Earthshattering Kaboom



""Where's the Kaboom? There was supposed to be an Earth-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 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 this as the final goal of the Big 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 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. Actually shattering a 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 thousands of quintillions 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. Of course, some villains one up this by going Star-Killing.

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.

Contrast Genesis Effect, where planets are created instead of destroyed.

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!)
 * I think a certain pair of moronic monarchs from Heroic 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 as collateral damage.
 * The Jabberwock from Project ARMS. it is capable of generating two fists of.
 * Also should be noted that
 * 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.
 * 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 once in Canon, 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.
 * In Digimon Adventure, Vademon summons a planet (complete with rings) to keep AtlurKabuterimon away. The insect digimon promptly blows it up.
 * In Digimon Frontier, Lucemon beats the shit out of the heroes by piledriving them straight into conveniently-placed moons. Said moons promptly explode.
 * 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.
 * Angol Mois from Keroro Gunsou is from a whole tribe of Humanoid Aliens with the power to destroy planets.
 * Subverted in the Clow Card arc of Cardcaptor 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 catastrophe isn't this trope. In fact, it's actually worse... kinda'.
 * Tsutomu Nihei, the author of Blame, stated that Killy's GravitonBeamEmitter 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 fired at Earth.
 * Toward the Terra has two such cases.
 * and even the combined efforts of Blue, Jomy and the Nazca children aren't enough to prevent this.
 * almost gets shattered into a million pieces, when the Grandmother decides it's time to get rid of the Mu for good.
 * Gurren Lagann has And that's nothing compared to the Final Battle:

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.

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 Chekhov's 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.
 * An old Doctor 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.
 * This strip by Quino.
 * In Starslayer, 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 in TheMonsterSocietyOfEvil, 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.

Fanfiction

 * In Chapter 10 of Chronicles of the Crusade: The Long Road, Captain Gideon and the crew of the Excalibur 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 throughout Reunions Are a Bitch.
 * In Reaper's Origin, this happens during the Battle of Antarctica and when the SGC destroys Erebus.
 * In Keepers of the Elements, Radcliffe does this to Zenith by taking out its central power core.
 * During the course of Thirty 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 from Star Wars, and of course, poor Planet Alderaan to supply the Kaboom. Later on in the movie, the Death Star gets its own Earthshattering Kaboom (okay, space station the size of a small moon, close enough).
 * The second (and larger) Death Star gets its own as well in Return of the Jedi.
 * 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.
 * 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 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).
 * 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 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.
 * Nearly all of the Bantam superweapons were Kevin J. Anderson's doing. He put at least one in each novel except in the Young Jedi Knights series.
 * 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.
 * The Eclipse-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 the Star Wars parody film, Hardware Wars.
 * Titan A.E. begins with the destruction of the Earth, and continues with the survivors from there.
 * 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 earth imploding "zip").
 * The Genesis Device from Star Trek II the Wrath of Khan and Star Trek III the Search For Spock. While technically a subversion (not only does it actually create habitable planets through terraforming, rather than blow a habitable planet into random debris, it can blow random debris into a habitable planet), the problems with it stem from the fact that if used against an inhabited planet, it would quickly destroy every living thing on a planet in favor of its new creation. In addition, the newly minted planet fell apart after a few 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.
 * Technically, it's an implosion, rather than an explosion as.
 * 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 Red Planet, Burchenal triggers a Surface Kaboom by dropping a torch on oxygened-algae and oxygened-bugs.
 * 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.
 * It is slightly hinted that Spaceballs parodies this as well.
 * 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 Daleks – 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 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's 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.
 * In Godzilla 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.
 * The Warhammer 40000 fanfilm Damnatus.
 * The beginning of Men in Black II shows Sarleena destroying planets she passed by.
 * In the end of Transformers: Dark of the Moon,
 * Lars von Trier's Melancholia 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).
 * Lars von Trier's Melancholia 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 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
 * Then why are we still here?
 * They're not finished yet.
 * In the Gray Lensman book of E. E. "Doc" Smith's Lensmen 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. 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.
 * 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.
 * The eponymous device of Alastair Reynolds' short story, Merlin's Gun.
 * 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.
 * 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'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 Weber's Honor 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.
 * 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
 * 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,
 * Possibly  from Stephen King's novel Firestarter.
 * Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000, in both the book and movie, Johnny "Goodboy" Tyler detonates.
 * It should be noted that is a plain old one (very old, actually). It's the way  interacts with the  that causes the big boom.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * 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 Zelazny 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 sterilize it of corruptive daemonic taint.  follows when the Blood Angels find its people fallen too far from the God-Emperor's light.
 * And in the Ciaphas Cain novel Caves 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 from orbit. Despite that, they're still not certain whether or not the explosion destroyed the Necron tomb hidden below the mine.
 * In the Nights 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.
 * Quite a few examples from the Star Trek Novel Verse:
 * Thallon in Star 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 of Shedai artifacts, others were destroyed 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.
 * In Star 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 in Star Trek Destiny, deliberately destroyed in order to maintain a stable time loop.
 * Dokaal in Star Trek: A Time to..., in a natural disaster.
 * Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep, set in the part of his Zones 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 the Sten 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.
 * The old earth is destroyed in this fashion at the end of the Left Behind book Kingdom Come.
 * In The History of the Galaxy, the LIGHT annihilation device is an Antimatter-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, except The Empire still had plenty of ships left, while La Résistance (who used the weapon) only had 8. Oh, and the weapon was destroyed as well. Can you say Pyrrhic 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.
 * In Sergey Lukyanenko's A 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 novel When 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's Urn Burial has this happen to the home planet of the Eldritch Abominations in the backstory; blown up with superweapons by the alien whose grave the human hero finds while herding sheep.
 * Robert Westall's Urn Burial has this happen to the home planet of the Eldritch Abominations in the backstory; blown up with superweapons by the alien whose grave the human hero finds while herding sheep.

Live Action TV

 * In Star 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.
 * 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, in Star 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 of Star 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,
 * 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).
 * 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," prevent  from using . 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
 * And in The 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 in The Dominators.
 * 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.
 * 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, when
 * "Lexx, use every last bit of juice you've got to ".   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.
 * Incidentally,
 * 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 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 Stargate 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 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
 * 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 from Vintergatan. 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 in Power Rangers. In Power Rangers in Space it took one of them to take out the Dimension Lord Big Bad Man Behind the Man. He was stabbed in the back with it by The Starscream.
 * And it's notable that being hit with said missile didn't kill him. It took Darkonda hitting him with a second Planet Killer to destroy him for good, and he still survived long enough to take Darkonda with him.
 * Also from Power Rangers is Serpentera, 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 the Mighty Morphin 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.
 * And the one time it did, the Rookie 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 for Frankie Goes to Hollywood's Two Tribes.
 * On the cover of the album Fragile by Yes.
 * Occurs in the end of "Third Stone From The Sun" by The Jimi Hendrix Experience.
 * On the cover of the Self-Titled Album Boston, by Boston.

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." 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 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.
 * Exalted: She Who Lives In Her Name invoked a Creation-shattering KABOOM that destroyed 90% 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. To The 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 by The Heartless,
 * 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.
 * 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
 * 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, of course), 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 SaGa 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, 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, 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 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.
 * Weaker versions, maybe?
 * 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
 * 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. 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 allows 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?"
 * 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, 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 a very 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 can only use it on inhabited worlds.
 * 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.)
 * Two space shooter games take this to the next level, with star-destroying weapons. The Shivans in Free Space 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.
 * 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 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). Some examples are Zebes, Dark Aether, Phaaze, and SR 388 (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 city on 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 to VG Cats, an ESK is the answer to giving powerful Pokémon to kids and then asking, "What's the worst that could happen?" Team Galactic thought too small.
 * 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.
 * Destroying Earth is actually required for Hundred-Percent Completion.
 * 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.
 * 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 in Tales of the Abyss, but careful manipulation by The Big Bad and quick scrambling by the heroes did result in.
 * 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. 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.
 * 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 Retcon 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 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 of Sonic 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 in Sonic Adventure 2, and to annihilate the Black Arms Comet in Shadow the Hedgehog.
 * 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 Trope Workshop:Impossible Mission is to crack the world's missile codes, triggering nuclear Armageddon.
 * In the first Ratchet & 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, explodes.
 * In Might and Magic VI if you don't  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 villians of The Second Story 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.
 * In the third 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 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.
 * 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.
 * In The Legend of Spyro's culmination, The Dawn of the Dragon, the world is subjected to this at the end of the final boss fight.
 * In the 8-bit games Driller and its sequel Dark 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 a superweapon which continuously collects energy from the Sun (with obvious results should it be fired on Evath).
 * In Homeworld,
 * Worse:  It's also implied that the hostile fleet was merely a patrol.
 * Made even more tragic by the music playing.
 * Marvel vs. Capcom 3. The final boss is the very first entry in Comic 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 attack if you refuse to give it another go.
 * The Twilight of the Arnor expansion for Galactic 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 famous After 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.
 * In Sword of the Stars the System Killer Unknown Menace is Exactly 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 from Sins 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.
 * In Star 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 the Nintendo 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, it explodes 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.
 * In Evolva, the Parasite tries this in the final level.
 * In Asura's Wrath, Asura does this to Wyzen, after wyzen beccomes as big as the earth, with his bare fists. It's also hinted that Gohma Vlitra  could do this, and Augus stabs through the planet with a sword at the end of your fight with him.
 * Terminal Velocity features two planet killers: one the Moon Dagger, that must be taken out before 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.

Web Comics
"Two weeks later...
 * In Folly and Innovation this trope is used with hilarious effect.
 * 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 Earthshattering Kaboom in hell, which is powerful enough to breach dimensional barriers.
 * Irregular Webcomic ended 2008 with not just an Earthshattering Kaboom, but with a universe-shattering kaboom.
 * 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...
 * This This Modern World strip.
 * In The 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 planet always works." Bob is the only person who has ever called him on it, realizing the fact that Riboflavin needed Earth for his plan and so couldn't blow it up, so the threat was an obvious bluff.
 * God shows how it's done in The KAMics
 * Used here in Subnormality.
 * In Bob the Angry Flower it is easy to do.

Freddie: ...and then you blew up the Earth!

Bob: Yeah, yeah, yeah... are you ever gonna let that go?"


 * Fractal bombs in Buck Godot Zap Gun for Hire.
 * The Snarl did this to the first world the gods made in Order of the Stick.
 * The Spark of Thought in Drive.
 * Schlock Mercenary had Io-shattering kaboom.

Web Original

 * On Deviant ART, 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".
 * 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 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.
 * In Fine Structure,

Western Animation
"Sal: "So your fantasy has always been to destroys a planets, huh?"
 * 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.
 * In the earlier short Duck 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.
 * In 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 shied away from destroying planets, but the best example of destruction comes from the episode "I Dated A Robot":

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 the Totally 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 serious Histeria!!). The credits were Abridged History, and future of humanity was already told at the end: mens running away with rockets and then, Ka-boom.
 * An episode of Pinky 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.
 * Re Boot had an episode where this happened inside a game. While not world ending, it still pissed off Bob since he was inside the planet when binomes triggered it. Bob chews them out after barely escaping, then lectures everyone else.
 * In the Kim Possible episode "Car Alarm", Shego seems to graduate to Omnicidal 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 cartoon Once 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 system
 * The ending of the I 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 of pork 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 and drives 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 - 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 ...
 * 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.
 * Insert rocky fragments near Uranus pun here.
 * Discussed in the History Channel series The Universe, where they point out that blowing up the planet would require hitting it with something extremely massive (i.e. another planet).
 * Forget Earth-Shattering Kabooms. Try Star-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 collission releases enough energy to actually blow the star apart. "Kaboom" doesn't even begin to cover it.