Apocalypse How / Class X

Apocalypse How
0 | 1 | 2 | 3a, 3b | 4 | 5 | 6
X | X-2 | X-3 | X-4 | X-5 | Z

Vegeta: That's it! EVERYONE DIES! Say goodbye to your planet, Kakarot!
Goku: Well that's not very nice!
Vegeta: Of course not! I'm f(BEEP)ing evil!

—Dragon Ball Z Abridged

Planetary-scale Physical Annihilation. There used to be a planet here. There isn't anymore. The rest of its solar system is still around, but the planet's gone.

See Also: Earth-Shattering Kaboom, Planet Eater.

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Examples:

Multiple Media

• Various incarnations of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy have the Vogons do this to Earth, ostensibly to make way for a hyperspacial express route, though it's really because Earth is calculating the Ultimate Question, and would put all the psychoanalysts in the universe out of business if it finished. In the novel Mostly Harmless, the Vogons finally succeed in destroying not just Earth, but every version of Earth across all the infinite parallel realities. Douglas Adams was definitely not in the best headspace when he wrote that one.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Thor: The Bifröst has enough power to annihilate entire worlds, which is why Heimdall refuses to keep the bridge open for too long when Thor and his friends travel to Jötunheim. Later on, Loki attempts to use the Bifröst to destroy Jötunheim so he can wipe out the Frost Giants and earn Odin's approval.
  • Thor: Ragnarok: Calling Asgard a planet in its own right might be a stretch, but it's ravaged by Surtr's fire and finally blasted to pieces, completing the prophecy of Ragnarok. Fortunately, a handful of Asgardians escape and survive. The Sacred Timeline isn't the only universe where Asgard meets this kind of end either.
  • Loki (2021): Episodes 3 and 4 take place on Lamentis-1, a moon turned into a mining colony that is about to crash into its planet in 2077, obliterating it and everyone living on it.
  • What If…? (2021): In "What If... Ultron Won?", Ultron commits several of these whilst purging his universe of sapient life, and it's implied to be his preferred method of seeing the universe-wide genocide through. Asgard, Xandar, and Ego the Living Planet are all physically blown up by Ultron and his fleet.
  • Eternals: The Emergence, the birth of the Tiamut, the Celestial that was planted in the Earth, would have destroyed the planet if it wasn't stopped.
• Superman: Kal-El and Kara Zor-El's backstory is their planet Krypton exploding spectacularly, becoming some of the Last Children of Kypton. Occasionally, the planet's sun is what goes, but the majority just had the planet explode.
• Transformers has had Unicron eat a planet or two. He's also eaten a universe or two. In Transformers: Prime, Unicron threatens to cause this via a different method: here, he's the core which the Earth formed around billions of years ago, and he naturally threatens to trigger an Earth-Shattering Kaboom to escape when he's awakened.

Anime and Manga

• In Assassination Classroom, imminent destruction of Earth if Koro-sensei, the living Time Bomb, is not stopped.
• Attempted in Diebuster, using Earth as a projectile at significant fractions of the speed of light. The attempt is stopped by Nono/Buster Machine 7 as the Diebuster
• Dragon Ball:
  • Earth and Namek in Dragon Ball Z. Earth was reset with the Dragon Balls, and part of Namek's population was resurrected and given a new home. Arlia was less lucky.
  • Earth gets it twice, first from Kid Buu (although Super Buu had performed a Class 3 previously), then again in Dragon Ball GT thanks to the effects of the Black Star Dragon Balls. The Namekian Dragon Balls restored it both times.
  • Planet Vegeta gets it before either of them, courtesy of Frieza himself.
  • And Frieza has a move called "Earth Breaker".
  • Broly does this countless times in his two movies. Ironically, he survived Frieza blowing up Planet Vegeta.
  • Majin Buu does this so many times.
  • And then Beerus from Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods and Dragon Ball Super takes it one step further when he blows up half a planet — by tapping one finger!
  • Later, Vados destroys a planet with a simple tap from her staff. She doesn't even need to touch it to blow it up!
  • In Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection 'F' and its Dragon Ball Super anime adaption, Frieza destroys Earth after being beaten by Super Saiyan Blue Vegeta, though Whis is able to protect all the other Z Fighters present (except for Piccolo who dies saving Gohan in "Super"). However fortunately, Whis reminds Goku of his Temporal Do-Over he had mentioned previously while he and Vegeta where training on Beerus' planet, which allows Whis to rewind time back three minutes allowing Goku to kill Frieza before he destroys the Earth. Goku kills Frieza with a Kamehameha preventing the destruction of Earth from ever occurring.
  • In the manga, during his fight with Beerus eons ago, Champa accidentally misses Beerus and kicks the planet they are on. Cue instant explosion.
• Eureka Seven has a phenomenon known as the Limit of Questions. If there are too many intelligent life forms, a black hole or something will destroy the planet. Specifically, the Limit of Questions means that too much sapient life occupying a certain amount of space will create a rift that destroys damn near everything close by, like, say, the planet said life is on.
• Futari wa Pretty Cure Splash★Star, though it was reversed.
• In Infinite Ryvius, the Blue Impulse uses gravity manipulation to shatter Saturn's moon Hyperion, killing everyone on it. All six Vaia Ships working in unison would have enough power to alter the ecliptic plane of the entire solar system, which could potentially cause a Class X-2, although they were actually designed to use this ability to prevent a Class X-2.
• This nearly happened in Kill la Kill courtesy of the Life Fibers, which can form a cocoon in the sky over the planet, then breed while absorbing the planet's energy until it blows up and spreads the Fibers through space, in search of new worlds.
• Macross:
  • The Dimension Eater in Macross Frontier. The one we saw took a very large (like a quarter) out of Gallia IV. A couple more would probably finish the job completely.
  • The Protodeviln Gigil annihilates roughly half a planet's mass when he dies in Macross 7. The rest of the planet quickly breaks apart due to the strain immediately after.
• RahXephon. Temporarily.
• In Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles, humans nearly blasted Earth, averted only by Invid Regess destroying the missiles. Though they were aiming for Class 2-3 just to get rid of the Invid, but underestimated the power of the Neutron-S missiles.
• Sailor Galaxia is seen casually destroying planets in Sailor Moon StarS way early on in the series.
  • She's also seen doing it in her backstory in the manga. And that was before meeting Chaos.
• Shelter: The size of the asteroid that hit the Earth is gigantic, meaning if there is still an Earth left, its definitely not habitable anymore.
• Shin Mazinger Zero: Has happened to Earth thousands of times over, courtesy of said Mazinger awakening.

Comic Books

• Adam Warren's adaptation of the Dirty Pair revealed that the Earth had been destroyed decades earlier in a massive Grey Goo outbreak, the "Nanoclysm", which led to nanotechnology being regulated and virtually outlawed. The villain of the miniseries planned to use a cache of nanotech to take over Heroes "R" Us's Central Computer, and from there, the known universe. (Unfortunately, the Central Computer revealed that it was partially based on something the Nanoclysm left humanity as an apology…)
• Narrowly averted in a Disney Ducks Comic Universe story about the Universal Solvent, which dissolves everything except diamonds and does not dissipate. When it's poured to the ground, it's going to keep dissolving the planet from within unless the heroes recapture it with a diamond-lined container.
• Superman:
  • In Superman vs. Shazam!, Karmang's evil scheme involves two parallel Earths colliding with each other and blowing up.
  • New Krypton ends with the eponymous planet exploding, and the whole Kryptonian race becoming nearly extinct again.
  • The Untold Story of Argo City: In an off-panel adventure, Superman and Supergirl saved an alien world from being destroyed by its exploding sun.
  • In Reign of Doomsday, Doomslayer intends to bring about a planetary extinction event by blowing Earth up.
    Lieutenant: We have an incoming signal, approaching from Sunward, blueshifted so hard—!
    General: Blueshifted?
    Lieutenant: It's approaching lightspeed, sir! And it's headed straight for Earth! Please understand, anything of that mass hits Earth at that speed—!
    General: The short version, Lieutenant.
    Lieutenant: Sir, we are ten minutes away from a planetary extinction event!
  • In The Last Days of Superman, Supergirl prevents a planet from hitting Earth in the future by moving it in the path of another empty world. The ensuing flaming explosion takes both planets.
  • The Phantom Zone: Wegthor, one of the Moons of Krypton, was accidentally destroyed by an experimental missile.
    The guidance system fails. The missile hurtles on past its target towards Wegthor, one of the Moons of Krypton, and its contingent of intrepid colonists...none of whom will survive the nuclear blast! In the first searing flash of heat, 500 men and women are reduced to cinder— a microsecond before the decimation of Wegthor itself!
  • In The Planet Eater Trilogy: After taking control over his gigantic planet-weapon the Planet-Eater, Brainiac uses its machines to unleash earthquakes, volcanoes, floods and tornadoes all over Earth.
  • In Supergirl's Greatest Challenge, Supergirl is about to square off against an eldritch abomination when the energy being deliberately changes its course and passes through an inhabited world, blowing it up.
  • "Superman and Spider-Man": Doctor Doom develops a new kind of fusion reactor which produces abundant clean energy. Unfortunately, the core is very unstable and is building towards an explosion that will atomize Earth unless someone find a way to stop it.
  • In Superman: Red Son human society eventually allows the Sun to swallow up the Earth because, with Luthor and his descendants having solved all mankind's problems, there's nothing left for humanity to do but die. one man alone does not succumb to fatalism, sending his son back in time to when Earth's sun was still yellow to save him - this son turns out to be Superman, and "Krypton" was the Earth all along, enmeshed in a Stable Time Loop.
  • "Luthor Unleashed": A battle between Superman and Luthor and an energy blast badly aimed causes the core of planet Lexor to detonate, turning Lexor into flaming debris.

Comic Strips

• In Safe Havens, the theory of the Earth/Moon system occuring when Theia crashed into Earth 1 (mentioned below) is presented as actually happening, with a twist: Theia and Mars were Genius Loci who were close to each other in the emotional sense, and Theia crashed into Earth while attempting to jump Earth's orbit and join Mars' instead. Theia's sentience still exist in some form on Earth, though, but only dogs are aware of it.

Fan Works

• Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): Word of God indicates when discussing a hypothetical timeline where Ghidorah succeeds in its goal of devouring the Zohar in the Hollow Earth near the core that it would've likely shattered the planet like an egg.
• Becoming a True Invader: After having previously suffered a Class 3 when the Employer's army invaded and wiped out every Irken except for the Tallest, Zim, Skoodge, and Tak, Irk is completely destroyed when the Employer's interdimensional portal malfunctions and creates a black hole which swiftly consumes the planet.
• Clash of the Elements: At the peak of his Villainous Breakdown Joe Dark starts charging up an attack that was stated by the Star Spirits to be capable of destroying an entire planet.
• The duplicate tries to do this in The Pez Dispenser and the Reign of Terror by setting Halley's Comet on course for the Earth. Calvin manages to stop him by blowing up the comet while they're fighting on it.
• It is mentioned by Lord of Change (cough, Mercury, cough cough) at the end of "Phoenix-fire" that one of the the only two sure-fire ways to kill him would be to do this to Earth. The kicker? It wants to die. The other way? Wait until the Earth has cooled down enough to not even have the energy of a campfire.
• In the Magical Girl Crossover Shattered Skies: The Morning Lights, this is done by the heroes to the uninhabited planet Carnaaji, as a last-ditch effort to keep a resurrected and repowered Book of Darkness and a planet-eating monstrosity from escaping off-world.
• In Power Girl fanfic A Force of Four, Badra and her partners don't merely intend to take over the world. They want to blow it up.

Film — Live-Action

• Cabin In The Woods ends with the giant magma hand of an Ancient One emerging from the ground and slamming down over the camera.
• The Day the Earth Caught Fire has the Earth hurtling towards the Sun when it's thrown out of orbit by a series of simultaneous nuclear tests at both poles.
• Evacuate Earth is a Speculative Documentary with a similar premise to When Worlds Collide: a neutron star is on a collision course with the Earth, and will destroy it completely in seventy five years. The film deconstructs what would be necessary to pull off a Homeworld Evacuation under these circumstances.
• The much larger planet Melancholia smashes into Earth and apparently absorbs all of its mass.
• Independence Day: Resurgence: The alien Planet Looters plan to inflict this to Earth by plasma-drilling to and harvesting the planet's core. The Harvesters have successfully inflicted this fate on many other worlds they conquered including the Sphere's own, and the film's opening shows them in the process of inflicting it on an alien world.
• Pandorum: Earth is gone, maybe. Unreliable Narrator is in effect.
• In Quantum Apocalypse, a strangelet, portrayed in the movie as a gravity vortex that only pulls in one direction, moves towards Earth and will completely destroy it in a few days unless scientists discover a way to stop it.
• Star Trek films:
  • In Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, the Genesis planet is revealed to be unstable and tears itself apart under Kirk's feet.
  • Star Trek VI, begins with the explosion of Praxis, a moon of Qo'noS.
  • Star Trek: Generations has Dr. Soren attempt to re-enter the Nexus… by destroying the Veridian star. The shockwave will annihilate every planet nearby, including one with three billion primitive aliens living on it. It actually happens, but then Picard averts it with time travel.
  • In Star Trek (2009), Nero destroys Vulcan by using Red Matter to create a black hole inside it, with the crew of The Enterprise stopping him before he can do the same to Earth. The backstory to this reveals that Romulus and Remus of the Prime Timeline was destroyed by a supernova, further expanded on in Star Trek: Picard.
• Star Wars:
  • The Death Star has the power to destroy entire planets, and in A New Hope, it is used on Alderaan, Leia's home planet. Rogue One reveals that it can create a massive but localized wave of destruction on a planet's surface as well, if only one reactor is activated.
  • The Rise of Skywalker: The planet Kijimi suffers this thanks to the Final Order star destroyer's cannon. The galaxy is placed under threat of the same by the Final Order.
• Arguably, Metaluna's fate in This Island Earth; it's hard to say it's really there if it's now a burning radioactive 'sun'.
• When Worlds Collide: A star is on a collision course with Earth. Since the end is inevitable, the story concentrates on how to save a handful of lives.
• Zack Snyder's Justice League: The detonation of the Mother Boxes' Unity disintegrates the Justice League and seemingly the Earth itself, as Flash has to undo this via Speed Force Time Travel while it's advancing, and the ground gets "rebuilt" under his feet as he runs.

Literature

• Arthur C. Clarke:
  • In Firstborn (in the Time Odyssey saga), has a Class X-lite, with the Q-bomb hitting a planet which will create strange quantum effects on space-time that will basically rip the upper layer of the planet off. This happened to Mars, when the Martians were eliminated by Firstborn. When Mars gets hit a second time after the Martian from the pocket dimension was contacted by humans and managed to make them divert the Q-bomb, Mars was destroyed completely. The planet's redirection into the sun by the Firstborn (listed in Sunstorm example above in Class 5) is also Class X.
  • In Clarke's Odyssey series, "something wonderful" happens to the planet Jupiter. Though it isn't mentioned in the films, Dave Bowman detected life on both Jupiter and Europa; the beings who control the Monoliths deliberately sacrifice Jupiter and its inhabitants to support the Europan life, which they considered to have more potential as intelligent beings.
• The Cthulhu Mythos has Dholes, enormous worms that destroy planets by burrowing through them until they collapse. In the Tabletop RPG based on the books, an investigator unfortunate enough to be attacked directly by a Dhole will get a single roll — to determine if there's enough bits left for a funeral.
• In The Culture series, planetary annihilation is practically a casual event. So much so, that in The Hydrogen Sonata, when a Culture Mind performs a precise hyperspace jump into an underground tunnel, it was quite aware that even the tiniest error in the maneuver would have destroyed the entire planet.
• In Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game the title character unknowingly destroys the Bugger home world using the Molecular Disruption/Detachment Device (alt. MD. Device, "Dr. Device", "Little Doctor").
• In Stephen King's one-act play "An Evening at God's," The Almighty is sitting at home in his easy chair, drinking a cold one and trying to watch a sitcom. The Earth hangs in between Him and the TV, blocking His view. Annoyed, He reaches out and crushes it into powder.
• Greg Bear's The Forge of God reaches its climax as a neutronium-antineutronium bomb, deposited in the core of the Earth by malevolent von Neumann machines, detonates, disrupting the entire planet over the course of a few hours with enough force as to put significant portions of it in orbit around the dead, molten remains. A small selection of humanity is rescued before the disaster by another group of friendly von Neumanns who had failed to stop the attack.
• Last and First Men: The Fifth Men's exodus to Venus is prompted when the Moon's orbit begins to decay, causing it to fragment and bombard the Earth into uninhabitability.
• The Last Guardian (2001): Earth and Noron are both destroyed utterly. But... there is still (or again?) a planet the Shining City lands on in the epilogue.
• In the final story of the Left Behind series, the old Earth is destroyed to make room for a new Earth created by God on which the holy city New Jerusalem will be placed.
• The Lensman books end up using planets as billiard balls against other planets as well as planet-sized masses of antimatter. The former results in a minor sun, while the latter leaves just a scattering of small rocks and immense quantities of hard radiation.
• In The Long Earth, the Gap is an alternate reality in which the Earth is simply gone, presumed to have been destroyed by a massive impact with one or more other celestial bodies.
• This is Ruin's immediate goal in Mistborn, and he comes uncomfortably close to succeeding. Because he's a literal god of entropy and decay, it's implied that having accomplished this he'd then keep marching up the scale if left unchecked.
• In The Saga of Seven Suns, the Faeros do this to the Moon. Yes, chunks do threaten Earth, but a coordinated response is possible. Additionally, humans destroy a brown dwarf more than 13 times the mass of Jupiter inhabited by Hydrogues, who then obliterate four moons around that once-planet-now-star (Class X destruction), declare war on humanity and the Ildirans, attempt to destroy two human planets, manage to destroy one Ildiran (two would-be Class 3s except other parts of humanity help them, and one Class 4-5 forcing an evacuation of the few who survive up to that point), had attempted to obliterate three ancient races previously, make a second (or possibly even further in) attempt on two of them, destroy a number of skymines, which given the size of the machines and their crew could count as Class 0s, to name a few things that happen.
• Michael Reaves' The Shattered World is a fantasy novel about a world that already suffered a Class X, but without losing its civilizations or ecosystems. The planet broke apart, but some fast action by the world's wizards kept its many fragments orbiting one another in an envelope of breathable air. The sequel, The Burning Realm, is about attempts to avert the belated Class 3 and Class 5 consequences of this Apocalypse before these orbit-sustaining spells wear out.
• In Eric Nylund's Signal to Noise, not-so-nice aliens provide humans with a teleportation system which is powered by the rotational inertia of the planet. The aliens then abuse this system to blow up the Earth, as well as an unrelated detonation of Mars by some post-humans trying to get away from Earth as fast as possible.
• Tree of Aeons: Aeon gains the title "Witness of a World's Death", when he visits another world as it's dying along with its (red giant) star, and evacuates what he can of its inhabitants. What's especially curious is that after the final collapse, not even rubble remains.
• Villains by Necessity depicts a world in which the heroes have defeated the forces of evil and been allowed to run through the world unchallenged... essentially upsetting the Balance of Good and Evil in the opposite direction. As the forces of light continue to spread unchecked the laws of physics twist; nights are shorter and shorter, free will slowly starts to disappear, and a group of villainous cutthroats decide to unleash the Sealed Evil in a Can before the world is "Sublimated." Sublimation will involve the world being consumed by light and wiped out, along with everything on it. During a spiritual vision, one of the villains even observes that such an event could threaten the stability of other worlds and lead to a cascade effect, potentially bumping this up to a higher level of destruction.
• In When Worlds Collide by Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer, the Earth is about to be hit and destroyed by the larger of a twin planet. Fortunately the smaller planet is drop-in replacement for Earth. The story (which arguably is the ur-creation that gave rise to stories like Flash Gordon and the many similar tales that followed), revolves around the attempt of a group of scientists to build a pair of rocketships to escape a world facing destruction.
• In Worm, the alien entities that granted people superpowers do this as part of their life cycle, obliterating the planet they parasitize in all possible realities.
• In The Zodiac Series, House Ophiuchus was wiped off the starmap by Dark Matter, along with everyone in it. However, in Thirteen Rising, we learn that it wasn't actually destroyed.

Live-Action TV

• Alien Worlds (2020): As Terra's aging sun expands, it will eventually reach and consume the planet, forcing its native civilization to abandon it entirely.
• Andromeda: A planet can be destroyed by either ejecting a charged slipstream core at the planet^note Which, given that you've just fired your FTL drive in an planet-shattering kaboom, is as likely as not to be suicidal or by chucking a Nova Bomb at it. (Though because Nova bombs momentarily invert gravity, planets hit by them more fall apart than explode. As the name implies, they're more intended for use against a system's sun, making them usually a Class X-2.) A Nietzschean weapon called a "Maxim Charge" is mentioned as being capable of destroying a planet when it's rigged for maximum capacity, but being survivalists first and foremost the Nietzscheans have a strict policy about never using these on inhabitable planets. It's one of the only reliable Nietzschean rules of war.
• Babylon 5's Class X member is the Vorlon Planet Killer, which, in accordance with a philosophy of swift and terrible justice, simply obliterates the entire planet being targeted, unlike its Shadow counterpart which leaves the planet intact but lifeless and is therefore only a Class 6. There is some contention over the Vorlon Planet Killer's effectiveness as a Class X weapon, as some of the planets attacked had survivors and atmosphere (as opposed to the planet Arcata 7, which post VPK contact is described as "not there anymore"), though one can get around that by assuming the Shadow bases for said planets were on their moons. The Vorlons would have blown those up, raining down devastation on the planet but not instantly killing absolutely everyone.
• Doctor Who has a number.
  • The home planet of the classic series Cybermen, Mondas.
  • The alternate Earth in "Inferno". Later stories in the Expanded Universe downgrade it to a Class 4.
  • Another example from the classic series, in "The Pirate Planet" there's a "planet" (more a spacecraft, but the inhabitants are unaware of this) which eats other planets. When it is finished eating, it makes a hyperspace jump to another planet and starts eating again. It's better than it sounds.
  • The Time War burned a lot of planets, such as the home world of the Zygons.
  • In "Boom Town", Blon Fel-Fotch Passameer-Day Slitheen plans to use the force of the Rift to tear the Earth apart, riding her tribophysical waveform extrapolator to safety.
  • The eponymous "Impossible Planet" (causing the deaths of dozens of Ood).
  • "Fear Her": The Isolus inhabiting Chloe eventually tries to capture the entire Earth in a drawing so it won't be alone, while on the planet. Disaster is averted with only moments to spare before she finished it.
  • The constant jumping between realities in "Doomsday" supposedly puts the two Earths in danger of crashing into each other, or both falling into the Void.
  • "The Infinite Quest": In the opening, Baltazar attempts to compress the Earth along with all carbon-based life on it (basically all native life) into a giant diamond.
  • "Journey's End": Martha planned to use the Osterhagen Key to blow the Earth up with strategically-placed nukes so that the Daleks couldn't go through with the death of reality itself.
  • "Victory of the Daleks": Just For the Evulz, near the episode's end the Daleks try to shunt the Earth into Another Dimension where it will "die screaming".
• In the BBC docudrama End Day, the final segment depicts a possible (albeit extremely small chance) result of the Large Hadron Collider (though not called by that name) being turned on. The entire planet gets sucked into a newly formed Black Hole, basically.
• The titular ship of Lexx had only one weapon: a Wave-Motion Gun that destroyed planets in glorious fashion. In point of fact, any place the Lexx visited was either destroyed by it or something worse (see Mantrid in Class X-4) including the afterlife and in the finale, Earth itself.
• In Lost, not entering the numbers into the hatch every 108 minutes and removing the plug from the Island's source is thought to destroy the Earth.
• By the end of Mystery Science Theater 3000 Season 8, three planets have been destroyed by Mike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds
• Odyssey 5 begins with the Earth blowing up, before the last surviving humans, a group of astronauts, are sent back to Set Right What Once Went Wrong.
• Season 2 of the Power Rangers sees Lord Zedd building his own zord Serpentera, a giant craft specifically stated to be capable of wiping out entire planets. In the episode of its introduction, Zedd takes Serpentera, follows the Rangers to a deserted planet, and destroys it. Luckily, with the sheer amount of power it uses, Serpentera runs out of power really quickly, making it a very ineffective weapon in the long-term.
  • Power Rangers Dino Charge series finale has Earth being sucked into black hole that's a result of the Rangers failing to completely foil Sledge's plan. The combined power of all the Energems and time travel shenanigans are required to circumvent it.
• While more notable for their Class X-2s, the Stargate-verse has seen its share of destroyed planets. In fact, when Stargate Atlantis had its Gondor Calls for Aid in the fourth season, the Traveler leader is dumbstruck when the Atlantis team casually suggest blowing up the Asuran homeworld.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: The Original Series gave us the Doomsday Machine, which would break up a planet into smaller chunks and then eat it.
  • The Xindi Weapon from Star Trek: Enterprise, in its completed form, was capable of destroying Earth (and did, in an alternate timeline).
  • The Star Trek: Voyager episode "Scorpion" features Species 8472, which blows a Borg planet to pieces by linking nine of their bio-ships together
  • In Star Trek: Discovery Season 4, Kwejian is utterly destroyed by gravitational waves from a mysterious Dark Matter Anomaly.
  • Star Trek: Picard picks up after the destruction of Romulus shown in the 2009 film and explores much of the fallout from that.
• "The Midnight Sun", a third season episode of The Twilight Zone (1959) presents a scenario in which Earth's orbit has changed course, drawing the planet closer to the sun with each passing day. It turns out to be All Just a Dream, with a twist (a mandatory trope in the Twilight Zone, really). The main character wakes up relieved to be feeling cool and comfortable, unaware that the Earth really has changed its orbit, only now it's moving away from the sun.
• Ultraman Leo begins with the titular hero's homeworld exploding in the opening sequence, and in the first episode we get the finer details of what happened to Planet L-77, as Gen recounts the invasion of his planet and the subjugation of his people at the hands of Alien Magma, before the flashback ends with L-77 exploding. Later on in the same show, both Earth and M-78 (the main homeworld of the Ultras, AKA "The Land of Light") are threatened with this fate when the Alien Babalou (disguised as Leo's brother, Astra) steals the Ultra Key, throwing M-78 out of its orbit and on a collision course with Earth. Fortunately, the crisis is averted when Babalou's treachery is exposed and the Ultra Key is returned to its rightful place, but only just.

Music

• Peter Schilling's "The Noah Plan" has the Earth's orbit slowly decaying as it drifts toward the Sun, forcing a Homeworld Evacuation.
• At the end of Space 1992: Rise of the Chaos Wizards, The Hollywood Hootsman pulls a Heroic Sacrifice to cause one of these, blowing up Earth to throw a wrench in Zargothrax's Evil Plan to cause a Class X-4.
• Jonathan Young's "Final Frontier" describes the impending destruction of Earth due to humanity's hubris, and the construction of an interstellar ark to find a new homeworld. The music video depicts Earth being ravaged by pollution and global warming before its core begins to go critical.

Tabletop Games

• This is the worst case (and most likely) scenario of The Apocalypse Stone.
• Old Alphatia met this end, forcing the Alphatians' ancestors to emigrate to the Mystara setting. It was an academic dispute between rival factions of archmages that kicked off this particular Earth-Shattering Kaboom.
• The planet Eris was blown up in Rocket Age.
• Warhammer 40,000's aptly-named Planet Killer and Blackstone Fortresses.
  • The Blackstone Fortresses can combine their beams to exponentially increase their effect. One is a Class X, disintegrating the planet by firing the Warp at it (compared to the Planet Killer, which leaves enormous quantities of debris), but three or more could qualify as X-2, since it is capable of destroying a star, wiping out the entire system with it. Abaddon has two. There were six of them.
  • After the Horus Heresy, a freak warp storm obliterated the Dark Angels' homeworld, Caliban, leaving only a scattering of debris. Their fortress-monastery, the Rock, miraculously survived intact. It was refitted with void shields, engines, and atmospheric controls, and now serves as the Angels' mobile base of operations.
  • Prior to the Horus Heresy, the Night Lords did this to their own homeworld after their Primarch Konrad Curze deemed the planet beyond saving, with the resulting Exterminatus breaching the planet's crust.

Video Games

• An unusual version happens in Asura's Wrath, where it is a planetary-sized being that gets destroyed this way, Wyzen gets punched to death and explodes after turning into the planet sized Gongen Wyzen.
  • This is also narrowly averted in the last episode where Gaia is almost torn apart by a gigantic laser.
• Your Eater does this in the "Bad" ending of Chimera Beast. It then proceeds into a Class X-2 and maybe even X-3 as it starts destroying more planets in its way. And the cause of all this is... you, the player.
• Commander Keen episode two (entitled The Earth Explodes!) has the villains of the first episode position a planetary destruction ship in orbit over Earth. If you screw up, you get to activate it. Guess what happens.
• High level Overlords in Disgaea are usually capable of destroying entire worlds in giant Earth-Shattering Kabooms. It's best not to get them mad enough to do this.
• The premise of Don't Escape: 4 Days to Survive is that the Moon has blown up, and in four days, the fragments will crash into Earth. No living creature will be left alive, no matter how far underground they are.
• ''Dragon's Dogma II: In the endgame, the Arisen's choice to Screw Destiny pisses off the Pathfinder to the point that he unleashes the Brine from the ocean, which threatens this in a few days time.
• Epic Battle Fantasy 5: The Final Boss deletes the Earth upon reaching 29% health, taunting the party immediately afterwards ^note The Earth returns upon his defeat, thankfully:
  "IT'S DONE. YOUR HOME WORLD IS GONE FOREVER. FADE AWAY ALONG WITH IT, INTO THE ENDLESS SCRAP-HEAP OF THE VOID. DISINTEGRATE BEFORE ME, BYTE BY BYTE."
• This is the fate that the heroes seek to cause on the Lostbelts in Part 2 of Fate/Grand Order, as doing so is a prerequisite for restoring Proper Human History. What keeps the Lostbelts anchored to the Earth's surface is the Trees of Emptiness, one of which can be found in every Lostbelt. If the local Tree of Emptiness is destroyed, the entire Lostbelt dies with it. If left alone, this would be the fate of six of the seven Lostbelts, as they would come into contact once they expanded enough, causing the weaker one to be subsumed by the stronger one, so Chaldea is simply eradicating one Lostbelt more than would disappear naturally.
  • The fourth and sixth Lostbelts, set in India and Britain, respectively, both have Class X apocalypses that have nothing to do with cutting down their Trees of Emptiness. The Indian Lostbelt's god manually destroys and re-creates the world every ten days, though every time he does so, he removes any people and animals he deems "evil" from the cycle of reincarnation, rendering them Ret-Gone in the new world. His goal is to create a world without evil, but at the rate he's going, and because Humans Are Flawed, his Lostbelt will end up reaching a permanent Class 6 instead.
  • The British Lostbelt, meanwhile, has already had its Tree of Emptiness cut down, and yet doesn't disappear due to it. This is because its ruler, Morgan, siphoned away the Tree of Emtpiness's mana to rule over Britain as its queen for thousands of years. This actually turns the Lostbelt into a Lostworld, which becomes a full competitor to Proper Human History as it needs nothing to sustain it. However, it ends up undergoing a Class X regardless, as Vortigern, the incarnation of Britain's will to die rather than carry on in its current form, manages to destroy it himself. He then intends to similarly destroy Proper Human History, but fortunately, Chaldea manages to stop him before he gets that far.
• Final Fantasy VII. Sephiroth's plan for his planet was to crash Meteor into it, thus forcing the Lifestream to stream out of the impact point in the planet's death throes. Where Sephiroth will absorb the entire Lifestream, become a god, and use the planet's lifeless husk as a giant spaceship to explore other worlds.
• Final Fantasy XIV reveals in Shadowbringer, and expands upon in Endwalker, that the planet you're inhabiting (along with its unique Multiverse), was made in the wake of another world's destruction: Etheirys, the world of the Ancients, and original home of the Ascians. Once a planet rich in aether and home to beings whose magical prowess bordered on being a race of Reality Warpers, they were brought down during the Final Days, when their magical powers ran out of control and created monsters that ravaged their world. It is said that the battle between the original primals, Zodiark and Hydaelyn, led to the World Sundering that led to the creation of the modern world of Hydaelyn and her Reflections. Endwalker reveals that what actually happened was that a being called Meteion was manipulating Dynamis energy to bring about the Final Days, and Zodiark's summoning, which required half of the world's population be sacrificed, was a last-ditch effort to restore Etheriys to the way it was before. When that failed and the survivors attempted another similar summoning, Venat, an Ancient who learned of future events thanks to you, took it upon herself to stop them and use her considerable power to fracture the world into its fourteen fragments, destroying her own world and giving birth to new ones of considerably less power and shorter lives in the hopes that, in their struggle to find meaning to their short lives, these new people would fight against despair and emerge stronger.
• Galaxian 3's bad ending (whether you fail to destroy all of the power relays or die in the middle of your journey) has Cannon Seed using its planet-fueled Wave-Motion Gun to blow up the Earth into "fragments smaller than California."
• In Kingdom Hearts, The Heartless will do this to a world if they rampage across it unchecked. If not for the Keyblade holders fighting them off and locking off the worlds from the Heartless, a Class X-4 would've been guaranteed, if not worse.
• The Planet Eaters in Lunar Knights are able to trigger one of these, especially when its governing Immortal decides keeping it around isn't worth it any longer. This can be because the Immortal is bored, because they just hate the people on the world, or because their plot to impose eternity upon the cosmos goes off the rails. Alice is heavily implied to be a lagomid survivor or a descendant thereof (Sheridan explicitly theorizes a Planet Eater visited her homeworld), while the titular Lunar Knights cause Polidori to trigger its self-destruct before it can do the same to theirs (and shoot him down before he can attempt a Class 4/5 himself). When he's revived in the optional epilogue, Duke Dumas states that this act of rebellion has not gone unnoticed by the rest of the Immortals, but we haven't seen this play out so far...
• In Machine Knight, Frain's original mission is to find a way to save his world from the "black sun" that science accidentally created. The opening narration states it's simultaneously eating up the last of the sun's energies and pulling the planet dangerously close, so depending on if the sun eventually goes nova or if there are other planets nearby, it could even be upgraded to a class X-2.
• In Master of Orion 2, the player could research, build, and mount a stellar converter on a large enough ship and wipe out entire planets with a nifty movie showing the massive explosion. This typically doesn't eliminate the empire that occupies it, but it does remove the planet from play permanently. Though if the system still has a colony, the resulting asteroid belt can be used to build a new planet. Even better, all planets constructed this way have the same size, which may be larger than the original one. Also, it is possible to avoid the "no terraforming on toxic planets" rule this way, making this a very rare example of using a Class X as a reasonable (if abusive) step in terraforming.
  • Also, the newly reconstructed planet can easily be bigger than the original one since all planets built from asteroids are the same size, making this actually a Class 0, unless you happen to lose your last planet in this fashion.
• Master of Orion 3 also has the Stellar Converter, but it was sadly de-powered to Class 6 level, leaving the planet an un-colonizable, lifeless cinder, but otherwise intact.
• There was a reason the aliens were afraid of The Maw. It's too bad their maximum-security specimen (and you) escape when their ship crash-landed. With nothing else in the offing, you and Maw work together to fight for your freedom. However, it becomes clear that Maw has an ever-growing appetite for anything. He climbs up the destruction scale as you progress and, by the end of the game, reaches this level... by eating the entire planet (you escape in a spaceship). Worse, the implication in the closing credits sequence is that Maw is not done yet.
• It seems a lot of Metroid games can't go without a planet exploding:
  • Mother Brain's self-destruct sequence destroys Planet Zebes in Super Metroid
  • Samus causes Dark Aether to be destroyed when she takes the final amount of planetary energy from the Ing in Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. The inverse almost happened at the start of the game where the Ing were on the verge of acquiring the final amount of planetary energy from Aether, which would have caused that planet to be wiped out instead, had Samus not arrived in time.
  • And of course, Phaaze in Metroid Prime 3 goes boom, thanks to Samus. Hey, it was aiming for multiple Class 2 catastrophes anyway due to The Corruption, so she beat it to the punch!
  • And a Buy One, Get One Free deal in Metroid Fusion: Samus executes a Colony Drop of the Biologic Space Labs station onto Planet SR388, annihilating both bodies.
  • Planet ZDR is already in bad shape when Samus arrives for the events of Metroid Dread, but when X Parasites are released and infect basically everything left on the planet, it's unlikely that Samus would leave the planet without blowing it up.
• In Might and Magic VI, if you don't get the Ritual of the Void from Archibald Ironfist but go ahead and destroy the Reactor anyway — or if you have the Ritual but teleport out of the Hive rather than leaving by way of the exit — you blow up the world. You were warned, fercryinoutloud.
• Cyborg Smoke's gloriously OTT (and immediately retconned) fatality from Mortal Kombat 3.
• Muri: Mars has disappeared. Presumably destroyed.
• This happens to Palma in Phantasy Star II, while Motavia suffers a Class 2 shortly after the end of the game.
• This very concept is the entire idea behind the RTS game Planetary Annihilation, though what would be lower levels of Apocalypse How are certainly possible.
• In Pokemon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, a meteor controlled by Deoxys is on a collision course with the Earth and threatens to destroy the planet unless the player rides Rayquaza into space to stop it.
• Portal: While not directly in the game it is revealed from an Aperture Investment Opportunity video that the Portal Gun is capable of creating a black hole that could destroy the Earth.
• In Ratchet & Clank (2002), Chairman Drek tries to do this twice — first with the Planet Buster Maximus to destroy Hoven, and again with the Deplanetizer to destroy Veldin, the latter being used to blow up his new planet (and him).
• In RayForce, this is the goal of the protagonist: Earth has been so overrun by an omnicidal AI that decides its clones and creations are superior to the originals that the only option left is to give the entire planet a Mercy Kill.
• In Saints Row IV, the Big Bad casually blows up Earth within the first few hours of you starting the game. The rest of the game is the Saints trying to avenge it by killing him and destroying his empire, then one of the endings of Saints Row: Gat Out of Hell is Johnny wishing for Earth to be Cosmic Retconned back into existence.
• The plot of Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne is kicked off by the Conception, an event which transforms Earth into the embryonic, demon-infested Vortex World, wiping out everything barring a small hospital in the middle of Tokyo. How the world gets rebuilt afterwards is determined by who the player sides with.
• Sonic Unleashed: This is what Dark Gaia is supposed to do once it gathers up enough energy inside the planet's core to wake up and destroy the world. It's then Light Gaia's/Chip's job to bring the shattered pieces back together in order to prepare it for life's rebirth. Eggman cracks the planet open early to get at Dark Gaia, who due to not being ready shatters into countless pieces itself, and when Dark Gaia is fully reborn at the end of the game it still thinks it's time to destroy the world and begins the process, forcing Super Sonic and Chip to fight it and save the world.
• Take a guess at what the Planet Buster in Spore does? There's a reason its use is forbidden by the Galactic Federation.
• Planet annihilation is possible in Star Ruler. Simply park a big enough ship nearby, order it to attack, and the ship will bomb the planet to the point where the planet will break up.
• Stellaris:
  • Using a World Cracker Colossus will permanently destroy a planet. There is a good reason for why using this weapon will infuriate basically every other empire in the galaxy. (Unless the target is a crisis faction.)
  • The Doomsday origin is a starting condition where your homeworld will explode a few decades after the game starts, killing anyone left on the surface and leaving behind a debris cloud rich with resources.
  • The Voidspawn and Ether Dragon Hatchling both incubate inside worlds that fracture when the creature is born.
• The Talos Principle: The end of the game causes the simulation to suffer a Metaphysical Annihilation, as the entire world is deleted after you are uploaded to Talos.
• Though possibly not a perfect example, World of Warcraft has Outland, which is the result of portals ripping the planet to bits, leaving only a large continent-sized chunk and several hundred minor pieces of debris. Yet the place still supports a few thousand inhabitants despite by logic lacking an atmosphere and dangerously close to a planet that would drag the left over planet chunks into fiery death...
  • Of course, Outland isn't floating in space. As the Earth-Shattering Kaboom that transformed Draenor into Outland was a result of dozens of interplanetary portals straining the planet, Outland was tossed into the Twisting Nether, which explains its complete disregard for physics.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 3: In Aionios' distant past, the worlds of Bionis and Alrest were dragged back into the same universe and collided with each other, completely destroying both worlds (except for a "light" that would remain in the aftermath and be used to rebirth all that was lost). Or rather, this is what was supposed to happen, but due to Z's machination the world was frozen in this fused state, constantly recycling life within it to maintain the stasis (though even then the stasis is not perfect, as Annihilation Events periodically erase chunks of the fused world).

Web Animation

• DEATH BATTLE!: The fight between Goku and Superman basically ends with the world's destruction.
• The Demented Cartoon Movie: The world is continually either blowing up or crashing into the sun.
• RWBY: In Remnant's ancient past, the gods were triggered into committing a species-level destruction. Although the God of Light seeks to remedy the effect, the method he employs threatens full planetary destruction if it fails. After Salem incites humanity to war against the gods, the gods wipe out the human race and leave her immortal and alone as punishment. However, the God of Light decides to give the reborn humanity one chance at redemption through the resurrection of Salem's love, Ozma: if he fails to redeem humanity in the eyes of the gods, they will destroy the entire planet this time, not just humanity. Salem, who just wants to die and thinks planetary destruction is her only chance, is therefore trying to make humanity as irredeemable as possible.
• Sock Series: The story behind the series would eventually have the moon grow into a baby, then eat the Earth. The series was cancelled before that, just leaving Earth in the immediate aftermath of Sock battling against the three other gods, and having some cube arrive.

Webcomics

• Turned on its head with the Planet Eater of Casey and Andy. He's designed to eat the planet Earth but, being about the size of a hamster, can only do it one bite at a time.
• Happened three times in the backstory of Kubera. When humanity cut ties with the sura and swore allegiance to the gods, the sura destroyed planets in retaliation. A thousand years later, more planets were destroyed during the Cataclysm. More recently, Carte, the planet Asha was born on, was destroyed when she was a little girl.
• This is what will happen to the world of The Order of the Stick if The Snarl gets released — and it is what happened to the previous world before the existing one was made (or so we've been told). Arguably a case of Metaphysical Destruction, as the Snarl is made of the threads of Creation itself, and is predicted to destroy the entire known 'verse, its inhabitants' souls, and the gods themselves, reducing everything to primordial Chaos. Meanwhile, the gods' proposed solution of physically unmaking the world and carefully rebuilding a new one to better imprison the Snarl is harder to classify, but seems closer to a straightforward Planetary Scale Physical Destruction.
  • Comic 1139 made it worse. The world didn't get destroyed once. It happened too many times to count.
• In Servants of the Imperium, a moon the characters visited began falling apart as collateral damage from a space battle going on in orbit around it. Specifically, it was hit by a single stray Lance shot. But, this is the Warhammer 40,000 universe, so what do you expect.

Web Original

• The Chaos Timeline faces this threat at its end. (Cause: Nano Machines.)
• In Fine Structure, this happens to the Earth as a side note during the Final Battle. Barely any human casualties though, thanks to the intervention of some really advanced alternate universe humans with copious experience in large-scale split-second rescues. They even build a new planet afterward.
• Tech Infantry blows up Earth's moon in this way, which does not do good things for Earth.
• One article at Things of Interest discusses why and how to destroy the Earth. Destroying humanity is not good enough, and ideally the destruction would be permanent.
• Depending on whose lore you read, Lord Helix and Red were attempting one of these at the end of Twitch Plays Pokémon Crystal. The Godslayers had the task of stopping them from doing so, a task which they succeeded at.
• In the Whateley Universe there was a sundering, which effectively destroyed the elves, their home, and their civilization. Their souls survived to arrive on Earth in a few instances, and their servants, the weres, were sent to Earth before the end, so this may be a subversion of it.

Western Animation

• The Adventures of Puss in Boots has an unstable Hellgate cause the planet and the Netherworld to collapse into each other, destroying both. Even enlisting the aid of the most powerful mage in the series, it's all he can do to protect just the single town of San Lorenzo from being destroyed with the rest of the planet.
• Ben 10: In "The Big Tick", the titular monster is a Planet Destroyer which roots into and feeds off the core of every planet it visits. The tick's influence first mutates the floral and fauna, and eventually causes the targeted planet to suffer an Earth-Shattering Kaboom. It's responsible for destroying the homeworld of Cannonball's species just a week before this episode takes place.
• In Dexter's Laboratory, Dexter and Mandark bicker over each other while forgetting about the meteor shower that destroys the Earth. This is ignored the very next episode.
• What the alien installation did to Mars in Exosquad and what Phaeton plans to do to Earth in revenge.
• Final Space: Earth seemingly suffered this at the end of Season 1 when it was physically dragged into Final Space by one of the Titans, but in Season 3 it gets downgraded to a Class 4. In Season 3, Earth is destroyed completely in an Earth-Shattering Kaboom when the Lord Commander fuses with the Titan embryo incubating in the planet's core and bursts out.
• Futurama:
  • One of Fry's lifelong desires was to blow up a planet. They do it one afternoon.
  • After being mined hollow due to containing starship fuel, the planet Vergon VI implodes on itself. Nibbler manages to eat most of the rescued wildlife too, but others manage to inexplicably survive in the floating debris.
• In an episode of Gargoyles, Fox and her mother are working with some nanomachines which escape and begin a Grey Goo scenario (below), where everything it doesn't turn into more nanomachines is restructured into unchanging order. Since it's meant to grow and evolve it will eventually engulf the entire earth (the heroes only have as much time to stop it as they do because it's reached it's current bounds and will take some time to gain the capacity to come further). They eventually stop it by sending Goliath and Dingo into the Dreaming, where they discover they can communicate with it. Dingo manages to convince it to protect the earth rather than destroying it by suggesting that instead of mathematical order it try law and order, which is similar, but requires less extinction.
• Green Lantern John Stewart is accused of causing a chain reaction leading to this in Justice League. It turns out that it was actually a hologram.
• This occurs in Koko's Earth Control, a short cartoon from 1928. Fitz the Dog pulls a lever that causes the end of the world, and after a series of humorous yet terrifying events, the earth explodes with an Earth-Shattering Kaboom. The apocalypse then extends to the real world, with buildings collapsing and shaking, but this apocalypse remains a Class 6 or lower.
• Looney Tunes: Marvin the Martian tried to accomplish this, but was repeatedly thwarted by a dangerous Earth creature. In Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century, Planet X, the planet of the shaving cream atom, is blown to pieces by Duck Dodgers and the Martian one-upping one another.
• Pinky and the Brain. Episode: 'It's Only a Paper World'. Pinky and the Brain move everyone to a duplicate Earth next door so that Brain can conquer the empty Earth. Then it gets smooshed by meteorite.
• In Shadow Raiders, the Beast Planet gets along by eating other planets, as demonstrated with planets Water, Tek, Fire, the Prison Planet, and Reptizar. Planet Jungle was blown up by setting a crap load of explosives next to its (nonfunctional) world engines. The Beast ate the remaining chunks. Given that the Beast Planet is not only capable of self-propelled intergalatic flight, but actively seeking out new planets to consume, it could be taken as an example of Class X-2.
• The second season finale of Star Trek: Lower Decks shows most of Pakled Planet has been reduced to a huge crater by a varruvium bomb. It's revealed in the following season premier that the Pakleds did it themselves, having framed Captain Freeman in the hopes of forcing Starfleet to relocate them to a more resource rich planet.
• Steven Universe: The Cluster is a gigantic, inseparable Fusion, comprised of billions of Gem shards. It's currently incubating in the Earth's mantle, and if it forms, it'll grown larger than the Earth and crack the planet open like an eggshell. Fortunately though, Steven and Peridot managed to stop it. By talking to it and encouraging it to make friends with itself. Yup.
• In the Season 3 finale of the 2012 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series, the Triceraton Empire comes knocking and prepares to destroy Earth with the Heart of Darkness, a device that creates a black hole that will engulf and annihilate the planet. Despite New York's most powerful heroes, mutants, and crimelords assembling to fend off the invasion, a betrayal from Shredder results in the crew failing to stop the Heart of Darkness before it activates, and thus the entire supporting cast is sucked into the ensuing black hole to their deaths, along with the rest of Earth. It takes a Cosmic Retcon six months in the making to go back in time and avert this.
• The planet of Thundera suffered this fate in the beginning of ThunderCats, forcing what was left of the Thunderans to get off the planet and find a new world to call home.
• This happens to Earth at the start of Titan A.E., Though a handful of humans evacuate.

Real Life

• The (in)famous and controversial Grey Goo scenario. Poorly programmed nanomachines go all von Neumann on all matter with which they come in contact, turning it into more poorly programmed nanomachines that do the same thing until every bit of matter within reach has been turned into poorly programmed nanomachines.
  • There's also the Strange Matter apocalypse. Same thing, except with unstoppable strange quantum matter — think of the Earth melting like ice cream in the hot sun and evaporating.
• A sufficiently large enough rogue planet, a neutron star or a black hole passing closs enough to Earth would have such strong tidal forces as to tear the Earth into pieces. Some remains would either enter orbit around the Sun or impact/get consumed by the intruding body. ^note  Don't panic though as the chances of this remotely happening within the next 3-5 billion years are practically slim to none
• Some scenarios for the origin of the Earth-Moon planetary pairing suggest that a somewhat larger "Earth 1" was hit by Theia, another, Mars-sized planetary body. This impact tore off a huge section of its surface, leaving behind our present "Earth 2". The dislodged debris settled into orbit as a ring, then gradually congealed into the Moon over millions of years.
• Models show that a few billion years from now, Mars is all but confirmed to pass too close for comfort from Earth ^note somewhere in the lines of 700km, with a small chance of frontal impact. ^note Don't panic yet, though. The models in question were exploring what could happen given various tweaks to Mercury's orbit thanks to interactions with the gravity wells of other planets. After running 2,501 simulations with a 0.38mm (yes, less than a millimeter) change in Mercury's orbital track the results were: 2,472 — nothing noteworthy happens; 25 — glancing collisions with Venus or the Sun (either of which would destroy Mercury); 3 — Mercury drops into the Sun, has a brief career as the Solar System's largest shooting star, and is obliterated; 1 — Mercury has a head-on with Venus; 1 — Mercury perturbs the orbit of Mars, resulting in Mars pulling a close pass by Earth at an altitude of about 800km in about 3.34 billion years, and the resulting strain rips Mars apart and it showers Earth with debris. The Paris Observatory places the odds on Mercury pulling a drunk-driver in the Inner System and running into another planet or running another planet off its road at less than 1%.
• Gamma ray bursts.
  • Only if it happens really close to the planet, like in the same solar system or a few light years away. A more likely scenario for a gamma ray burst-based apocalypse would be "merely" having the side of the planet facing the blast completely sterilised while the other side burns as the atmosphere catches fire.
    • The distance for mass extinction (this one would dwarf anything Earth has seen before) would be about 1,000 parsecs. The distance for "Farewell, atmosphere." would be 500 parsecs. A parsec being about 3.26 light-years. GR Bs emit obscene amounts of energy, ejecting matter from the star at 99.995% the speed of light. Still, there'd still be a planet. Granted, there would never be life on it again...
• Any kind of interstellar space drive can easily be used as a planet killer. A slower-than-light relativistic starship doubles as a relativistic kinetic kill weapon, releasing awesome energies on collision with a planet, leading to at least a Class 5 and possibly a Class X. The speculative Alcubierre, Cleaver-Obousy, and White warp drives are shown to release monstrous showers of radiation on arrival. If any of these will ever be built, no one's giving such power to some space opera trader, smuggler or another private space dog, of course.
• Older theories for the formation of the asteroid belt put forward the idea that it was all that was left after a planet that occupied that orbit broke up. Of course, as science marched on, it's now seen as more likely that the asteroids are simply remains of the solar accretion disc that didn't get a chance to form a planet in the first place.
• This is likely to be the fate of the Earth in 5-6 billion years when the sun becomes a Red Giant. The outer layers of the sun will swell up to engulf Mercury, Venus, and Earth, thus disintegrating the planet. Though there is some chance that the Earth's orbit will have moved far enough outward by then (due to the sun gradually losing mass) to escape this fate, "just" becoming a burnt-out cinder instead and maybe stripped down to its core. At the moment, though, equations suggest that Earth probably won't make it.
• Two moons in the solar system, Phobos (orbiting Mars) and Triton (orbiting Neptune) have orbits which are slowly decaying over time. Eventually — millions or billions of years in the future — they will either fall out of orbit and smash into their parent planets, or shatter into trillions of fragments and form ring systems.
• Two worlds orbiting very close to their stars are currently experimenting that fate, as discovered with help of the Kepler space telescope: EPIC 201637175, also known as K2-22b, and EPIC 201563164, also known as WD 1145+017. The latter is of special interest since we're witnessing what remains of a terrestrial planet being ripped apart by the final remnant of stars similar to the Sun in mass and this could be the fate that awaits to the Earth, assuming it survived the Sun's red giant phase^note A large number of white dwarfs have metals and other heavy elements in their atmospheres, thought to have arrived there in a similar way.

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