How is it that the player is the ONLY survivor?

The player is not the only survivor. On some friendly spaceships you can find humans that say there where there too.

 

Plus multiplayer... when you play with others, it’s basically finding other surviving protectors and banding together.

 

if you play the start thru the frakkin universe mod, it changes it from a simple graduation, to a huge meeting of all the highest ranking folks of the protectorate. every bigwig and general was at the meeting, to talk about the ruin, how we should stop bickering and deal with it.
but it deals with us first lol.
its a good way to explain how come we may be the last protector in the game (outside of multiplayer lol) other than retirees and old folks put out to pasture.

even without FU
the tenticles that destroy the earth are different to the tenticles elsewhere arent they? maybe the cultists summoned the ruin to destroy earth befor we could stop them?
and many ships trying to exit but blowing up..well if the ruin was squeezing earth from a hole in its prison dimension, wouldnt that distort the space around earth enough to not only account for the damage our ship sustains (maybe our AI warped out when it was further from earth, which reduced our damage?) but also if they tried to warp out too close to the distortion, destroy bigger ships and even smaller ones? im not sure how the warp type drives work in starbound, but in many other scifi situations the fields can be damaged, warped and even distorted by space/time/dimension holes ect.
i dont even know WHAT we are warping thru here lol. hyperspace, trans-warp drive slipstreams? folding space?
so many options lol

 

I believe some space ships were able to get off of Earth when The Ruin attacked, and you meet them periodically on planets as space hobos?