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"Where's the kaboom? There was supposed to be an Earth-shattering kaboom!" - Marvin the Martian
'When you absolutely, positively, have to kill everybody on the planet, accept no substitutes.
Sometimes, The End Of The World As We Know It just isn't enough. If you really want to put the world in danger, why not destroy the planet right from under everyone's feet?
Science Fiction writers have devised many methods of demolishing a planet: you can blast it with a laser, you can hit it with a really big object, you can feed it to self-replicating all-consuming Nanomachines, or use other, even more imaginative ways. In any case, it's likely going to make a terrible, ghastly noise.
This is understandably worse than just conquering a world or wiping out the present civilization. Mankind can always rebuild after that. There's usually no "After" for this End. Destroying a planet is usually reserved for the most " Holy crap" moments in a Sci-Fi or even Fantasy series. Blowing up an entire, inhabited planet is one of the fastest ways to really ratchet up the body count and cross the Moral Event Horizon.
Some series prefer to have that as the final goal of the Big Bad, with the heroes racing to stop him. Others have the event be inescapable, and focus on the actions of the few survivors as they try to carry on, seek revenge or simply live with the fact that their home has been completely obliterated.
A slightly less devastating variation of this is to simply blast the surface of the planet until the air hums with radioactivity and nothing can live on it. This is Colony Drop and Kill Sat taken to the extreme. Compare the Planet Eater.
Wikipedia refers to ships and weapons capable of doing this as Planet Killers . Destroying the world is in fact considerably harder than TV makes it look. Even if your huge laser manages to blast into the planet, you still have to overcome the gravity of all that rock with some sort of explosion capable of sending all hundreds of millions of tons far enough away that it won't just clump together again. 'Cause if you've just got a big laser, all you're going to do is drill a button hole in it.
The full-on Earth Shattering Kaboom is a Class X on the Apocalypse How scale.
Examples
Anime
- Gunbuster goes past mere planetary destruction with the Black Hole Bomb, a weapon capable of destroying the core of the galaxy. One of the weapon's components? The planet Jupiter. (Quick! Blow up Jupiter!)
- Space Runaway Ideon goes even further than that, as the titular Humongous Mecha has three main weapons that start at planet-killing, and go up from there.
- The Dirty Pair count as planet-killing weapons all by themselves - they have blown up at least seven planets entirely by accident.
- Parodied in Yu-Gi-Oh: The Abridged Movie: when Anubis announced his intention to destroy the world, Yami asks him what he could possibly gain from that. As revealed on his LiveJournal, the creator included this because he considered Anubis to be a terrible movie villain with, in his own words, 'generic motives'.
- Also in the Abridged Series, a running series called "Zorc and Pals" features Big Bad Zorc Necrophades and Yami Bakura discussing Zorc's plans to destroy the world. The clip from "Zorc and Pals: The Movie" in the Abridged Movie details what Zorc is going to do after he destroys the world... He's going to Disney World. And then he's going to destroy it. However, he found it much too fun, so he destroyed Euro Disney instead.
- The Dragon Ball saga is full of characters who can destroy the world. All the major villains starting with Vegeta are capable of it (we see Vegeta destroy other planets, although it should be remembered that the times we do see him destroying planets are in Fillers); the usual reason they don't just do it is that they want to fight Goku first. Earth is successfully destroyed twice though, first by Buu and then by the Black Star Dragon Balls. (It gets better.)
- In Transformers Generation 1, the Quintessons blow up their own planet to destroy the Autobot Matrix (they fail). Later, Rodimus Prime has the planet Paradron detonated to prevent its energon falling into Decepticons. Then in Transformers Headmasters, Scorponok succeeds in blowing up both Cybertron and Mars before the show is halfway through.
- In Digimon Adventure, Vadermon summons a planet (complete with rings) to keep Atlur Kabuterimon away. The insect digimon promptly blows it up.
- Lost Logia in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha can, and have, destroyed several worlds across multiple dimensions in the past. Needless to say, the heroes don't want them falling into criminal hands and/or going out of control.
- In Mortal Kombat 3, cyborg Smoke has a Fatality in which bombs come spilling out of his chest panel. We then see a shot of Earth exploding from space.
Comic Books
- Comic books like this trope as a sufficiently worthy threat for the best heroes to deal with. The most famous is probably Galactus of the Marvel Universe, a gargantuan being who literally eats planets.
- While there is some debate over what actually happens if Galactus succeeds in eating, the zombies who ate his dimensional double definitely create massive rubble.
- This is also a major threat in the Planet Hulk saga.
Film
- One of the most famous Planet Killers is the Death Star from Star Wars, and of course, poor Planet Alderaan to supply the Kaboom.
- The lesser version is known to the Expanded Universe as Imperial Order Base Delta Zero. Much is made of the fact that the Empire can do this in a few hours or days with standard fleet elements. Superweapons are just for flash.
- And speaking of the Expanded Universe, further planet-killers are encountered there, such as the Darksaber (the Death Star's laser, rebuilt without an actual Death Star) and the Sun Crusher (which is even worse than the Death Star; it does pretty much what it sounds like).
- The "planet killer arms race" featured in the Star Wars EU, in which every planet-killer has to be somehow bigger and badder than the last, is one of the most-cited reasons why some fans consider the entire EU non-canonical and ridiculous. This was only really happening in the nineties, when Bantam had the license. Del Ray, for all their perceived faults, have almost never used that plot gimmick. They did create the Vong, though, who were practically Planet Killers onto themselves.
- For the last Star Wars books Bantam published they brought back Timothy Zahn, who was not entirely satisfied with the way other writers had taken the EU since he published his famous trilogy in the early '90s. The result was the Hand of Thrawn duology, 1000 pages of Take That against every single thing that bugged him about the Bantam EU. And it was excellent. Superweapon-of-the-week also found itself subject to an amusing Take That in Destiny's Way by Walter Jon Williams, one of the better New Jedi Order novels.
- Titan AE begins with the destruction of the Earth, and continues with the survivors from there.
- The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. Ironically, the destruction of the Earth in the film version is silent (more like an earth imploding "zip").
- The Genesis Device from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. While technically a subversion (not only does it actually create habitable planets through terraforming, rather than blow a habitable planet into random debris, it can blow random debris into a habitable planet), the problems with it stem from the fact that if used against an inhabited planet, it would quickly destroy every living thing on a planet in favor of its new creation. In addition, the newly minted planet fell apart after a few years in Star Trek III.
- In Beneath the Planet of the Apes (the first sequel), a group of mutants (who captured Taylor, his girl and the guy who came to rescue him) worships a powerful nuke, that when detonated would destroy Earth. Then the apes attack, and while Taylor is falling dead, he triggers the bomb... one hell of a Downer Ending, specially due to the Insignificant Little Blue Planet speech that follows.
- Parodied in Mystery Science Theater 3000 in Season 8. The Satellite of Love was orbiting a Planet of the Apes-like Earth...when Mike Nelson gives advice that starts the bomb that a cult worships. Predictable results...and Mike was only beginning.
- In Battle Beyond The Stars, the Big Bad has a weapon called a Stellar Converter that, well, converts planets into stars.
- In the 1966 Doctor Who movie: Daleks - Invasion Earth 2150 AD, the Daleks planned to detonate a bomb which would remove the earth's core.
- A Q-Bomb is used to crack Planet OM-1 in Starship Troopers 3: Marauder, though the sight wasn't enough to distract General Dix Hauzer from snogging Captain Lola Beck (as we're talking about Jolene Blalock's luscious lips I can't blame him).
Literature
- In the Gray Lensman book of E. E. 'Doc' Smith's Lensman series, two planets have their inertia dampened (i.e. forward momentum placed in stasis), after which they are moved into place on opposite sides of a planet of villains. When their inertia or forward momentum is returned, they rush together to crush the planet between them. Later in the series, this is deemed insufficient and even more powerful weapons are used.
- Some of those more powerful weapons included two planets from opposite sides moving faster than the speed of light, and a planetary sized load of antimatter.
- The Revelation Space universe features many Earth Shattering Kabooms: First, the main antagonists destroy at least three planets during the main trilogy and an unknown but very large number more during the previous one billion years; second, defeating those antagonists releases a rogue terraforming agent, which, it is implied, destroys the whole universe in several billion years. From the very first novel a group of humans have a cache of 40 weapons, each capable of destroying a planet. And then finally, there are the Nestbuilder Weapons, of which little is seen but much is said.
- Julian May's Magnificat ends with the destruction of one of Earth's major colony planets, alluded to in the rest of the series as the biggest mass murder of all time.
- In Dan Simmons's Hyperion saga, the Earth has been destroyed a long time ago, but not before mankind had colonized a major part of the known universe. It later turns out that it wasn't destroyed, only hidden by some Higher Power.
- Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game involves the "Little Doctor" device, which is indeed capable of blowing up a planet, and is used for that purpose near the end of the book. In the sequel Children Of The Mind, a second such disaster is narrowly averted.
- David Weber and Steve White's The Shiva Option features this (in the form of anti-matter warhead barrages from fighter swarms) being used against a genocidal alien race as a regular tactic, once the good guys discovered the aliens communicated by telepathy. Kill anything over several hundred million on-planet, and the psychic hammerblow of the mass deaths cripples anything else in-system. Given that the alien species was a lot of ancient horror cliches come to life (including Soylent Green to the point of making conquered races into planetary-scale livestock ranches), I'm inclined to rule it necessary. Especially since an earlier book in the series ended with a Terran Federation ex-President sacrificing his own health to prevent the destruction of a different species' planet where only the world government was at fault.
- In Stranger in a Strange Land, Mike mentions that he is able to destroy the Earth with his psychic powers, although he reassures Jubal Harshaw that he is morally unable to do so. The book also mentions that the asteroid field between Mars and Jupiter was created when the Martians used the same powers to destroy a planet between them many eons ago.
- In the epilogue of the expanded edition of that novel, it is noted that the Martians eventually do decide to destroy the earth; by then, however, humanity has colonized space, a lot.
- In the novel Starship Troopers, the Terran Federation develops the Nova Bomb. It is used on planets that are heavily occupied by bugs and of no strategic importance to the Federation.
- It is also the first such device called a 'nova bomb' this troper has seen, and probably the reason 'nova bomb' is a common name for a planet-killer.''
- Heinlein originally used the term "nova bomb" in his 1949 short story "Gulf". It was a theoretical bomb that could destroy the entire Earth.
- In Greg Bear's The Forge of God, Earth was blown up after (a) being shot with one giant neutronium bullet and one giant anti-neutronium bullet that met and exploded and (b) having vast quantities of hydrogen extracted from the oceans and turned into hydrogen bombs. Talk about overkill!
Live Action TV
- The Xindi superweapon in season three of Star Trek Enterprise was designed to do this. In fact, we actually see it happen in the alt-future episode "Twilight".
- The USS Enterprise can also be assumed to have planet-killing abilities (of the lesser kind), unless Captain Kirk was bluffing when he mentioned General Order 24...
- The ISS Enterprise in the Mirror Universe clearly does have the capacity to destroy a planet or at least sterilize its surface.
- Subversion: Earth is destroyed on-screen in the Doctor Who episode "The End of the World", but nobody in that era makes a big deal out of it... because it's five billion years from now, Earth's destruction was long overdue anyway, and humanity has abandoned it long before.
- In the season finale episode "Journey's End," the Daleks prevent Martha Jones from using the Osterhagen Key doomsday device. Just as well.
- Babylon 5 destroyed at least two dozen planets in its fourth season, when the Vorlons and the Shadows both went, "Oh, now it's on, bitch!", culminating in the entire Earth solar system getting blown up a million years in the future. But it didn't end there, either, as yet more planets were destroyed in the sequel movie, A Call to Arms. Strangely enough, the Earth has come to the brink of planetary destruction three different times, and averted it each time. Lucky, much?
- Maybe not. Under normal circumstances, the solar system will continue to exist pretty much as-is for billions of more years (the Sun is about halfway through its life-cycle.) The show's creator has claimed that he knew this when making the episode, thus, the destruction happening a "mere" million years in the future is possibly an indication of deliberate destruction by.. someone.
- In fact, in one of his interviews he stated that unusual readings inside the sun were being caused by millions of jump gates (portals into hyperspace) being opened, which would be channeling available hydrogen out of the star and shrinking its mass. Not fun.
- Lexx featured the destruction of many planets over the course of the series (some deliberately, some accidentally), culminating in the last episode, when the Lexx is tricked into blowing up the Earth!
- "Lexx, use every last bit of juice you've got to blow up that ugly blue planet!". 790 had to have loved saying that.
- The Showtime series Odyssey 5 started with the world blowing up, and had five astronauts, who had survived because they were on the titular Odyssey space craft at the time, getting sent five years into the past to prevent it.
Tabletop RPGs
- Warhammer 40000 gives us a number of ways to kill a planet, from the appropriately named Cool Ship Planet Killer, to fleets of Space Monsters that can literally eat a planet down to the rock. Like Star Wars, they also have a planet-killing order, called "Exterminatus."
- Maid: The Role-Playing Game includes among its numerous strange items (which venture often into I Am Not Making This Up territory) the "Earth-destroying bomb," which when used turns the world setting to post-apocalyptic.
Video Games
- Kingdom Hearts deals with the destruction of several worlds by The Heartless, which are reformed, just as they were before they were destroyed, at the end of the game.
- In Persona 2: Innocent Sin, the villains are working to fulfill a prophecy that will cause the Earth to explode, except for a single city that's floated up into space as part of fulfilling said prophecy. They actually succeed, leading to one of the more bizarre applications of Make A Better World.
- Starcraft had
at least one two planetary surfaces sterilized by the Protoss to stop the spread of the Zerg; Chau Sara, and Mar Sara.
- The Covenant in Halo "glass" planets - they blast them from orbit until the surface has melted into a glasslike substance. And, of course, the Halos themselves obliterate sentient life to cut off the Flood. A "Galaxy Shattering Kaboom"?
- The Wing Commander series of games had two of these in Wing Commander III - a Cool Ship (the Behemoth) basically a slimmed down Death Star (read as: one honkin' big cannon with a ship wrapped around it) is used to destroy a world, and is later destroyed itself since the ship conveniently wasn't finished before being rushed off to destroy the Big Bad's homeworld. The job is later finished by a "Temblor Bomb" dropped into a faultline by a solo space fighter(the player, natch), resulting in the Big Bad's home being utterly blown apart through the resulting earthquakes, magically stopping the war.
- This troper feels that the situation is misrepresented. After delivering the bomb, the main character (Blair) is quickly taken prisoner. He gives a pointed speech to his captors that they just lost their homeworld, along with an untold number of political leaders, military strategists, and shipyards.
- Planet FM in Mega Man Star Force killed Planet AM using Andromeda. Two items are required to wake it up for its malicious deed; the controller, held by king Cepheus, and the key, which Omega-Xis stole before bailing to Earth.
- In the anime, Omega-Xis uses the Andromeda Key to blow up a planetoid as a diversion to get the hell away from his pursuers; Cygnus managed to trail him despite such efforts.
- Many villains from the Final Fantasy series are examples (although most only attempted to do so). These include Kefka, Neo Exdeath, Sephiroth, Kuja, etc.
- Kefka very nearly succeeded with the lesser version, notably.
- The MacGuffin from Space Quest I is the Star Generator, a device which turns a planet into a sun. It was meant for the best, honestly, but obviously it gets stolen and used for extortion. The device is blown up at the end of the first game, for which the evil villain takes revenge in Space Quest II
- Commander Keen episode two, appropriately called "The Earth Explodes" has the bad guys from the first episode position a planet-destroyer ship over the Earth. At Game Over, or if the hero is foolish enough to push the Big Red Button, it activates rather spectacularly. The fifth episode repeats this, with a galaxy destroyer.
- Space Empires V, and possibly earlier games in the series, allow any empire to destroy nebulae, stars, planets, black holes, wormholes, or create any of these, given the proper research.
- The Planet Buster missiles in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri may not be powerful enough to destroy Planet, but they can level entire continental masses!
- More than level, it can blast down to below sea level and the ocean will reclaim the area quickly. "Dude, didn't there used to be a continent here?"
- Master of Orion II has the Stellar Converter, a weapon that can vaporize most battleships and blow an undefended planet to bits, reducing it to an asteroid belt (which a sufficiently advanced race can actually reconstitute later.) It makes for a great defense when built planetside, but in space it needs a ship the approximate size of the Death Star built around it modulo aggressive miniaturization research. Note that at the stage of the game where the Stellar Converter becomes available, any fleet that can defeat the defenses of a planet should also be capable of obliterating its colony and therefore its significance. Advanced colonies are nigh-impossible to rebuild from scratch and the territorial significance of planets will have waned to negligibility. Does this stop players from zapping worlds? Not at all.
- Two space shooter games take this to the next level, with star-destroying weapons. The Shivans in Freespace 2 can do this with some eighty dreadnoughts combined, and X-COM Interceptor had a nova bomb you could research, which was needed to destroy the moon-sized alien superweapon to win the game. What was cool about the nova bomb was that it wasn't just needed for the final mission - you could use it any time you liked to wipe stars off the map, along with any bases or fleets in the system.
- Most demons of overlord level or higher in the Disgaea series and Makai Kingdom (about level 1000+ in-game) are capable of this.
- In what may be one of the earliest examples of player-controlled planet-cracking power, Star Flight gives the player 3 Black Eggs, artifacts that are capable of literally destroying a planet. Of the 3, you only need to use at most 2 in the course of the game, and can beat the game with only one of them...so which planet would you like to see destroyed today?
- Several Metroid games love to blow up planets and have Samus narrowly escape (more info at Samus' entry in Mike Nelson Destroyer Of Worlds).
- Pokemon Diamond and Pearl had Team Galactic set off a bomb at one of the three main lakes, and the resulting kaboom was enough for a city on the other side of the region to feel it.
- One of the ultimate devices in the space-age section of Spore is the Planet Buster, a weapon that obliterates any planet it is fired at.
- In Super Paper Mario, Mario and his friends are on a quest to assemble the Pure Hearts in order to stop the destruction of all worlds. They don't achieve this goal in time for some.
- Not quite a kaboom in Tales of the Abyss, but careful manipulation by The Big Bad and quick scrambling by the heroes did result in half the world missing at one point.
- In Kirby Super Star, one of the minigames is called Megaton Punch. Do well enough on the three timing sections, and the little pink puffball will destroy a pile of bricks, the stage, and split the entire planet of Pop Star in half.
- The very first thing that happens in Planet Busters is that Earth gets blown up by aliens. During the course of the game, you blow up Mars, and countless extra-solar planets, moons and asteroids.
Webcomics
Western Animation
- The Trope Namer here is Chuck Jones character Marvin the Martian from Looney Tunes, for his line "Where's the kaboom? There was supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom!" after Bugs Bunny stole his Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Mod-U-Lator in the short "Hare-way To The Stars". His motive was that Earth was obstructing his view of Venus.
Real Life
- A lawsuit was filed to keep CERN from turning on the Large Hadron Collider for fear that it would create a black hole and destroy Earth. The lawsuit failed, and the LHC is scheduled to become active on September 10th, 2008. Cross your fingers.
- Note that while the LHC is being fired up in September, the actual proton-splitting won't take place until October. And that even if it did create a black hole its effect would depend on whether it evaporates, which itself depends on the existence of as-yet theoretical Hawking radiation. Also, there is concern about a similar strange matter oriented disaster.
- On an extremely encouraging note, the name "Large Hadron Collider" was deemed too plain and it has been suggested that the device be renamed. Its new moniker? "Halo".
- According to the scientists, it won't nearly be powerful enough to create black holes. Doom dismissed.
- The LHC was turned on as scheduled on 9/10/2008. And somehow, we're all still here...
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