How to destroy the Earth

[alexander]

I got the easiest solution for the destruction of earth: just keep on doing what we are doing with pollution and overpopulation.... not too hard to continue, and hey in some 100 years, who knows...

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by alexander

I got the easiest solution for the destruction of earth: just keep on doing what we are doing with pollution and overpopulation.... not too hard to continue, and hey in some 100 years, who knows...

The original post and linked article (best use this archived copy, as the 2005 link appears broken) explicitly qualifies that “destroy” means “physically disintegrate” vs. just render unable to support human life, or support it well.

The closest thing I’ve encountered to a proposal that simply continuing with our irresponsible polluting ways might physically damage the Earth itself, as opposed to the life infesting it, involved the “Venus syndrome”, a speculative theory that runaway greenhouse effect might make the earth retain so much heat that the seas were evaporated and the surface made molten. After a brief, alarming, very speculative heyday in the 1970s, the theory was generally discredited and abandoned, as it appears that runaway greenhouse effect can’t be nearly that bad.

Even that doesn’t qualify as “destruction”, in the strict sense used by the OP. Actually taking apart a world, it appears, takes much more than just irresponsibility and neglect.

[alexander]

100 years also gives time for evolution of machines.... you have watched the matrix and the terminator, right?

We could always get hit by a lingering comet, it neednt be more then a quarter mile in diameter either....

besides at the rate we are starting new wars.... in a hundred years there is a high chance of us destroying our planet ourselves, too.

[freeztar]

Originally Posted by alexander

100 years also gives time for evolution of machines.... you have watched the matrix and the terminator, right?

Those movies were both about a fight for humanity, not the Earth.

We could always get hit by a lingering comet, it neednt be more then a quarter mile in diameter either....

As As Craig discussed several posts back, an impactor around the size of Pluto would be the minimum necessary and the tech neeeded to pull it off is not likely to come about for quite some time, if ever.

besides at the rate we are starting new wars.... in a hundred years there is a high chance of us destroying our planet ourselves, too.

Fighting each other is counter-productive to obliterating the Earth imo.

[DFINITLYDISTRUBD]

D.D.-Load a TBM with nukes and other assorted weapons of mass destruction... aim it for the earths core...start it up and wait.

les see will it or won't it?

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by DFINITLYDISTRUBD

les see will it or won't it?

Short answer: it won’t.

From this post on the subject of heating mars with nuclear explosives, we can make a very high estimate that the total energy of all the nukes ever made total about . A couple of independent estimates of the energy necessary to actually blow up the Earth – send all its pieces going their separate ways – come up with a figure of about . So, all the world’s Nukes have about one 40-billionth of the energy needed.

Without working out the details, I’ve a hunch that detonating all the nukes in the world at the Earth’s core wouldn’t even be a significant seismological event.

Then there’s the question of making a tunnel boring machine that can get anywhere near the Earth’s core. Though the subject of some fun science fiction going back to at least 1864, the reality is that no such technology is even close to existing. Even if such a machine could be built, once it penetrated the crust, it would need to be a magma-swimming machine, then an iron-boring machine – pretty extreme engineering challenges.

This is pretty much the point of this thread – destroying the Earth would be much, much more difficult than is commonly believed.

[Turtle]

I listened to a fella, Phil Plait I think, on the radio last week, and the subject of the Sun burning out came up and so then what could we Earthians do. The plan he put forward is to capture a sizeable asteroid (sizeable? ) and put it in orbit around Earth in such a manner that it tugs Earth slowly into a larger orbit. I want to rmember the guy said he saw practical calculations for this. (Craig!? )

So, to destroy Earth, we do the same thing except use an orbit for the asteroid that pushes Earth into the Sun. Bada bing; badda bang boom.

BBC News | SCI/TECH | Planet Earth on the move

Originally Posted by Dr David Whitehouse

...Using the well-understood "gravitational sling shot" technique that has been employed to send space probes to the outer planets, the researchers now think a large asteroid could be used to reposition the Earth to maintain a benign global climate.

It is an "alarmingly simple" technique, the astronomers say. It could ensure humanity's survival and even allow our descendants to alter our Solar System to move moons and planets to make new Earths.

The astonishing idea has been put forward by Don Korycansky, of the University of California, along with Gregory Laughlin, of the US space Agency Nasa, and Fred Adams, of the University of Michigan. ...

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by Turtle

I listened to a fella, Phil Plait I think, on the radio last week, and the subject of the Sun burning out came up and so then what could we Earthians do. The plan he put forward is to capture a sizeable asteroid (sizeable? ) and put it in orbit around Earth in such a manner that it tugs Earth slowly into a larger orbit. I want to rmember the guy said he saw practical calculations for this. (Craig!? )

The “gravity tug” idea is a major one in the young engineering discipline of altering the orbits of celestial bodies. Mostly, it’s been proposed as a way that a dangerously large NEO found to be on a collision course with Earth could diverted enough to avert disaster. It’s attractive because it solves the problem of how to “get a grip” or “find a hard point” on an such an asteroid, which observation suggest are more “gravel balls” than solid objects one could just bolt rocket motors onto.

The approach applies well to moving Earth, too, as it “spreads the load” of the required thrust more smoothly than rigid structures (Earth surface-mounted rockets, deeply-anchored cables into space, etc), at worst playing hell with tides and weather, but not threatening to cause earthquakes or collapse of big pieces of the surface, while keeping any motors well clear and out of the atmosphere.

It doesn’t get around the need for a lot of energy, though, as something has to give the tugging asteroid/moon acceleration. Simply put into orbit around Earth, such a body, no matter how large, would accelerate it an equal amount in all directions along its orbital plane, for a net acceleration of zero. “A lot of energy” here means a LOT of energy – about , roughly ten time the amount required to explosively disintegrate the whole Earth. Super space engineering, again.

Super space engineering though it may be, if you’re willing to take very long time to do it, it’s not inconceivable. In Turtle’s linked-to article ”Planet Earth on the Move”, NASA’s Gregory Laughlin’s scheme to move the Earth to an orbit large enough that a 10% increase in solar energy output continues to give Earth the same energy input (increasing its orbital radius from 1 AU to 1.004881 AU) involves a tug from a 100 km asteroid every 6,000 years, presumable repeated about 200 million times over a period of about a billion years. This is super space engineering on a very long timeline!

If you work out the transfer orbit requirements of the 1 AU – to 1.004881 AU transfer (which includes a the nudges needed on the “top end” to re-circularize Earth’s orbit, you get a total of about 700.25 m/s delta-v, vs. 26877 for a 1-way transfer orbit into the surface of the Sun (at about .0047 AU), requiring a “mere” .00068 times the energy – a tiny fraction of the Earth-shattering energies we’ve been discussing).

If you have the technology to do it with one big asteroid ever 6,000 years, however, there’s nothing in principle stopping you from doing it with more and bigger asteroids more frequently.

The big picture in such a scheme, either the moving Earth out a little or moving it in all the way one, is to get a “conveyor belt” of bodies, the more and the more massive the better, moving on closed orbits between Earth and some other large body (the largest, Jupiter, is an obvious candidate), transferring momentum between the large bodies by transferring it between the small ones and the large ones. Super space engineering, the high-level executive summary kind.

The main constraint on how fast such a scheme could alter the Earth’s orbit is the amount of mass – lots of asteroids, etc. – you can get on the “conveyor”, and how efficiently you can engineer their orbits to make close passes at the large bodies. There are so many variable in this I can’t begin to make any estimates, but my guess is that even the super-est space engineers couldn’t manage any major orbit changes in less than thousands of years.

Somehow, this lacks the space-opera dramatic zing of a Star-Wars type death-star – it’s hard to promote a “policy of fear” with statements like “Impudent Earthlings! Prepare to meet your ends … in 150,000 years!”

[freeztar]

Great post Craig. It reminded me of this article I read years ago.
SPACE.com -- Recipe for Saving Earth: Move It

[Moontanman]

Originally Posted by CraigD

PS: Post #1’s link to Sam Huge’s “how to destroy the Earth” webpage is broken. Here’s its 3/2/2005 archive, and its latest (7/11/2007) one.Huge and the several hypographer’s over several years appear to me right on the subject – literally blasting the Earth into never-to-reform rubble would NOT be easy.

By my very rough model, the total gravitational potential energy of the Earth (that is, how much GPE was lost by all of its little pieces when the fell together to form it) is about (not too far from UncleAl’s wikipedia figure of , so my model appears not too rough after all ). This is a lot of energy – about 5.4 days of the Sun’s total energy output. Assuming, then, that the Earth is held together by nothing more than gravity (not, I think, an unreasonable assumption, for estimating purposes), and that you could somehow perfectly apply the energy to exploding it, you’d need to use a minimum of that much energy to completely take it apart. Per my model again, it doesn’t much matter what size rubble – reducing it to tiny pieces takes only slightly more energy than reducing it to moon-size chunks.

I can only imagine a few ways to accomplishing this:

• A giant impactor
• An antimatter bomb
• A small, ultra dense (black hole-ish) object

Giant impactor approach
, so a body around the mass and initial position of Pluto, nudged to fall inward, then be deflected into a retrograde orbit that exactly strikes Earth, would be just about the minimum necessary.

Getting all of an impactor’s kinetic energy to accelerate each bit of Earth equally seems undoable – some pieces would almost certainly get much more, other much less, so what would result from this would likely be a debris cloud a significant fraction of Earth’s original mass that would eventually recoalesce into a smaller planet/ring/moon system (likely in very interesting ways). You might even just “punch a hole” in the Earth, and wind up with no worse than a topsy-turvy jumbled-up reconfigured Earth with nothing worse than “capsized tectonic places, a century or two or planetary rings and constant meteorite showers, a new moon or two, etc. Though not a total disintegration, I’d say any of these scenarios still qualifies, or come pretty close to qualifying, as “destroying the Earth”.

Getting a Kuiper belt object to hit the Earth would be a colossal, though not IMHO inconceivable, project. You’d likely have to directly force small bodies (using a spacecraft-based approach like that being considered by groups such as the B612 Foundation, use these to alter the orbit of larger ones, etc., until you can put one of the largest KBO onto a that takes it into just the right grazing path with one or more giant planets to accomplish the final, weird change to a retrograde Earth collision orbit.

Antimatter bomb approach
, so half this mass of antimatter annihilating with matter meets the minimum-to-disintegrate the Earth threshold. is a lot, but not astronomically – about 167,000 Great Pyramids, all the practical coal reserves on Earth, 40 Iceberg B-12s, or a 12 km diameter sphere of water.

Since there’s essentially no naturally occurring antimatter, this would have to be manufactured. Taking the most optimistic estimated for anti-matter factory efficiency (about 0.01%), to manufacture this much antimatter, you’d need about 2 years of the Sun’s total power. To get anything like this, you’ve got to do space solar power engineering on a scale requiring the dismantling of at least major asteroid-size bodies, put them in the closest possible solar orbit, build giant factories in space, etc.

Anybody who could do this could think of much more effective ways of messing with the Earth than blowing it up.

Black hole-ish approach
Celebrated in several works of science fiction (notably James Hogans 1980 “Thrice Upon A Time” Greg Bear’s 1987 “The Forge of God”), this approach requires some super-material engineering technology, with which you somehow make an very dense object, and drop it into the Earth. Due to friction, its subterranean orbit should quickly become nearly stationary at the Earth’s core, where it will begin stripping matter from the less dense core and behaving like a neutron star, gaining degenerate matter and radiating x-ray and more energetic radiation. Depending on complicated factors, something awful – the Earth becoming a tiny neutron star – will happen sooner or later.

This isn’t a true disintegration – Earth likely won’t lose much mass – but it renders the Earth entirely inhospitable to present-day human life, so I’d say qualifies as “destroying the Earth”.

In short, with any of these approaches, we’re talking super science and engineering, likely (at least for the giant impactor approach) centuries of it. This isn’t accomplishable today, or likely in a human generation. Given the resources it would take to do such a thing, it’d likely require the cooperation of all of humankind, which, for a “destroy the Earth” project, seems very unlikely.

PS: Post #2’s and Huge’s “direct the Earth into the sun” approach requires about 10 time the energy of a direct “explode it” approach. The Hohmann transfer orbit for 1 AU () to grazing the Sun’s surface ( requires an initial speed change of about 26877 m/s, a kinetic energy change.

The forge of God approch was to drob two chunks of nuetronium into the earth both were around basket ball sized, one was matter the other was antimatter. After they orbited around inside the earth for a while they would come together and boom the earth is blasted away! No black hole was nesesarry. but then again i don't think we have that tecnology yet. As for striking the earth with another object, an asteroid impact of about 300 miles in diameter is enouth energy to melt the earth's crust down to a depth of a couple of miles or so. The planet would survive but it wouldn't be the earth we know! The earth survived an impact from a mars sized planet early in it'
s history (suposedly) and the result was the moon. I'm not sure if we will ever have the energy to destroy the earth in one bang but you could change it's orbit drastically by passing numerous asteroids by the earth over thosands of years. I guess if you did it corectly you could eventually cause the earth to hit the sun or jupiter.

michael