Planet killer

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In science fiction, a planet killer is an entity, often a large spaceship, expressly designed to destroy or render uninhabitable a planet. The most famous planet killer is the Death Star from the Star Wars franchise, though many others have been seen on film or print. The science fiction series Babylon 5, Star Trek, Lexx, Farscape, and Stargate SG-1, the tabletop game Warhammer 40,000, as well as the Starflight and Wing Commander computer games all have at least one such device.

The Star Wars Expanded Universe uses the term "superweapon" for such a device.

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To kill a planet

Science-fiction writers have devised many methods of destroying a planet; blasting it with a specially designed laser weapon, launching nuclear missiles at the surface until the radiation and heat sterilises the planet, or through the use of exotic energy weapons not covered by present-day physics. The defining criterion is that the weapon must at least destroy the planet's entire ecosystem and render the planet uninhabitable afterwards; a more thorough tactic is to physically demolish the planet itself. Genre writers, being ever-creative to one-up each other's worst atrocity machines, have created many designs to fulfil both of these purposes.

Most writers, working in a print medium and unable to match the visceral chill of a short film sequence of an obviously life-bearing blue marble world being turned into a brilliant fireball in less than a second, prefer to use slower methods of planet destruction, making up in pathos what they lack in instantaneous impact. Under such a constraint, planet destructions are often much slower affairs, taking minutes, hours, sometimes even days for the protagonists to act or simply reflect upon their fate. The classic exception to this rule is probably Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the print version of which destroys the Earth in three sentences:

There was a terrible ghastly silence.
There was a terrible ghastly noise.
There was a terrible ghastly silence.

When categorizing such apocalyptic instruments, one should note that several devices—Asimov's Electron Pump or the 27th century Tox Uthat, to name a couple—operate not by destroying a planet, but by annihilating the star which it orbits. The absolute energies involved here can exceed that produced by the Death Star's blast, but they are generated indirectly. Finally, inventions like Egan's Ensemble mod are too esoteric to admit classification by energy output.

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To eat a planet

Some writers (and comic book cartoonists) make stories about devices that convert planets into various products, often other machines (although the Monoliths in 2010: Odyssey Two turn Jupiter into a star). This is mainly seen in the printed literature rather than in the movies.

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To blow a planet up

In order to completely disperse a planet, one must supply at the very least enough energy to overcome its gravitational binding energy. One can supply more than this, of course, to overcome inefficiencies or to make the planet's dispersion more spectacular. The king of brute-force planet destruction is the Death Star, whose energy output has been estimated to equal the Sun's output for over thirty thousand years in a single blast. Then again, the Veloxi Black Egg from Starflight could do the same thing in a package about fourteen quintillionths of the volume and mass, so in terms of power per mass the popular king may be relatively lacking.

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To render a planet uninhabitable

For many plot purposes, it is sufficient to render a planet uninhabitable instead of completely destroying it. There are countless ways of accomplishing this, as it is usually enough to disrupt only one of the requirements for life. As examples, in Larry Niven's Known Space, the planet of the Grogs (a race who could exert mind-control) had a Bussard ramjet in orbit around the star. If necessary, it would fly into the star, and the ramjet "scoop" would disrupt the stellar magnetosphere, causing long term problems that would eventually end life on the planet. A more direct method of planetary extermination occurred in Catherine Asaro's Primary Inversion. Here, some of the atmosphere from a gas giant was siphoned onto the air of the planet, and its atmosphere was lit on fire. Anyone who could withstand the searing heat and following torrential downpour would find no oxygen left to breathe.In the book The Xenocide mission The superweapon "Device Ultimate" is a series of boxes containing a device that, then put into a small ship and fires into a sun, would cause the sun to become unstable, and exploding the first 1% of the sun and releasing a large amount of radiation, enough to kill all life in the solar system and a small explosion that would disinegrate the first planet of the solar system.

Less large scale efforts at making a planet uninhabitable include chemical, biological, and nuclear attack, as well as dusting the surface with radioactive dust (as in some of Issac Asimov's short stories). In Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, the author also presents a version of water called "Ice 9" which is just like ordinary water except that it takes on a crystal form at room temperature. Ice 9 can also convert neighbouring water molecules from their "wet" form into their crystalline form (in a similar way that some prions can influence other protiens by making them fold into different shapes, with the new shape also having this property). The result of contaminating even the smallest part of the water system on a planet like Earth would have disastrous consequences for all the liquid water on the entire planet, as effectively there is really only one body of water which is connected by rivers, seas, drains, groundwater reservoirs, and so on. A single chip of Ice-9 would be capable of rendering a planet uninhabitable to water-needing life such as just about every living thing on Earth.

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Famous planet killers

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Babylon 5

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Gundam

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Halo

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Lexx

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Stargate SG-1

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Star Trek

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Star Wars

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Warhammer 40,000

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Various computer games

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Various films, television and radio programmes

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Various novels and written sources

  • The Dahak-class battle station (David Weber's Heirs of Empire trilogy)
  • The Electron Pump (Isaac Asimov's The Gods Themselves)
  • Galactus (Marvel Universe)
  • Molecular Disruptor weapon (MD or "Doctor Device") (Ender's Game)
  • Spacer nuclear reaction intensifier (Robots and Empire)
  • The Warworld (DC Comics)
  • The Neutronium Alchemist (Peter F. Hamilton's The Night's Dawn Trilogy)
  • Nova Bombs (Starship Troopers)
  • At least three methods in E. E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman saga: a "nutcracker", consisting of crushing a planet between two others; a "negasphere," an antimatter planet; and a "sunbeam", a way of concentrating most of a sun's energy output into a narrow beam -- this one a defensive-only weapon against the two other methods.
  • The Supernova (Matthew Reilly's Temple)
  • Stephen Baxter's Moonseed: a virus-like microscopic object (or substance made from it) that transforms substances into more copies of itself - and thus consumes Venus and then the Earth by doing so. (Baxter has also employed geomagnetic storms (see Sunstorm) and larger universal constructors (see Evolution) as planet killers.)
  • Device ultimate in The Xenocide Mission
  • The Lensman series by E. E. Smith has several different means of destroying planets. "Super-atomic bombs" are mentioned early on, and later anti-matter bombs the size of planets are also used. Whole planets are occasionally used as enormous missiles, whilst the Sun Beam uses the system's star to melt the surface of an otherwise impregnably shielded planet in just a few seconds. Finally, planets from other dimensions can be used to ram planets or even create supernovas - there was even the worrying possibility that these "Nth space planets" could cause the Big Crunch in zero time!
  • In E. E. Smith's Skylark of Space series various planet-killers are used or discussed. Throwing planets and moons out of orbit, incredibly high-yield atomic or copper bombs, near-instantaneous dematerialisation of physical objects and the teleporting of close to fifty billion stars in order to wipe out a Galaxy-wide alien civilisation are all used.
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External links

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