Preamble
Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe.
You've seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You've heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing hideous quantities of pollution into the atmosphere threatens to end the world.
Fools.
The Earth was built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you've had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy.
This is not a guide for wusses whose aim is merely to wipe out humanity. I can in no way guarantee the complete extinction of the human race via any of these methods, real or imaginary. Humanity is wily and resourceful, and many of the methods outlined below will take many years to even become available, let alone implement, by which time mankind may well have spread to other planets; indeed, other star systems. If total human genocide is your ultimate goal, you are reading the wrong document. There are far more efficient ways of doing this, many which are available and feasible RIGHT NOW. Nor is this a guide for those wanting to annihilate everything from single-celled life upwards, render Earth uninhabitable or simply conquer it. These are trivial goals in comparison.
This is a guide for those who do not want the Earth to be there anymore.
Mission statement
For the purposes of what I hope to be a technically and scientifically accurate document, I will define our goal thus: by any means necessary, to change the Earth into something other than a planet. Any of the following forms could represent success: two or more planets; any number of smaller asteroids; a dust cloud; a more exotic object such as a quantum singularity. But the list does not end here.
Current Earth-destruction Status
* Number of times the Earth has been destroyed: 0
Information courtesy of the International Earth-Destruction Advisory Board
Methods for destroying the Earth
To be listed here, a method must actually work. That is, according to current scientific understanding, it must be possible for the Earth to actually be destroyed by this method, however improbable or impractical it may be. This is a recent (2005|03|03) clarification of the rules intended to facilitate greater scientific accuracy. Up until now the rules were "I'll add it if I feel like it" and things were getting untidy. As a result of this change, several long-standing methods have been relegated to the "less scientifically probable" list.
Methods are ranked in order of feasibility.
Several methods involve moving the Earth a considerable distance off its usual orbital track. This is an essay in itself, so a separate page has been created for it.
1.
Gobbled up by strangelets
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You will need: Some strange matter.
Strange matter is a phase of matter which is even more dense than neutronium. (Wow.) It's theorized to form in particularly massive neutron stars when the pressure inside them becomes just too great for even neutronium to exist: the individual neutrons comprising the neutronium are instead broken down into strange quarks. The neutron star then becomes a "strange star" which is essentially a single gigantic nucleon.
Some theories suggest that a lump of strange matter ("strangelet"😉 could remain stable outside of the intense pressure which created it. This would make it theoretically possible for strangelets of sizes all the way down to the atomic scale to exist. It's further theorized that the gravitational field of a microscopic strangelet would be enough to gobble up anything it comes in contact with, turning it into more strange matter.
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Method: Hijack control of a particle accelerator. I suggest the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Brookhaven National Laboratory, Long Island, New York. Use the RHIC to create a strangelet large enough to remain stable. Once created, your job is done: relax and wait as the strangelet plummets through to the Earth's core, where it will eventually swallow up the entire Earth.
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Earth's final resting place: a tiny glob of strange matter, perhaps a centimetre across.
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Feasibility rating (revised): 2/10. Evidence for the existence of strange matter is sketchy at best; there are a few neutron stars which look too small to be made of neutronium, there are a few earthquakes which might have been caused by a microscopic strangelet passing through the Earth at high speed, but that's about it. And even if it were possible that small stable strangelets could exist and swallow matter up in the manner described, the odds of forming one in a particle accelerator are pretty much zero.
2.
Sucked into a microscopic black hole
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You will need: a microscopic black hole.
Note that black holes are not eternal, they evaporate due to Hawking radiation. For your average black hole this takes an unimaginable amount of time, but for really small ones it could happen almost instantaneously, as evaporation time is dependent on mass. Therefore you microscopic black hole must have greater than a certain threshold mass, roughly equal to the mass of Mount Everest.
Creating a microscopic black hole is tricky, since one needs a reasonable amount of neutronium, but may possibly be achievable by jamming large numbers of atomic nuclei together until they stick. This is left as an exercise to the reader.
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Method: simply place your black hole on the surface of the Earth and wait. Black holes are of such high density that they pass through ordinary matter like a stone through the air. The black hole will plummet through the ground, eating its way to the centre of the Earth and all the way through to the other side: then, it'll oscillate back, over and over like a matter-absorbing pendulum. Eventually it will come to rest at the core, having absorbed enough matter to slow it down. Then you just need to wait, while it sits and consumes matter until the whole Earth is gone.
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Earth's final resting place: a singularity with a radius of about nine millimetres, which will then proceed to happily orbit the Sun as normal.
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Feasibility rating: 2/10. Highly, highly unlikely. But not impossible.
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Comments: Getting closer!
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Source: The Dark Side Of The Sun, by Terry Pratchett. It is true that the microscopic black hole idea is an age-old science fiction mainstay which predates Pratchett by a long time, he was my original source for the idea, so that's what I'm putting.
3.
Overspun
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You will need: some means of accelerating the Earth's rotation.
Accelerating the Earth's rotation is a rather different matter from moving it. External interactions with asteroids might move the Earth but won't have a significant effect on how fast it spins. And certainly it won't spin the Earth fast enough. You need to build rockets or railguns at the Equator, all facing West.
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Method: The theory is, if you spin the Earth fast enough, it'll fly apart as the bits at the Equator start moving fast enough to overcome gravity.
To do this the Earth will need to be spinning very fast indeed. Currently it rotates completely on its axis once every 24 hours. You'll need to spin it fast enough to perform a complete rotation once every 84 minutes.
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Comments: This assumes that the Earth won't distort as it spins faster, which it will - the poles will flatten and the Equator will expand. It's also completely unknown what will happen once the rotation actually reaches the kind of speed we're looking at here. Will a ring of matter spontaneously lift off from the Equator and expand outwards? Will lumps of matter fly off at a tangent? If they do, will they come back down again? Will some other exchange of angular momentum occur to slow the planet down? The only thing we can be sure of is that Earth will not simply just fly apart into pieces. It'd take some computer modelling to find out what would actually happen.
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Earth's final resting place: presumably, various lumps of matter expanding away from each other.
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Feasibility rating: 3/10. Improbable, difficult, messy, and possibly not even workable.
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Source: This method suggested by Matthew Wakeling.
4.
Blown up by matter/antimatter reaction
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You will need: 1,300,000,000,000 tonnes of antimatter
Antimatter - the most explosive substance possible - can be manufactured in small quantities using any large particle accelerator, but this will take some considerable time to produce the required amounts. If you can create the appropriate machinery, it may be possible - and much easier - simply to "flip" 1.3 trillion tonnes of matter through a fourth dimension, turning it all to antimatter at once.
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Method: This method involves detonating a bomb so big that it blasts the Earth to pieces.
This, to say the least, requires a big bomb. All the explosives mankind has ever created, nuclear or non-, gathered together and detonated simultaneously, would make a significant crater and wreck the planet's ecosystem, but barely scratch the surface of the planet. There is evidence that in the past, asteroids have hit the Earth with the explosive yield of five billion Hiroshi...
Originally posted by Santa DrummerFrom which site you copied and pasted this useless crap?
Preamble
Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe.
You've seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You've heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing hideous quantities of pollution into the atmosphere threatens to ...[text shortened]... at in the past, asteroids have hit the Earth with the explosive yield of five billion Hiroshi...
Originally posted by RavelloThis one....
From which site you copid and pasted this useless crap?
Thread 34470
Originally posted by Daemon Sin"Tournament started cannot view" ,genius........
This one....
Tournament 34470