12 KiB
[EDU][BST] How To Destroy The Earth
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Author: u/AmeteurOpinions Finally, everyone was working together.*
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Score: 14
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Created: 2014-12-21T14:34:37
Post:
Comments:
u/xamueljones [+6] My arch-enemy is entropy (4 hours later)
Funniest quotes in the Genocide page:
Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe.
This is not a guide for wusses whose aim is merely to wipe out humanity.
This is a guide for those who do not want the Earth to be there anymore.
Special effects no longer satisfy me.
You'd get into trouble.
Number of times the Earth has been destroyed: 1
However, as a rule, you will probably want to keep the true purpose of your project secret from as many people as possible for as long as possible.
You will need: An entire planet Earth made from antimatter.
You will need: .....an unimaginable amount of energy.
You're looking at billions of years minimum, folks.
This is left as an exercise to the reader.
Hmm. The problem is, the microscopic black hole would still be in hydrostatic equilibrium, so it would still qualify as a planet according to the IAU!
Earth, like the liquid metal Terminator, will reform from its shattered shards.
It's clear that dropping the Earth into a singularity is massive overkill.
But if you have the technology to build a Dyson sphere, why are you reading this?
It's surprisingly easy to end up with Earth in a loopy elliptical orbit which merely roasts it for four months in every eight. Careful planning will be needed to avoid this.
If your best efforts fail, you needn't fret. Nothing lasts forever; the Earth is, ultimately, doomed, whatever you do.
Total existence failure. You will need: nothing. Method: No method. Simply sit back and twiddle your thumbs.
Swallowed up as the Sun enters red giant stage. You will need: patience.
Crunched. You will need: considerably more patience.
Torn a new one. You will need: about half as much patience.
Decayed. You will need: all-surpassing patience.
White dwarf is good, but we're not fussy.
Atmospheric considerations are ignored here since it is far more energy-efficient to manually remove the Earth's atmosphere, move the planet, and reinstall it.
It all depends how fussy you are about how the Earth looks afterwards, of course.
Let me emphasize the words "big", "heavy" and "clonk".
This can be employed to move the Sun and Earth in tandem to a place where the Earth can more easily be destroyed.
Existence negated via time travel.
Destroying Rob proved remarkably easy.
Destroyed by God. You will need: God.
In all three cases, the new Earth would still need destroying for real.
A few people suggested...making [Earth] a moon rather than a planet. Yeah, yeah, very clever. Get back to work.
What would you do if the Earth were destroyed? C. Begin work on Venus
Proving that 1 = 0.
Gay marriage.
Earth is old and obviously in pain; it should be put out of its misery.
u/traverseda [+1] With dread but cautious optimism (2 days later)
Almost all of these are great culture ship names.
u/None [+3] (a day later)
I was thinking that the antimatter Earth collision wasn't such a great solution because you'd have to fire this anti-Earth at Earth extremely fast in order to ensure a high percentage of each collides with the other. However, on reflection, this isn't true; the anti-Earth and Earth will have a contact explosion, knocking both away, but the shearing forces will cause both to crumble.
This suggests that a much smaller anti-planetoid would work, or a moderately smaller sabot round.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (a day later)
That is mentioned. The anti-neutronium and neutronium slug of matter concept is also mentioned
u/None [+2] (7 hours later)
Soo.... I can't just drop some gray goo in a puddle and go get drunk?
u/Jace_MacLeod [+3] (10 hours later)
Still technically leaves a planet; Not good enough.
u/philip1201 [+2] (20 hours later)
(4) - cooked in a solar oven - is wrong:
Feasibility rating: 3/10. The major problem here is: What's to stop the matter cooling and becoming a planet again? In fact, once the top layer of planet becomes gaseous, what would compel it to vent into space rather than remaining on the surface, absorbing more heat and preventing the lower layers from even being heated?
Weirdly, in (3) he correctly says that fissioning Earth to helium would cause it to evaporate, but here he forgets the mechanism. Increasing surface temperature increases the kinetic energy of particles in the atmosphere. Above certain temperatures, a significant portion of particles in the upper atmosphere have velocity greater than escape velocity, and vent into space.
The expected value of the velocity scales with the square root of temperature over molecular mass (source). Increasing temperature tenfold (as suggested) would therefore mean that instead of a lower limit on atmospheric molecules of around 8u, it's 80u. As matter evaporates, the planet gets smaller, so the achievable temperature increases. It might however be better to focus the mirrors on a smaller area and have 90% evaporate per minute, rather than focus on the entire earth and have 0.0001% evaporate per minute, turning it into a solar-powered mass driver.
reduced to true vacuum
If possible, this can in fact be set up by creating a (microscopically small) region of space with very high energy density. The reason we think it might be possible at all is that inflation somehow stopped (if it happened), suggesting there's a way to convert between inflation and other forms of energy.
Since we haven't been destroyed yet, it would be weird if that energy density is below what can be found in nature - so below around 10^20 eV - but that still leaves the entire region between 10^20 and 10^28 eV (the Planck energy) unexplored. If it works, this would actually be the cheapest option: all you need is a particle accelerator the size of Neptune's orbit to get some particles up to the required energy and have them collide head-on.
Also note that Sam's explanation of the 'true vacuum' is bogus. In both a true and false vacuum, particles appear and disappear out of the wholecloth due to quantum field theory. The distinction between vacua is how much dark energy they have per cubic meter. In modern particle physics and cosmology, dark energy is a fudge factor: the above-mentioned vacuum particles mean that the vacuum should still have an energy density. That energy density generates gravity, which in the standard model would cause the universe to collapse in 10^-25 seconds. This is not what we observe. So there's the theory of supersymmetry which would make the energy density exactly zero, but that's not what we observe either. We seem to observe a universe that is at present 0.25 parts dark matter (matter which does not interact with electromagnetism) and 0.05 parts visible matter, 0.0001 parts radiation, and 0.7 parts energy density of unknown origin ("dark energy").
The Einstein gravity equations elegantly permit the energy density of the vacuum as a free parameter, so it was set as such. However, if inflation is true, it appears instead to be a variable; a variable that was high in the past to generate inflation, but then decayed to the present value. The behavior of this field would most simply be explained by the energy density being the potential energy of "the inflation field" - an ad hoc particle-cum-quantum field. The potential energy is like standard potential energy explanations: a ball on a hill. Except with a quantum field, every point in spacetime has its own ball, and the balls are tied together. During inflation, all the balls were on top of a hill, or in a high valley, or rolling down a hill. And when inflation ended, they all dragged down into the valley we're in now. When you generate high energy density, you have a chance of your particles interacting with the balls, pushing one of them very hard. If there's a lower valley than where we are, the ball could push over the hills and end up in that lower valley, and then drag all the other balls along with it.
On the object level, each ball is the possibility^1 of a pair of particles - an inflaton and an anti-inflaton, which is also an inflaton, like how light is its own antiparticle - appearing and disappearing out of nothing at that point. The potential is the energy of those particles, which can be positive or negative because fuck intuition. On macroscopic scales, the existence of these pairs therefore affects energy density of the vacuum, so changes of the potential change the energy density of space. All other particles behave just like they normally would.
Well, unless string theory is correct, in which case you don't need a separate inflaton field, and the balls navigate the potential of the multi-dimensional String Landscape instead, and changes to their position changes the way the curled up dimensions fold, changing regular physics.
[1] a unit of |ψ|^2 - "quantum probability amplitude" by physicists, "magical reality fluid" on lesswrong.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (a day later)
I'm not sure if this would fall into one of the subclasses, but how about Von Neumann machines creating themselves from Earth's mass, and then leaving Earth via orbital mechanics?
Solar powered self-replicating machines slowly reproduce themselves from the planet's mass, and start moving to the equator. Over time, the Earth becomes a plate-shape instead of a sphere. Eventually, the self-replicating machines reach a plate diameter sufficient to start shedding any machines that manage to crawl high enough on top of their bretheren.
At that point, the Von Neumann machines are sufficiently established, and they would begin building space elevators by simply erecting them directly from the surface of the planet, supporting them within the plate until they extend beyond the escape point. Connect as many space elevators as you like to a ring of carbon nanotubes surrounding the Earth. Two elevators would work - more is just faster.
Now, all the Von Neumann machines start carrying water, non-metals, and other materials they don't need for their own manufacturing up the space elevator and simply dump it off into space, where the orbital velocity at the ends of the counterbalanced space elevators exceeds the escape velocity from Earth.
After all the less useful solids and liquids are gone, the machines simply walk up the elevators and jump off into space.
You never have to worry about disposing of Earth's gaseous mass, because the gasses will disperse as the Earth gets less massive.
The power for all this could be any number of things, but solar would probably be the easiest after humans are gone. You could use orbital mirrors to light the dark side of the Earth, so there is sunlight 24x7. More mirrors would allow more energy to be directed to Earth but there would likely be a point of diminishing returns, as the mass and complexity of the mirrors grows.
It sounds a lot like a grey goo scenario, but it's not. The Von Neumann machines can use themselves to build infrastructure to allow for very low energy dispersal of Earth's mass into space.
I'm fairly confident it's not the same as meticulous destruction (as currently described in the article) because the space elevators make it so much more efficient to shed Earth's mass