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How to destroy the Earth (2006)

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Re: How to destroy the Earth (2006)

#11

Post by abecedarius »

wlesieutre wrote: post #5
ck2 wrote: post #2

This comes up on HN every year but I re-read it every time. My idea is just figure out a way to nudge earth towards the sun and inertia will do the rest, slowly but surely, so a vote for their #10 Or settle for wiping out all human life on earth and earth will survive just fine without us. Picking a US President that will use nuclear weapons might be a dangerous starting point to investigate.

> My idea is just figure out a way to nudge earth towards the sun and inertia will do the rest, slowly but surely, so a vote for their #10 I don't think you can. Even if you could give the whole Earth a push toward the sun, it has enough orbital velocity (~30,000 m/sec) that it'll miss and keep on going around. You might turn its orbit into a slightly different ellipse. Say we want to straight up (down?) launch a pro…

It's straightforward: throw the moon off in the direction of Earth's motion around the sun. The Earth has 81 moon-masses, so you'd have to throw the moon 81 times faster: still less than 1% of the speed of light. That'd take considerable energy, but the sun outputs 3.846×10^26 W, so we'd only need 17 years of total solar output. It'd be a lot easier to just roast the Earth's surface, it's true.

(I haven't read the original post in a long time, but had thought about it myself before.)

Re: How to destroy the Earth (2006)

#12

Post by _kst_ »

Method 1: Annihilated by an equivalent quantity of antimatter

I don't think this would work as well as one might assume. When Earth and anti-Earth collide, the vast majority of the mass will be blown into space by the initial explosion, and will never actually get a chance to annihilate. There might even be some coherent chunks left over.

If you can manage to transform every other atom from matter to antimatter, evenly distributed through the body of the planet, then you've got yourself a good kaboom.

Method 11: Ripped apart by tidal forces.

The idea here is to move Earth within the Roche limit of either the Sun or Jupiter. The problem is that the Roche limit depends on density, and Earth is substantially denser than either the Sun or Jupiter (Earth 5.51, Sun 1.41, Jupiter 1.33). I haven't done the math, but it's possible that the relevant Roche limit in both cases would be below the surface -- i.e., the Earth would (barely) survive the tidal stress even in a surface-hugging orbit. And once you've done that, you might as well just drop it a little lower; falling into either the Sun or Jupiter would do the trick quite effectively.

Re: How to destroy the Earth (2006)

#13

Post by gambiting »

Bjartr wrote: post #9
zeveb wrote: post #6

This reminds me of what the Web used to be: amusing entries by interesting people, devoid of advertising, marketing or JavaScript.

It's still there, the signal-to-noise radio is much, much worse though.

Yeah, article like this one would exist, but with a caption "You wouldn't believe 10 ways this guy invented to destroy the earth! Number 6 will blow your mind!" and then the article is split in 100 pages just to get more clicks.

Re: How to destroy the Earth (2006)

#14

Post by TeMPOraL »

ck2 wrote: post #2

This comes up on HN every year but I re-read it every time. My idea is just figure out a way to nudge earth towards the sun and inertia will do the rest, slowly but surely, so a vote for their #10 Or settle for wiping out all human life on earth and earth will survive just fine without us. Picking a US President that will use nuclear weapons might be a dangerous starting point to investigate.

> Or settle for wiping out all human life on earth and earth will survive just fine without us. Picking a US President that will use nuclear weapons might be a dangerous starting point to investigate.

This may be very dangerous. When you take antibiotics, you need to do the full course, 'lest some bacteria survive. Similarly, if the nuclear destruction isn't complete enough, the surviving humans will repopulate the planet and continue to trouble it for millennia to come. When planning an apocalypse, one needs to be sure it can be carried out to the end.

Re: How to destroy the Earth (2006)

#15

Post by TeMPOraL »

Bjartr wrote: post #9
zeveb wrote: post #6

This reminds me of what the Web used to be: amusing entries by interesting people, devoid of advertising, marketing or JavaScript.

It's still there, the signal-to-noise radio is much, much worse though.

Unfortunately, the increasing noise is rapidly pushing interesting information to below Shannon limit.

Re: How to destroy the Earth (2006)

#16

Post by stcredzero »

paulpauper wrote: post #4

hmm...the singularity not the same as event horizon. The Schwarzschild radius of the earth is 9mm. The singularity is infinitely small

You talk about "the singularity" as if it exists. For all we know, that could be a mathematical fiction due to our limited understanding. The Event Horizon as we currently understand it might as well be the demarcation to a separate universe. We have no access to any information from the events beyond it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNaEBbFbvcY

Re: How to destroy the Earth (2006)

#17

Post by TeMPOraL »

wlesieutre wrote: post #5
ck2 wrote: post #2

This comes up on HN every year but I re-read it every time. My idea is just figure out a way to nudge earth towards the sun and inertia will do the rest, slowly but surely, so a vote for their #10 Or settle for wiping out all human life on earth and earth will survive just fine without us. Picking a US President that will use nuclear weapons might be a dangerous starting point to investigate.

> My idea is just figure out a way to nudge earth towards the sun and inertia will do the rest, slowly but surely, so a vote for their #10 I don't think you can. Even if you could give the whole Earth a push toward the sun, it has enough orbital velocity (~30,000 m/sec) that it'll miss and keep on going around. You might turn its orbit into a slightly different ellipse. Say we want to straight up (down?) launch a pro…

> You could potentially dump some energy with a gravitational assist off of Venus (transfer some of our momentum into speeding up its orbit while slowing ours down)

I've heard that a hard turn around Jupiter is even better. I remember Scott Manley dropping a probe into Kerbol via Jool gravity assist in one video[0].

Actually, now I want to make a simulation with Earth doing Jupiter flybys. What's good for that nowadays? Universe Sandbox?

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNS6VKNXY6s

Re: How to destroy the Earth (2006)

#18

Post by stcredzero »

gambiting wrote: post #13
Bjartr wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still there, the signal-to-noise radio is much, much worse though.

Yeah, article like this one would exist, but with a caption "You wouldn't believe 10 ways this guy invented to destroy the earth! Number 6 will blow your mind!" and then the article is split in 100 pages just to get more clicks.

There were far more interesting USENET articles than this op in rec.arts.sf.science. There were back of the envelope calcs by researchers involving hypothetical attempts by humanity to boil the biosphere using decades worth of global industrial output to seen the entire planet with a grid of hydrogen bombs. This one is a 1+ steps removed rip-off of those discussions.

Re: How to destroy the Earth (2006)

#19

Post by Shivetya »

_kst_ wrote: post #12

Method 1: Annihilated by an equivalent quantity of antimatter I don't think this would work as well as one might assume. When Earth and anti-Earth collide, the vast majority of the mass will be blown into space by the initial explosion, and will never actually get a chance to annihilate. There might even be some coherent chunks left over. If you can manage to transform every other atom from matter to antimatter, even…

I read this site and am reminded of EE Doc Smith's Lensman series. He has many of the methods described, including hurling an antimatter planet at another, relativistic speed planets, and even a sun beam though that was used to vaporize a fleet.

Great imagination with a few throw backs to the sensibilities of his age but he did go beyond them too

Re: How to destroy the Earth (2006)

#20

Post by stcredzero »

ck2 wrote: post #2

This comes up on HN every year but I re-read it every time. My idea is just figure out a way to nudge earth towards the sun and inertia will do the rest, slowly but surely, so a vote for their #10 Or settle for wiping out all human life on earth and earth will survive just fine without us. Picking a US President that will use nuclear weapons might be a dangerous starting point to investigate.

My idea is just figure out a way to nudge earth towards the sun and inertia will do the rest

ARRGH! This is about as big a misunderstanding as not knowing the difference between sending a rocket to space vs. getting to orbit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNS6VKNXY6s

tl;dr -- the Earth is whizzing around the Sun at a really high speed. You'd have to cancel most of that velocity to get a spacecraft to get anywhere near the Sun. It would actually be less energy to send the Earth to Jupiter than to drop it into the Sun.

You've repeatedly re-read this article, but never delved into basic orbital mechanics all that time!? I'm going to have to remember this in my chronicles of "Stuff I've actually seen posted in comments on HN."

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