How to destroy the Earth, part 6

6.
Blown up

You will need: 25,000,000,000,000 tonnes of antimatter.

Method: This method involves detonating a bomb so big that it blasts the Earth to pieces.

This, to say the least, requires a big bomb. All the explosives mankind has ever created, nuclear or non-, gathered together and detonated simultaneously, would make a significant crater and wreck the planet's ecosystem, but barely scratch the surface of the planet. There is evidence that in the past, asteroids have hit the Earth with the explosive yield of five billion Hiroshima bombs - and such evidence is difficult to find. It is, in short, insanely difficult to significantly alter the Earth's structure with explosives. This is not to mention the gravity problem. Just because you blasted the Earth apart doesn't mean you blasted it apart for good. If you don't blast it hard enough, the pieces will fall back together again under mutual gravitational attraction, and Earth, like the liquid metal Terminator, will reform from its shattered shards. You have to blow the Earth up hard enough to overcome that attraction.

How hard is that?

If you do the lengthy calculations you find that to liberate that much energy is equivalent to the complete annihilation of around 1,246,400,000,000 tonnes of antimatter. That's assuming zero energy loss to heat, neutrinos and radiation, which is unlikely to be the case in reality: You'll probably need to up the dose by at least a factor of twenty. Once you've generated your antimatter, probably in space, just launch it en masse towards Earth. The resulting release of energy (obeying Einstein's famous mass-energy equation, E=mc2) should be sufficient to split the Earth into a thousand pieces.

Greg Bear's novel, "The Forge Of God", contains an interesting refinement of this technique. Here, the antagonist instead generates antimatter in the form of a "slug" of anti-neutronium - superdense material massing a billion kilograms per cubic centimetre. This is fired into the Earth's core. Neutronium passes through ordinary matter as easily as a ball flies through the air, so the anti-neutronium slug doesn't annihilate immediately; rather, it builds up a protective sheath of plasma around it as it plunges downwards towards the Earth's core. It's then followed up by a slug of regular neutronium, which also falls into the core, at a time calculated to meet the first slug head-on at the exact centre of the Earth, where they annihilate themselves, and soon afterwards, the Earth itself. Highly space-efficient, and with the added bonus of all the energy being released at the Earth's core, where it can do the most damage. In the book, the antagonists simultaneously detonate nuclear warheads in certain oceanic trenches, to weaken the crust and allow the planet to be blown apart more easily.


Rearranging Earth into two planets - which, provisionally, is sufficient according to my current criteria - would take slightly less energy, but considerably more finesse.

Earth's final resting place: A second asteroid belt around the Sun.


Comments: trembling writes, "I still think that antimatter is crazy s**t, i.e. wouldn't want it on my flapjacks"

Feasibility rating: 4/10. Just about slightly possible.

How to destroy the Earth, part 1

In a series of articles (written by someone else) I will attempt to demonstrate that it is possible to destroy our home planet using the limits of our scientific knowledge.

But rest assured, readers. Its bloody difficult to do!

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 is 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.

This is not a guide for wusses whose aim is merely to wipe out humanity. I (Sam Hughes) can in no way guarantee the complete extinction of the human race via any of these methods, real or imaginary. Humanity is wily and resourceful, and many of the methods outlined below will take many years to even become available, let alone implement, by which time mankind may well have spread to other planets; indeed, other star systems. If total human genocide is your ultimate goal, you are reading the wrong document. There are far more efficient ways of doing this, many which are available and feasible RIGHT NOW. Nor is this a guide for those wanting to annihilate everything from single-celled life upwards, render Earth uninhabitable or simply conquer it. These are trivial goals in comparison.

This is a guide for those who do not want the Earth to be there anymore.


Mission statement

For the purposes of what I hope to be a technically and scientifically accurate document, I will define our goal thus: by any means necessary, to change the Earth into something other than a planet or a dwarf planet.

The International Astronomical Union defines a planet as:

a celestial body that

1. is in orbit around the Sun
2. has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and
3. has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit

and a dwarf planet as:

a celestial body that

1. is in orbit around the Sun
2. has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape,
3. has not cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit, and
4. is not a satellite.

These definitions instantly suggest some very simple ways of stripping the Earth of its planethood, such as hurling it into interstellar space, moving it into orbit around a gas giant, or moving it into a solar orbit whose neighbourhood is not cleared (the main asteroid belt being the most obvious choice). A slightly less obvious method would be redefining "planet" not to include the Earth. Naturally, these methods (the latter of which is by far the most feasible method listed in this document) will not be considered to count - redefining something doesn't make it go away.

We are left, therefore, with the challenge of significantly altering the Earth's physical structure, or else reducing its mass such that it can maintain a shape which is not round. For example: blowing it up, turning it into a dust cloud, merging it with a larger body, et cetera.
Current Earth-Destruction Status

* Number of times the Earth has been destroyed: 0

Information courtesy of the International Earth-Destruction Advisory Board

Methods for destroying the Earth

To be listed here, a method must actually work. That is, according to current scientific understanding, it must be possible for the Earth to actually be destroyed by this method, however improbable or impractical it may be.

Methods are ranked in order of feasibility. Feasibility ratings are given out of ten - these are based primarily on my gut instinct and do not reflect actual mathematical probabilities in any way.

1. Annihilated by an equivalent quantity of antimatter

You will need: An entire planet Earth made from antimatter

Antimatter - the most explosive substance possible - can be manufactured in small quantities using any large particle accelerator, but this will take preposterous amounts of time to produce the required amounts. If you can create the appropriate machinery, it may be possible to find or scrape together an approximately Earth-sized chunk of rock and simply to "flip" it all through a fourth spacial dimension, turning it all to antimatter at once.

Method: Once you've generated your antimatter, probably in space, just launch it en masse towards Earth. The resulting release of energy (obeying Einstein's famous mass-energy equation, E=mc2) is equivalent to the amount the Sun outputs in some 89 million years. Alternatively, if your matter-flipping machinery is a little more flexible, turn half the Earth into antimatter (say, the Western Hemisphere) and watch the fireworks.

Earth's final resting place: When matter and antimatter collide, they completely annihilate each other, leaving nothing but energy. All that would be left of Earth is a scintillating flash of light expanding across space forever. This method is one of the most permanent and total on this list, as the very matter which makes up the Earth ceases to exist, making it impossible to even reassemble the planet afterwards.

Feasibility rating: 2/10. It IS possible to create antimatter, so, technically, this method IS possible. But since the proposed matter-to-antimatter flipping machine is probably complete science fiction, we're looking at stupid, stupid amounts of time to pull this off.

Comments: With a significantly smaller amount of antimatter, you can simply blow the Earth up - see later.