Upon its entering the exo wormhole we detected the single strongest energy pulse on record. [...] The Blade is gone, as is the planet it entered from, and apparently whatever the AI was drawing from on the other side. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure the galaxy on the other side is still there.
—Dr. Michael Davidson, AI War: Fleet Command
Galactic-scale Physical annihilation. Via some means, billions of stars, nebulae, pulsars, and so forth, along with the super-massive galactic-core black holes at their centre are utterly destroyed.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Multiple Media
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy saga makes brief reference to a planet's residents killed by the planet being used as a ball in galactic snooker. The result of an entire game can only be imagined.
Anime and Manga
- In the most recent movie Battle of the Gods, Beerus is stated to be able to destroy entire Galaxies.
- Had Goku not defeated Planet Moro in the Dragon Ball Super manga before his body completely broke down due to the angelic energy overloading him, the entire galaxy would have been obliterated with Earth at the center of the explosion as stated by Whis.
- Gunbuster: Humans turned the planet Jupiter into a bomb capable of blowing the core right out of the Galaxy, in order to wipe out a race of space monsters, who themselves destroyed stars simply through their reproductive process.
- Strongly implied as a possibility in Sailor Moon Stars (manga) both by Galaxia and Sailor Cosmos, the latter of who utilized all the Sailor Senshi Crystals in the Galaxy to create the Cosmos Crystal, and soon after destroyed the Galaxy Cauldron. And the reason Sailor Cosmos went back in time was to get Sailor Moon to do that much sooner in an attempt to stop Chaos for good. Sailor Moon talked her out of it.
- In Tenchi Muyo!, the Milky Way is almost destroyed by two choushin struggling. The multiverse was about to be destroyed by Tenchi's leaking power. Note that about 1/4 of the Milky Way got obliterated simply from one choushin blocking another's punch. It's hinted they could end the universe on a whim if they really wanted to. And Tenchi can go beyond that and, in theory, kill the choushin.
Comic Books
- Dirty Pair: the titular heroines have managed to reach most of the levels in this list at one point or another — only the universe and human civilization as a whole surviving keeps them from a clean sweep. Their record was set in the comic Fatal, But Not Serious, when an Evil Clone of Yuri used their Cool Ship's Wave-Motion Gun to cause a sun to go supernova, causing a chain reaction that would destroy other inhabited systems for light years around.
- In Dreadstar, the Milky Way is destroyed, by the good guys no less, using a Doomsday Device called the Infinity Horn which calls upon energies from the 15th dimension to bombard the galaxy until it explodes. This was justified as giving the galaxy a quick death as opposed to a long and drawn out suffering caused by the genocidal Zygoteans.
- In Metabarons Universe: The Metabaron, a violent collision of galaxies that results in both exploding, as opposed to the rather benign merger that happens in real life, is what signals to the titular character that the universe is coming to an abrupt end and he must find a way to fix it.
- The Mighty Thor: Odin was able to destroy galaxies as a side-effect of his battles with Infinity and later on Seth.
- X-Men: Dark Phoenix is capable of devouring stars and plunging entire solar systems into darkness. And was capable of far more; had she not stopped herself in The Dark Phoenix Saga, she could have annihilated the universe. And in at least some What If? stories, did.
Film — Live-Action
- According to Doc Brown in Back to the Future Part II, the time paradox caused by young Jennifer and old Jennifer meeting each other could just destroy the Milky Way Galaxy (rather than the entire universe, depending on the severity).Marty: Well that's a relief.
Literature
- The Bolo universe has the Final War between the Human Concordat and the Melconian Empire. The war devastated the entire Orion Arm
to the point survivors had troubles finding a planet that merely had its population massacred, instead of being scorched to bedrock/heavily irradiated/contaminated with some horrible bioweapon, thus qualifying as a soft X-3. - The Deathstalker novels by Simon R. Green includes a superweapon known as The Darkvoid Device. The one time it was activated, it extinguished a thousand suns in a heartbeat. It created an area known, itself, as the Darkvoid, the home of aliens bent on the destruction of all civilization. The Darkvoid Device is later revealed to be a massively powerful psychic — and the infant child of one of the main characters, both of them kept in stasis for hundreds of years, both awakened in the current time by a descendant.
- Greg Egan's Diaspora features a galactic threat in the form of two black holes colliding, prompting the main characters to escape the galaxy (and possibly the universe) by travelling into higher spatial dimensions.
- Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep. To stop the Blight, the heroes use a weapon that brings civilization crashing down on millions of worlds. Arguably just a very parallel Class 1 or 2.
- Isaac Asimov's The Gods Themselves is about a power source which, if not stopped, will blow up the Sun... and start a chain reaction bringing the catastrophe to just below this ("Just below" because it is expected to blow up one of the arms).
- John Ringo's Into the Looking Glass series features a horde of biological creatures planning to eat the Galaxy.
- Larry Niven's Known Space series:
- In "At the Core", Beowulf Shaeffer flies to the centre of the galaxy, until he sees that since stars in the core are so close together, one of them going supernova set off a chain reaction causing the entire galactic core to explode, and our part of the galaxy will be destroyed in some 25,000 years when the explosion reaches us. When he returns and tells the Puppeteers, they pack up their entire civilization and flee immediately. (Which makes sense, since they're taking their homeworld with them, and it won't go faster than light.)
- In the (far, far ancient) prehistory, the Slaver Wars are conjectured to have ended this way — with one side or the other building a massive telepathic weapon that killed every creature in the galaxy with a developed nervous system. The galaxy would eventually be reprobated by the descendants of the lifeforms too simple to have detectable minds, although it would take billions of years for food yeast to evolve into life complex enough to think its own thoughts again.
- The Krikkit Wars from Life, the Universe and Everything rage for 2,000 years with casualties into the "grillions". If not stopped, the Krikkits would have killed everything in the entire universe.
- Stephen Baxter's Manifold: Space culminates in the hero trying the save the galaxy from being sterilized by a Gamma Ray Burst, as it has periodically many times before.
- The first quarter of Sister Alice ends with the Galactic Core exploding due to Sister Alice's attempts to open a path to another universe.. Thousands of years later, the explosion is still raging outwards, consuming millions of stars.
- In the final book of E. E. "Doc" Smith's Skylark Series, nearly all of the stars in one galaxy are teleported into the same space as a star in another galaxy, one-to-one, to wipe out a particularly wide spread enemy. The planets with good guys are safely teleported to a third galaxy at the same time.
- Jack Chalker's Well World series had an example. A weapon that not only destroyed anything it hit, but eliminated the energy in the area as well, ripping a hole in reality...and it is spreading.
Live-Action TV
- Doctor Who:
- The Time War is assumed to be this, with at least five populated planets confirmed to have perished, even if it all went unnoticed for lesser creatures like the humans.
- The Moment, a Doomsday Device which the War Doctor stole to end the Time War, is explicitly described as a "galaxy-eater".
- "Utopia": In the year 100 trillion, an implicitly gradual one has already occurred as the universe is approaching its natural destruction by heat death — all the stars have burnt out and faded, leaving what survivors remain reliant on an atmospheric shell to avoid freezing to death.
- "The Pandorica Opens": At the episode's very end, a severe one only a few degrees short of a Class X-4 destroys every last star in the universe at every moment in history (essentially, every one of those stars are not only gone but retroactively never shone), leaving Earth floating alone in the void. We see in the next episode that Earth is perfectly fine (as is the moon), with the TARDIS explosion acting as a substitute for the sun to ensure life and humanity still develops; but past the moon and substitute sun, there's now absolutely nothing in this Alternate Timeline. And the bigger Class Z that's caused this is still progressing over the episode and is erasing what's left bit by bit.
- In "Nightmare in Silver", it is revealed that in order to eradicate the Cybermen once and for all an entire galaxy was destroyed, including all its inhabitants.
- Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars — At the climax of the show, John Crichton unleashes a wormhole weapon which will "eat the galaxy" unless the warring sides make nice. Having spent four years desperately warning people that it's not a good idea to have them he finally builds one and goes on to prove his point by creating a weapon that swallows a planet, two entire battlefleets and doubles in size every fifteen seconds or so, and will never, ever stop growing. Even Magnificent Bastard, and sometimes Omnicidal Maniac (towards the Scarrans at least) Scorpius admits that this weapon is madness, to which John retorts that this is exactly what Scorpy wanted.
- The Dakara Superweapon from Stargate SG-1, if combined with the Stargate Virus that dials every Stargate in the galaxy simultaneously has the possibility of pulling off a Soft X-3. Bye-bye to all life in the Milky Way. The irony of the thing is that the device was designed to create life by the original builders, but can be reversed to kill it as well. The immortal Goa'uld Anubis tries to use the Dakara Superweapon to start all over again with lifeforms that he can personally design to worship him as a god-being. The Heroes simply wanted to use it to permanently neutralize all the Replicators in the galaxy.
- Supernatural: In "The Thing", Yokoth is a Lovecraft Lite Big Eater from an Alternate Universe, who mentions she and her mate Glythur have consumed most of their universe.
Tabletop Games
- Traveller:
- The fall of the Ancients at the hand of Grandfather left the local part of the galaxy "worse for wear", with several planets shattered, certain stars no longer there, and the wide-ranging Droyne civilization on course for extinction (only surviving on a few handfuls of planets). Fortunately this was only one section of a spiral arm.
- The Long Night and the Rebellion might not have been complete physical annihilation, but certainly caused massive diebacks across thousands of solar systems.
- Warhammer 40,000:
- One of the apparent aims of Chaos is to break down the barrier between the Warp and real space. The likely result of this is all of the galaxy being turned into a hellish realm of daemons and skeletons on fire, a galaxy-wide effect of anything up to Class X.
- Not only is there the possibility of it happening, it already happened at least once before: the Fall of the Eldar, which involved the Eldar literally Squicking a Negative Space Wedgie from Hell into existence, and wiping out the vast majority of their society across hundreds of light years.
- Even the Imperium can do this one. Some rare artifacts can apparently induce supernovae, and when the wrong people got their hands on the technology, trillions died. Trillions. Wrap your head around that.
- While the Tyranids don't physically destroy galaxies per se, they do consume every last morsel of biomass in them. And since they're coming straight at the Milky Way from all sides, the only question is whether they finish eating before one of the other factions blows up the galaxy first.
Video Games
- AI War: Fleet Command: The scavenged, sapient Precursor vessel known as the Exodian Blade ends up causing one of these through a Suicide Attack, plunging into the wormhole to whatever galaxy the AI (and the Blade's counterpart that controls it) truly resides in with all their reinforcements and industrial might. The result can apparently be observed from all they way over in the Milky Way, and eliminated everything within the same galactic region on the other side of that wormhole; it was strong enough just the tiny blowback that makes it back through the wormhole deletes both local AI homeworlds from the map.Dr. Michael Davidson: Most of the normal instruments were useless, of course, but we have some specialized equipment for observing stellar transition phenomena and the like. This was on the upper end of even that scale.
- If you lose in Commander Keen 5, not only Earth, but the whole galaxy is blown up.
- In the backstory of EVE Online, humanity colonized thousands of star systems across New Eden. However, the Eve Gate (the initial wormhole from Earth) collapsed, leaving the inhabitants of every star system stranded without resources. Most colonies died out, and those that survived experienced a technological regression back to medieval times, forcing them to rediscover science and technology over thousands of years of isolation.
- In the indie video game Gravmari, you play the cause of one of these, a wandering Planet Eater that can potentially grow large enough to devour suns.
- The "secret" ending to Hyper Princess Pitch involves the Galactic Princess Buster, a Finishing Move that causes destruction on an increasing scale until the galaxy explodes.
- Darth Traya's ultimate plan in the end of Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords is to use the Exile's death to create a wound in the Force that will spread outward, echoing across the galaxy and deafening all those touched by the Force until nothing is left behind in its wake but empty planets with no life on them as a part of her Rage Against the Heavens ideology.
- Mass Effect:
- The Reapers cause Galaxy-Wide Class 3/4 Apocalypses that take tens of thousands of years to recover from and, even then, only because the Reapers leave the necessary technology around so they can do it all over again. Species that have not obtained Mass Effect technology are exempted, however, since the Reapers use activated Mass Relays to track potential targets.
- And in the controversial endings of Mass Effect 3, Shepard unleashes Class 1 (if not Class 2) upon the galaxy with the destruction of the Mass Relay network, with the "Synthesis" ending essentially being a Class 3 of all fully-organic life in the galaxy in favor of something that's part-organic and part synthetic. And that's not even mentioning the worst endings of this saga.
- South Park: The Fractured but Whole: The coon and friends base has a Rubik's cube in a glass container. The Coon states that if you break it you will wipe out the entire Milky way galaxy. Should you choose to continue to mess with it, it eventually will fall out of the container and break, and you will discover that the cube was not just part of the superhero roleplay, and it actually does destroy the galaxy in a Non-Standard Game Over.
- StarCraft:
- The Zerg kill or "infest" billions of other lifeforms throughout the Terran Dominion.
- Amon's eventual goal is, so far as he's saying anything, to kill every sentient being (possibly every living thing) in an area not smaller than the Koprulu Sector but probably quite a lot larger, with the possibility of physically reshaping the affected areas to suit himself afterwards.
- In Star Wars: The Old Republic, in Act 3 of the Jedi Knight storyline, it transpires that the Sith Emperor's ultimate goal is the complete annihilation of all life in the galaxy via an immense dark-side ritual. Needless to say, averting this becomes the Knight's priority for the remainder of their class quests.
- Stellaris:
- This is a possible outcome when dealing with an entity known as "The End of the Cycle". When it offers to bring you into a covenant, accepting the offer (which the game advises against with a tooltip that reads "DO NOT DO THIS!"), you gain a +100% buff to Resource Output and Navy Capacity for the next fifty years. Once those fifty years have passed, however, the Reckoning begins. Every ship in your fleet is destroyed, every megastructure scrapped, every planet depopulated and rendered uninhabitable, and every leader killed except for one Ignored Expert who had the forethought to know this was a bad idea and escape with a handful of like-minded individuals to a small colony far away from your now-destroyed empire. Worse still, the souls of the citizens in your empire whom you damned by entering into the covenant form a massive fleet with a Military Power level in excess of one million that will proceed to spread throughout the galaxy and start expunging all life, leaving your puny colony for last as you watch the galaxy die, knowing it's all your fault. Even in the unlikely event that this unholy fleet of destruction is routed and the galaxy is spared from total oblivion, you will be stuck with a permanent -1000 Opinion modifier debuff: any empires still left standing will, in all likelihood, want to take revenge on you.
- If you manage to communicate with the Prethoryn Scourge, they will explain that they consume galaxies to escape something they call "The Hunters". If you learn this, it is possible to start a research project to examine the direction the Scourge came from... and there's nothing there. Just a void where the last galaxy they ate should be. The Scourge don't actually destroy stars, so that leaves two possibilities: there's either something absolutely massive blocking the view of that galaxy, or that galaxy was completely annihilated.
- Nemesis gives empires the ability to knowingly cause this with the ascension perk "Become the Crisis". The Crisis candidate creates a megastructure (the Aetherophasic Engine) which allows them to breach the Shroud and allow their race to become god-like beings. Powering the megastructure requires detonating stars to harvest dark matter and actually activating it causes every remaining star in the galaxy to collapse into a black hole, wiping out everything and leaving nothing but a void in its place.
- Total Annihilation is set at the end of a war that's essentially a galaxy-wide Class 2, with examples of everything else on the scale. The Core Contingency Expansion Pack one-ups this with the Core faction's master plan of destroying the entire galaxy except for one Core Commander, who would then rebuild the Core civilisation. Then in Supreme Commander, two of the three factions are trying to use a superweapon capable of doing this on their opponents. The Cybran plan (which is the canon ending, or the closest thing to it) is to just disrupt the Quantum Gate network so they'll be left alone, but this inadvertently unleashes an alien horde bent on carpet nuking everyone that's not them. Basically if you live in a game made by Chris Taylor, sooner or later you're gonna get exploded.
Webcomics
- Schlock Mercenary's Book 6: Resident Mad Scientist concerns a plot by Dark Matter entities known as the Paan'uri to sabotage a science-experiment in the galactic core — ultimately resulting in the birth of a new universe, expanding faster than light, and destroying everything it touches. Would, eventually, have destroyed all conventional matter in the galaxy, but it all got fixed via Time Travel. The Paan'uri destroy entire civilizations on a regular basis by blowing up nearby stars, but are by no means the only big thinkers. The Gatekeepers can use stars as fragmentation grenades/gravitic guns.
Web Original
- In QNTM's Ed stories, Ed accesses the root layer of the universe for a fraction of a second, and accidentally wipes out the Andromeda Galaxy. The denizens (those who remain) are not pleased.
- In Starsnatcher, the Big Bad's Assimilation Plot threatens all civilizations across the Milky Way and possibly more. By the end of the story, a Mechanical Abomination causes a femtobot plague that, had the protagonist not stopped it, would have physically destroyed the entire galaxy as we know it. However, there are still Abusive Precursors remaining and the epilogue implies that they will eventually kill any life in the galaxy other than themselves.
Western Animation
- The race of Highbreed, knowing they're on the verge of sterility-induced extinction, intend to take every other form of life in the galaxy with them on Ben 10: Alien Force.
- Futurama
- While on the way to Earth, the Brainspawn wipe out (presumably countless) planets.
- Prof. Farnsworth has several doomsday devices, at least one caused a huge supermassive black hole that ate enough stars to spell out "I love you Leela". They also had a star moving machine. The ability to move around stars at will is a pretty significant superweapon in the wrong hands. Good thing the crew are too lazy.
- In Miraculous Ladybug (no, really) we see a Bad Future in which an akumatized Adrien is responsible for turning Paris into a wasteland (his akumatized ability is a super-enhanced and long-range version of his Cataclysm.) However, it gets worse: he eventually threatens to destroy everything, and we see him gathering energy, and the sphere goes from visible from space, to planet-sized, to galactic, to so large the galaxy is a fraction of its size. Future Alix warns Ladybug that he's going to end the world, but if he'd unleashed that power, the end of the whole galaxy is a very lowball estimate of what would probably have happened.
- In the 2011 remake of Thundercats Mumm-Ra does this to forge the Sword of Plundarr.
- You probably didn't expect a Disney cartoon to show up here but Lord Dominator from Wander over Yonder successfully managed to destroy the entire galaxy (save one small planet) before being defeated. However, the barren planets eventually start growing back in the aftermath of their destruction. Also, it should be noted that most of the galaxy's inhabitants either survived or fled said apocalypse.
- What If…? (2021): This seemingly happens in "What If... Ultron Won?" when Ultron, during his and the Watcher's battle across multiple universes, uses the Infinity Stones to materialize his head at galaxy-size and physically chomp the galaxy where the Watcher is located in one universe.
Real Life
- This kind of apocalypse will happen in the very far future (assuming no Big Rip, Big Crunch, or other still-to-be-thought ends for the Universe). After trillions and trillions of years, gravitational interactions between the stars (better said, their dead and dark remmants) in a galaxy will disrupt their orbits, expelling most of them to intergalactic space and approaching the others to the Supermassive Black Hole that lies in the center of most galaxies and that will end swallowing them. Many, many, many years later that Supermassive Black Hole will vanish due to emission of Hawking radiation, disappearing the last trace of what once was a galaxy.
- Subverted with Galactic Collisions (like the one predicted to happen between the Milky Way and Andromeda in 3 billion years), though. Due to the sheer amount of empty space compared to actual stuff in galaxies, and the incredible length of time the merges occur over, the likelihood of any objects actually colliding are tiny.
