How to destroy the Earth (completely)

by aycangulez • 16 years ago

117 73 16 years ago

mseebach• 16 years ago

This is somewhat entertaining, but it's a giant strawman. When someone talks about destroying earth, they don't mean literally making the planet cease to be a such, they don't even mean annihilating humanity. They mean permanently making earth a significantly less pleasant place to live for a significant portion of its population. Such as, cutting down the rain forest, disrupting the CO2 pump (or whatever) and lowering the air quality with more disease to follow (or some variation - either way, it's still a planet, and it's still very much populated by humans).

aycangulez• 16 years ago

I have updated the title. It represents the article better, and hopefully makes it clear that the article is tongue-in-cheek :)

ErrantX3• 16 years ago

> They mean permanently making earth a significantly less pleasant place to live for a significant portion of its population.

In the context of this article such people would be termed either "wannabes" or "lacking in vision".

stcredzero11• 16 years ago

Really? We're talking about those who can see a way to achieve basically the same thing, but whose methods are dozens of orders of magnitude more efficient. That strikes me as clever. To me, the ones who propose such a ridiculous goal are those "lacking in vision."

noonespecial2• 16 years ago

If you really want to do a thorough job, you'll need a Vogon and a bulletin board.

ErrantX3• 16 years ago

You mean "Vogon constructor fleet"? A single Vogon seems a non-optimal strategy (seeing as mass suicide via poetry is only a partial solution)

jerf• 16 years ago

When a writer chooses a definition, as long as the definition is not insane ("When I say 'brutal murder', I actually mean the color purple"), you really have to go along with it. English is not a sufficiently precise language to be immediately suitable to the expression of all ideas.

I don't know what the original title was, but I do know the contents of the article, in which the author makes it abundantly (and if you read everything in that section, repeatedly) clear that he is aware of the usual use of the phrase "destroy the Earth". It is not a "strawman", it is the topic of the essay. If anyone is erecting a strawman, it is those who refuse to deal with the text on its own terms and insist on forcing their personal definitions of various terms onto the text, despite clear, repeated disclaimers, and the obvious fact that the entire idea of the essay is predicated on the author's definition.

Maybe you were just reacting to this title, but this has been linked in a few places and every time it seems this reminder needs to be given, so even if you are now satisfied by the new title, this still needs saying. An author is free to choose their topic and the precise meaning of some of the terms they are using; nothing else makes any sense.

stcredzero11• 16 years ago

Insane? How about nonsensical? The "blow up the earth real good" goal is of the mentality of someone who watches Star Wars and decides the movie portrays real physics. Vaporizing the oceans and turning the crust into molten lava is plenty of destruction. It's also many orders of magnitude less energy than a lot of the patently unphysical proposals in the article. Equivalent mass of antimatter? You'd need a lot less than that to exceed the gravitational binding energy of planet Earth, and even that is ridiculously inefficient.

That's like the proposal to achieve AI by simulating a whole human body down to the molecules. It sounds clever to college freshmen, but it really just shows people are ignorant of the orders of magnitude of what they're discussing.

DeusExMachina• 16 years ago

Already discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=998734

stcredzero11• 16 years ago

This is an amazing topic for getting scientific misconceptions out in the open. Unfortunately, it does nothing for allaying them. People keep on insisting on ridiculous things like dropping the Earth into the Sun, even though there are far more efficient ways to reduce the whole planet to a featureless, lifeless molten glob. Most of the people who have the capacity to learn from such a thread have already learned and the people left haven't the inclination.

This particular article can't hold a candle to rec.arts.sf.science discussions of the same topic from the early 90's.

pesco• 16 years ago

This is completely old, but so funny every time, I have to up it. :)

greenlblue• 16 years ago

Hilarious.

pvdm• 16 years ago

"Give me the place to stand, and I shall move the earth." Archimedes. Said to be his assertion in demonstrating the principle of the lever.

ErrantX3• 16 years ago

Moving the Earth is dealt with in some (err, much) depth here: http://qntm.org/moving

In terms of Archimedes:

"Give me a place to stand, and I will move the Earth", proclaimed Archimedes upon discovering the principles of leverage. Unfortunately, that place needs to be immovable, which is impossible. Also, what he didn't specify is that he also needs an equally immovable fulcrum - equally impossible - and a lever of stunning length which is unbreakable. Hah! Nice try, Archimedes.

astine• 16 years ago

"Unfortunately, that place needs to be immovable"

No, it merely needs to be of sufficient mass. As a practical strategy for moving the earth, this would clearly be infeasible, but, strictly speaking, I don't think that it is impossible.

mkramlich• 16 years ago

Talk about exactly the kind of article title I wouldn't want to be easy to find by bad guys.

sliverstorm4• 16 years ago

If they have the kind of time, money and resources to pull these things off, I think their discovery of this article is the least of our problems.

I mean, if you've got 25,000,000,000,000 tonnes of antimatter just laying around in a warehouse somewhere, I don't care if you want to kill me and destroy the earth- I want to shake your hand.

exit• 16 years ago

if no one existed there would be no suffering.

joe_the_user4• 16 years ago

One point of note is that is that a small-enough black hole would be essentially harmless.

See http://www.aip.org/pnu/2008/split/871-1.html

Obviously, there is a tipping point where a black hole becomes dangerous - but it's worth remembering that gravity is the weakest of the major forces. Any physics geeks care to calculate how long it would take an Everest-sized black hole to eat the earth?

ars14• 16 years ago

The calculations are impossible without lots more details, but do you mean Everest volume, or Everest mass?

joe_the_user4• 16 years ago

Given this is entirely for entertainment purposes, any back-of-envelope speculation will do.

The article does mention Everest mass.

Everest volume would, of course, not be a "small" black hole at all.

sliverstorm4• 16 years ago

> One point of note is that is that a small-enough black hole would be essentially harmless.

I never realized that.

... Can I have one as a pet?

dmoney2• 16 years ago

Destroying the Earth is kind of overkill. Unless you're making way for a hyperspace bypass, most supervillains' needs could be served by destroying what makes it different from any other planet. Burn off the atmosphere, melt the crust, release a metagenic virus that kills the biosphere, dump 130 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico...

ars14• 16 years ago

And?

Did you read the article?

dmoney2• 16 years ago

And what?

I read it the last couple times it was posted here.

dennisgorelik• 16 years ago

That article is a good demonstration of scientific entertainment. I liked that method: --- "What you need to do is to point our most powerful radio-telescope transmitters at likely solar systems and taunt them. 'The girly-beings in your miserable solar system could never destroy a planet as cool as this one...'" ---

stcredzero11• 16 years ago

Many think that all we have to do is show:

1) we are here

2) that we're savages who have nuclear weapons and who are perfectly willing to use them on each other.

3) we're going to develop interstellar spacecraft

I think many civilizations worthy of the name would want to bomb us before we get out of Earth's gravity well en masse.

sliverstorm4• 16 years ago

In the grand scheme of things, I have come to realize nuclear warheads are not that fearsome. Thus far they have caused less damage to the surface of the earth than a pimple causes to your face. And the earth is insignificantly small.

They are definitely scalable, but they are certainly no Dr. Device

blitzo• 16 years ago

They left out one possible solution: create a time machine to traveled back to a minute before 4.54 billion years ago. Equipment needed: high-pressured suction vacuum machine preferably solar-powered with a dustbag hard enough to store around 1.08321 × 1012 km3 mass volume of solar's dust and gas left over. Contrary to popular believe, it is actually easy to shop for a decent time-traveled machine: imdb.com Feasibility: 1/10

bkudria• 16 years ago

This is fun and all, but my question is: what happens when all the honeybees die out?

eru• 16 years ago

Let them eat cake.

Avshalom4• 16 years ago

There are a couple of comments here about the phrase "destroy the world" normally referring to life on earth.

In that vein I'd like to say that killing all life currently within 6500 kilometers of the Earth's center of mass is, in some ways, harder than simply destroying the Earth.

Take for instance the humble Water Bear they range from microscopic to a millimeter in size and can survive being frozen to within a degree of 0k and have survived 10 days in hard vacuum, during which time eggs were laid and hatched. It seems likely that any of the various "disassemble Earth" methods would fail to kill them. Similarly any chunk of Earth with a sealed ecosystem, like some caves, might continue to keep going indefinitely.

Killing everything might require vaporizing the planet in the sun or eating it with a black hole.

stcredzero11• 16 years ago

Heating the biosphere and the crust to a depth of 5 miles to 500 degrees and keeping it there for at least a couple of hours would likely do it, even for the Water Bears and radiolarens. That could be accomplished with asteroid/comet bombardment. The energy budget for that is many orders of magnitude smaller than most of the proposals in the article.

Avshalom4• 16 years ago

Well you'd probably want to go deeper than 5 miles to be sure. But a massive comet strike doesn't guarantee the sterilization of ejected material which is really the difficult part. Because there is life that can handle vacuum you have to not only heat the world to 200C (we think) but you have do it in a way that nothing larger than individuals molecules escape due to heating. which is also tricky because at some altitude in the atmosphere evaporative cooling might allow for something to survive indefinite periods of superheated crust.

EDIT: really what it comes down to is how many 9s of biocide do you want. Ramming Luna into the Earth might accomplish 7 or 8 9s, but if you want to kill everything, 100% of life from LEO down not just practically everything it's going to take more finesse than that.

bitwize• 16 years ago

An Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator will not suffice?

stcredzero11• 16 years ago

Wabbits. (Admittedly, not the best reference, since there was no FUD in that episode.)

How to destroy the Earth (completely)

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