
How to destroy the Earth (2006) - Smaug123
https://qntm.org/destroy
======
zeveb
This reminds me of what the Web used to be: amusing entries by interesting
people, devoid of advertising, marketing or JavaScript.

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

~~~
syngrog66
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 faster you could perhaps meta-
spider/index on top of them, where your wrapper site added this constraint as
a filter.

I'd love to be able to explore a curated web subset that was just text and
images, no bandwidth bloat, no obvious SEO abusers, no pirated content farms,
no ads, no spyware, no audio, no (automatically streaming/playing) video, etc.

~~~
Bjartr
>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.

~~~
syngrog66
nice suggestion! I'll try that

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_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.

~~~
deciplex
> _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? Make Earth
the center of this sphere, then wait.

~~~
_kst_
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.

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noahlt
The author, qntm, recently posted a follow-up article entitled "To Destroy the
Earth", which looks at the problem from a different perspective:
[https://qntm.org/destro](https://qntm.org/destro)

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dkbrk
> Antimatter... 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.

Obviously this idea is entirely speculative, but I haven't heard of it before
and was wondering what the theoretical foundation for it is.

I think it's alluding to a 4D rotation causing a change in parity, which seems
plausible. Physics is very nearly symmetric under a conjugation of parity and
charge (the CP symmetry, which is violated only by the weak nuclear force); so
the idea would be that a change in parity through this 4D rotation causes a
charge conjugation, maintaining CP symmetry.

I don't think this would work. Symmetries in Physics imply a conserved
quantity, through Noether's theorem. The problem is that the conserved
quantity associated with a charge-conjugation symmetry is _not_ charge itself,
but 'charge parity', a multiplicative quantum number. Under CP-symmetry, the
product 'charge parity' * 'spatial parity' is the conserved quantity, so a
change in spatial parity from the 4D rotation would cause an associated change
in charge parity (assuming CP symmetry), which merely means the system would
behave differently under a charge conjugation operation, not that the charge
is actually changed.

Charge conservation itself originates from the gauge invariance of
electromagnetism, and I'm not sure how that would be affected by this
scenario.

I'm not saying the idea is necessarily wrong, but I think it's likely to have
originated from a misunderstading.

For further information:

\-
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetry_%28physics%29#Conserv...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetry_%28physics%29#Conservation_laws_and_symmetry)

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david-given
Man, I feel old. I remember this when it was the alt.destroy.the.earth FAQ...

[https://jult.net/adte.htm](https://jult.net/adte.htm)

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ck2
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.

~~~
wlesieutre
> 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 probe into the sun. It's a hard
thing to do because it has to shed all of that orbital speed to get its
velocity vector pointed in the right direction (at which point it can fall in
on its own). If you only get rid of most of it, you'll fall into a long
elliptical orbit.

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), but there's still the matter of getting the Earth to Venus for
that to work. And at that point maybe you just want to stick to #9.

I haven't played enough KSP to be sure of all that, but that's my
understanding of the orbital mechanics.

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TeMPOraL
> _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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNS6VKNXY6s)

~~~
deciplex
Scott Manley also made a trip to Minmus using only the starting Career parts.
Just because he did a thing doesn't mean it's the optimal way to do that thing
:-)

(In fact, it's probably a better indicator _against_ , heh.)

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logfromblammo
I 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 neighbors. You now have a
uniform robot tensegrity shell around the planet. The linkages expand until
the shell rises to a uniform altitude above the surface. This likely requires
a material with tensile strength higher than any currently known, and a
material with compression strength higher than any currently known. I haven't
done the math. Reasonable strengths may require that the shell robots run on
the surface a bit to start the whole thing spinning faster than the planet.

A circular section of the shell directly facing the sun de-links, falls back
to the surface, and begins replicating as before. The remainder of the robot
shell opens like a jellyfish mantle, to catch the solar wind and reflect
additional solar energy to the dark side of the planet. The shell sails to a
different orbit, so as to not re-collide with the planet.

Repeat until all shells have sailed away.

~~~
ars
Solar wind is not strong enough to put something in orbit.

~~~
teraflop
I dunno. Given a self-supporting spherical structure around the planet, you
could raise it above the atmosphere and set it up to experience a net torque
from solar radiation pressure. Just add "sails" that are black on one side and
mirrored on the other. Then sit back as it very very slowly spins itself up to
orbital velocity.

Of course, there would be plenty of practical difficulties. (For one thing,
radiation pressure is a hideously inefficient use of energy; for another, your
spherical shells will be unstable and require constant maneuvering to keep
them centered.) So if you have an army of self-replicating robots, it's
probably easier to just have them build millions of solar-powered mass drivers
and fire rocks directly into space.

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amptorn
This is from 2003, in fact.

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ars
Here's my way: An enormous particle accelerator.

Shoot electrons into space in vast quantities until the whole earth becomes so
highly charged it blows itself to pieces.

~~~
Arnavion
Shooting electrons out gets harder and harder as you go since you're
counteracting an ever increasing positive charge from the Earth.

Besides, on a uniformly conductive sphere (which admittedly the Earth is not
at the crust but probably _is_ near the mantle and core), excess charge
distributes over the surface, so only the top layer of the Earth would get
blown off (along with your accelerator).

~~~
ars
> Shooting electrons out gets harder and harder as you go since you're
> counteracting an ever increasing positive charge from the Earth.

Sure. This is fantasy of course - my accelerator is powerful enough to handle
it.

> excess charge distributes over the surface

Yes. The plan is to put the accelerator in a hole so it can tap into all the
electrons that are hiding below the surface (since the surface would be
depleted of electrons). As the surface is blown away it would dig itself
deeper.

It wouldn't blow itself to pieces like a bomb in a move, but rather as giant
chunks fling themself into space chasing the electrons I've shot there.

I like my plan because I think it's the most energy efficient one out there
that is actually theoretically possible today (i.e. doesn't require new
physics).

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

~~~
stcredzero
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNaEBbFbvcY)

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kordless
Fools. The way to destroy the Earth is for me to remove 1% of the electrons
from my motorcycle.

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cygnus_a
plan B: wait another 10 billion years, and the sun will destroy the earth when
it becomes a giant.

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thomashtrc
hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com

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misnome
I'm sure electing Trump will get us most of the way there.

