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August 30, 2005
Top 10 Ways to Destroy the Earth
kay, I did have to laugh at this, but there's a little part of me that wonders if we are allowing geeks too much leeway and tax monies to pursue their particularly weird specialties. Sam Hughes at LiveScience has come up with a guide the tells us the Top 10 Ways to Destroy the Earth. Not destroy life on earth, but ending the planet as we know it.
Yes indeed. So what are the Top 10 Ways? It's worth reading the full text of the entire list, but since you might be in a hurry, here's the Reader's Digest version: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.
10. Total Existence Failure: You will need: nothing. Method: No method. Simply sit back and twiddle your thumbs as, completely by chance, all 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000 atoms making up the planet Earth suddenly, simultaneously and spontaneously cease to exist.
9. Gobbled Up By Strangelets: You will need: a stable strangelet. Method: Hijack control of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Brookhaven National Laboratory, Long Island, New York. Use the RHIC to create and maintain a stable strangelet. Keep it stable for as long as it takes to absorb the entire Earth into a mass of strange quarks.
8. Sucked Into a Microscopic Black Hole: You will need: a microscopic black hole. Method: simply place your black hole on the surface of the Earth and wait.
7. Blown up by matter/antimatter reaction: You will need: 2,500,000,000,000 tons of antimatter. Method: This method involves detonating a bomb so big that it blasts the Earth to pieces.
6. Destroyed by vacuum energy detonation: You will need: a light bulb. Method: This is a fun one. Contemporary scientific theories tell us that ... the volume of space enclosed by a light bulb contains enough vacuum energy to boil every ocean in the world. ... All you need to do is figure out how to extract this energy and harness it in some kind of power plant - this can easily be done without arousing too much suspicion - then surreptitiously allow the reaction to run out of control.
5. Sucked into a giant black hole: You will need: a black hole, extremely powerful rocket engines, and, optionally, a large rocky planetary body. Method: after locating your black hole, you need get it and the Earth together.
4. Meticulously and systematically deconstructed: You will need: a powerful mass driver, or ideally lots of them; ready access to roughly 2*10^32J. Method: Basically, what we're going to do here is dig up the Earth, a big chunk at a time, and boost the whole lot of it into orbit. Yes. All six sextillion tons of it.
3. Pulverized by impact with blunt instrument: You will need: a big heavy rock, something with a bit of a swing to it... perhaps Mars. Method: Essentially, anything can be destroyed if you hit it hard enough. ANYTHING. The concept is simple: find a really, really big asteroid or planet, accelerate it up to some dazzling speed, and smash it into Earth, preferably head-on but whatever you can manage.
2. Eaten by von Neumann machines: You will need: a single von Neumann machine. Method: A von Neumann machine is any device that is capable of creating an exact copy of itself given nothing but the necessary raw materials. Create one of these that subsists almost entirely on iron, magnesium, aluminum and silicon, the major elements found in Earth's mantle and core. It doesn't matter how big it is as long as it can reproduce itself exactly in any period of time. Release it into the ground under the Earth's crust and allow it to fend for itself.
1. Hurled into the sun: You will need: Earthmoving equipment. Method: Hurl the Earth into the Sun.
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Posted by witnit at August 30, 2005 12:58 AM
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