14.01.2005, 00:50
Sucked into a giant black hole
You will need: a black hole, extremely powerful rocket engines, and, optionally, a large rocky planetary body. The nearest black hole to our planet is 1600 light years from Earth in the direction of Sagittarius, orbiting V4641.
Method: after locating your black hole, you need to move it as close to Earth as possible. This is likely to be the most time-consuming part of this plan. There are two methods, moving Earth or moving the black hole. Moving the Earth is simply a case of building three or four upward-pointing rocket engines (possibly nuclear? and each roughly the size of Switzerland) and firing them at strategic moments to steer it onto a collision course with your black hole of choice. Moving the black hole requires rather more skill since it is impossible to physically touch it and survive. For this you need to build your rockets on a completely different planet and push this in front of the black hole, towing it along in a carrot-and-donkey fashion. If time is short, you can consider moving both the Earth AND the black hole simultaneously.
Earth's final resting place: a nondescript cubic centimetre of neutronium in the heart of the part of the mass of the black hole (thanks, cakedamber).
Feasibility rating: 4/10. Way beyond our technological reach.
Earliest feasible completion date: I do not expect the necessary technology to be available until AD 3000, and add at least 1600 years for travel time.
Sources: The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy, by Douglas Adams; space.com.
Blown up by matter/antimatter reaction
You will need: twelve kilograms of antimatter, magnetic confinement chambers, a very deep hole in the ground. Antimatter - the most explosive substance possible - can be manufactured in small quantities using any large particle accelerator, but this may take some time to produce the required amounts. If you can create the appropriate machinery, it may be possible simply to "flip" 12kg of matter through a fourth dimension, turning it all to antimatter at once.
Method: Choose a good spot. Drill a mine shaft all the way to the centre of the Earth (6,371km down). This is the minimum guaranteed effective depth for your antimatter planetbuster bomb, but roughly 3000km should be sufficient for near-total disintegration. While drilling, manufacture 12 kilograms of antimatter and store it in magnetic confinement chambers for detonation. Place the antimatter at the bottom of the shaft, and switch off the confinement chambers. The resulting release of energy (obeying Einstein's famous mass-energy equation, E=mc2) should be sufficient to, at the very least, split the Earth into a thousand pieces.
UPDATE! Instead of going to all the trouble of constructing and maintaining a 3000km mineshaft (bearing in mind that the deepest such shaft built to date is a mere 3000-odd metres), consider loading your antimatter onto a self-contained drilling machine, perhaps powered by geothermal energy. This could burrow its way all the way to the core of Earth without you having to worry about keeping the passage behind it open. Note, however, that communicating a "detonate" command through a half-planet of molten iron is easily as difficult a task as manufacturing the antimatter in the first place. Timed or depth-triggered devices, on the other hand, are prone to failure.
Earth's final resting place: A second asteroid belt around the Sun.
Comments: Rubyflame informs me that 12 kg of antimatter would be nowhere near enough, and the appropriate calculations suggest that one would actually require somewhere in the region of a billion tonnes. In this case, four-dimensionally flipping an appropriately sized rock could prove to be the only surefire method. I should've known that it was never that easy. Thanks, Rubyflame.
trembling says I still think that antimatter is crazy s**t, i.e. wouldn't want it on my flapjacks
Feasibility rating: 5/10. Just about slightly possible.
Earliest feasible completion date: AD 2500. Of course, if it does prove possible to manufacture antimatter in the sufficiently large quantities you require - which is not necessarily the case - then smaller antimatter bombs will be around long before then.
Hurled into the Sun
You will need: a very large meteor indeed (say half the size of the Moon, or actually the Moon would do), some method of steering it
Method: Collision with any kind of meteor is unlikely to do any more damage to the Earth than carving a chunk out of it, rendering it uninhabitable, and knocking it out of its orbit. However, if you do your maths right, knocking it out of its orbit may be enough. Sending Earth on a collision course with the Sun is not as easy as one might think; it's surprisingly easy to end up with Earth in a loopy elliptical orbit which merely roasts it for four months in every eight, but with skill and backspin it can be done. Attach whatever rockets are necessary to a rocky body which is sufficiently far from the Earth. Swivel the body to face in the correct direction, and fire the rockets for a good long burn so that you build up a good speed. Note: more important than high speed is precision. Some knowledge of billiards may be useful.
Earth's final resting place: a small globule of vaporized iron sinking slowly into the heart of the Sun.
Feasibility rating: 6/10. Impossible at our current technological level, but may happen by freak accident.
Earliest feasible completion date: Via act of God: 2028 - any earlier and we'd have already spotted the asteroid in question. Via human intervention: given the current level of expansion of space technology, 2250 at best.
Source: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, by Grant Naylor
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, aluminium 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. I suggest exploring the possibilities of using geothermal energy as a power source. Release it into the ground under the Earth's crust and allow it to fend for itself. Watch and wait as it creates a second von Neumann machine, then they create two more, then they create four more. As the population of machines doubles repeatedly, the planet Earth will, terrifyingly soon, be entirely eaten up and turned into a swarm of as many as at least six trillion trillion machines. Technically your objective would now be complete - no more Earth - but if you want to be thorough then you can command your VNMs to hurl themselves, along with any remaining trace elements, into the Sun. This hurling would have to be achieved using rocket propulsion of some sort - thanks, C-Dawg - so be sure to include this in your design.
Earth's final resting place: the bodies of the VNMs themselves, then a small lump of iron sinking into the Sun.
Comments: randombit suggests that nanobots, as opposed to macroscopic VNMs, are the way to go. They consume raw materials and build new nanobots and/or nanoassemblers. "I suppose a giant killer robot that built more copies would work to, but doing it at the molecular level seems easer." Good thinking, randombit!
Feasibility rating: 7/10. So crazy it might just work.
Earliest feasible completion date: Potentially 2045-2050, or even earlier.
Source: 2010: Odyssey Two, by Arthur C. Clarke
Meticulously and systematically deconstructed
You will need: a powerful mass driver, or ideally lots of them; ready access to roughly 1026J
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 septillion tonnes of it. A mass driver is a sort of oversized electromagnetic railgun, which was once proposed as a way of getting mined materials back from the Moon to Earth - basically, you just load it into the driver and fire it upwards in roughly the right direction. We'd use a particularly powerful model - big enough to hit escape velocity of 11 kilometres per second even after atmospheric considerations - and launch it all into the Sun or randomly into space.
Alternate methods for boosting the material into space include loading the extracted material into space shuttles or taking it up via space elevator. All these methods, however, require a - let me emphasize this - titanic quantity of energy to carry out. Building a Dyson sphere ain't gonna cut it here. (Note: Actually, it would. But if you have the technology to build a Dyson sphere, why are you reading this?) See below for a possible solution.
Earth's final resting place: Many tiny pieces, some dropped into the Sun, the remainder scattered across the rest of the Solar System.
Feasibility rating: 8/10. If we wanted to and were willing to devote resources to it, we could start this process RIGHT NOW. Indeed, what with all the gunk left in orbit, on the Moon and heading out into space, we already have done.
Earliest feasible completion date: Ah. Yes. At a billion tonnes of mass driven out of the Earth's gravity well per second: 189,000,000 years.
Source: this method arose when JoeBaldwin and I knocked our heads together by accident.
Destroyed by vacuum energy detonation
You will need: a light bulb
Method: This is a fun one. Contemporary scientific theories tell us that what we may see as vacuum is only vacuum on average, and actually thriving with vast amounts of particles and antiparticles constantly appearing and then annihilating each other. It also suggests that the volume of space enclosed by a light bulb contains enough vacuum energy to boil every ocean in the world. Therefore, vacuum energy could prove to be the most abundant energy source of any kind. Which is where you come in. 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. The resulting release of energy would easily be enough to annihilate all of planet Earth and probably the Sun too.
Earth's final resting place: a rapidly expanding cloud of particles of varying size.
Comments: unperson's quantum field theory courses suggest that the quantity of vacuum energy available from zero point fluctuations in this method would actually be infinite. Ironically, though this doesn't invalidate the theory, it doesn't sound nearly as impressive... thanks, unperson.
Feasibility rating: 9/10. Worryingly plausible.
Earliest feasible completion date: 2060 or so.
Source: 3001: The Final Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
Swallowed up as the Sun enters red giant stage
You will need: patience
Method: Simply wait for roughly 5,000,000,000 years. During its natural progress along the Main Sequence, the Sun will exhaust its initial reserves of hydrogen fuel and expand into a red giant star - swallowing up Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars in the process. This is your basic fall-back method if all of the above fail.
Earth's final resting place: Again, boiling red iron in the heart of the Sun.
Comments: Rob, before he expired, also told me that this method is also semantically inaccurate, since you are not the one who destroys or causes the destruction of the Earth. Hey, whatever works.
Feasibility rating: 10/10. Guaranteed to work.
Earliest feasible completion date: AD 5,000,000,000
You will need: a black hole, extremely powerful rocket engines, and, optionally, a large rocky planetary body. The nearest black hole to our planet is 1600 light years from Earth in the direction of Sagittarius, orbiting V4641.
Method: after locating your black hole, you need to move it as close to Earth as possible. This is likely to be the most time-consuming part of this plan. There are two methods, moving Earth or moving the black hole. Moving the Earth is simply a case of building three or four upward-pointing rocket engines (possibly nuclear? and each roughly the size of Switzerland) and firing them at strategic moments to steer it onto a collision course with your black hole of choice. Moving the black hole requires rather more skill since it is impossible to physically touch it and survive. For this you need to build your rockets on a completely different planet and push this in front of the black hole, towing it along in a carrot-and-donkey fashion. If time is short, you can consider moving both the Earth AND the black hole simultaneously.
Earth's final resting place: a nondescript cubic centimetre of neutronium in the heart of the part of the mass of the black hole (thanks, cakedamber).
Feasibility rating: 4/10. Way beyond our technological reach.
Earliest feasible completion date: I do not expect the necessary technology to be available until AD 3000, and add at least 1600 years for travel time.
Sources: The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy, by Douglas Adams; space.com.
Blown up by matter/antimatter reaction
You will need: twelve kilograms of antimatter, magnetic confinement chambers, a very deep hole in the ground. Antimatter - the most explosive substance possible - can be manufactured in small quantities using any large particle accelerator, but this may take some time to produce the required amounts. If you can create the appropriate machinery, it may be possible simply to "flip" 12kg of matter through a fourth dimension, turning it all to antimatter at once.
Method: Choose a good spot. Drill a mine shaft all the way to the centre of the Earth (6,371km down). This is the minimum guaranteed effective depth for your antimatter planetbuster bomb, but roughly 3000km should be sufficient for near-total disintegration. While drilling, manufacture 12 kilograms of antimatter and store it in magnetic confinement chambers for detonation. Place the antimatter at the bottom of the shaft, and switch off the confinement chambers. The resulting release of energy (obeying Einstein's famous mass-energy equation, E=mc2) should be sufficient to, at the very least, split the Earth into a thousand pieces.
UPDATE! Instead of going to all the trouble of constructing and maintaining a 3000km mineshaft (bearing in mind that the deepest such shaft built to date is a mere 3000-odd metres), consider loading your antimatter onto a self-contained drilling machine, perhaps powered by geothermal energy. This could burrow its way all the way to the core of Earth without you having to worry about keeping the passage behind it open. Note, however, that communicating a "detonate" command through a half-planet of molten iron is easily as difficult a task as manufacturing the antimatter in the first place. Timed or depth-triggered devices, on the other hand, are prone to failure.
Earth's final resting place: A second asteroid belt around the Sun.
Comments: Rubyflame informs me that 12 kg of antimatter would be nowhere near enough, and the appropriate calculations suggest that one would actually require somewhere in the region of a billion tonnes. In this case, four-dimensionally flipping an appropriately sized rock could prove to be the only surefire method. I should've known that it was never that easy. Thanks, Rubyflame.
trembling says I still think that antimatter is crazy s**t, i.e. wouldn't want it on my flapjacks
Feasibility rating: 5/10. Just about slightly possible.
Earliest feasible completion date: AD 2500. Of course, if it does prove possible to manufacture antimatter in the sufficiently large quantities you require - which is not necessarily the case - then smaller antimatter bombs will be around long before then.
Hurled into the Sun
You will need: a very large meteor indeed (say half the size of the Moon, or actually the Moon would do), some method of steering it
Method: Collision with any kind of meteor is unlikely to do any more damage to the Earth than carving a chunk out of it, rendering it uninhabitable, and knocking it out of its orbit. However, if you do your maths right, knocking it out of its orbit may be enough. Sending Earth on a collision course with the Sun is not as easy as one might think; it's surprisingly easy to end up with Earth in a loopy elliptical orbit which merely roasts it for four months in every eight, but with skill and backspin it can be done. Attach whatever rockets are necessary to a rocky body which is sufficiently far from the Earth. Swivel the body to face in the correct direction, and fire the rockets for a good long burn so that you build up a good speed. Note: more important than high speed is precision. Some knowledge of billiards may be useful.
Earth's final resting place: a small globule of vaporized iron sinking slowly into the heart of the Sun.
Feasibility rating: 6/10. Impossible at our current technological level, but may happen by freak accident.
Earliest feasible completion date: Via act of God: 2028 - any earlier and we'd have already spotted the asteroid in question. Via human intervention: given the current level of expansion of space technology, 2250 at best.
Source: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, by Grant Naylor
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, aluminium 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. I suggest exploring the possibilities of using geothermal energy as a power source. Release it into the ground under the Earth's crust and allow it to fend for itself. Watch and wait as it creates a second von Neumann machine, then they create two more, then they create four more. As the population of machines doubles repeatedly, the planet Earth will, terrifyingly soon, be entirely eaten up and turned into a swarm of as many as at least six trillion trillion machines. Technically your objective would now be complete - no more Earth - but if you want to be thorough then you can command your VNMs to hurl themselves, along with any remaining trace elements, into the Sun. This hurling would have to be achieved using rocket propulsion of some sort - thanks, C-Dawg - so be sure to include this in your design.
Earth's final resting place: the bodies of the VNMs themselves, then a small lump of iron sinking into the Sun.
Comments: randombit suggests that nanobots, as opposed to macroscopic VNMs, are the way to go. They consume raw materials and build new nanobots and/or nanoassemblers. "I suppose a giant killer robot that built more copies would work to, but doing it at the molecular level seems easer." Good thinking, randombit!
Feasibility rating: 7/10. So crazy it might just work.
Earliest feasible completion date: Potentially 2045-2050, or even earlier.
Source: 2010: Odyssey Two, by Arthur C. Clarke
Meticulously and systematically deconstructed
You will need: a powerful mass driver, or ideally lots of them; ready access to roughly 1026J
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 septillion tonnes of it. A mass driver is a sort of oversized electromagnetic railgun, which was once proposed as a way of getting mined materials back from the Moon to Earth - basically, you just load it into the driver and fire it upwards in roughly the right direction. We'd use a particularly powerful model - big enough to hit escape velocity of 11 kilometres per second even after atmospheric considerations - and launch it all into the Sun or randomly into space.
Alternate methods for boosting the material into space include loading the extracted material into space shuttles or taking it up via space elevator. All these methods, however, require a - let me emphasize this - titanic quantity of energy to carry out. Building a Dyson sphere ain't gonna cut it here. (Note: Actually, it would. But if you have the technology to build a Dyson sphere, why are you reading this?) See below for a possible solution.
Earth's final resting place: Many tiny pieces, some dropped into the Sun, the remainder scattered across the rest of the Solar System.
Feasibility rating: 8/10. If we wanted to and were willing to devote resources to it, we could start this process RIGHT NOW. Indeed, what with all the gunk left in orbit, on the Moon and heading out into space, we already have done.
Earliest feasible completion date: Ah. Yes. At a billion tonnes of mass driven out of the Earth's gravity well per second: 189,000,000 years.
Source: this method arose when JoeBaldwin and I knocked our heads together by accident.
Destroyed by vacuum energy detonation
You will need: a light bulb
Method: This is a fun one. Contemporary scientific theories tell us that what we may see as vacuum is only vacuum on average, and actually thriving with vast amounts of particles and antiparticles constantly appearing and then annihilating each other. It also suggests that the volume of space enclosed by a light bulb contains enough vacuum energy to boil every ocean in the world. Therefore, vacuum energy could prove to be the most abundant energy source of any kind. Which is where you come in. 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. The resulting release of energy would easily be enough to annihilate all of planet Earth and probably the Sun too.
Earth's final resting place: a rapidly expanding cloud of particles of varying size.
Comments: unperson's quantum field theory courses suggest that the quantity of vacuum energy available from zero point fluctuations in this method would actually be infinite. Ironically, though this doesn't invalidate the theory, it doesn't sound nearly as impressive... thanks, unperson.
Feasibility rating: 9/10. Worryingly plausible.
Earliest feasible completion date: 2060 or so.
Source: 3001: The Final Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
Swallowed up as the Sun enters red giant stage
You will need: patience
Method: Simply wait for roughly 5,000,000,000 years. During its natural progress along the Main Sequence, the Sun will exhaust its initial reserves of hydrogen fuel and expand into a red giant star - swallowing up Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars in the process. This is your basic fall-back method if all of the above fail.
Earth's final resting place: Again, boiling red iron in the heart of the Sun.
Comments: Rob, before he expired, also told me that this method is also semantically inaccurate, since you are not the one who destroys or causes the destruction of the Earth. Hey, whatever works.
Feasibility rating: 10/10. Guaranteed to work.
Earliest feasible completion date: AD 5,000,000,000