I figured this would be the right place for this... Either this or the general board.

Anyway, I am writing a (fan) script with a friend in which the inhabitants of a planet must leave thier planet because something is wrong with it, in search of a new home.

Currently we are thinking that there could something wrong with the sun, maybe it's expanding at a rapid rate and will engluf the planet or something... or something to do with electro magnetic fields... Maybe something that would make the planet explode...

We want the problem to be unique and different and really sci-fiy and fantastical yet beleivable.

So any suggestions and ideas would be most welcome and appreciated.

I just had an idea now while typing this along the lines of a huge solar flare sends some kind of electro magnetic shock wave through space and when it hits the planet the poles would reverse and extreme weather would happen and stuff like that... Would something like that be possible? Does it work? It's not too un-beleivable is it?

It is believed that the earths magnetic poles are about to change soon, altho I'm not to sure how soon this it, it could also bring on another ice age, maybe, so how about something like that

they are going to flip late in the year 2012 im pretty sure. it happens once or twice every 26000 years. when it does in 2012 i think ice caps are going to melt and send us into an ice age...... so.... yeah, something like that would be believable. if it were me, id do some research on 2012 (search google for '2012' - youll be suprised) and write the story on that

How about the planet stops rotating... putting half the planet in perpetual night, and the other half in non-stop daylight? The climate turns freezing in the night half, and scorching in the day half. I'm sure you could develop something from there.

i remember reading a short sci-fi story where the earth is evacuated because the sun is going super nova, that sort of thing has allready been done a few times.
how about, an alien civilization has decided to build a hypergalactic bypass through our solar system and earth has to be destroyed.....oh wait that was done to.

got it! jupiter has moved it's orbit enough that it's pulling earth into it's orbit and a collision is imminent.

how about not using an apocolyptic story line ? tis quite cliche.

It's always cool when people get left behind. Have someones like brother get left behind.

if it has a moon you could state change in orbit of the moon affecting the planets tides causing the land to dissapate. or go for this planets probable end, weapons of mass destruction fired retaliation begins and so the planet goes to hell