Centre for Applied Eschatology

It works as follows:

1. Quantumly randomise the list, such that there is no way of knowing what order the list is in until it is observed. This will divide the universe into O(n!) universes; however, the division has no cost, as it happens constantly anyway.

2. If the list is not sorted, destroy the universe. (This operation is left as an exercise to the reader.)

3. All remaining universes contain lists which are sorted.

- http://wiki.c2.com/?QuantumBogoSort

Depopulating a city is relatively easy and achievable with conventional bombs. A small country would only be moderately more difficult with nuclear weapons. After this, things get much harder.

Sure, enough nukes could finish off the human race, but that's out of the price range for most shoppers in this market. In the long term, climate change might do it, but who's got that sort of time? You're probably left with something like a biological agent, a pathogen of some sort, and still run the risk of pockets of people hiding away or being immune. Still, let's say you did it, it worked, humans are gone. Yay! You destroyed the world! Right?

No. You extinguished one species. You have a long way to go on the entire world.

So you put your mind to it. Defoliation agents for the plants, the cast of Deadliest Catch to get the crabs (you planned ahead and saved them from the nuclear fallout), a few billion tons of boric acid for the roaches-- get it all covered. Yay, party time?

Again, no. If you were meticulously thorough, you killed all life, but really the project has just begun. Everything is dead, but it's all still here. The Earth is still here. And if you thought rooting out the last extremophiles was hard work, you've never had to try & sweep 6 * 10^24 kg of mass under the rug.

Do you break it up? Is that enough? Technically it's still there and if you leave it it will all just accrete back together. So maybe you decide to push it into the Sun, either piece by piece or all at once, depending on on your level of godhood.

Finally, you can relax. Cut yourself a nice piece of "I destroyed the world" cake. Have a beer... ... ... Ehh, maybe don't eat the cake or drink the beer. You didn't really destroy the world, of it's matter sti exists. It's not gone, it's just molten.

So no cake for you. In fact, it will be a long long time before you see any cake coming your way.

The response to 'How can I help?', namely 'You are surely helping already' seems like the biggest clue to me that this is a joke.

I dunno, there's plenty of nukes that are ready and waiting and have been paid for. I wonder what would be more effective; nuking the targets that have been designated by various states already since the cold war, or piling up all the nukes, maybe a few km underground, and trigger a cataclysmic event (like a supervolcano as mentioned on the page).

Re: climate change, they could accellerate the process a bit and nuke the north and south pole ice, maybe. Or spread a darkening agent on any exposed ice to increase heat absorption.

But anyway, I don't think any of these would completely sterilize the earth, possibly only humanity and other large animals. To sterilize it, we need to get rid of the atmosphere and most of the earth's crust. I guess a big enough asteroid could do it (think moon-sized), something whose impact is so big it breaks up the whole ball.