13.01.2005, 23:50
Hier mal eine Klugscheisser Anleitung wie man die Erde zerstoert . Ist ziemlich genial und auch wenn es sehr lange ist, es lohnt sich wirklich. ;)
How to destroy the Earth
Preamble
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 a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It was built to last. 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 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 render the Earth into a form in which it may no longer be considered a planet. Such forms include, but are most definitely not limited to: two or more planets; any number of smaller asteroids; a quantum singularity; a dust cloud.
Current Earth-destruction Status
Number of times the Earth has been destroyed: 0
Number of plans currently in progress with the final aim of bringing about the Earth's destruction: 0
Number of scientific experiments currently underway with the potential to bring about the Earth's destruction: 0
Minimum amount of time until the Earth is destroyed by natural means (discounting total existance failure): 25 years
Minimum amount of time until the Earth is destroyed by artificial means: 50 years
Know your enemy
Age: 4,550,000,000 years
Mass: 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000 metric tonnes
Radius: 6,371 kilometres (average)
Surface gravity: 9.798 metres per second per second
Escape velocity: 11,186 metres per second
Physical structure (simplified):
Crust 0 to 35km Rock, hard and soft sediments, ice, miscellaneous 0 to 1000°C
Mantle 35 to 2900km Oxides of silicon, magnesium, iron and aluminium 1000 to 3700°C
Core 2900 to 6371km Iron (liquid shading to solid as you go deeper) 3700 to ~5000°C
Chemical composition by mass:
34.6% Iron
29.5% Oxygen
15.2% Silicon
12.7% Magnesium
2.4% Nickel
5.6% miscellaneous
Data from NASA and Wikipedia
Methods for destroying the Earth
Methods are ranked in order of feasibility.
Total existance failure
You will need: nothing
Method: No method. Simply sit back and twiddle your thumbs as, completely by chance, all 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms making up the planet Earth suddenly, simultaneously and spontaneously cease to exist. Note: the odds against this actually ever occuring are considerably greater than a googolplex (1010100) to one. Failing this, some kind of arcane (read: scientifically laughable) probability-manipulation device may be employed.
Current feasibility rating: 0/10. Utter, utter rubbish.
Existence negated via time travel
You will need: a time machine, heavy rock-moving equipment/explosives
Method: Using your time machine, travel back in time just over 4,500,000,000 years to shortly (i.e. a few billenia) before the formation of the Earth. What you should find in its place is a young Sun and an accretion disc formed of the dusty/[lexicon]rocky[/lexicon] material that will later become our Solar System. Find the patch of material that is likely to condense into the Earth. Now blow up, split apart and otherwise stir up the material so that it never gets a chance to come together and form the Earth. Return forwards in time in several hundred-million-year jumps, repeating the process each time so that no planet of any kind ever forms at roughly 1 AU from the Sun. If you make an error, simply go back in time and try again.
Earth's final resting place: When you finally return to the present day, you will be left with a largish asteroid belt where Earth should be. Alternatively, you may find that the matter has been assimilated into the bodies of other planets or the Sun.
Current feasibility rating: 0/10. Nonsense.
Comments: My good friend Rob rightly informs me that this course of action does not strictly speaking "destroy" the Earth - there is no actual destruction event in which the Earth goes from existing to not existing. What one ends up with instead is a universe in which the Earth does not and never did exist.
Destroying Rob proved remarkably easy.
Gobbled up by strangelets
You will need: a stable strangelet
Method: Hijack control of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Brookhaven National Laboratory, Long Island, New York. Use the RHIC to create and maintain a stable strangelet. Keep it stable for as long as it takes to absorb the entire Earth into a mass of strange quarks. Keeping the strangelet stable is incredibly difficult once it has absorbed the stabilising machinery, but creative solutions may be possible.
Earth's final resting place: a huge glob of strange matter.
Feasibility rating (revised): 1/10. A while back, there was some media hoo-hah about the possibility of this actually happening at the RHIC, but in actuality the chances of a stable strangelet forming are pretty much zero.
Sucked into a microscopic black hole
You will need: a microscopic black hole having enough mass not to evaporate instantly (thanks, Cletus the Fetus). Creating a microscopic black hole is tricky, since one needs a reasonable amount of neutronium, but may possibly be achievable by jamming large numbers of atomic nuclei together until they stick. This is left as an exercise to the reader.
Method: simply place your black hole on the surface of the Earth and wait. It will eat its way into the ground until it reaches the centre of the Earth, at which point it will sit and consume matter until the whole Earth is gone.
Earth's final resting place: roughly one cubic centimetre of neutronium a singularity of zero size (thanks cakedamber), which will then proceed to happily orbit the Sun as normal.
Feasibility rating: 2/10. Highly unlikely.
Source: Dark Side of the Sun, by Terry Pratchett. Starrynight and DejaMorgana have both cited earlier examples in science fiction, and though it is true that the microscopic black hole idea is an age-old science fiction mainstay which predates Pratchett by a long time, he was my original source for the idea, so that's what I'm putting.
Destroyed by a long-duration gamma ray burst/hypernova
You will need: a star in Earth's stellar neighbourhood with >40 solar masses. Such massive [lexicon]stars[/lexicon] are hard to come by; even Betelgeuse has only 20 solar masses. The best candidate I know of is Eta Carinae, which has over 120 solar masses but is ~7500 light years away.
Method: Gamma ray bursts are powerful, short-lived floods of gamma ray photons. GRBs come in two flavours, short (less than 2 seconds) and long (2 seconds to about 3 minutes); the latter are believed to be caused by stellar explosions called hypernovae, hundreds of times more violent than ordinary supernovae. Such [lexicon]stars[/lexicon] are usually billions of light years away when they explode - the fact that we can detect them at this range should tell you enough about how powerful a hypernova is. So how about triggering one locally? Any such explosion within about 20 light years would probably be violent enough to destroy the Earth itself.
Feasibility rating: 2/10. Way beyond our technological reach and likely to remain so indefinitely.
Sources: Lycurgus suggested this method. Further information from nasa.gov.
Engulfed in supernova
You will need: neutrinos? Or possibly some means of inhibiting nuclear fusion reactions. (Thank you, jasmine.)
Method: Simply cause the Sun to suddenly halt all its nuclear fusion reactions, thereby collapsing and then exploding with enough energy to momentarily outshine the entire rest of the galaxy. This one's actually pretty tricky, since as yet there is no scientific theory which could allow you to induce the Sun to go supernova. However, it does promise to be one of the most efficient and spectacular ways to destroy the Earth, so if you have the necessary skills and machinery, then I would recommend this over most other methods.
Earth's final resting place: a smear of vaporized iron moving across the universe at roughly 5% of the speed of light.
Feasibility rating: 2/10. Highly unlikely. Relies on as-yet undiscovered scientific theories.
Source: The Songs of Distant Earth, by Arthur C. Clarke
How to destroy the Earth
Preamble
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 a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It was built to last. 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 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 render the Earth into a form in which it may no longer be considered a planet. Such forms include, but are most definitely not limited to: two or more planets; any number of smaller asteroids; a quantum singularity; a dust cloud.
Current Earth-destruction Status
Number of times the Earth has been destroyed: 0
Number of plans currently in progress with the final aim of bringing about the Earth's destruction: 0
Number of scientific experiments currently underway with the potential to bring about the Earth's destruction: 0
Minimum amount of time until the Earth is destroyed by natural means (discounting total existance failure): 25 years
Minimum amount of time until the Earth is destroyed by artificial means: 50 years
Know your enemy
Age: 4,550,000,000 years
Mass: 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000 metric tonnes
Radius: 6,371 kilometres (average)
Surface gravity: 9.798 metres per second per second
Escape velocity: 11,186 metres per second
Physical structure (simplified):
Crust 0 to 35km Rock, hard and soft sediments, ice, miscellaneous 0 to 1000°C
Mantle 35 to 2900km Oxides of silicon, magnesium, iron and aluminium 1000 to 3700°C
Core 2900 to 6371km Iron (liquid shading to solid as you go deeper) 3700 to ~5000°C
Chemical composition by mass:
34.6% Iron
29.5% Oxygen
15.2% Silicon
12.7% Magnesium
2.4% Nickel
5.6% miscellaneous
Data from NASA and Wikipedia
Methods for destroying the Earth
Methods are ranked in order of feasibility.
Total existance failure
You will need: nothing
Method: No method. Simply sit back and twiddle your thumbs as, completely by chance, all 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms making up the planet Earth suddenly, simultaneously and spontaneously cease to exist. Note: the odds against this actually ever occuring are considerably greater than a googolplex (1010100) to one. Failing this, some kind of arcane (read: scientifically laughable) probability-manipulation device may be employed.
Current feasibility rating: 0/10. Utter, utter rubbish.
Existence negated via time travel
You will need: a time machine, heavy rock-moving equipment/explosives
Method: Using your time machine, travel back in time just over 4,500,000,000 years to shortly (i.e. a few billenia) before the formation of the Earth. What you should find in its place is a young Sun and an accretion disc formed of the dusty/[lexicon]rocky[/lexicon] material that will later become our Solar System. Find the patch of material that is likely to condense into the Earth. Now blow up, split apart and otherwise stir up the material so that it never gets a chance to come together and form the Earth. Return forwards in time in several hundred-million-year jumps, repeating the process each time so that no planet of any kind ever forms at roughly 1 AU from the Sun. If you make an error, simply go back in time and try again.
Earth's final resting place: When you finally return to the present day, you will be left with a largish asteroid belt where Earth should be. Alternatively, you may find that the matter has been assimilated into the bodies of other planets or the Sun.
Current feasibility rating: 0/10. Nonsense.
Comments: My good friend Rob rightly informs me that this course of action does not strictly speaking "destroy" the Earth - there is no actual destruction event in which the Earth goes from existing to not existing. What one ends up with instead is a universe in which the Earth does not and never did exist.
Destroying Rob proved remarkably easy.
Gobbled up by strangelets
You will need: a stable strangelet
Method: Hijack control of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Brookhaven National Laboratory, Long Island, New York. Use the RHIC to create and maintain a stable strangelet. Keep it stable for as long as it takes to absorb the entire Earth into a mass of strange quarks. Keeping the strangelet stable is incredibly difficult once it has absorbed the stabilising machinery, but creative solutions may be possible.
Earth's final resting place: a huge glob of strange matter.
Feasibility rating (revised): 1/10. A while back, there was some media hoo-hah about the possibility of this actually happening at the RHIC, but in actuality the chances of a stable strangelet forming are pretty much zero.
Sucked into a microscopic black hole
You will need: a microscopic black hole having enough mass not to evaporate instantly (thanks, Cletus the Fetus). Creating a microscopic black hole is tricky, since one needs a reasonable amount of neutronium, but may possibly be achievable by jamming large numbers of atomic nuclei together until they stick. This is left as an exercise to the reader.
Method: simply place your black hole on the surface of the Earth and wait. It will eat its way into the ground until it reaches the centre of the Earth, at which point it will sit and consume matter until the whole Earth is gone.
Earth's final resting place: roughly one cubic centimetre of neutronium a singularity of zero size (thanks cakedamber), which will then proceed to happily orbit the Sun as normal.
Feasibility rating: 2/10. Highly unlikely.
Source: Dark Side of the Sun, by Terry Pratchett. Starrynight and DejaMorgana have both cited earlier examples in science fiction, and though it is true that the microscopic black hole idea is an age-old science fiction mainstay which predates Pratchett by a long time, he was my original source for the idea, so that's what I'm putting.
Destroyed by a long-duration gamma ray burst/hypernova
You will need: a star in Earth's stellar neighbourhood with >40 solar masses. Such massive [lexicon]stars[/lexicon] are hard to come by; even Betelgeuse has only 20 solar masses. The best candidate I know of is Eta Carinae, which has over 120 solar masses but is ~7500 light years away.
Method: Gamma ray bursts are powerful, short-lived floods of gamma ray photons. GRBs come in two flavours, short (less than 2 seconds) and long (2 seconds to about 3 minutes); the latter are believed to be caused by stellar explosions called hypernovae, hundreds of times more violent than ordinary supernovae. Such [lexicon]stars[/lexicon] are usually billions of light years away when they explode - the fact that we can detect them at this range should tell you enough about how powerful a hypernova is. So how about triggering one locally? Any such explosion within about 20 light years would probably be violent enough to destroy the Earth itself.
Feasibility rating: 2/10. Way beyond our technological reach and likely to remain so indefinitely.
Sources: Lycurgus suggested this method. Further information from nasa.gov.
Engulfed in supernova
You will need: neutrinos? Or possibly some means of inhibiting nuclear fusion reactions. (Thank you, jasmine.)
Method: Simply cause the Sun to suddenly halt all its nuclear fusion reactions, thereby collapsing and then exploding with enough energy to momentarily outshine the entire rest of the galaxy. This one's actually pretty tricky, since as yet there is no scientific theory which could allow you to induce the Sun to go supernova. However, it does promise to be one of the most efficient and spectacular ways to destroy the Earth, so if you have the necessary skills and machinery, then I would recommend this over most other methods.
Earth's final resting place: a smear of vaporized iron moving across the universe at roughly 5% of the speed of light.
Feasibility rating: 2/10. Highly unlikely. Relies on as-yet undiscovered scientific theories.
Source: The Songs of Distant Earth, by Arthur C. Clarke