How to destroy the Earth

[Buffy]

In yesterday's SF Comical (Chronicle to you out-of-towners), Jon Carroll, our favorite local columnist highlighted this web page on "How to destroy the Earth", an interesting little musing about various scenarios for, well, its obvious:

http://ned.ucam.org/~sdh31/misc/destroy.html

The thing I found most facinating was how *difficult* it is to get rid of a planet: it takes a LOT of energy!

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.

Now of course the author is strict in his definition of "destroy" as "obliterate" and dismisses options like "Armageddon" and "Ceasing all thought (if the Earth is not observed, then how can it exist?)," and getting rid of us vermin who inhabit the planet is inconsequential.

Think about it, what *would* it take?

Strangelovian,
Buffy

[muller]

I offer to improve method #9 were the author suggests to direct the Earth to the Sun. I think it would take much less energy to hurl the Moon to the Earth acting the same way. Result would be quite good - the Earth and the Moon will turn to new asteroid belt.
But chance to wipe out the mankind bothers me much more than destroing the planet itself because who cares about the planet if threre are no more people ?

[Fishteacher73]

In A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson, he notes that the impact of the meteor at the KT boundry was larger than an explosion of a Hiroshima atomic bomb for every living human (Which I think is currently around 8 billion). That just took out the dinos with really the only effect to the phsicality of the earth was the Gulf of Mexico.

[Robust]

My two-cents on this , okay?

We are probably going about it already in one of the most expeditious manners possible: pumping the earth's coolant from out of its bowels and dissipating it into its atmosphere.

[UncleAl]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravita...binding_energy

2.24x10^32 joules to disassemble the Earth. That's about 2.5 trillion metric tonnes of mass as energy. Gonna be a real bitch to lug around even in its condensed phase.

You could try a long line of fat thermonukes at the bottom of the Mariana Trench and hope for massive landslides. The resulting tsunamis would inundate the Pacific rim to maybe ten miles inland, crippling perhaps 10% of the worlds' economic outputs.

Talk to Arabia and build a huge Freon-12 plant with mammoth storage tanks for the liquefied gas. If things don't subsequently go your way, broach storage and remove the ozone layer for 100 years. It's better than Cobalthorium-G or an Illudium PU-36 explosive space modulator. If the world gives in, you get rich drawing down inventory by maufacturing decent air conditioners and refrigerators.

[Boerseun]

Destroy the Earth?

Easy.

1) Bury oil somewhere.
2) Let an American find out about it.

[Chacmool]

Originally Posted by Boerseun

Destroy the Earth?

Easy.

1) Bury oil somewhere.
2) Let an American find out about it.

North Korea would be the ideal location.

[bumab]

Originally Posted by Chacmool

North Korea would be the ideal location.

That's the funniest thing I've read all week.

[nkt]

If you could develop a very, very good capacitor, you could store a large (and I mean vast!) amount of charge in it. This could then be sent off-planet, or otherwise "destroyed". Keep doing this until the earth becomes positively charged to such a degree that the charges rip the planet apart.

Should be easier than megatonnes of antimatter!

[infamous]

Any attempt at preforming this task would require vast amounts of energy and careful planning. When considering the cost and feasibility, I think launching a missle at a passing asteroid of sufficient size and nudging it into earth's path would pull this off quite effectively.