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alt title(s): Planet Killer 
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.
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, for example, the "glassing" of planets in the Halo verse. 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.
Think of it as a Tokyo Fireball on a planetary scale. The full-on Earth Shattering Kaboom is a Class X on the Apocalypse How scale, often represented with an Earth Shattering Poster.
The villain archetype who wants to cause this is called the Omnicidal Maniac. Alternatively, if he does it by accident (or just doesn't know why he'd do it), he's the Mike Nelson Destroyer Of Worlds.
Oh, and if somehow if some part of planet still remains, and someone settles on that, then it becomes Shattered World. See also Why You Should Destroy The Planet Earth.
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 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 Infinite Ryvius, the Blue Impulse uses gravity manipulation to destroy Saturn's (inhabited) moon Hyperion.
- Uchuu Senkan Yamato: although the original Wave Motion Gun is not in fact a planet-killer, several of the alien races have (and use) this capability.
- Sailor Galaxia is shown blowing up "junk planets" during her search for the strongest star in Sailor Moon: Stars.
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.
- The planet dies, basically it goes from Earth-like to Mars-like, that's it.
- It depends on the current author. Some authors say he "consumes the life force" of life-sustaining planets, turning Earth-like worlds into sterile rocks, others say he literally "eats" the planets leaving, I dunno, an asteroid belt-like ring of planet crumbs or something.
- They're pretty explicit about what Ultimate Galactus would do to a planet. Intelligent life would be wiped out by psychic attack and death cultists. A flesh-eating supervirus would reduce all (multicellular?) life to sludge. Then robotlike nodes would descend to the planet, crack open the crust and charge themselves up by siphoning off geothermal heat. Maybe there was more to it, I don't remember, but the end result is that Galactus would be recharged ("fed") for a voyage to the next planet in its path and the world would stripped of all its current life and unable to support anything like that for a long time, if ever.
- This is also a major threat for the planet Sakaar in the Planet Hulk saga. The Chekovs Gun finally goes off in Skaar: Son of Hulk, as Galactus devours Sakaar.
- Superboy-Prime becomes one of these during the Countdown To Final Crisis miniseries. Having been displaced from his own universe, he tries to find his way back - repeatedly flying into a rage at the inferior copies of Earth he finds in the alternate universes and destroying them.
- DC Comics has an entire species of giant space critters called Sun Eaters, who do just that.
- Earth is blown up on the very first page of Shakara, which then follows battles between various aliens.
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. Later on in the movie, the Death Star gets its own Earth Shattering Kaboom (okay, space station the size of a moon, close enough).
- The lesser version is known to the Star Wars 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.
- Or for destroying planets with shields, which is pretty much all the ones that matter.
- And speaking of the Expanded Universe, further planet-killers are encountered there, some built by Imperial forces, others not. These include the Darksaber (the Death Star's laser, rebuilt without an actual Death Star. And it doesn't work), the skeletal prototype Death Star, the Eye of Palpatine, Centerpoint Station, and the Sun Crusher (which is even worse than the Death Star; it's a tiny indestructible ship that, if you replace "crush" with "supernova", 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 several fair-sized chunks of the 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, mostly uses this gimmick with the Vong, who possessed and often were Planet Killers themselves.
- And then there were the World Devastators. Basically they were Star Forges in miniature, except taking materials from planets instead of stars and having to chew said planets up to get them. These "merely" rendered the planet an uninhabitable ball of rock significantly smaller than it used to be, rather than an actual kaboom. Notably, in the first Rogue Squadron game players could fly against the World Devastators as Wedge Antilles.
- Titan AE begins with the destruction of the Earth, and continues with the survivors from there.
- The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. Ironically, rather than a "terrible, ghastly noise" (as in the book and, less literally, the radio series), the destruction of the Earth in the film version is silent (more like an earth imploding "zip").
- As the camera is in space when we see the Earth destoyed, this is what we'd expect to hear. The fact that it made any noise at all could even be taken as an indication of how loud it really was.
- 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 weeks in Star Trek III.
- Kirk's son couldn't actually get the technology to work so he put proto-matter in it. It then worked initially , but proto-matter being unstable that's why the planet self destructed.
- Not to be outdone, Star Trek: Generations introduced the "Trilithium Warhead," a small device which could implode a star, causing a shock wave that could destroy an entire solar system, and which could be produced and deployed by one person.
- The new Star Trek movie ups the ante even more, with the Romulan Big Bad's plan being to destroy every single planet in the Federation, just to get back at Spock for not being able to stop Romulus from being destroyed by a star going supernova in time. The villain actually gets as far as destroying Vulcan, and is in the process of trying to destroy Earth before he is stopped by Kirk and Spock.
- At the very end of the Argentinian animated film Mercano, el marciano (Mercano the Martian) the Earth explodes because the characters cut the wrong wire of the remote controlling all of the world's computers, that were turned into bombs.
- 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 Arthur C Clarke's 2010: The Year We Make Contact (both film and book) the Sufficiently Advanced Aliens who made The Monolith invoke its abilities to cause Jupiter to collapse and ignite as a star. It's notable that this is not for nefarious purposes; instead they want to provide an energy source to the evolving life forms on Europa, who would otherwise have died out as the geothermal vents keeping them warm went cold.
- 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 (seeing as we're talking about Jolene Blalock's luscious lips I can't blame him).
- In Plan 9 From Outer Space, an alien comes to Earth to explain that, since Humans Are Bastards, they will not stop at atom bombs and hydrogen bombs, and will soon produce the solaronite bomb, which, by exploding sunlight and everything it touches, will create a chain reaction destroying the universe.
- The John Carpenter ultra low budget film Dark Star featured a starship crew whose job was to traverse the Galaxy, using "Exponential Thermostellar Bombs" to destroy planets that might someday threaten human colonies. For twenty years. On the ragged edge of terminal boredom.
- Godzilla vs Destoroyah adds an ironic twist, radiation is what powers Godzilla. Too bad he can absorb too much and go into a meltdown form that when it reaches 1200c he will either explode or meltdown, either way earth will be wiped out and to make things worse a monster called Destoroyah adds fuel to the fire by pissing him off thus speeding up the meltdown.
Literature
- The Douglas Adams book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy starts with the Earth being demolished to make way for a hyperspace expressway.
- And then ratchets it up at the end of the series by destroying every Earth in every alternate dimension ever.
- 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 — and, near the end of the series, two planetary sized loads of antimatter from opposite sides moving faster than the speed of light.
- 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 the final book of the Galactic Milieu series ends with the destruction of one a major colony planet, 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.
- The device is nicknamed the "Little Doctor" because it's actual name is the Molecular Disruption device, abbreviated MD, which is also the abbreviation for "Medical Doctor". It works by creating an energy field that prevents atoms from clinging together. The field's strength and area of effect is related to how much mass the target has. The effect spreads from atom to atom in a chain reaction. This means that the weapon requires the same amount of energy to be used against a single ship as it does an entire planet.
- 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 Human Resources 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.
- Heinlein originally used the term "nova bomb" in the 1953 version of his 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!
- Actually, not really overkill at all. Unlike many other examples here, this one involved just a little more boom than the gravitational binding energy of the Earth. The explosion took a realistic several minutes. To make something explode as fast as, say, Alderaan takes several orders of magnitude more energy.
- Possibly Charlie McGee from Stephen King's novel Firestarter. ''"Suppose there is a little girl out there someplace this morning, who has within her...the power to crack the very planet in two like a china plate in a shooting gallery?"
- Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000, in both the book and movie, Johnny "Goodboy" Tyler detonates the Psychlo homeworld by teleporting a nuclear device to the planet.
- Alan Dean Foster's Humanx Commonwealth series features a couple of these, starting with the basic mechanism used for Faster Than Light Travel — immensely strong artificial gravity fields that can theoretically demolish large chunks of a planetary body if brought too close. Needless to say, doing this is considered a horrific crime, and would almost certainly be suicidal to boot. More literally, the novel The End of the Matter features a search for a Lost Superweapon that creates anticollapsars, or white holes, made out of antimatter. The long gone race that created the weapon did so in order to counter rogue black holes, but also threatened to use it on the planets of their contemporary rivals. (The resulting arms race destroyed both species.)
- Matthew Reilly's Temple has the Supernova - a nuke capable of vaporising one third of the Earth's mass and knocking the rest out of it's orbit around the sun. There's 3 of them
- C J Cherry wrote about one method in her Chanur novels. The main character speculates how the bad guys might hijack loose interplanetary debris and accelerate same, followed by aiming said debris at the main character's homeworld.
- In Michael Reaves' The Shattered World and The Burning Realm, this had happened to a fantasy world a thousand years ago. The damage-control efforts of every wizard in the world allowed fragments of the broken planet to be saved, orbiting one another in a bubble of atmosphere. The Shattering was blamed on the power-mad Necromancer's final, spiteful spell, cast when the nations of the world refused to bow down to him. He was actually a scapegoat for a collision between planets, and had really used his powers to keep the world's fragments from disintegrating into dust.
- The oldest and still canonical example of this in the Perry Rhodan universe is the Arkon bomb, a reasonably portable device capable of causing a runaway nuclear chain reaction that will destroy the planet it is planted on over the course of only a few days. The arguably most destructive weapon ever built by Terrans, the Hyperinmestron, was used only three times in the series and only once for actual military purposes — it's capable of blowing up a star, and that first use resulted in side effects that caused supernovae and other general chaos and devastation throughout the center of the Andromeda galaxy.
- Creatures of Light and Darkness by Roger Zelyazny includes shattering "worlds", supposed to contain multiple planets, in the course of the battles of the gods.
- In the Warhammer 40000 Blood Angels stories, the planet Orilan is Exterminatus'd to sterilise it of corruptive daemonic taint. Shenlong follows when the Blood Angels find its people fallen too far from the God-Emperor's light.
- In the Night's Dawn Trilogy, the scientists studying the ruins near the habitat Serenity crap themselves when they realize that the planet of this ancient alien civilization was actually destroyed, as in reduced to large chunks of rock floating around space. This reaction is largely provoked by the fact that the best that their technological advances so far, which include light-speed warping, anti-matter bombs, living thinking Bitek space vessels and habitats (Serenity is actually one of these), and techno-telepathy, have only made it as far as being able to completely screw with the surface of a planet and destroy its climate and ecology. It gets worse, because for reasons unknown, this ancient alien race apparently did it to themselves.
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.
- And of course the planet killer from the original series episode "The Doomsday Machine".
- 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.
- This is played straight in Doctor Who too many times to count. Not always with Earth, mind, but with a planet inhabited by humanoids. Gallifrey, for instance, goes boom in the new series, and in The Invasion of Time, the Sontarans threaten to blow it up.
- 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.
- Probably named for Heinlein, the series Andromeda had Nova Bombs. How powerful were they? Well, the Andromeda carrying 40 of them was enough to send resident badass and proud warrior race guy Tyr into a fit because it was enough firepower to conquer an empire. The bombs cause stars to go super-nova, and can be volley-fired into black holes to turn them into white holes.
- Crichton's wormhole weapon on Farscape could easily destroy planets, not to mention sizeable chunks of the galaxy, were it ever deployed in warfare.
- Hell, forget planets. Peacekeeper Wars shows that it's more than capable of destroying the entire universe. And Crichton isn't gun-shy.
- In StargateSG-1, several different Goa'uld take a crack at Earth, although Anubis nearly succeeds a couple times. But none of them top Major Samantha Carter using a Stargate to blow up a sun and wipe out an entire solar system, complete with (almost all of) Apophis' fleet.
- "You know, you blow up one sun and suddenly everyone expects you to walk on water!"
- McKay destroys one in a similar manner in Stargate Atlantis though. Accidentally.
- He would like to remind you that it was "only five-sixths of a solar system," and an uninhabited one. And then later there was the Replicator homeworld...
- Stargate Universe blows up a planet in the first episode through a combination of an unstable radioactive core, plugging a Stargate into said core and dialing it to a ship billions of light-years away, and having the Lucian Alliance bombard the base.
Card Games
- In Flying Buffalo's Nuclear War, there is a rule that allows an improbable series of events to result in a nuclear chain reaction that not only destroys the Earth, but the entire solar system.
Tabletop RPG
- Warhammer 40000 gives us a number of ways to kill a planet, from the appropriately named Cool Starship 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."
- Most of these methods usually leave a dead ball of rock, however. Except the Planet Killer; that really does blow up planets. And then we get to the Blackstone Fortresses...
- There are many methods of Exterminatus, and while it is true that most of them just leave a dead rock, Two-Stage Cyclonic torpedoes indeed cause a Planet-Shattering Kaboom
- Maid The RPG includes among its numerous strange items (which venture often into territory) the "Earth-destroying bomb," which when used turns the world setting to post-apocalyptic.
- The Alphatians of Mystara came to that planet after destroying their own in an academic dispute between rival factions of wizards.
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 three planetary surfaces sterilized by the Protoss to stop the spread of the Zerg; Chau Sara, Mar Sara and Antiga Prime.
- 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 UNSC NOVA bomb. To elaborate, it is a cluster of nine nukes, each surrounded by a shell that, when the bomb goes off, briefly compresses each of the nine explosions to neutron-star density, giving each blast a 100x boost. One is accidentally set off on an Elite loyalist vessel in orbit around a loyalist world: the planet is wiped clean of life, its moon is shattered, and nearly the entire fleet massed nearby is annihilated.
- 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.
- In the first game of the series, fighter missiles are armed with an explosive mineral referred to in the (necessary for the copy protect scheme) manual as Illudium Q36. Missile explosive power was measured by their "ESK" rating. Three guesses what "ESK" stood for.
- The Destroyer from Romancing Sa Ga 3 blows up more than just the earth, it wipes out the entire universe!
- 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.
- Kuja fully succeeded in doings so, fortunately, it was merely a long-dead planet hidden inside the regular world...somehow. Frankly, it didn't make much sense while they were explaining it in-game either.
- Zodiark's Final Eclipse boosts right past Earth Shattering Kaboom and reaches "Existence Shattering Kaboom". It still deals a measly 50.000 damage to every target, when the hardest Bonus Boss in the game has FIFTY MILLION HP, in addition to the attack being Awesome But Impractical.
- It should be noted that some of these (e.g. Sephiroph's Supernova) are regular magic attacks that get used possibly dozens of times in the relevant boss battles. How that works is anyone's guess.
- 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.
- "IT SLICES! IT DICES! It causes a 100,000 light year-diameter quantum explosion! THE OMEGAMATIC. Available from Vitacorp. Assembly required."
- 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 use 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.
- For those who absolutely insist on every planet being useful, one can use the Stellar Converter to destroy a crappy world (abnormal gravity, poor resources, toxic environment, small size) and rebuild it into something eventually useful. Just don't think about how the rubble of a "tiny" world with ultra-poor resources can be made into a "large" planet of abundant resources.
- For those who don't care about having planets but don't want their opponent(s) to have any use of them, it's the ultimate "screw you, you Rubber Forehead Alien bastard!". (AI players can research building planets, but are unable to use the fruit of that research.)
- You don't need Death Star-size ships to field Stellar Converter. Titan-size (2nd largest) are big enough, if you have certain tech. Of course that ships' equipment is pretty much limited to Stellar Converter.
- With maximum tech, they can even be fitted on the midsize cruiser class of ships—though you can't fit much else, for instance shields. Then again at that point you don't really need to.
- 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.
- In Descent: Freespace, the Shivans also have technology to destroy the surface of planets, in the form of their superdestroyer the Lucifer.
- Most demons of overlord level or higher in the Disgaea series and Makai Kingdom (about level 1000+ in-game) are capable of this.
- Laharl actually does it if you beat him in the battle that you're suppose to lose.
- 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 Never Live It Down).
- 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.
- In Spore, the most powerful weapon in the Space stage is the Planet Buster. It does Exactly What It Says On The Tin and gets nearby empires mad with you, even if they were not the target.
- Also, the Sol system exists in Spore and if you find it, you can use one of these monsters pull off a literal ''Earth-shattering kaboom''. There's even a hidden achievement for doing this!
- 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.
- 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.
- In Meteos, planets must constantly ignite the meteor blocks raining on them to get them off. If the stack goes too high, the planet explodes.
- In Sins Of A Solar Empire, Siege ships do exactly that, and one of the specialized Capital Ships you can build does it with a bigger bang.
- In Turok 2: Seeds Of Evil, it is said that if the Cosmic Horror Primagen escapes, he will cause a rupture in the fabric of space, leading to a universe-shattering kaboom. However, as told by Ret Con in the manual for Turok 3: Shadow Of Oblivion, it happened anyway after you destroyed him. Although a few characters survived, including another Cosmic Horror, Oblivion.
- Averted in Sonic Unleashed, where Eggman uses a cannon that one would think would cause an Earth Shattering Kaboom, but which instead ends up cracking the planet into eight floating continents with few ill effects on the populace other than minor earthquakes, according to the characters in the game.
- In R Type Final, the Giant Warship's Giant Wave Motion Gun is said to have the capability to do this.
- The goal of the Mad Scientist villain in Impossible Mission is to crack the world's missile codes, triggering nuclear Armageddon.
- In the first Ratchet and Clank game, the villainous Drek needs to remove a planet in order to give his man-made world the perfect orbit. Drek's tool for achieving this goal is the appropriately named Planet Buster. The weapon does produce an Earth Shattering Kaboom, but not on the planet you'd expect.
- In EVE Online the storyline that heralded the Apocrypha expansion and the formation of wormholes, sympathetic reactions from the explosion of a Lost Technology device caused several distant stars in the galaxy to flare and space-time to rupture; the kaboom from one of the star flares burnt the inhabited mining world of Seylin I to a cinder.
- In Darius Gaiden's Zone Z ending, Darius explodes.
- In Might And Magic VI if you don't release a previous villain, Archibald so he can give you a seriously powerful scroll that encloses an area in its own pocket dimension. Without it when you blow up the reactor in the Kreegan Hive ship, or if you die afterwards thus preventing you from using it not only does the world explode but the moon inexplicably blows up afterwards.
- Ray Force ends with the explosion of the Con-Human-transformed Earth.
- The villians of the second Star Ocean game unleash the Symbol Of Annihilation, a magical incantation that when cast would cause the entire universe to stop expanding and collapse in on itself. The destruction of the cosmos is prevented only by the heroes' use of the Symbol of Divinity, which limits the Symbol of Annihilation to merely destroying the planet that they were on.
- Atrea, the world in which Aion takes place, is a hollow sphere whose inhabitants live on the inside rather than the outside. The Tower of Eternity is a large tower running through the inside of the planet which provided light to its inhibitants in lieu of a star, although the planet does still orbit a star. However, when the Tower of Eternity broke in two, the resulting explosion blew the planet into two pieces connected only by a magical field created through Heroic Sacrifice.
- Marathon: At the beginning of Infinity, a Cosmic Horror Wrkncacnter escapes and causes a universe shattering kaboom, forcing our hero to jump between Alternate Historys to try to prevent its release.
- Happens in Anachronox. What else do you think could happen to a planet called "Sunder"?
- The Warcraft series: At the end of Warcraft 2: Beyond The Dark Portal, the orcish warlock Ner'zhul opens up too many portals at once and ends up ripping the orcish homeworld to pieces - the remnants are still reasonably habitable, though, and are featured in Warcraft 3 and the Burning Crusade expansion to World Of Warcraft.
Web Comics
- The Earth exploding randomly is a constant Running Gag in the Sprite Comic Neglected Mario Characters.
- The end of the War In Hell arc in Dominic Deegan ends with an Earth Shattering Kaboom in hell, which is powerful enough to breach dimensional barriers.
- Irregular Webcomic ended 2008 with not just an Earth Shattering Kaboom, but with a universe-shattering kaboom. (or lack of a "kaboom", per se...)
- It was actually the entire MULTIVERSE.
- Played for laughs in Sluggy Freelance when this happens to the planet of Gritania during the GOFOTRON arc.
- The GOFOTRON arc ends with a universe-shattering kaboom, in fact. But it's only a tiny universe.
- In Quentyn Quinn, Space Ranger, the Racconan Empire of the Seven Systems owns a small fleet of Stellar Lances. One of which was used to destroy a Kvrk-Chk solar system. Word Of God is that the Lance operates by firing a planet-sized beam of "antigravitons" through the heart of the system's star, causing it to hemorrhage from either side, spraying the surrounding planets with white-hot stellar matter (picture a water balloon with a pinhole on either side spinning on a string).... the lawn sprinkler from Hell. If conditions are just right, it goes downhill from there, into a stellar collapse and supernova...
Web Original
- On deviantART, there are "Power emoticons" that take regular emoticons to the EXTREME. Many include a view of the Earth (or a part of it) being destroyed.
- Three words: "Gleeg Snag Zip".
- Don't forget "Zeeky Boogy Doog".
- Tech Infantry has an dinosaur-killer-sized asteroid dropped on earth in the backstory. After the Earth partially recovers and is just starting to be recolonized by rebels against the main human government, said government sends in a fleet that blows up the moon, first by firing several small black holes through it to weaken its structure, then ramming it with a miles-long starship moving at 90 percent of the speed of light. The shattered fragments of the moon rain down on the surface of the earth, melting the top few miles of crust into a continuous layer of molten lava, boiling off the oceans, and blasting the atmosphere away. A few decades later, some nasty aliens invade, and the invasion is only stopped by using Dooms Day Devices to send the suns of the main alien homeworlds into supernova.
Western Animation
- As indicated by the page quote, the Trope Namer here is the Chuck Jones character Marvin the Martian from Looney Tunes, who says the line after Bugs Bunny steals 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.
- Shown here.
- In the later short Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2 Century. Dodgers (Daffy) and Marvin manage to reduce Planet X to a rock the size of a basketball.
- 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. Later, the Transformers Zone OAV begins with the planet Feminia being destroyed.
- Futurama has never shyed away from destroying planets, but the best example of destruction comes from the episode "I Dated A Robot":
Sal: "So your fantasy has always been to destroys a planets, huh?"
Fry: "Sure! What have they ever done for me?"
Fry presses a button - a planet explodes
Leela: "Wow! The most mundane events look almost exciting through your eyes."
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.
- Which, of course, didn't happen when they did turn it on. Or di-
- Stop it, this isn't fu-
- Good lord! We have released Candle Jack unto the wor
- This website has instructions on how to achieve such a result.
- Actual Real Life: The current prevailing theory of the formation of Earth's moon is that the proto-Earth was hit by another proto-planet that blasted both the proto-Earth and the impacting planet into a loose conglomeration of material, most of which reformed into the Earth and some of which coalesced into Luna, the moon Earth has today. Literally Earth-Shattering. Although there was (probably) no Kaboom.
- Though since sound is just vibrations traveling in a medium....there could've been if enough "stuff" was floating around.
- On a smaller scale than that, there was the Late Heavy Bombardment - few hundred kilometer wide objects pummeling the Earth and Moon for a few hundred million years. This likely served as a preemptive Rocks Fall Everybody Dies. And somewhat smaller still, the dinosaurs had to deal with a certain asteroid impact ...
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