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.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Buffy  Think about it, what *would* it take [to physically disintegrate the Earth] ? |
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.
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Some original minimum energy calculations, and some unoriginal engineering approaches 
They might read them and destroy the earth. Or homeland insecurity might see it, and then you'd be in even more trouble! 
