed in him if he ever knew it crossed his mind. Luckily Spoiler saves them before it becomes too much of an issue.
- Star-Lord once blew up a moon inhabited by 35,000 people in order to generate enough energy to defeat the Fallen One, a former herald of Galactus who had been serially destroying planets. He promptly turned himself over to the Nova Corps and stopped using the title of Star-Lord for a time.
- Star Wars: Doctor Aphra: Early in the Remastered arc, Triple Zero puts Dr Aphra in this position just to Kick the Dog. He hires one too many mercenaries for her mission so her spacecraft is too heavy to take off, then lets her choose who gets to stay behind and get killed by the Imperial stormtroopers he's tipped off about their presence. He's not the last person she ends up sacrificing on that mission either, which Triple Zero also knew would happen.
- In the Tintin comic album Explorers on the Moon, when Thompson and Thomson turn up as accidental stowaways on the Moon-Rocket, Calculus worries that, since oxygen supplies were assessed for only four people, there might not be enough for six, and decides to shorten the trip from fourteen to ten days. It gets worse when Colonel Jorgen is revealed to have smuggled himself on board, with the help of The Mole. He intends to maroon Tintin and his companions on the surface of the Moon, pointing out that they don't have enough oxygen to bring prisoners back to Earth. Later when the villains are overpowered, Tintin refuses to leave them behind despite having exactly the same problem. After Jorgen is killed in a Gun Struggle, Wolff decides to atone for his actions by stepping out the airlock. Even so Tintin and his companions almost don't make it - they're forced to let the rocket autopilot do most of the work, and spend as much time as possible in their bunks to preserve oxygen. By the time the rocket finally lands on Earth, they're all unconscious and minutes away from death, forcing the Syldavian officials to cut the rocket open to get them out.
- Twisted for a XXXenophile story (The Big One). The bomb shelter will only hold two, and the female character tells her two male companions that if she has to repopulate the Earth she wants to enjoy herself doing it, so "auditions" are now in order. World War III did not just break out, she said it had as an excuse for threesome sex.
Fan Works
- In Background Pony, Lyra is eventually faced with the Sadistic Choice of allowing herself to be forgotten forever, or restoring her existence at the cost of erasing everything she achieved — something that would put the whole world at risk.
- Fallout: Equestria: Of the robotic sort. Littlepip and Co stumble upon the remains of a Stable devoid of life, and perusing the computer reveals why: A stray bullet from a child practicing shooting hit their water supply, slowly leaking its contents over the course of weeks. The AI in charge noticed this, and deduced the most efficient solution to be methodically halving the population to accommodate dwindling supplies until it finally went empty, and the population dropped to zero.
- Four Five Six: When Buffy figures out that the Crystallizer only needs 10% of something on Earth dead and not necessarily the children, she sets up a virus that will kill 10% of the elderly instead, justifying it as they are already dying anyway unlike the kids. Willow is naturally horrified and figures out that Buffy is actually Elizabeth, as the real Buffy wouldn't do that and quickly destroys the virus once she regains control of her mind.
- This is the dark side of Doctor Strange's history manipulating methodology in Child of the Storm, with the end goal of stopping Thanos' omnicidal rampage. Generally, he's good enough at manipulating the timeline that this isn't necessary. At times, though, it's explicitly compared to triage, and at points it is also explicitly noted that by refusing to step in, he lets a lot of people suffer and die for the sake of ensuring the Earth will be ready.
- Danganronpa Re:Programmed has one of the culprits convinced to commit murder through this line of logic: while they aren't keen to kill anyone, the idea that they may be able to retrieve help for the rest is enough to sway them, however reluctantly, towards making that sacrifice.
- In When Reason Fails, when Izuku expresses his dislike of Yagi not being willing to help Tsuyu adapt to life among humans, the teacher points out that, yes, he could do that - but, apart from the fact that Tsuyu may actually not want said help, the time and resources spent helping her would be time and resources not spent in helping many other people.
- Vow of Nudity: In one extended flashback, a slave, a soldier, and a scientist are the sole remaining survivors of a disastrous island expedition, and eventually reach the beach with a makeshift raft that can only carry two of them. With hostile wildlife inbound, the group must quickly choose who gets to escape and who gets left behind to die. (In the end, the soldier kills the scientist, and then the slave kills the soldier.)
- Dangerverse: In Amanda's backstory, she, her betrothed, and her little brother were caught in a deathtrap, and she had enough magic to save any two of them but not all three. She chose to save herself and her betrothed, and left her brother to die. The guilt from this action eventually tore her soul, causing her to create an accidental Horcrux.
- Here Comes the New Boss: The last Noelle clones suffered severe medical issues which required constant medical treatment by PWN's Tinkertech to survive. Early on, Abattoir II pointed out that PWN would have an easier time if there were less patients to take care of and offered to let himself be killed. Due to Abattoir's inheritance power, his mind and powers would be preserved in the next host and PWN would be able to better focus his efforts. This process repeated itself several times over the next weeks as the clones died off, until only PWN remained.
Films — Animation
- Spider-Man: Spider-Verse:
- In Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Peter B. Parker, Gwen Stacy, Peni Parker, Spider-Man Noir, and Spider-Ham all come from other universes, and dimensional incompatibilities mean that they cannot survive indefinitely in Miles's universe. They have a way back to their own dimensions in the form of the control goober for the collider, but they also need to destroy it to prevent the multiverse from collapsing, and that has to be done in Miles's dimension. Miles insists that he can handle the job, but because he's only been a superhero for a day at that point, nobody believes him, meaning that the plan ends up being that one of them will send the other four home, then destroy the machine, sacrificing themselves for the multiverse. Naturally, these being superheroes, all five insist that it should be them who stays behind. It ends up not being necessary because Miles takes a level or three in badass just in time for the climax, however.
- In Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, this is the general reasoning of Miguel O'Hara's Knight Templar mentality: force all Spider-People across the multiverse to suffer the pain that is typical of the franchise (the "Uncle Ben" murders, on top of the list) as "Canon Events" or risk their universes unravelingnote . As that would mean allowing his father to be killed, Miles Morales is firmly on the side of "to hell with that".
- In The Transformers: The Movie, the Decepticons' ship is filled with wounded from their failed attack on Autobot City and its weighing down their ship during its escape. Starscream, being Starscream, tells them to dump their wounded, which includes their leader Megatron, on the grounds that they won't make it back to Cybertron anyway. Big mistake: they end up drifting into the direction of Unicron and are turned into his heralds.
Films — Live-Action
- 3 Godfathers: Robert, Pedro, and the little baby they're carrying are desperately trying to cross a salt flat in the Thirsty Desert in order to reach the town beyond. When Pedro falls and breaks his leg, a frantic Robert suggests either fixing him a splint or fixing up a travois and dragging him. Pedro calmly points out that either way, they'll be too slow and all three of them will die of dehydration before they make it across. So Robert has to leave Pedro behind.
- 633 Squadron: A Norwegian resistance member who knows about the operation is captured by the Germans. Ace Pilot Roy Grant has to bomb Gestapo HQ in Bergen before they can make him talk, and blow the whole mission.
- Abbott and Costello Go to Mars:
- Threatened when the group are on their way to Venus and Mugsy threatens to dump Orville outside if he tries to cause any trouble.
- Spoofed in the end — when the men leave Venus, the spaceship has too much weight to take off, forcing them to leave behind... all the gorgeous space-babes that Orville is trying to sneak back to Earth.
- The Abyss (1989): Bud and Lindsey are trapped underwater with one set of breathing equipment, which Bud is already wearing. Bud offers the gear to Lindsey, which would doom him. Lindsey presents what she calls "the logical option", which gives both of them a chance of survival: she drowns, and Bud drags her body to safety, and hopes she can be revived. Bud is the stronger swimmer, so Lindsey has to drown. Bud's initial response is "Fuck logic!", but with the water rising fast and no other viable options, he soon comes round.
- After the Dark is all about debating this trope, when a teacher sets the below-mentioned nuclear bunker scenario to his students. The Protagonist is not happy when she discovers that the reason why the teacher decided to do this roleplaying is a variation of Revenge via Storytelling — he is not taking the fact that she ditched him for a new boyfriend, a fellow student of the class, well.
- Alien (1979): After the xenomorph does some snacking, there are four crew members left.
Lambert: I say that we abandon this ship. We get the shuttle and just get the hell out of here; we take our chances and hope that somebody picks us up!
Ripley: Lambert, the shuttle won't take four.
Lambert: Well why don't we draw straws then—
Parker: I'm not drawing any straws. I'm for killing that goddamned thing right now. - One of the pub crowd in An American Werewolf in London tells a joke about a plane full of U.N. representatives who need to lighten the load or they'll crash. Just tossing out the baggage and seats isn't enough.
British Diplomat: God save the Queen! (Jumps out.)
French Diplomat: Vive la France! (Jumps out.)
American (Texan) Diplomat: Remember the Alamo!! (Tosses out the Mexican.) - Apollo 13, as in the Real Life incident, runs up against the Equation a few times, but the guys in mission control are able to ensure that Everybody Lives.
- Once the explosion happens and the mission switches to "get them back home", the overarching concern is how they get three men to survive for four days in a lunar module designed to sustain two people for a day and a half — the biggest issues are power and carbon dioxide. Thankfully, with rationing of the former and a clever solution for the latter, there turns out to be enough resources to pull it off without sacrificing anyone.
Kranz: I don't care what anything was designed to do. I care about what it can do.
- The Equation does get alluded to aboard the Aquarius when it comes to the carbon dioxide level being too high. When the crew is first alerted to the problem by Mission Control, Haise doesn't believe it at first having gone over the calculations thrice. Haise eventually figures out where his math went wrong — he only calculated for two people, i.e., he forgot Swigert, who on a normal mission wouldn't have been in the lunar module.
Swigert: Maybe I should just hold my breath.
- Once the explosion happens and the mission switches to "get them back home", the overarching concern is how they get three men to survive for four days in a lunar module designed to sustain two people for a day and a half — the biggest issues are power and carbon dioxide. Thankfully, with rationing of the former and a clever solution for the latter, there turns out to be enough resources to pull it off without sacrificing anyone.
- Avengers: Infinity War: This is what Thanos thinks he's doing with his 'kill half of all life' plan. In his backstory, he suggested killing half his species as a desperate plan to prevent an Overpopulation Crisis, but his plan was rejected, and everyone but him died. So now he's decided to push the solution on the entire universe as much to prove to himself that it would work as anything. Avengers: Endgame shows the results of this logic: massive environmental damage, as Population Control does not work that way. Endgame, for its part, reveals that Doctor Strange, in pushing for the one timeline where Thanos was stopped, had to have known it would involve the Heroic Sacrifices of Black Widow and Iron Man.
- Bird Box: Melanie has to row a boat down the river with herself and the children blindfolded so they won't be driven insane by the Brown Note Beings. But to get past the rapids, one of the children has to remove their blindfold and guide her. Her son volunteers, but it's implied Melanie will force the Girl to do it instead. In the end Melanie can't bring herself to do it and tries to row unguided, causing the boat to capsize—fortunately they all make it to shore.
- Chariot: Operation Chariot is a secret government program to save valuable or useful people in the event of a massive attack on the United States. Those on the list are kidnapped from their homes by government agents, regardless of whether they might want to stay and die with their families.
- Destination Moon: The rocketship loses reaction mass landing on the moon, so someone has to stay behind even after they've thrown out every piece of equipment they can unbolt. While the Science Heroes are arguing over who gets to make the Heroic Sacrifice, the Plucky Comic Relief sneaks outside and laconically tells the others to take off without him. Fortunately someone realises how to dispose of an extra piece of equipment so they can all return safely.
- Doomsday Machine features an absolutely bonkers zig-zagged version of the trope. The Earth has been destroyed, and the only survivors of humanity are the seven astronauts aboard the spaceship Astra, en route to Venus to establish a colony there. The oldest astronaut notices an increase in radiation, and calculates that it's not fatal—but at their current speed, it'll sterilize them all by the time they reach Venus. He also calculates that they can avoid this fate if they jettison part of the Astra, most of their equipment... and four of the crew members. He uses the ship's computer to calculate which of them should die, but before he can announce the results, two other astronauts get killed in an accident with the airlock. Sick of all this dying, the Astra's captain decides to disregard the calculations: they'll jettison everything except the crew, accelerate as much as possible, and hope for the best. But part of the ship gets stuck as they're jettisoning it, so Daniel and Georgiana (who had been marked for death in the original equation anyway) go to manually un-stick it, knowing they'll be left behind in the process. And then in one final, bizarre twist, Daniel and Georgiana survive by finding an abandoned but still functioning spacecraft from a prior mission to Venus, while the three designated survivors aboard the Astra all die when the ship is destroyed off-screen. note
- Dune (2021): Discussed when Duke Leto Atreides leads a rescue operation using 3 vehicles to try to evacuate 21 spice harvesters from an approaching Sand Worm. The vehicles each only have room for six more people, so Leto's men say they'll have to leave three behind. Fortunately, Leto's son Paul comes up with the idea to dump their shield generators, making enough room to save them all.
- Dunkirk: A group of soldiers conceal themselves on a Dutch trawler that's washed up on the beach. The tide comes in, but the boat doesn't float so they start arguing that someone should get off. Rather than ask for volunteers they try to force a French soldier off at gunpoint, then when a British soldier tries to object they declare he'll be next, because he's not a member of their regiment. It becomes a moot point because the trawler floats off at that point, but the German see this and start riddling it with gunfire, causing it to sink.
- Fail Safe is a Cold War movie where the US accidentally launches nuclear bombers and, while most are recalled back successfully once it was discovered that it was a radar glitch, due to a computer glitch and successful evasive maneuvering one group gets through Soviet air defenses and is heading for Moscow. In order to convince the Soviets not to retaliate and initiate Mutually Assured Destruction of both superpowers, the US president makes the grim decision to launch a nuclear strike on New York so that both sides suffer about equally and the Soviets won't massively retaliate, even with the First Lady and the commanding general's wife and kids both known to be there at the time. Effectively, the president trades about 3-5 million lives so that 245 million others can live.
- The Final Destination films are built around the idea of people being slated to die at particular moments in time, and Death coming back for them (in the order in which they would've died naturally) when somebody, thanks to a premonition of a coming disaster, manages to save themselves and some of their friends. Final Destination 5 raises the idea that somebody marked for death can kill somebody else and gain the time that their victim had until they were fated to die. Nathan accidentally kills Roy and so gets passed over in Death's order, causing Peter, who is next in line, to try and kill Molly (the one person in their group who didn't die in Sam's premonition of the disaster) in order to claim the time that she had left. The ending reveals that Nathan only bought himself a couple of weeks, because Roy's autopsy revealed a massive aneurysm in his brain that would've burst "any day now" had he not died sooner — meaning that the film ends with Nathan getting squashed.
- Five Came Back: A plane has crashed in the jungles of the Amazon. The pilots fix it, but due to one of the engines being damaged beyond repair, the plane can carry only five people. Unfortunately there are ten people in the party, and it's a Cold Equation because the sound of drums has revealed that The Natives Are Restless, and they're headhunters, and they're about to attack.
- Flash Gordon (1980) has first Zarkov then Flash himself attempt to sacrifice himself to stop Ming. "It's a rational transaction; one life for billions."
- Discussed in I Am Mother with the Ethics course that A.I. robot Mother gives to the human Daughter she is raising in a bunker After the End. One of the questions on the practice exam is whether a doctor should let one of their patients die so that their organs can be donated to five other patients who need organ donors; if the doctor should save the patient but let the other five die; or if the doctor should let themselves die and give up their own organs for the patients. Daughter points out that sacrificing someone to save the others depends on the type of people they are, because it would be a Senseless Sacrifice if these people are murderers/bad people. Mother finds her answer interesting. This foreshadows The Reveal that Mother brought about the extinction event herself in the hope of raising more ethical humans under her guidance.
- I, Robot (2004): Spooner was once in a car accident that almost resulted in both him and a young girl drowning in a river. The robot that first arrived didn't have time to save both of them, and chose to rescue Spooner because it calculated that Spooner had a 45% chance of survival while the girl only had 11%. Spooner doesn't seem to object to the notion that only one of them could have survived, but resents the robot (and all robots, by extension) for choosing to save him instead of the child, who did not survive.
Spooner: That was somebody's baby. 11 percent's more than enough. A human being would've known that.
- Defied in The Ice Road. When a bunch of trapped miners start to run out of air, the Jerkass of the group stirs up dissonance in the group by trying to convince the rest to kill the miners who got wounded in the explosion that caused the cave-in (and they don't know if they will survive long enough for rescue even without the oxygen issue), but the leader of the group prevents a riot by pulling out a Zippo and threatening to blow everybody up with the methane that got trapped in with them if they take one step closer to the wounded. The rescue does come, but it cut it really close to the wire.
- The Imitation Game: Referred to as "blood-soaked calculus." After the team has cracked the German Enigma code, they realize that they can't act on every decoded message as the Germans will realize their communications are compromised and come up with a new code, prolonging the war. The decision is made to identify key German operations to counter but leave the rest alone, meaning that they will knowingly allow allied soldiers to walk into certain death in order to end the war more quickly and save more lives in the long run.
- In Interstellar, Cooper does a Heroic Sacrifice by detaching himself from the spaceship to ensure Brand's safe onward travel to Edmunds planet. Apparently, resources weren't enough for both of them to survive.
- The Last Days on Mars: Campbell, Irwin, and Rebecca escape the Mars expedition base in the solar-powered land Rover, but as it's night the Rover doesn't have enough power to reach the landing zone where a Drop Ship will pick them up. They could walk the rest of the way, but their infected colleagues are coming after them and Rebecca has been wounded in the leg. She's a suspected Zombie Infectee, so Irwin suggests they leave her behind. Campbell refuses, but then Irwin remembers there's another Rover nearby they can use instead. The Take a Third Option trope is defied however when Irwin steals the Rover after unsuccessfully trying once more to persuade Campbell to abandon Rebecca.
- Lifepod is set in an escape pod ejected from a sabotaged spaceship with limited air, food and water. Stating that their odds of survival would increase if one of them dies, a blind passenger tries to cut his wrists. He's actually the saboteur, and did it knowing the others would stop him.
- In Marooned (made before the Apollo 13 disaster), the crew of an Apollo mission is left stranded in Earth orbit with no means to deorbit and a dwindling oxygen supply. Both an emergency rescue mission and a passing cosmonaut eventually help the crew, but not before Mission Control calculates that there's only enough left to save two of the crew. The mission's commander decides to sacrifice himself.
- The Meg: Jonas' career as a deep sea rescue specialist was spoiled by one when he was forced to decide between going back into a sunken nuclear submarine to save his best friends (which would've risked the lives of everyone down there), or return to the surface with the eleven people they had already rescued by then. He chose the latter, something he has never forgiven himself for even years later. There's a Call-Back to this in the sequel when Jonas has to decide whether to close the hatch in a flooding underwater base or wait for Jiuming, who fortunately does make it in time. Jiuming then scolds Jonas for not closing the hatch, and the two jibe each other over whether he'd considered doing so.
- Morning Departure: When Lt. Cdr. Armstrong discovers that there are not enough breathing sets to allow all of the crew to escape to the surface, he has to decide which of the remaining crew will be allowed to leave, and which will have to stay and wait for a rescue that might never come.
- Pitch Black: As the spaceship Hunter-Gratzner is Coming in Hot, its pilot Carolyn Fry starts to purge the cargo compartments. She then decides to purge the passenger compartment as well, but her navigator jams the airlock door open between themselves and the compartment to stop her. Much of her subsequent heroism is atoning for this action.
- This is evoked at one point in Red Planet, and one of the three still-alive crewmen decides to try and reach the old Russian module alone. The second crewman later dies protecting the third one.
- Saw V: Five people are put in a series of booby trapped rooms by Jigsaw. Out of a selfish desire to survive, they sacrifice members at each trap until there are two left. For example, in a room with a bomb, they run to bomb shelters and leave one outside to be blown up. At the final trap, it is revealed that they could have all survived the previous traps if they had worked together; the bomb shelters had room for more than one person each, so they could have shared them. The final trap requires a sacrifice of 10 pints of blood to bypass; if all five were alive, they would have only had to give 2 pints each. The final two give 5 pints each and are badly weakened, but survive and are rescued.
- In the 1955 war movie The Sea Chase, John Wayne plays a German captain trying to evade British warships to get back to Germany, but one of his sailors is dying of gangrene poisoning. He could save him if he surrenders to the British, but he might be executed for war crimes thanks to their Token Nazi Crewmember murdering British civilians. The sailor hears their argument, smashes open a nearby pistol cabinet and shoots himself. Everyone rushes in to find the captain standing over the dead man holding the pistol
- Seven Waves Away (a.k.a. Abandon Ship), a 1957 film starring Tyrone Power, has the survivors from a torpedoed ship in an overloaded lifeboat. The captain tries to keep it afloat by ruthlessly throwing out those who can't survive and keeping those he feels can, making no moral judgments on who is worth saving. Inspired by the Holmes case (see Truth in Television).
- Sink the Bismarck! features a number of these decisions on both sides:
- On the British side, Shepard realizes early on that stopping the Bismarck will require every ship the Royal Navy can spare and then some, as he recommends escort ships be pulled from already vulnerable convoys, and ultimately that the Mediterranean fleet be weakened by sending a task force to join the hunt. Notably, his superiors are pleased with his ability to make such tough decisions dispassionately.
- On the German side, the equation comes up twice when the Bismarck's crew are dealing with the damage to their ship. First, Admiral Lutjens is seemingly prepared to risk divers in dangerous sea conditions in order to repair the ship's rudder. Later, during the climactic battle, an officer is seen ordering the ship's magazines flooded - even though the men inside will almost certainly drown - to prevent a catastrophic explosion.
- Starflight One is a 1983 Disaster Movie involving a hypersonic passenger plane that gets stuck in orbit. Most of the passengers are successfully evacuated and the crew intends to try and achieve reentry, but they're running out of oxygen (the plane is only meant to pass through space for a short time before returning to Earth). A Corrupt Corporate Executive on the ground half-heartedly suggests that if there were three less passengers... The pilot demands this jerk be thrown out of the control room, and he is.
- The story of Stowaway (2021) is based on the Trope Namer, so the usage of this trope is not surprising. Being a realistic sci-fi, the spaceship is built with enough spare resources to bear the extra crew member, but the breakage of the carbon-dioxide scrubber results in oxygen shortage.
- Sunshine:
- Icarus II is damaged on its mission to reignite the sun, but the crew realize there is still enough oxygen to get there if one of them dies. A scientist who's lapsed into depression after indirectly causing the death of The Captain (and soon the rest of them even more indirectly) is an obvious candidate. All but one of the crew vote to kill him (their mission is, after all, to save the entire human race) only to find he's already killed himself. Or he was killed by a stowaway whose presence makes the whole question moot.
- When there's only one spacesuit to cross back to the Icarus II, the other crewmen immediately start putting Capa (the only man who can fire the payload that is their mission) into the suit, ignoring the protests of their acting commander.
- The Master Computer takes control of the spacecraft from the astronauts because it has been programmed to prioritize the mission. Exposure to sunlight has started a fire in the garden that provides their oxygen, so the computer turns the Icarus II so the heatshield is fully facing the sun, killing the captain who is on the heatshield doing repairs. The astronauts try to re-establish manual control to prevent this, but the captain refuses to give his permission.
- Threads: After a nuclear attack devastates Britain, the Sheffield emergency council argue over whether to distribute food to people in irradiated zones who are going to die anyway, or horde it as currency to conscript the survivors to work on clean-up operations.
- In The Time Travelers, Councilman Willard points out that the four time travelers cannot be brought on to the rocket to Alpha Centauri because the number of passengers has been precisely established. Adding four extra people would require extra air and provisions, which would reduce the amount fuel they could carry, which would cause them to miss their rendezvous with the planet. The time travelers will have to remain on Earth and either find a way to survive in the caves or attempt to rebuild their time portal.
- In Titanic (1997), this is the reason given why the lifeboats don't go back to try to save those in the water after the Titanic sinks: if they go, they'll be mobbed by people trying to get on the boat, causing the lifeboats to sink and killing the passengers aboard them.
- The Transporter has one in the opening sequence. Frank is hired to be the wheel man for a bank robbery, with the express and very clear agreement that there will be three men at 254 kilos. The gang shows up with four men. Frank refuses to budge, since he has planned for a very precise amount of fuel to optimally carry three men plus himself and not one smidgen more. The gang's left with the choice of kicking out one man to make weight or sitting still and waiting to be caught. There's nothing tying Frank to the gang, so he's perfectly willing to cool his heels. Finally, the gang leader shoots one of the accomplices and throws his body out, at which point Frank springs into action and proves himself and his ways worth every penny.
- When Worlds Collide: A rocket ship is built to escape The End of the World as We Know It, but it can only take forty people selected by a Lottery of Doom with the exception of some reserved seats, such as the jerkass financier who's funding the rocket's construction on condition that he be taken along. When the girlfriend of one winner has to stay behind he decides to stay as well, so it's arranged for both to go. Then the protagonist is also brought in as back-up pilot. Therefore when the rocket is about to take off the scientist who thought up The Ark idea stays behind and forces the financier to stay with him, so the rocket will have enough fuel.
- Woman in the Moon: After a struggle punctures the oxygen tank, the two male crewmembers draw straws to see who gets to return to Earth on the rocket. The Dirty Coward gets the short straw and breaks down sobbing, so the hero makes the Heroic Sacrifice and stays behind on the Moon instead.
Jokes
- A joke that surfaces with every election: The President, the Pope and a Boy Scout are on a plane when the pilot dies of a heart attack. Every passenger grabs a parachute and jumps, but the last three realize there's only two parachutes left. The President grabs a handle and says "I'm sorry, but as the leader of the free world, my life is worth more than yours", and jumps. The Pope looks at the Boy Scout and says "Take mine, my son." The Boy Scout says "Don't worry, your Holiness, he grabbed my backpack by mistake!"
- In a similar setting, a plane carrying a delegation of diplomats suffers an engine loss and has to lighten its load.
British Diplomat: God save the Queen! [Jumps from plane].
French Diplomat: Viva la France! [Jumps from plane].
Texan Diplomat: Remember the Alamo! [Throws out the Mexican]. note
Literature
- The Bee Dungeon: Belissar has to adjust to his bees' willingness to risk their lives, because he knows there are greater threats in the world, and so the Tower needs to grow, which means taking on greater "purification" challenges and probably taking casualties in the process. Every time he reaches an expansion threshold, he has to weigh up the risks of the next difficulty level versus the risk of delay — and also, the bees' desire to show that he can trust them with the Tower defence.
- The Trope Namer is of course The Cold Equations, the classic 1954 sci-fi short by Tom Godwin famous for averting the Always Save the Girl trope (it was specifically commissioned to be an example, or at least as an example of Science not saving the day). A young girl stows away on an emergency rocket carrying vital vaccines to an exploration outpost, not knowing that its fuel has been precisely calculated and her extra weight is enough to cause disaster.
- In Black Man, a Super-Soldier has smuggled himself on board a spacecraft travelling from Mars to Earth. However Cryonics Failure means he wakes up too early. Because he can't call for a rescue without abandoning his mission, his only recourse is to thaw and eat the other passengers. Unsurprisingly he's got a major screw loose by the time he gets to Earth.
- A non-space example shows up in The Book of Questions, a book with scenarios with no clear-cut answer intended to provoke thought. It involves getting trapped in a cave-in with another miner. You have a gun with two bullets and sleeping pills. You know that there is only enough air for one sleeping person to survive for six hours and it's likely to take at least six for the rescuers to reach you. After agreeing to that conclusion, the other miner takes the sleeping pills, hands you the gun, and says it's your decision.
- Arthur C. Clarke's short story "Breaking Strain" is about a two-man spaceship that (after a micrometeor strike) has only enough oxygen for one of them to survive the trip. It follows one of the characters' thoughts as he becomes more and more tempted to murder his companion and save himself. It has two different Adaptation Expansions: the novel Venus Prime 1: Breaking Strain, in which the story's aftermath is investigated, and the film Trapped in Space (which expands the crew to six people and has a more And Then There Were None kind of plot with successive murders).
- In The Broken Earth Trilogy, everyone is familiar with cold equations. During the global cataclysms known as "fifth seasons"; comms enact seasonal law under which everyone is potentially subject to being drafted for suicide missions to get supplies, left to likely starve to death outside the comm (being "ashed out"), or being killed and eaten if necessary for other people to live ("you don't think about the meat").
- Chakona Space: Discussed during the first chapter of the "More Terrible Than Chains" story, a slave ship breaks down light years from anyplace habitable. One of the crew wants to protect their significant investment. The captain understands the limitations of the life pods.note
"Idiot! You know the life pods are designed solely to support a certain number of people for a certain amount of time. Add just one slave and no one in that pod may get to the destination alive."
- Fortunately, this enables the Federation to rescue the left-behind slaves without resistance.
- The Cthulhu Mythos short story "The Preserved Ones" by Christopher Geeson has the nuclear bunker version. When the remaining survivors emerge they discover Earth has been taken over by the Mi-Go, and having already crossed the moral horizon with this trope, find it easy to justify becoming Les Collaborateurs in a Vichy Earth as just another necessary evil to survive.
- In The Dark Forest, following a Curb-Stomp Battle in which a single alien probe wipes out most of the human space fleet, two small groups of ships survive: the "Starship Earth", consisting of the Ultimate Law, Natural Selection, Blue Space, Deep Space and Enterprise, and the Bronze Age and the Quantum going off in a different direction. Both groups run the numbers and find that they do not have enough fuel to get to another system alone, nor are they able to effectively transfer people to one ship, but there are enough supplies within the fleets to get one ship out of the system. The resultant engagements, which feature heavy use of infrasonic H-bombs in order to kill crews without damaging supplies, are referred to as "Battles of Darkness", and kill thousands of people. To be fair to the crew of the Blue Space, the victor of the "Starship Earth" incident, they did at least hold a funeral ceremony for the casualties on the other four ships. In a broader sense, this is also the nature of interspecies relations for most of the galaxy: due to the difficulty of establishing trust, and the finite resources of the universe, pretty much all surviving species have concluded that every other species is by definition taking up resources they could use and are likely to be a threat, typically leading directly to "dark forest strikes": system kills.
- Discworld:
- Snuff all but invoked the trope name with the concept of the "dreadful algebra" of survival. When faced with lean times, a goblin mother will eat her child. Their religion involves the construction of pots to store certain bodily excretions, and the most precious of these is the jar in which a goblin mother will place the soul of her devoured child, to be reborn when food is more plentiful.
- The Last Hero references this when the crew aboard a makeshift spaceship note that there isn't as much oxygen as there should be. Food shows up missing, and they briefly theorize that they have picked up an alien intruder, in a shout-out to Alien. Turns out it's the Librarian, who stowed away before takeoff. Luckily, Discworld's moon has breathable air, so they are able to land there and refill.
- The Dragonriders of Pern story "Rescue Run" had this problem turn up when the rescued colonists try to smuggle in several hundred kilos of precious metals (which turned out to be less valuable than the homemade medicines and seeds they packed legitimately), throwing the mass calculations off. Instead of spacing people, the crew spaces the metal, along with some furniture.
(bending one of the retrieved platinum plates) "Individually, these don't weigh very much, but they damn near coated the ship with them. Ingenious."
- In Down to a Sunless Sea by David Graham, at one point the narrator's Boeing and his new girlfriend's Antonov are fleeing to Antarctica to escape the nuclear devastation of the entire civilised world. Unfortunately, they run into heavy clouds which are lethally contaminated with fallout, and the Antonov doesn't have the fuel to make the trip at the higher altitude required to clear the fallout. So the Russian co-pilot calls for volunteers and opens the Anti's cargo doors, and leads a procession of about one-third of the passengers on the long drop into oblivion. In some editions of the book, it turns out that they were the lucky ones when all was said and done.
- In Dune Messiah it is Fremen tradition that blind men must leave the tribe go to the desert in self exile, and probably get eaten by a Sand Worm. Paul ends up blinded and must do the same to ensure the Fremen would be loyal to his children Leto II and Ghanima.
- Flashman at the Charge. Flashman and Scud East are in a horse-drawn sled being pursued by Russian Cossacks, and have to Bring News Back of a Russian plan to invade India. So Flashman decides it's time for an Emergency Cargo Dump. Amoral bastard that he is, instead of making a Heroic Sacrifice Flashman throws overboard a Russian princess they're carrying. He then suffers Laser-Guided Karma when the sledge crashes, pinning him beneath it, and Scud decides to leave him to his fate under the same trope.
- In Gone, Astrid debates whether or not killing Little Pete is worth it if it ends the FAYZ. She kills him in Plague.
- In the Heechee Saga book Gateway, it's one of the many occupational hazards of space travel when all your ships are alien craft with preset trips of unknown length. The ship will go somewhere, but there's no telling where, or how long it will take until the ship starts decelerating, meaning you damn well better have enough supplies to last the trip. If you haven't reached the midway point of the outbound voyage by the time a quarter of your food is gone, you draw straws... loser goes into the fridge. At least a couple of trips return with nothing aboard but corpses. The protagonist Robinette Broadhead also finds himself in an accidental version when a two-ship expedition is trapped by a black hole; one ship has to be flung into the black hole to provide the boost for the other ship to escape. He suffers Survivor Guilt when his ship survives at the cost of his companions when he had been trying to sacrifice himself.
- In Larry Niven's short story How the Heroes Die, Carter (a murderer) is fleeing Alf in a buggy across the surface of Mars. Carter figures his pursuer will have to give up the chase and return to base because he'll run out of oxygen, but Alf points out that he will have enough oxygen if he kills Carter and takes his oxygen supply. Carter wins their duel, but Alf hid his spare oxygen tanks somewhere on his route, so Carter dies as well.
- Judge Dee: In The Willow Pattern, the Judge is running the capital due to a plague shutting down the government. There's also a famine, so he has the grain warehouses under military guard to prevent looting. The Heat Wave doesn't help, and a riot is preventing by the soldiers firing into the crowd, killing thirty people.
'By shooting those thirty men,' Judge Dee said gravely, 'you saved uncounted thousands of citizens from starvation. If the mob had succeeded in plundering and burning the Granary, a few hundred people would have eaten their fill tonight, but that would have been all. If doled out in the regular rations, on the other hand, the stores will supply the population of the entire city with their basic food for at least another month. It was not a pleasant duty, but it couldn't be helped.'
- The Langoliers: Eventually, the characters figure out how to get out of being trapped in the past - fly through the time rift backwards. However, they have two problems. First, the titular Langoliers (who eat the past) are actively trying to stop the plane, and second, they must be asleep to survive going through. The solution to the first problem involves throwing a passenger out as a distraction to the Langoliers, and the second, by lowering the cabin pressure to knock them all unconscious, for which someone must be awake to restore it so they'll wake up on the other side. The first victim chosen is Craig Toomy, who's been having a violent breakdown throughout the novel, and the second is Nick, who volunteers in order to atone for accidentally killing children.
- Averted in a short story by Lino Aldani. A ship is stranded on Titan, one of Saturn's moons, and can't return to Earth because of sixty-two kilograms overweight. The crew can't leave their cargo (it's an important cure for an epidemic back on earth), but they consider a lot of different options... In the end, every member of the crew got one arm amputated, so No One Gets Left Behind.
- The Martian. Johannsen tells her father that the crew of Hermes have made a secret pact that if their food resupply mission goes wrong, the others will commit suicide straight away. Johannsen, who is the youngest and smallest crewmember, will then have the maximum amount of food for the return journey to Earth. But that still won't be enough to survive, so she'll be required to eat the bodies of her crewmates.
- Stanisław Lem played with this scenario in Moon night. And an entirely sensible punchline turned it into great Black Comedy.
- On the Edge of Gone functions on a deconstruction of the Cold Equation, as a comet is about to hit Earth and only a limited number of people can leave in space ships, so only the most fit and useful are allowed on the ships. Then the comet actually hits, and most of their initial assumptions of who will or won't be useful fall apart. As well as their assumption that they have to leave Earth behind at all.
- Oxygen by John B. Olson and Randall S. Ingermanson. A bomb explodes on a NASA spaceship heading for Mars, leading to the venting of much of their oxygen supply. The crew might survive if all but one of them are placed in a drugged coma. The question is: can you trust that one person who's going to be conscious, when you know the bomber is on board?
- Jack McDevitt's Priscilla Hutchins series has a couple of examples:
- In The Engines of God, Hutch is piloting a spaceship which crashes into a Big Dumb Object, shutting down their fusion engine. The spaceship starts to lose heat (so much that it starts snowing inside) and the oxygen pumps fail, leaving them with only a week's worth of air in the shuttle and the nearest rescue ship ten days away. A Lottery of Doom is half-heartedly suggested, but Hutch tells everyone to sleep on it, then sneaks out with the intention of committing suicide (as pilot it's her responsibility to ensure the safety of the others). At the last moment Hutch realises all they have to do is melt the 'snow' (actually frozen atmosphere) to get the needed oxygen. Later on another pilot is looking at his shuttle — named after a pilot who famously performed a similar sacrifice — and bemoans the fact that such exciting heroics don't happen now that spaceflight has become routine and safe.
- In Chindi, Hutch is piloting a ship being sent for standby duty at a research station near an unstable star. When she's nearly there, she realizes that the list of Academy personnel on the station includes a teacher, which suggests that the researchers may have their families there—but due to a bureaucratic snafu, her ship is only large enough to carry the listed personnel! At which point, an EM pulse from the star fries everyone's communications systems, and the explosion that caused the pulse looks like it will destroy the station. A number of researchers volunteer to go down with the station, so that others might live, but fortunately, someone back home noticed the snafu, and when communications go out, hurriedly redirects another ship, which arrives just in the nick of time.
- In Jack McDevitt's Moonfall, ten people have to stay behind on a Moonbase just before a comet is about to impact the Moon, including a politician who made a rash promise to the public that he would be the last to be evacuated. To his credit he sticks to his promise, and a Crazy Enough to Work plan gets them off Just in Time.
- In Scavenger Alliance, Scavenger Blood reveals Cage and his followers' plan to escape the coming firestorm: to leave behind "burdens" like the sick, injured, elderly and small children, allowing them to move faster and saving all the supplies for themselves. They also plan to kill any of the able-bodied who aren't on board. The fact that Hannah is on board with this is the final straw that pushes Blaze to lock her away with the others.
- The Scholomance: The titular school is essentially a massive triage operation that sacrifices approximately three-fourths of the student body to mals so enclave children and the best and brightest (and luckiest) independent wizard children can survive and live, the latter so they can be used for their services by the enclaves and provide their own children as fodder when it's the next generation's turn to attend. El outright says in the first chapter of the first book that they're not all meant to survive the school, and that Orion disrupting the status quo by saving so many people is going to eventually bite them in the ass. She's correct—Orion's Chronic Hero Syndrome starves the horde of mals down in the Graduation Hall so much that they're riled up enough to try and break down the wards that keeps them out of the rest of the school just for the sake of a meal.
- Subverted in The Seventh Tower, when Tal accidentally seals himself and Crow into a corner by producing a shield of solid magic to protect them from a spiritshadow. Tal accidentally makes the shield airtight and he can't dispell it. Tal considers killing Crow (and Crow is clearly considering killing Tal) but both decide it was better to to try to wait out the spell than to take the selfish way out.
- A Song of Ice and Fire, among the families of the North, in the continent of Westeros, it is common during winters—which can span decades—for old men to announce they are "going hunting" and leave their homes so so as to leave a little more food for the young. In times of war, instead of "going hunting", the old men enlist in join the armies in order to die in battle.
- [Arya] remembered a tale she heard from Old Nan, about how sometimes during a long winter men who'd lived beyond their years would announce that they were going hunting. And their daughters would weep and their sons would turn theirs faces to the fire, [...] but no one would stop them, or ask what game they meant to hunt, with snows so deep and the cold wind howling.
- In Peter David's Star Trek: New Frontier novel, "Stone and Anvil", Mackenzie Calhoun, a former teenage warlord now on the Command path in Starfleet Academy, creates an unusual solution to the Kobayashi Maru test — firing on the Maru's leaking engines, with the resulting blast destroying two Romulan Warbirds and allowing him to retreat, thus 'beating' the scenario. When debriefed by the scenario proctors, one of them mentions it was an acceptable albeit unorthodox solution, stating that sometimes a Starship captain has to make very hard choices. Brutal choices dictated by the cold equations of space.
- Subverted in Starquake, the sequel to Dragon's Egg. When the crew of a starship discover they'll be stuck in orbit for six months, with an insufficient food supply, The Spock of the group calculates that they'll need to kill and eat two crewmembers to survive. Then she points out that they'd never feel at ease again among humans if they did, and suggests they Face Death with Dignity instead. They are later rescued by the Cheela, who are by then a Higher-Tech Species with few of the Terrans' limitations.
- As the flesh-eater plague in the novel Ushoran: Mortarch of Delusion worsens, Kosomir continually frames his measures as this. Why risk a thousand lives to save a hundred that are probably already lost, after all? As the story goes on, it becomes increasingly clear that Kosomir is more interested in saving himself and the idea of his own glory than actually saving those around him, with the numbers he is willing to sacrifice quickly eclipsing those he is supposedly saving.
- Watership Down
- Cowslip's warren is a free-range rabbit farm with willing inmates. The farmer puts out food and kills any rabbit predators, enabling the rabbits to live easy lives with the occasional loss from a snare or two. When Hazel, Fiver and the others turn up, they quickly decide to invite the strangers to join their warren without warning them of the danger.
Fiver: Don't you see? The farmer only sets so many snares at a time and if one rabbit dies, the others will live that much longer.
- Not that the main characters don't think this way at times. During the raid on Nuthanger Farm, the domesticated hutch rabbits freeze up once they're out in the open, with the farm cat prowling about and the dog barking at them, so Bigwig suggests leaving them behind if needed.
"If it comes to the worst," said Bigwig, "we can leave the hutch rabbits and bolt. Elil take the hindmost, don't they? I know it's tough, but if there's real trouble we ought to save our own rabbits first. Let's hope that doesn't happen, though."
- Cowslip's warren is a free-range rabbit farm with willing inmates. The farmer puts out food and kills any rabbit predators, enabling the rabbits to live easy lives with the occasional loss from a snare or two. When Hazel, Fiver and the others turn up, they quickly decide to invite the strangers to join their warren without warning them of the danger.
- The Redeker Plan in World War Z was a strategy used in the zombie war, which involved isolating smaller though well supplied groups of survivors in such a way that the undead would converge on them, ultimately dooming them. This would have the effect of distracting the hordes away from the larger populations (giving them time to regroup and prepare for an attack themselves), and perhaps even reducing their numbers in the process.
- Xandri Corelel: During the Second Zechak War, the Zechak took over Halcyon, a mining planet in a strategic location, and filled it with slaves so they could manufacture powerful weapons. The Starsystems Alliance tried to take the planet back, but the Zechak easily defeated their armies. Fearing that the Alliance's planets might be invaded if the Zechak kept Halcyon, Admiral losTavina ordered the surface of the planet destroyed, making it useless to the Zechak, but also wiping out millions of innocent slaves.
Music
- Referenced in the song "Nautical Disaster" by The Tragically Hip.
I was in a lifeboat designed for ten
Ten and only
And anything that systematic would get you hated
It's not a deal nor a test nor a love of something fated
The selection was quick, the crew was picked
In an order
And those left in the water were kicked off our pantlegs
And we headed for home - Steve Taylor's "Lifeboat". An elementary school teacher leads her class in a thought experiment of being stuck in an overcrowded lifeboat, and asks the students which of the various "undesirables" should be thrown overboard. The kids learn the lesson a little too well: applying the message to their current situation, the kids decide the teacher is dead weight and throw her out the classroom window.
Mythology & Religion
- In Chinese Mythology, Hou Yi and his wife Chang E are stripped of their divinity and immortality as punishment for something only Hou Yi did (and which was necessary to save the world in the first place) so, naturally, the couple wants to regain their divinity by any means necessary. Hou Yi tracks down, and manages to obtain, the elixir of life from a sympathetic goddess, and is told that drinking one dose gives immortality and two doses gives divinity. Unfortunately, the ingredients of the elixir take 6000 years to grow, and the goddess only has two doses available. Thus, either both Hou Yi and Chang E become immortal but remain human in every other respect, or one of them can regain their full divinity but condemn the other to die. Later, when Hou Yi’s student attacks them while trying to steal the elixir, Chang E, realizing that there is no other way to stop the thief and who will certainly be killed otherwise, drinks both doses, and Hou Yi sadly accepts this.
Tabletop Games
- BattleTech, in the Wars of Reaving Clans Steel Viper, and Star Adder just obtain a great deal of isorla(spoils of war) from fleeing Clan Snow Raven fleet. When they didn't have enough room for all their isorla, they decided to throw out clan civilians out the air lock.
- Paranoia:
- One mission includes a Running Gag with malfunctioning elevators to the 99th floor, one of which is airtight and slo-o-o-ow. Sure, the PCs could just use their lasers to ventilate the wall - and face a fine for damaging Computer property - but, this being Paranoia, they're just as likely to instead ventilate the traitors who were using up all the air.
- Another mission gives the PCs an ever-expanding authority role over a project driving all of Alpha Complex toward mass starvation. Near the end, someone may notice a politically-discredited but effective device that converts any organic material into food.
"Gentlemen, how many citizens does this sector really need?"
- Yu-Gi-Oh!: The art for Painful Decision shows Ojama Yellow as a lifeguard trying to decide who to save when Ojama Green and Ojama Black are both being chased by a shark.
Video Games
- If the RNG in 60 Seconds! is particularly unkind, you might have to choose a family member to let die of starvation, dehydration, or illness.
- Fate/Grand Order:
- Mephistopheles puts Jeanne d'Arc in an illusion where she is on a ship that is fleeing a disaster. They run into her mother and Pierre Cauchon, the bishop who had her burned at the stake, but the ship only has room for one more person. Mephistopheles clearly expected her to leave Pierre to die, and this would prove she has darkness in her heart out of a need for revenge. Instead, Jeanne gives up her seat so that both her mother and Pierre can live. Pierre refuses to thank her and calls her a witch. Jeanne merely comments she expected that, and Mephistopheles comments that the real one would react the same way.
- In the Camelot Singularity, the Lion King believes the Incineration of Humanity cannot be stopped, so she starts a project called the Holy Selection. She will choose 500 people she deems worthy and absorb them into Rhongomyniad so they can survive. She is emotionless and does not care about everyone else that will die. The heroes end up stopping her.
- In the Norse Lostbelt, humanity is barely surviving. Due to lack of resources, people are exiled from villages when they turn 15 (25 if they managed to bear a child), where they will surely be killed by the giants roaming outside.
- In Fire Emblem: Three Houses, the Flame Emperor believes that the lives lost to Fodlan's status quo far outweigh the casualties caused by the war they started to change it, though the game's other factions disagree to varying extents.
- Mass Effect 1: During the time the Reapers were cleaning up after themselves, the AI Vigil was tasked with keeping an eye on a bunker full of Protheans in stasis, waiting for the Reapers to leave. However, in that time, the bunker's systems began running low on power, forcing Vigil to turn off the life support for the less "essential" personnel. Agreeing with Vigil that this was a necessary move (which it kind of was, since it's only because of that choice Shepard has a chance of stopping the Reapers at all) nets the player a few Renegade points.
- In Mass Effect 3 this trope is discussed by Shepard and Garrus, calling it "the ruthless calculus of war." Shepard is tasked with making many hard decisions in the war with the Reapers, including allowing some planets to fall in order to save others. Shepard invokes this in one of their many speeches:
Shepard: It's hard enough fighting a war. But it's worse knowing that no matter how hard you try... you can't save them all.
- No matter what his or her status, you always have the option to just up and kill a party member in Organ Trail. Of course you'll inevitably have to kill a member who's been bitten, but you can also choose to kill a perfectly healthy member just to have one less person to divide your limited food and medical supplies with. They'll come back as an enemy toward the end of the game if you do though, you monster.
- In Sands of Destruction, a desperate and depressed Kyrie decides that if Naja kills him, Morte and the others will be able to continue to live because he can't destroy the world if he's dead. An interesting case where this trope meets Heroic Sacrifice.
- In Super Robot Wars 30, this is one of several types of questions the villain periodically asks Captain Mitsuba throughout the campaign, with the game's ending determined by her decisions. Taking both routes, however, reveals that both options are really just an excuse for the villain to do whatever he wants: either humanity is unable to deal with this trope, in which case it's too foolish to let live, or it can deal with it, which makes it too dangerous to let live.
Visual Novels
- Played With in Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, in which the nine characters have nine hours to find their way off of a cruise ship. Along the way, they must solve puzzles behind numbered doors, which only three to five people may enter. They may escape when they make it through a door with a nine on it, and some of the characters realize early on that no more than five people can escape. Later subverted when the doors with the nines are found, and the protagonist contemplates that the purpose of there being two was to inflict regret upon those who sacrificed members after doing the math. However, this is soon double subverted when, after the two doors, there is another room with a single door with a nine; characters who are left behind after that will still have a chance to escape, but they don't know that when deciding who passes through the door. Triple Subverted, because...well, the author is like that. The door with Nine will ONLY open if every single person is alive to do it, except the one person who was unavoidably killed.
- In one ending of Ever17, Tsugumi and Takeshi find an escape module with which to leave LeMU, but it turns out not to be able to carry both of them to the surface, so one of them ends up having to sacrifice themselves for the other. In case you were morbidly curious as to who self-sacrifices for whom, Takeshi sacrifices himself so Tsugumi can live.
- Discussed in Your Turn to Die, as Kanna advocates for her own death through the reasoning that compared to Sou, she is expendable. Ironically, more good comes out of ignoring her request and killing off Sou.
Webcomics
- Narbonic parodies "The Cold Equations" here; when the pilot is Dave and the cute stowaway is Mell, it's not the stowaway who's going out the airlock.
- Quentyn Quinn, Space Ranger devotes an entire arc to tearing into the trope namer. According to the author only an over-regulated state monopoly (and not, say, a corporate lowest bidder) would ever use death traps like the shuttle in the original story. Author's politics aside, no one in their right mind would ever design a shuttle with zero margin for error—and even if some emergency situation did pop up that required such a risk, it shouldn't be happening often enough for legal precedent to require the murder of the stowaway.
Web Original
- In Swan Song, part of the Roll Play series of Dungeons & Dragons livestreamed shows, this is the core of the plot of the 8th "episode" or week. After a couple of botched jumps on already-low life support by the ship's navigator, the crew math-out that they have significantly fewer person-days of life support than they need for their five-man ship. The doctor of the ship has to put first their escorted passenger, then the rest of the crew bar the navigator, including himself, into a risky experimental coma to preserve the little remaining life support (cutting resource usage into a tenth). Piling on the problem, they are also low on fuel with their method of manual fuel extraction destroyed, so they discuss and realize that their only option is to go to a modern-day-era tech-level system and hope they can refuel on the desolate refueling station until they find a higher-tech system that offers a way to resuscitate the comatose crew... assuming they can even be put into a coma with the combination of space-morphine and dice rolls. Miraculously, they do... but the navigator then realizes that while he made it to the system, he doesn't have the life support to fly to a fuel station and must instead crash-land onto the only inhabited planet.
- The short film "Vacuity" involves a man on a damaged space station who's forced to choose between saving himself by ejecting the escape pod he's in (its airlock will open in a few minutes and due to the damage suffered, ejecting is the only way to abort the opening) or sacrificing himself so that the rest of the station's crew can cut their way into the escape pod and use it. Complicating matters is the fact that he can't contact the rest of the station, so he has no idea if the rest of the crew is even still alive. Ultimately, he decides to let himself die after he manages to hear the other crewmembers trying to get in to help him, feeling that he can't be as selfish as to let others die so he can live.
Western Animation
- Princess Bubblegum makes the decision to sacrifice James to distract the zombies so the other three can escape in the Adventure Time episode "James". Comes across as a harsh moment for Bubblegum because she chooses James as the least valuable person to save, rather than him volunteering.
- Arcane: Ambessa insists on wiping out the royal family of the kingdom conquered in the flashback, viewing it as killing one to avoid killing thousands in a future uprising.
- Archer:
- The Season 4 finale sees Archer, Lana, Cyril and Ray trapped in a room quickly filling with water and only three sets of scuba gear to swim out and to the surface. The only option is for one of them to drown and die, hopefully temporarily, while the other three use the scuba suits to get themselves to safety and resuscitate the volunteer. Ray has robot legs, and Cyril is the next best swimmer, so the choice is between Lana and Archer. Archer immediately volunteers after Lana reveals she's pregnant.
- Played for comedy in Season 5 when Ray, while piloting the plane he, Archer, and Cyril are on, realizes they won't make it to the runway because there's only enough fuel to carry the weight of two people, Archer attempts to convince Cyril to jump out, but Cyril pitches the shipment of guns they were carrying off the side.
- In an episode of Futurama, this occurs when the Space Titanic is sinking into a black hole. The main characters board an escape pod, but the extra weight of Bender's Girl of the Week is causing the escape pod to drift towards the black hole, so she willingly lets go, saving the other characters. She is, of course, killed by falling into the black hole, and is never heard from (or even mentioned) again.
- In King of the Hill during one of Cotton's war stories. His ship was attacked and was able to rescue Fatty, Stinky, and Brooklyn. A Zero fighter attacked him and he had to sacrifice Fatty to the sharks to swim to safety.
- In the first episode of Mighty Ducks: The Animated Series, the Ducks' ship is traveling through dimensional limbo. Unfortunately, the ship is attacked and will be ripped apart unless some weight is jettisoned, and everything onboard is bolted down. Team leader Canard decides to jettison himself. Wildwing tries to stop him, but only manages to save the mask of Drake Dukane Canard wanted to hand him.
- The nuclear shelter scenario is spoofed in The Simpsons episode "Bart's Comet". A comet is about to strike Springfield and so the entire towns' population tries to cram into Ned Flander's bomb shelter. They somehow manage this, but can't get the door closed. After arguing about who should be sacrificed Homer points out that the one skill future society doesn't need is the ability to sell left-handed products, so Ned gets thrown out of his own shelter. Eventually they all feel guilty about this decision (with Homer ironically inciting the guilt and expressing his contempt for everyone else having agreed with it), and so leave the shelter to die with him. The comet ends up breaking up to small bits in Springfield's toxic atmosphere anyway with the only actual damage it causes is piercing an unmanned hot air balloon which flies out of control...ironically, striking the bomb shelter and destroying it, which rather puts its usefulness against an intact comet in doubt.
- Star Trek:
- Star Trek: The Animated Series:
- The crew faces this in the episode "One Of Our Planets Is Missing". The alien of the week is a literal planet eater who has already demonstrated its capacity, and it is heading straight for a populated planet. There aren't enough ships (or time, for that matter) to evacuate everyone, so the planet's leader opts for saving the children.The population of the planet cooperates readily with the decision once they know what is happening.
- In the same episode, Kirk makes a similar choice - there is a chance of stopping the Planet Eater and saving the doomed planet...but only by flying the Enterprise right into the creature and triggering self-destruct. Fortunately, it turned out that the monster in question was Obliviously Evil, and once convinced by Spock that the planets it is eating has living beings along, chooses to back off.
- Star Trek: Prodigy has this as part of Jankom Pog's backstory. He was part of a Tellarite sleeper ship, and the ship's computer woke him up when things started breaking down. After what seems to have been days if not weeks of constant repair-work, he succeeds in saving the ship, but doing so has also used up more oxygen than expected and some got lost in a past breakdown. He decides to take an escape pod to let the other sleepers survive, which the computer proudly congratulates him on his sacrifice never being forgotten. Played for Laughs as the ship's computer is primitive and faulty and immediately forgets his name.
- Star Trek: The Animated Series:
Other
- This scenario can also be about the evils of nuclear proliferation: there's six people but only room in the nuke shelter for five — whom do you throw out? There would usually be an obvious Red Shirt character like a priest, supposedly proving the irrelevance of organised religion. These scenarios never included the details that would matter in real life, such as who was your best buddy, who was an attractive member of the opposite sex or who was holding a firearm at the moment the crucial decision was made. It also doesn't factor in Values Dissonance. A devoutly religious person might well decide that having a priest is far more important than having a doctor, for instance. In the end, the resulting argument is intended to make everyone conclude that nuclear war is wrong as Take a Third Option.
- There's an urban myth where people found the dead body of a man in the desert holding a piece of straw. In a line from his body are clothes and equipment. It's impossible for him to have walked and there are no tracks leading away from a vehicle. The solution to the mystery is that he was on a balloon that was descending over the desert; the passengers threw out everything they could to gain height, before realizing one person would have to go. The corpse drew the short straw.
- Another scenario meant to teach to never judge a book by the cover uses this, and runs thusly: You are in a balloon that is rapidly losing height at a rate such that any impact will prove fatal for all aboard. The passengers are you, a geriatric old woman, a wealthy looking man in a suit, and a teenager about to inject himself. One person must be thrown out, but who? Turns out the old woman fought for women's rights, the businessman earns hundreds of dollars through fraud, and the teenager's actually injecting himself with insulin—he's diabetic. (Of course, many people would just pick the wealthy-looking man immediately, giving it a rather different message: Eat the Rich. Or specifically in this case. . . yeet the rich.)
- The Trolley Problem is a thought experiment that makes use of a Cold Equation to gauge people's ethics: You see a runaway trolley moving toward five incapacitated people lying on the tracks, and you are standing next to the lever that will redirect the trolley onto a side track that misses the five people. However, there is one person lying on the side track. Your only two options are 1: pull the lever and kill the one person to save five, or 2: do nothing and let the five people on the main track die. According to numerous surveys, 90% of people opt to pull the lever. However, according to further surveys, that number drasticaly decreases if they are the ones who must push someone into the path of the oncoming trolley directly, or are given other various qualifiers, such as it being five drunks who shouldn't be on the tracks vs a railroad employee doing their job. note
Real Life
- NASA attempts to avert this trope by building in several levels of redundancies and overengineering into their space vehicles. Despite this, even the Shuttle launches had several windows where any malfunction or error would result in "LOV" (Loss Of Vehicle).
- Apollo 13 ran into this dilemma. After an oxygen tank in the Service Module exploded, and the Command Module the crew was forced to use the life-support systems of the Lunar Excursion Module. Normally, this wouldn't have been a problem, but the LEM was only designed to support two people, not the full crew. note The problem in this case was actually of a buildup of carbon dioxide instead of a lack of oxygen, since the LEM was designed to support its crew for several days on the lunar surface, including being completely vented out every time they needed to open the door. The carbon dioxide scrubbers on the LEM, however, were not up to the task of filtering the atmosphere with all three crewmembers inside, and the LEM's ports did not fit the CM's more powerful filters. Luckily, NASA was able to MacGyver up a solution that did not include murder, and all three returned safe and free of CO2 poisoning.
- Apollo 13 also had a critical water shortage due to the command module water supply being the exhaust from oxygen-hydrogen fuel cells for which the oxygen had been lost. Fortunately, the return to Earth did not take so long to force any decision about who got to drink - although all three astronauts were significantly dehydrated by splashdown.
- There are two famous court cases in The Common Law tradition involving survivors of shipwrecks who took to the lifeboats and were charged with murder for their subsequent actions. Both cases ended with the accused being convicted of murder (albeit with vastly reduced sentences), setting the precedent that self-preservation does not excuse the murder of an innocent.
- United States vs. Holmes - a US federal case in which sailors forced passengers off an overcrowded lifeboat.
- R vs. Dudley and Stephens - an English case 40 years later that cited Holmes, in which sailors murdered and ate the weakest member of their lifeboat crew, on the grounds that they were starving and he was likely to die anyway. note
- United States vs. Holmes
- Lawrence Oates went out into a blizzard after supplies for the ill-fated Scott Antarctic Expedition ran low, in an ultimately futile attempt to save his companions.
- The commander of a Cold War-era underground base in North Bay, Ontario would have been forced to invoke this had a nuclear bomb detonated near the base and forced it to be sealed. To prevent radiological contamination, the entire base's air supply would be sealed. Even the air-supply for the emergency generators! They had a choice: keep the generators running so that the base's air defense computers kept running, and kill everyone within hours, or keep them off, survive for weeks, but weaken the defenses of a continent? Luckily, this never happened.
- In a mass casualty incident where there are insufficient resources available for rescue, this becomes an aspect of triage. Standard triage tags for injured people have four colours: green for minor injuries that can be safely ignored by first responders, yellow for a non life-threatening injury (such as a broken arm) that can have treatment delayed until resources are available, red for someone who needs immediate attention (such as someone going into shock or having trouble breathing), and black. A black tag on someone who isn't dead yet means they're not to be given any medical treatment except pain medication (and potentially not even that, depending on resources) until everyone else is dealt with because their injuries are almost certainly fatal with the resources available and efforts spent on them would end up unavailable to people who have a higher probability of living.
- The equivalent of the human body is in cases of fasting and severe starvation, once the fat reserves and glycogen stores in the liver have been used up, to basically break down proteins (read: muscles and cells) to keep essential organs such as the brain working for as long as possible.
- The Trolley Problem is a thought experiment that uses this sort of thing analyze your own morality. A trolley is moving toward five people on the tracks, and you have the option, but no obligation, to pull a lever and divert it so it only hits one person on a different track: do you do nothing and allow five people die knowing you had no hand in it happening and chose not to sacrifice a life to save others, or do you pull the lever and hit one person knowing you consciously made the decision to kill that one person to save the other five? There is no right or wrong answer: it merely compares concepts like Cold Equation, I Did What I Had to Do, The Needs of the Many, What Is One Man's Life In Comparison?, and Sadistic Choice, without any third options available to make you think about your own morality.
