"Where's the Kaboom? There was supposed to be anEarth-shattering Kaboom!" —Marvin the Martian, Looney Tunes

Sometimes,The End of the World as We Know It just isn't enough. If you really want to end the world, why not destroy the whole planet—tear the very ground from under everyone's feet?

Science Fiction writers have devised many methods of demolishing a planet: you canblast it with a laser, you canhit it with a really big object, you can feed it to self-replicating all-consumingNanomachines, or useother, 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" forthis 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 reallyratchet up the body count and cross theMoral Event Horizon.

Some series prefer to have this as the final goal of theBig Bad, with the heroes racing to stop him. In other series, there's no way to stop the Earth Shattering Kaboom, and the subsequent storylines 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 theHalo verse. This isOrbital Bombardment and companion tropesColony Drop,Kill Sat, andYou Can See the Explosion from Orbit taken to the extreme. Compare thePlanet Eater.

Think of it as aTokyo Fireball on a planetary scale. The full-on Earth Shattering Kaboom is a Class X on theApocalypse How scale, often represented with anEarth-Shattering Poster. Oh, and if you're in the right position,You Can See the Explosion from Orbit. Of course, some villains one up this by goingStar-Killing.

The villain archetype who wants to cause this is called theOmnicidal Maniac. Alternatively, if he does it by accident (or just doesn't knowwhy he'd do it), he's theMike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds.

Ships and weapons (andindividual people!) capable of doing this arePlanet Killers. Actuallyshattering a world is in factconsiderably 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 thousands of quintillions of tons far enough away that it won't just clump together again. Sure, anyone on the surface isn't going to be having a good time, but the planet won't actually be shattered. 'Cause if you've just got a big laser, all you're going to do is drill a button hole in it.

Oh, and if somehow if some part of planet still remains, and someone settles on that, then it becomesShattered World. See alsoWhy You Should Destroy the Planet Earth.

ContrastGenesis Effect, where planets are created instead of destroyed.

Anime and Manga

• 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!)
  • I think a certain pair of moronic monarchs fromHeroic Age could help you out with that one.
  • It should also be noted that in the images of the final battle, entire planets and moons are shown being destroyed ascollateral damage.
• The Jabberwock fromProject ARMS.After it absorbes a nuclear missile it is capable of generatingtwo fists ofantimatter.
  • Also should be noted thatit was super-sized at the time, so those 'fists' were probably car-sized or bigger.
• Space Runaway Ideon goes even further than that, as the titularHumongous Mecha has three main weapons thatstart at planet-killing, and go up from there.
• TheDirty Pair count as planet-killing weapons all by themselves - they have blown up at least seven planetsentirely by accident.
• TheDragon 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 inFillers); the usual reason they don't just do it is that they want to fight Goku first. Earth issuccessfully destroyed once inCanon, though, by Kid Buu.
  • They added a nice touch when it was destroyed by the worst villain of the series, Pilaf, in GT.
  • Let's not forget that Freeza destroys Planet Vegeta and Planet Namek, Gohan blows up the Makyo Planet, Cell blows up King Kai's planet, and Earth isn't the last planet destroyed by Kid Buu.
• InDigimon Adventure, Vademon summons a planet (complete with rings) to keep AtlurKabuterimon away. The insect digimon promptly blows it up.
  • InDigimon Frontier, Lucemon beats the shit out of the heroes by piledriving them straight into conveniently-placed moons. Said moons promptly explode.
• Lost Logia inMagical 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.
• InInfinite Ryvius, the Blue Impulse uses gravity manipulation to destroy Saturn's (inhabited) moon Hyperion.
• Uchuu Senkan Yamato: although the originalWave 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 inSailor Moon: Stars.
• Angol Mois fromKeroro Gunsou is from a whole tribe ofHumanoid Aliens with the power to destroy planets.
• Subverted in the Clow Card arc ofCardcaptor Sakura. With the Clow Cards free, Kero warns of a catastrophe that will befall the world if they're not captured, only to later reveal that the catastropheisn't this trope. In fact, it's actually worse... kinda'.
• Tsutomu Nihei, the author ofBlame, stated that Killy'sGravitonBeamEmitter would cause a substantial environmental change when fired on Earth.It doesn't take a genius to figure out what would happen if it's firedat Earth.
• Toward the Terra has two such cases.
  • Nazca, Mu’s new home, gets completely destroyed by Megido and even the combined efforts of Blue, Jomy and the Nazca children aren't enough to prevent this.
  • The Earth almost gets shattered into a million pieces, when the Grandmother decides it's time to get rid of the Mu for good.
• Gurren Lagann hasplanets beingthrown at the Super Galaxy Gurren Lagann. And that'snothing compared to theFinal Battle:GALAXIES THEMSELVES BECOME WEAPONS!

Comic Books

• Comic books like this trope as a sufficiently worthy threat for the best heroes to deal with. The most famous is probablyGalactus of theMarvel Universe, a gargantuan being who literallyeats planets.
  • While there is some debate over whatactually happens if Galactus succeeds in eating, the zombies whoate 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 thePlanet Hulk saga. TheChekhov's Gun finally goes off inSkaar: Son of Hulk, as Galactus devours Sakaar.
• Superboy-Prime becomes one of these during theCountdown 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 ofShakara, which then follows battles between various aliens.
• An oldDoctor Who comic had an insane hermit living in some ruins in an asteroid belt, desperately seeking to capture the TARDIS. When the Doctor caught up with him, the gun he was holding turned out to be sentient, and the Doctor asked it to explain why an asteroid belt had formed when there should be a planet.It turned out the lunatic was once a famed inventor interested in creating the ultimate weapon. He finished building it and tested it on a spittoon. The blast took out theentire freaking planet and he only survived because of the energy shield the gun created.
• This strip byQuino.
• InStarslayer, Torin mac Quillon comes into possession of a weapon that can implode a sun into a black hole. He ends up using it.
• Possibly the oldest comic book example is inThe Monster Society of Evil, where it nearly happens a couple of times, Mister Mind tries firing giant shells at America and Russia from a ten-mile Big Bertha, then in another chapter he tries to blow the Earth in half using explosives set up by tiny Americans living underground in case the war went badly for America.

Fan Works

• In Chapter 10 ofChronicles of the Crusade: The Long Road, Captain Gideon and the crew of theExcalibur detonate the Mark IX inside of Enceladus so that Kathenn can be destroyed. They later remark that Sheridan would be pissed that he wasn't the one who pushed the button to detonate it.
• This happens several times throughoutReunions Are a Bitch.
• InReaper's Origin, this happens during the Battle of Antarctica and when the SGC destroys Erebus.
• InKeepers of the Elements,Radcliffe does this to Zenith by taking out its central power core.
• During the course ofThirty Hs, Harry kills the fuck out of at least two planets, and Dumblecop kicks another planet in half.

Film

• One of the most famous Planet Killers is the Death Star fromStar Wars, and of course, poor Planet Alderaan to supply the Kaboom. Later on in the movie, the Death Star gets itsown Earthshattering Kaboom (okay, space station the size of a small moon, close enough).
  • The second (and larger) Death Star gets its own as well inReturn of the Jedi.
  • The lesser version is known to theStar Wars Expanded Universe as Imperial OrderBase Delta Zero. Much is made of the fact that the Empire can do this in a few hours or days withstandard fleet elements. Superweapons are just for flash.
    • Base Delta Zero just kills off the biosphere and renders the planet uninhabitable. Death Stars (or the like) are still needed if you want to blow it up like a firecracker.
  • And speaking of theExpanded 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 evenworse than the Death Star; it's atiny indestructible ship that, if you replace "crush" with "supernova", doespretty much what it sounds like).
    • Fridge Brilliance: To release enough energy to blow a star up, you need to crush its core with the outer layers.
  • The "planet killer arms race" featured in theStar 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 theVong, who possessed and often were Planet Killers themselves.
    • Nearly all of the Bantam superweapons wereKevin J. Anderson's doing. He put at least one in each novel except in theYoung Jedi Knights series.
  • And then there were theWorld Devastators. Basically they wereStar 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 firstRogue Squadron game players could fly against the World Devastators as Wedge Antilles.
  • TheEclipse-class Super Star Destroyer had a superlaser that extended the length of the battleship. It had only 1/3 the power of the Death Stars' superlasers, but it was still powerful enough to rip a gap in the crust of a planet. It wasn't nicknamed the "Continent Cracker" for nothing.
• And while the Death Star and Alderaan are fresh on our minds, let us not forget the similar destruction of the peaceful planet Basketball in theStar Wars parody film,Hardware Wars.
• Titan A.E. begins with the destruction of the Earth, andcontinues with the survivors from there.
  • Near-perfectly inverted at the end with an Earth Creating Kaboom. TheBig Bad shows up to try to destroy the Titan AE, but instead destroys himself and createsa new earth Bob.
• The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy. Ironically, rather than a "terrible, ghastly noise" (as the book, listed below, describes), the destruction of the Earth in the film version is silent (more like an earthimploding "zip").
• The Genesis Device fromStar Trek II the Wrath of Khan andStar Trek III the Search For Spock. While technically a subversion (not only does it actually create habitable planets throughterraforming, 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 inStar 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 newStar Trek movie ups the ante even more, with the RomulanBig Bad's plan beingto 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.
  • • Technically, it's an implosion, rather than an explosion asthe red matter is injected into the planet's core and ignites, setting off a black hole.
• At the very end of the Argentinian animated filmMercano, 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.
• InRed Planet,Burchenal triggers aSurface Kaboom bydropping a torch onoxygened-algae andoxygened-bugs.
• InBeneath thePlanet 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 aDowner Ending, specially due to theInsignificant Little Blue Planet speech that follows.
  • Parodied inMystery 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 wasonly beginning.
  • It is slightly hinted thatSpaceballs parodies this as well.WhenPresident Skroob, Dark Helmet, and Colonel Sandurz crashland on the Planet of the Apes, an ape says "Oh shit, there goes the planet." The scene changes after that, and never switches back to the planet, making it seem more of aWhat Happened to the Mouse?, but if you've seenBeneath the Planet of the Apes,we can assume what happens next.
• InBattle Beyond the Stars, theBig Bad has a weapon called a Stellar Converter that, well,converts planets into stars.
• InArthur C. Clarke's2010: The Year We Make Contact (both film and book) theSufficiently Advanced Aliens who madeThe Monolith invoke its abilities to cause Jupiter to collapse and ignite as a star. It's notable that this isnot 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.
• InDaleks – Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D., the Daleks planned to detonate a bomb which would remove the Earth's core.
• A Q-Bomb is used to crack Planet OM-1 inStarship Troopers 3: Marauder, though the sight wasn't enough to distract General Dix Hauzer from snogging Captain Lola Beck (seeing as we're talking aboutJolene Blalock's luscious lips I can't blame him).
• InPlan 9 from Outer Space, an alien comes to Earth to explain that, sinceHumans Are the Real Monsters, 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.
• TheJohn Carpenter's ultra low budget filmDark 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.
• InGodzilla vs. Destoroyah, it's revealed that Godzilla's heart is basically a nuclear reactor. When Birth Island erupts and exposes Godzilla to a bed of radioactive materials, he absorbs too much and begins to undergo meltdown. Unfortunately, his self-destruction will also take most of the planet with him, sending scientists and the military scrambling for a way to prevent it. Things get more complicated when Destoroyah arrives on the scene, making Godzilla's meltdown occur faster and become more powerful due to his rage at Destoroyah's actions.
• TheWarhammer 40,000 fanfilmDamnatusends with Inquisitor Lessus ordering an Exterminatus on the planet of Sancta Heroica in aDowner Ending after the heroesfuck up their mission anddie trying to escape. Given this is theCrapsack Verse of 40K, this is pretty much par for the course.
• The beginning ofMen in Black II shows Sarleena destroying planets she passed by.
• In the end ofTransformers: Dark of the Moon,Cybertron collapses in on itself when the Autobots destroy Sentinel's Space Bridge.
• Lars von Trier'sMelancholia revolves around the destruction of Earth by collision with an immense rogue planet (though there's not a lot of suspense about it, as the world's fate is revealed up front in the opening sequence).

Literature

• The Douglas Adams bookThe 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 bydestroying every Earth in every alternate dimension ever.
    • Then why are we still here?
    • They're not finished yet.
• In theGray Lensman book ofE. E. "Doc" Smith'sLensmen series, two planets have their inertia dampened (i.e. forward momentum placed in stasis),^{[please verify]} 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. This is merely a coda to the use of an antimatter bomb of planetary size. Later in the series, this is deemed insufficient and even more powerful weapons are used, including planets from other universes with intrinsic velocities significantly above lightspeed.
• TheRevelation Space universe features many Earthshattering 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 wholeuniverse 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 butmuch is said.
  • The eponymous device of Alastair Reynolds' short story,Merlin's Gun.
• Julian May'sMagnificat - the final book of theGalactic Milieu series - ends with the destruction of a major colony planet, alluded to in the rest of the series as the biggest mass murder of all time.
• InDan Simmons'sHyperion 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 someHigher Power.
• Orson Scott Card'sEnder'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 sequelChildren 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.
    • The weapon's range isn't actually that great, which means that any ship using it against a planet is on a suicide mission, as the field from the planet's destruction will get anything in orbit. Of course, the ships using it in the first book had 70-year-old equipment, so it's possible that later developments upped that range.
• David Weber and Steve White'sThe 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 hammer-blow of the mass deaths cripples anything else in-system. Given that the alien species was a lot of ancient horror clichés come to life (includingHuman 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 Weber'sHonor Harrington stories, pretty much everyone has the ability to do it, but no one does because of the "Eridani Edict." Anyone indiscriminately bombarding planetary targets will themselves meet the same fate, when everyone else in the galaxy turns around and does the same to them.
• InStranger 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 thatthe Martians eventually do decide to destroy the Earth; by then, however,humanity has colonized space, a lot.
• In the novelStarship 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'sThe 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 explodedand (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.
• PossiblyCharlie McGee fromStephen King's novelFirestarter."Suppose there is alittle 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 detonatesthe Psychlo homeworld by teleporting a nuclear device to the planet.
  • It should be noted thatthe nuke is a plain old one (very old, actually). It's the waynuclear radiation interacts with thePsychlos' breath-gas that causes the big boom.
• Alan Dean Foster'sHumanx Commonwealth series features a couple of these, starting with the basic mechanism used forFaster-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 novelThe End of the Matter features a search for aLost Superweapon that creates anticollapsars, or white holes, made out of antimatter. Thelong 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'sTemple 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. Cherryh wrote about one method in herChanur 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 andThe 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 thePerry 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 byRoger Zelazny includes shattering "worlds", supposed to contain multiple planets, in the course of the battles of the gods.
• In theWarhammer 40,000Blood Angels stories, the planet Orilan is Exterminatus'd to sterilize it of corruptive daemonic taint.Shenlong follows when the Blood Angels find its people fallen too far from the God-Emperor's light.
  • And in theCiaphas Cain novelCaves of Ice, a bomb that was placed in a mine that was flooded with millions of gallons of highly volatile promethium resulted in a gigaton range explosion that obliterated a mountain range and caused a shockwave that could be felt fromorbit. Despite that, they're still not certain whether or not the explosion destroyed the Necron tomb hidden below the mine.
• In theNights Dawn Trilogy, the scientists studying the ruins near the habitat Serenity crap themselves when they realize that the planet of this ancient alien civilization wasactually destroyed, as in reduced to large chunks of rock floating around space. This reaction is largely provoked by the fact that thebest 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 tocompletely screw with the surface of a planet and destroy its climate and ecology. It gets worse, because for reasons unknown, this ancient alien race apparentlydid itto themselves.
• Quite a few examples from theStar Trek Novel Verse:
  • Thallon inStar Trek: New Frontier, by virtue of the Great Bird of the Galaxy, which has been gestating inside its core for millennia. Now ready to "hatch", it destroys the planet from within.
  • Several planets in the Taurus Reach during the 2260s, due to the use of Shedai technology by Federation and Klingon researchers. Some planets were destroyed accidentally as a result of inept use ofShedai artifacts, others weredestroyed deliberately by the Shedai Wanderer in her attempts to prevent her people's technology coming into the hands of other, younger races. Palgrenax was one such planet. See:Star Trek: Vanguard.
  • InStar Trek: Titan, the Shalra homeworld was destroyed by a space-going creature, which fed on the remains. Also, Oghen - and possibly other worlds in the Neyel Hegemony - were destroyed by the effects of the Red King protouniverse.
  • Erigol inStar Trek: Destiny, deliberately destroyed in order to maintain a stable time loop.
  • Dokaal inStar Trek: A Time to..., in a natural disaster.
• Vernor Vinge'sA Fire Upon the Deep, set in the part of hisZones of Thought verse that allows FTL and other ubertech, contains at least two types of planetcracker weapons: antimatter warheads (with sufficient yield to, at the very least, sterilize a planet's surface) and kinetic missiles accelerated to relativistic speeds. As typical warships carry thousands of the former as their standard armament, space conflicts can (and do) become fast and bloody...
• In theSten series, the Empire has Anti-Matter Two weapons called planetbusters. The Eternal Emperor tries not to use them much, for the pragmatic reason that blowing up entire worlds tends to attract unwanted attention from other governments and is generally bad for business.However, inEmpire's End, one is deployed against the Manabi homeworld.
• The old earth is destroyed in this fashion at the end of theLeft Behind bookKingdom Come.
• InThe History of the Galaxy, the LIGHT annihilation device is anAntimatter-based weapon that can blow up a Moon-sized planetoid. That's actually the largest target it ever had and was its first use in battle. How? By luring the enemy armada to it and turning all the planetoid's mass into energy with an anti-matter stream. That was the plan, anyway. What actually happened was both fleets got wiped out, exceptThe Empire still had plenty of ships left, whileLa Résistance (who used the weapon) only had 8. Oh, and the weapon was destroyed as well. Can you sayPyrrhic Victory? The only thing that saved the colonists was that the enemy had no idea they were defenseless. The device is later mounted on flagship cruisers but almost never used.
• InSergey Lukyanenko'sA Lord From Planet Earth trilogy, quark bombs are relatively small spheres. One is fully capable of starting a process of total subatomic fission that is impossible to stop and consumes a planet in a matter of minutes. Even small chunks of the planet can re-start the process on another world if they happen to make it that far. Luckily, the bomb has to be delivered by ship, as teleportation renders it inert. After only two uses, it was banned by the entire galaxy. The only safe way to dispose of the bomb is to take it to a very remote area of space and blow it up.
• In the 1932 novelWhen Worlds Collide by Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie, a Jupiter-sized rogue planet drifts into the Solar System on a direct course for Earth with a result one character compares to tossing a walnut in front of a cannon at the instant the cannon is fired.
• Robert Westall'sUrn Burial has this happen to the home planet of theEldritch Abominations in the backstory; blown up with superweapons by the alien whose grave the human hero finds while herding sheep.
• The print version ofwhat if? (by Randall Munroe, the creator ofxkcd) ends with a question about what would happen if a magnitude 15 earthquake hit a major city. The reply includes the sentence, "To put it another way,the Death Star caused a magnitude 15 earthquake on Alderaan."

Live-Action TV

• InStar Trek, the USS Enterprise can 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. Mirror Kirk's first action as captain was the suppression of the "Gorlan uprising" through the destruction of the rebels' home planet.
  • In "A Piece of The Action", the Enterprise is able to knock out the entire population of Sigma Iotia with the main phasers on "stun", the lowest setting.
    • Not the entire population, just everyone "in a one-block radius of [Kirk's] coordinates." And only the ones who were outdoors.
  • And of course the planet killer from the episode "The Doomsday Machine".
  • In addition, inStar Trek: Voyager Species 8472 could combine the energy from 9 of their ships to create a beam powerful enough to make a planet explode.
  • The Xindi superweapon in season three ofStar Trek: Enterprise was designed to do this. In fact, we actually see it happen in the alt-future episode "Twilight".
  • In "The Die Is Cast", it is stated that a fleet of 20 Romulan and Cardassian ships can destroy a planet down to its core within 6 hours (1+5). The opening volley alone destroyed 30% of surface,after which the fleet was interrupted by 150 Dominion ships and destroyed.
  • The Defiant could supposedly reduce the surface of the new Founder Homeworld to a smoking cinder in short order. (While it was Garak who said this, he said it to Worf, who would be the most familiar with the Defiant's systems).
• Doctor Who:
  • Subversion: Earth is destroyed on-screen in the episode "The End of the World", butnobody 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 preventMartha Jones from usingthe Osterhagen Key doomsday device. Just as well.
  • This is played straight inDoctor Who too many times to count. Not always withEarth, mind, but witha planet inhabited by humanoids. Gallifrey, for instance, goes boom in the new series, and inThe Invasion of Time, theSontarans threaten to blow it up.
  • And inThe Pirate Planet, the eponymous planet destroys other worlds by materialising around them, stripping them of their resources and shrinking them down to the size of a basketball, after which they are displayed in the captain's trophy room.
  • It's the plan inThe Dominators.
• Babylon 5 destroyed at least two dozen planets in its fourth season, when the Vorlons and the Shadows both went, "Oh, now it'son, 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.) Theshow'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.
      • Although reducing the mass of the Sun would actually increase its lifespan, not shorten it. It would reduce the pressure and temperature in its core, thus slowing the fusion reaction and allowing it to continue longer before exhausting its fuel. The most massive stars have lifespans of less than a hundred thousand years, while the puniest red dwarfs might as well be immortal.
  • It should be noted that the Shadow planetkiller didn't actually destroy planets; they just turned them uninhabitable. The main mass was still there in one piece. It's not clear if the Vorlon planetkiller did the same thing or actually made the planet cease to exist.
• Lexx featured the destruction of many planets over the course of the series (some deliberately, some accidentally), culminating in the last episode, whenthe Lexx is tricked into blowing up the Earth!
  • "Lexx, use every last bit of juice you've got toblow up that ugly blue planet!".790 had to have loved saying that.
• The Showtime seriesOdyssey 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 seriesAndromeda 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.
  • Incidentally,there is a literal Earth-shattering kaboom in the series' final episode. Nova Bombs are not to blame but rather something called Radical Isotopes: stuff with negative mass from another dimension.
  • Harper also designs an even more destructive variant of the Nova bomb, and it's used to destroy an artificial sun.
• Crichton's wormhole weapon onFarscape 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 destroyingthe entire universe. And Crichton isn't gun-shy.
• InStargate SG-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 inStargate 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 theReplicator 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.
    • And then, in the season finale, the situation gets reversed - it's a Lucian Alliance base planet getting attacked/destroyed by Earth forces.
• The doomsday planet fromVintergatan. Of course, with a name like that, it was pretty certain to be... well,doomed.
• While not actually ever used for its intended purpose, missiles with the power to blow up a planet are known to exist inPower Rangers. InPower Rangers in Space it took one of them to take out theDimension LordBig BadMan Behind the Man. He was stabbed in the back with it byThe Starscream.
  • And it's notable that being hit with said missiledidn't kill him. It took Darkonda hitting him with asecond Planet Killer to destroy him for good, and he still survived long enough totake Darkonda with him.
  • Also from Power Rangers isSerpentera, a colossus of a Zord (which is saying something) built by Lord Zedd and his subordinates which on its maiden voyage blew up an abandoned planet in an attempt to stop theMighty Morphin Power Rangers from retrieving the Sword of Light. Unfortunately for Zedd, and fortunately for the universe at large, Serpentera was never able to build up anywhere near that kind of power again.
    • Andthe one time it did, theRookie Red Ranger rammed his motorcycle into it and blew it up.
• Kamen Rider Kuuga is said to be able to do this in his Ultimate Form with his Rider Kick... probably why we never see it.

Music

• The video forFrankie Goes to Hollywood'sTwo Tribes.
• On the cover of the albumFragile byYes.
• Occurs in the end of "Third Stone From The Sun" by TheJimi Hendrix Experience.
• On the cover of theSelf-Titled AlbumBoston, byBoston.

Tabletop Games

Card Games

• In Flying Buffalo'sNuclear 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 40,000 gives us a number of ways to kill a planet, from the appropriately namedCool StarshipPlanet Killer, to fleets of Space Monsters that can literallyeat a planet down to the rock. LikeStar Wars, they also have a planet-killing order, called "Exterminatus." Exterminatus is usually used on planets where there is no possible way of ever using the planet again, say because soldiers deployed to it invariably defect to Chaos.
  • Most of these methods usually leave a dead ball of rock, however. Except the Planet Killer; that reallydoes 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 ofMystara came to that planet after destroying their own in an academic dispute between rival factions of wizards.
• Exalted:She Who Lives In Her Name invoked a Creation-shattering KABOOM that destroyed90% of the the world she helped create.Apparently one of the creators of the universe decided that if she can't rule it, she would rather have it destroyed. The fact that her very name is deeply intertwined with the sub-structure of the universe make it very easy for her to do so.
  • Fans and Authors argue about the Three Sphere Cataclysm. Some feel that making it too cosmic runs the risk of causing the pre-cataclysm era to be fundamentally unrelateable as a storytelling medium. Others feel that letting her destroy 90% of just raw land mass isn't grand enough for a newly-minted cosmic horror. The deepest fan-theories hold that she annihilated Creation's Dynamic Link Library (its card catalog), thus making it impossible for anyone in the world to feel like the world as a whole makes sense... which, granted, is the one thing she would've coveted over the purely physical parts of reality.
  • Note that Creation isn't actually a planet, but it's close enough in that it's a bubble of stability in an infinite ocean of chaos. ToThe Fair Folk who lives outside Creation, even the glorious First Age was but a tiny spark of what Creation used to be in the age of the Primordials.
  • Then there's the giant dragon, what was his name, Kukla-something? Anyway, he's a 1,200 foot long gently slumbering beast guarded by twelve high-level war gods, whose job it is to kill anyone who tries to summon or otherwise disturb Kukla's sleep. Why? Because when he wakes up, he'll blow up Creation through liberal application of insane quantities of the five elements, and then go on to blow up the Wyld. Then, seven scales will fall down from his body and form the continents of a new world... Yeah.
    • That's The Kukla. He's given as one example of a mid-power Greater Elemental Dragon. This isn't even touching the Five Elemental Dragons, who are the apexes of the Elements.

Video Games

• Star Ruler allows players to bombard planets until they break up - usually by shooting giant railgun slugs the size of Cyprus at a sizable fraction of the speed of light.
  • And then there's the DSM, or Directed Spatial Manipulator, a super-weapon so powerful it can only be fired manually, which is capable of blowing up planets, and even suns.
• Defender.
• Kingdom Hearts deals with the destruction of several worlds byThe Heartless,which are reformed, just as they were before they were destroyed, at the end of the game.
• StarCraft hadat least onetwo three planetary surfaces sterilized by the Protoss to stop the spread of the Zerg; Chau Sara, Mar Sara and Antiga Prime.
• The Covenant inHalo "glass" planets - they blast them from orbit until the surface has melted into a glasslike substance.
  • 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 isaccidentally set off on an Elite loyalist vessel in orbit around a loyalist world: the planet is wiped clean of life, its moonis shattered, and nearly the entire fleet massed nearby is annihilated.
• TheWing Commander series of games hadtwo of these inWing Commander III - a Cool Ship (theBehemoth) 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 theBig Bad's homeworld. The job is later finished by a "Temblor Bomb" dropped into a faultline by a solo space fighter (the player, of course), resulting in theBig 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 fromRomancing SaGa 3 blows up more than just the earth, it wipes out the entire universe!
• Planet FM inMega 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 theFinal Fantasy series are examples (although most only attempted to do so). These includeKefka,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 Earthshattering Kaboom and reaches "Existence Shattering Kaboom". It still deals a measly 50.000 damage to every target, when the hardestBonus Boss in the game has FIFTY MILLION HP, in addition to the attack beingAwesome 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.
    • Weaker versions, maybe?
• TheMacGuffin fromSpace 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 inSpace Quest II
  • In the VGA remake it is also possible to escape the alien ship without destroying the Star Generator, leaving them free to use it.
• 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. AtGame Over,or if the hero is foolish enough to push theBig Red Button, it activates rather spectacularly. The fifth episode repeats this, with agalaxy destroyer.
  • "IT SLICES! IT DICES! It causes a 100,000 light year-diameter quantum explosion! THE OMEGAMATIC. Available from Vitacorp. Assembly required."
• Space Empires allows any empire to destroy nebulae, stars, planets, black holes, wormholes, or create any of these, given the proper research.
• The Planet Buster missiles inSid Meier's Alpha Centauri may not be powerful enough to destroy Planet, but they can levelentire 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?"
  • Planet, of course,does not appreciate you doing this.
• Master of Orion II has the Stellar Converter, a weapon that can vaporize most battleships and blow an undefended planet to bits when used in the post-battle bombardment,^[1] 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 one of the largest ship hulls initially, though with further research it can be squeezed into avery barebones cruiser hull. Note that at the stage of the game where the Stellar Converter becomes available, the usefulness of the weapon is minimal from a purely logical viewpoint. 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. Sadly, you canonlyuse it on inhabited worlds.
  • For those who don't care about having planets but don't want their opponent(s) to haveany use of them, it's the ultimate "screw you, youRubber Forehead Alien bastard!". (AI players can research building planets, but are unable to use the fruit of that research.)
• Two space shooter games take this to the next level, with star-destroying weapons. The Shivans inFree Space 2 can do this with some eighty dreadnoughts combined, andX-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 itwasn'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.
  • InDescent: 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 theDisgaea series andMakai 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.
  • His father, the overlord, split a planet in two when his wife died.
• In what may be one of the earliest examples of player-controlled planet-cracking power,Starflight 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 onlyone of them...so which planet would you like to see destroyed today?
• SeveralMetroid games love to blow up planets and have Samusnarrowly escape (more info at Samus' entry inNever Live It Down). Some examples are Zebes, Dark Aether, Phaaze, and SR388 (Dark Aether was of the lesser variety, as it was a pocket dimension).
• Pokémon 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 cityon the other side of the region to feel it.
  • This is ignoring, of course, the semi-kaboom (but probably counting as 'earth-shattering') that was born from the top of Mt. Coronet...
  • According toVG Cats, an ESK is the answer to givingpowerful Pokémon to kids and then asking,"What's the worst that could happen?" Team Galacticthought too small.
• InSpore, the most powerful weapon in the Space stage is the Planet Buster. It doesExactly What It Says on the Tin and gets nearby empires mad with you, even if they were not the target.
  • Destroying Earth is actuallyrequired for100% Completion.
• InSuper 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.
  • ALL worlds. Each of the game's levels are actually separate universes, meaning that Count Bleck is literally destroying everything. Everything as in EVERYTHING everything - including Heaven (the Overthere), Purgatory (the Underwhere), and Hell. In fact, the only universe left would be the one created by Dementio, which was created specifically for that.
    • Actually, the Big Bad emphasizes that he is not destroying worlds, but actually erasing them, so that the worlds would have never existed, if that makes sense.
• Not quite a kaboom inTales of the Abyss, but careful manipulation byThe Big Bad and quick scrambling by the heroes did result inhalf the world missing at one point.
• InKirby 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 ofPop Star in half.
• The very first thing that happens inPlanet 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.
• InMortal Kombat 3,Cyborg Smoke has aFatality in which bombs come spilling out of his chest panel. We then see a shot of Earth exploding from space.
• InMeteos, planets must constantly ignite the meteor blocks raining on them to get them off. If the stack goes too high, the planetexplodes.
• InSins 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. Also, the Novalith Cannon superweapon fires an obscenely large nuke at faster than light speed. The explosion takes up a large portion of the gravity well and kills nearly everyone planetside.
• InTurok 2: Seeds Of Evil, it is said that if theCosmic Horror Primagen escapes, he will cause a rupture in the fabric of space, leading to a universe-shattering kaboom. However, as told byRetcon in the manual forTurok 3: Shadow Of Oblivion, it happened anyway after you destroyed him. Although a few characters survived, including anotherCosmic Horror, Oblivion.
• Averted inSonic Unleashed, where Eggman uses a cannon that one would think would cause an Earthshattering 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.
  • Prior to (and similar to)Unleashed, this trope was part of the plot ofSonic Advance 3.
  • The ARK's Eclipse Cannon was capable of destroying a planet with the power of the Chaos Emeralds. It was used twice: first to blow apart half of the moon inSonic Adventure 2, and to annihilate the Black Arms Comet inShadow the Hedgehog.
• InR-Type Final, the Giant Warship's GiantWave Motion Gun is said to have the capability to do this.
• The goal of theMad Scientist villain inImpossible Mission is to crack the world's missile codes, triggering nuclear Armageddon.
• In the firstRatchet & 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.
• InEVE Online the storyline that heralded the Apocrypha expansion and the formation of wormholes, sympathetic reactions from the explosion of aLost 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.
• InDarius Gaiden's Zone Z ending,Darius explodes.
• InMight and Magic VI if you don'trelease 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.
• Star Ocean
  • The villains ofThe Second Story unleash the Symbol Of Annihilation, a magical incantation that when cast would cause the entireuniverse 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.
  • In thethird installment, the Earth itself is destroyed from an attack by the Executioners. In this case, the Executioners doom many other worlds off-screen as well.
• Atrea, the world in whichAion takes place, is a hollow sphere whose inhabitants live on theinside 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 throughHeroic Sacrifice.
• Marathon: At the beginning ofInfinity, aCosmic Horror Wrkncacnter escapes and causes a universe shattering kaboom, forcing our hero to jump betweenAlternate Historys to try to prevent its release.
• Happens inAnachronox.What else do you think could happen to a planet called "Sunder"?
• TheWarcraft series: At the end ofWarcraft 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 arestill reasonably habitable, though, and are featured in Warcraft 3 and the Burning Crusade expansion toWorld of Warcraft.
• InThe Legend of Spyro's culmination,The Dawn of the Dragon, the world is subjected to this at the end of the final boss fight.It's fixed by Spyro'sHeroic Sacrifice
• In the 8-bit gamesDriller and its sequelDark Side, this is what will happen to the planet Evath if you fail in your mission. The first game takes place on a moon where gas has begun to build up under the surface; eventually, the moon would explode, the debris destroying the planet as well. The second one takes place on the other moon of the same planet, where terrorists have built asuperweapon which continuously collects energy from the Sun (with obvious results should it be fired on Evath).
• InHomeworld,you find out that the planet you're living on isn't really your home planet. Then just as you're about to set off into the stars to search out your true homeworld, a hostile fleet comes out of nowhere and razes your planet....with most of your civilization still on it.
  • Worse:They did it for the sole reason that you broke a treaty that was so old, nobody fromyour civilization even remembered it. It's also implied that the hostile fleet was merely apatrol.
  • Madeeven more tragic by themusicplaying.
• Marvel vs. Capcom 3. The final boss is the very first entry inComic Books, Galactus. As you fight, he's already siphoning off energy from the Earth, turning it more and more of a hideous red shade the longer you battle. If you lose, he then proceeds to crush what remains of the planet between his hands, sending shattered chunks hurtling toward your screen as it fades to white.You can see the aftermath of his attackif you refuse to give it another go.
• The Twilight of the Arnor expansion forGalactic Civilizations 2 adds the Terror Star. While wildly impractical in some respects due to its horrendously slow travel rate, the Terror Star can vaporize any star, completely obliterating any planets in that solar system. One famousAfter Action Report depicts a player attempting to beat the game through peaceful means and cultural influence, then saying "to hell with it" when one too many races get belligerent with him and going on a massive solar killing spree.
• InSword of the Stars the System KillerUnknown Menace isExactly What It Says on the Tin. The Von Neumann Construct, labelled in data files as "final solution", is a copy of the System Killer and can be on the field at the same time as the original.
• The Novalith Cannon fromSins of a Solar Empire launches a massive nuclear warhead at an enemy planet that pretty much eliminates all life and wipes it clean with radiation if it is not fully upgraded, especially horrifying when you consider that the last thing people see is a blinding flash of light.
• The Guardian Legend - You have to save the world from this fate by blowing up NAJU, the massive alien base on a collision course with Earth.
• InStar Fox Assault, this is how the villains, the aparoids, are defeated. The heroes use a selfdestruct program on their queen, and when she explodes, so does the aparoid homeworld.
• Can be invoked by the player in theNintendo 3DS AR Games. When playing with the globe, all you can do is spin it around by shooting it at different angles. However, shooting it repeatedly causes it to start turning red. Should you keep shooting it beyond that state, itexplodes into a million fiery pieces, leaving behind a message that says "Take care of our planet" and is accompanied by creepy doomsday-like music that shifts into a sad melody. The globe is erased from your games list and you have to buy it again to play with it again.
• InEvolva, the Parasite tries this in the final level.
• InAsura's Wrath, Asura does this to Wyzen, after Wyzen becomes as big as the Earth, with his bare fists. It's also hinted that Gohma Vlitraeven before going one winged angel could do this, and Augus stabs through the planet witha sword at the end of your fight with him.
• Terminal Velocity features two planet killers: one theMoon Dagger, that must be taken outbefore it cores the Earth (actual in-game text), and the other the asteroid (now minor planet) Ceres that has been sent on a collision course with Earth.
• InSaints Row IV, Zinyak threatens it if the Saints try to escape.He goes through with the threat, killing several characters in the process and horrifying the rest, but alsochanging the Boss's mind from wanting to fold and flee to wanting to fight back.

Web Comics

• InFolly and Innovation this trope is used withhilarious effect.
• The Earth exploding randomly is a constantRunning Gag in theSprite ComicNeglected Mario Characters.
• The end of the War In Hell arc inDominic Deegan ends with an Earthshattering Kaboom in hell, which is powerful enough to breach dimensional barriers.
• Irregular Webcomic ended 2008 with not just an Earthshattering Kaboom, but with auniverse-shattering kaboom.(or lack of a "kaboom", per se...)
  • It was actually theentire MULTIVERSE.
• Played for laughs inSluggy 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.
• InQuentyn 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...
• ThisThis Modern World strip.
• InThe Inexplicable Adventures of Bob, space villain Fructose Riboflavin likes to extort cooperation from people by threatening to do this. "Remember, Galatea... threatening to blow up a planetalways works." Bob is the only person who has evercalled him on it, realizing the fact that RiboflavinneededEarth for his plan and socouldn'tblow it up, so the threat was an obvious bluff.
• God shows how it's done inThe KAMics
• Usedhere inSubnormality.
• InBob the Angry Flower it iseasy to do.

Two weeks later... Freddie: ...and then you blew up the Earth! Bob: Yeah, yeah, yeah... are youever gonna let that go?

• Fractal bombs inBuck Godot Zap Gun for Hire.
• The Snarl did this to the first world the gods made inOrder of the Stick.
• TheSpark of Thought inDrive.
• Schlock Mercenary hadIo-shattering kaboom.

Web Original

• OnDeviant ART, there are "Power emoticons" thattake regular emoticons to the EXTREME. Many include a view of the Earth (or a part of it) being destroyed.
• The Demented Cartoon Movie: Three words: "Gleeg Snag Zip".^[context?]
  • Don't forget "Zeeky Boogy Doog".^[context?]
    • Technically, one of the latter by itself wouldn't do the trick. A whole *bunch* of "Zeeky Boogy Doog"s (or one broadcast all over the world), however, would and did.
• 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.
• Parodied inYu-Gi-Oh: The AbridgedMovie: 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" featuresBig 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.
• InFine Structure,this is the ultimate fate of Earth during theFinal Battle. Luckily humanity from thenext universe over jumps in to pick up survivors.

Western Animation

• As indicated by the page quote, theTrope Namer here is theChuck Jones character Marvin the Martian fromLooney 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.
  • In the earlier shortDuck Dodgers in The Twenty Fourth And A Half Century. Dodgers (Daffy) and Marvin manage to reduce Planet X to a rock the size of a basketball.
• InGeneration 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 inTransformers Headmasters, Scorponok succeeds in blowing up both Cybertron and Mars before the show is halfway through. Later, theTransformers ZoneOAV begins with the planet Feminia being destroyed.
• Futurama has never shied 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."

• In theTotally Spies! episode "Evil Professor", the titular professor tries to use the stolen "inflator" weapon to blow up the planet.
• Once Upon a Time, Man ("Il était une fois l'homme") was a multiple nationality and educational cartoon,from 80's and about History (as a seriousHisteria!!). The credits were Abridged History, and future of humanity was already toldat the end: mens running away with rockets and then, Ka-boom.
• An episode ofPinky and The Brain had the destruction of the Earth at the end of the episode, but it's all right...everyone had already moved to Brain's papier-mache replica.
• ReBoot had an episode where this happened inside a game. While not world ending, it still pissed off Bob since he wasinside the planet when binomes triggered it. Bob chews them out after barely escaping, then lectures everyone else.
• In theKim Possible episode "Car Alarm", Shego seems tograduate toOmnicidal Maniac by hoping to use a rocket car she and Motor Ed stole in order to use its full powered rocket boost to destroy the planet. Ed on the other hand just wanted to use it to drive around with Shego as arm candy.
• Batman: The Brave And The Bold: The teaser for "Joker: The Vile and the Villainous!" ends with Joker pressing the button on the Omega warhead. Which blows up the Earth.
• The Little Mermaid: King Triton blows up the model of the planet Earth in Ariel's lair, along with the other of Ariel's human things.
• The French cartoonOnce Upon a Time... Space has a type of warship used by the androids of planet Yama that combine to form one larguer star-shaped vessel with enough firepower to destroy a planet. It's tested on a planet of their systemand in the penultimate episode of the series it's used to force the surrender of Cassiopeia threatening to destroy that planet.
• The ending of theI Am Weasel episode "The Hole" had this, due to I.R. Baboon plugging up a huge hole that turned out to be a ground-level volcano (complete with buildings, cars and a plate ofpork butts and taters flying from the explosion). The only survivors left are Weasel, his local assistant and Baboon, on a very small fragment of land left from the blast, but then Baboon gets in his car anddrives off the edge to his death.

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.
  • Check out their webcam and see for yourself.
• This website has instructions on how to achieve such a result.
  • Number of times the Earth has been destroyed:1 - wut?
    • Apparently CERN was responsible. They destroyed the Earth in advance just to be sure the LHC wouldn't.
• 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.
  • It is a testament to just how hard it is to blow up a planet. Even running head long into another planet at full speed isn't going to cut it.
  • On a smaller scale than that, there was the Late Heavy Bombardment - a few hundred-kilometre-wide objects pummelling the Earth and Moon for a few hundred million years. This likely served as a preemptiveRocks Fall Everybody Dies. And somewhat smaller still, the dinosaurs had to deal with a certain asteroid impact.
• It's been hypothesized that Miranda, a moon of Uranus, had been shattered by an impact and its fragments reassembled; thus explaining the patchwork of geological features on the moon.
  • Insertrocky fragments near Uranus pun here.
• Discussed in the History Channel seriesThe Universe, where they point out that blowing up the planet would require hitting it with something extremely massive (i.e. another planet).
• ForgetEarth-Shattering Kabooms. TryStar-Shattering. Stars have a limited supply of nuclear fusion fuel, and when a particularly large-massed star reaches the end of its supply, its core loses the battle against gravity,allowing the outer layers of the star to come crashing in. The resulting collision releases enough energy to actuallyblow the star apart. "Kaboom" doesn't even begin to cover it.

• Trope
• Pages with Examples Needing Verification
• Pages with Examples Needing Context
• Earth-Shattering Kaboom
• Apocalypse How
• Apocalyptic Index
• Death From Above
• Narrative Devices
• Overdosed Tropes
• Speculative Fiction Tropes
• Stuff Blowing Up
• This Index Earth