Here's my Earth Day special. Bush and Pombo have nothing on me!
I had some trouble sleeping last night as happens occasionally these days. Usually there's some pressing concern that wakes up my brain and I go from one neurotic worry to another until I manage to convince myself it's all nonsense and I'd rather be asleep than putting myself through this. Sometimes I get up and do some random web surfing or read a little- though this can feed the mind and wake me up all the way if I'm not careful. Last night I found the perfect antidote: a website devoted to a discussion of how best to destroy the Earth.
Posted originally on New Worlds
Who in the world- or off of it- would want to do that? Well, bad guys of course. Sith lords working on Death Stars. etc. This is the cookbook. From the introduction:
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.
The site goes on to list 10 ways that the Earth could be destroyed, ranging from the least feasible- total existence failure, to the most- hurling Earth into the Sun. Each way listed includes what you will need, the method, Earth's final resting place, and the earliest feasible completion date. Fortunately, none of the methods described are likely to be employed in the lifetimes of anyone currently living on Earth which was somewhat heartening. In fact, I found the descriptions of the difficulties of such an enterprise to be so reassuring that I had no trouble at all getting back to a peaceful sleep soon after finishing reading the details of how to hurl Earth into the Sun.
Here are the ten methods ranging from least to most feasible.
Total existence failure
Gobbled up by strangelets
Sucked into a microscopic black hole
Blown up my matter/antimatter reaction
Destroyed by vacuum energy detonation
Sucked into a giant black hole
Meticulously and systematically deconstructed
Pulverized by impact with blunt instrument
Eaten by von Neumann machines
Hurled into the Sun
What's your favorite method for destroying the Earth?