plan B: wait another 10 billion years, and the sun will destroy the earth when it becomes a giant.
How to destroy the Earth (2006)
41–47 of 47 posts
Re: How to destroy the Earth (2006)
#42Fools. The way to destroy the Earth is for me to remove 1% of the electrons from my motorcycle.
Re: How to destroy the Earth (2006)
#43I choose a "meticulously deconstructed" variant. I call it the "onion method". First, invent a self-replicating robot. It does not need to be miniaturized. It would actually probably work better if they were all stadium-sized. Allow replication, using solar energy and near-surface resources, until the entire planet is covered by a uniform layer one robot deep. The robots then securely connect to their nearest neighbo…
Solar wind is not strong enough to put something in orbit.
The center of gravity of the shell starts coincident with the center of gravity of Earth. So as long as the shell keeps its integrity, and the center of mass of the Earth is inside the spherical shell, it is effectively unattached to the Earth by gravity.
Let's also assume that the first round of robot-building made the Earth a perfectly smooth ellipsoid. So now you have a spherical shell on a spherical planet, standing on trillions of robot wheels. All the robots sync up, and do some math, and at the same millisecond mark, start turning their wheels.
So the shell starts spinning faster than Earth. Its increase in angular momentum is subtracted from Earth's angular momentum. The robots now have to link arms pretty tightly to keep their wheels in contact with the surface. They connect to each other with cables of adjustable length.
Escape velocity at Earth's surface is about 11.2 km/s. That's not practical due to atmospheric drag. Even a stable orbit at 200 km altitude requires 7.8 km/s. So the shell runs as fast as it can in air. Then all the robots simultaneously jettison their legs and spool out their cables, and the whole thing jumps in altitude.
Now they start sacrificing. The robots nearest the spin axis twist as hard as they can on their own cables, slowing their own spin and increasing that of the remaining robots in the shell. Then they let go and drop back to Earth. The next opposing rings of robots do the same. Eventually, you reach a point where a spherical ring section of the shell is spinning fast enough to keep the linkages under a reasonable amount of tension, entirely outside the atmosphere.
Now each robot deploys a solar sail, and angles it to accelerate the ring towards the winter end of Earth's axis, until Earth gravity starts pulling it back. Then the sails tack, and start pushing in the opposite direction. It's like pumping your legs on a playground swing. Eventually, the entire ring achieves Earth-escape velocity and flies off. Then you repeat with a new shell.
[Edit:] Actually, let's make the shell an ellipsoid with greater eccentricity than the Earth during the spin-up phase. The robots nearest the poles can therefore keep running with wheels on the surface until their arms get torn off. Then the polar discs get sacrificed.
Re: How to destroy the Earth (2006)
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's still there, the signal-to-noise radio is much, much worse though.
Your comment suggested a new tool/feature to me: what if we had something like Google, except it added the additional constraint where it only led you to sites/pages that were in that old retro lean static simple HTML style. The graph of text pages, perhaps with embedded images, version of the web. Ideally it would be just an add-on feature to an existing web search engine like Google. But if you wanted to boot it up…
>Your comment suggested a new tool/feature to me: what if we had something like Google, except it added the additional constraint where it only led you to sites/pages that were in that old retro lean static simple HTML style. The graph of text pages, perhaps with embedded images, version of the web.
Sometimes when looking for knowledge on Google and can only find blogspam, if the information isn't particularly volatile over time, e.g. information about effective exercises for various purposes, then I've got a trick that sometimes helps:
Use google's search tools to limit the results to a custom range of time, and only specify the end date as something like 2002. You end up getting just pre-web-2.0 stuff.
Re: How to destroy the Earth (2006)
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your comment suggested a new tool/feature to me: what if we had something like Google, except it added the additional constraint where it only led you to sites/pages that were in that old retro lean static simple HTML style. The graph of text pages, perhaps with embedded images, version of the web. Ideally it would be just an add-on feature to an existing web search engine like Google. But if you wanted to boot it up…
>Your comment suggested a new tool/feature to me: what if we had something like Google, except it added the additional constraint where it only led you to sites/pages that were in that old retro lean static simple HTML style. The graph of text pages, perhaps with embedded images, version of the web. Sometimes when looking for knowledge on Google and can only find blogspam, if the information isn't particularly volati…
nice suggestion! I'll try that
Re: How to destroy the Earth (2006)
#46Method 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 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. The author mentioned an Earth made from antimatter. How about a spherical shell of gaseous antimatter, whose total mass is equal to Earth?…
The matter-antimatter annihilation near the boundary would generate enough energy to blow the antimatter shell into deep space (where it would cause some serious problems for the rest of the Solar System).
The released energy would likely (I haven't done the math) be enough to vaporize the Earth, which would meet the original requirements, but I don't think it would annihilate a large percentage of the Earth's mass.
Re: How to destroy the Earth (2006)
#47This is from 2003, in fact.