What would be the easiest way to OBLITERATE THE ENTIRE PLANET?

[Plaatinum Aerospace]

Personally, my favorite way to destroy the Earth is to increase the chance of the curious quantum event called a "total existence failure" to 100%. Sort of (read: exactly) like the starship Titanic in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

[Pugspaceprogram]

We could enable infinite fuel, put 10^ sepratrons on the rotational equator, and fire them retrograde.

Stopping the planet turning slowly wouldn't do much, but doing it quickly would rip it apart violently.

[Silicon014]

I mean we could destroy the crust with nuclear bombs, but would that count as obliterating the entire planet? What if we (Inspired by the moving the Earth thread, but easier!) blasted nuclear bombs retrograde on the moon and caused it to veer it's course enough to collide with the Earth?

"Now witness the firepower of the fully armed and operational battle station"... Enough said, I think.

[Captain Sierra]

Obliterate the entire planet:

1) remove all satellites from orbit (when in doubt, nuke em and shoot em off into the sun!)

2) place as many large heavy objects in sun-stationary orbit along the prograde terminator as possible.

3) wait several thousand years as the satellites' gravity accelerates earth's orbit into the asteroid belt.

4) whitness large space rocks obliterating the planet.

5) eat cake.

[Brenok]

Obliterate the entire planet:

1) remove all satellites from orbit (when in doubt, nuke em and shoot em off into the sun!)

2) place as many large heavy objects in sun-stationary orbit along the prograde terminator as possible.

3) wait several thousand years as the satellites' gravity accelerates earth's orbit into the asteroid belt.

4) whitness large space rocks obliterating the planet.

5) eat cake.

I don't think that this method would be very efficient... better put the rockets directly on Earth.

[Squishu]

Just... launch pieces of it bit by bit into space. Send the pieces to the sun or Jupiter or the asteroid belt, or anywhere really. Just keep taking away pieces, it'll take a while, but at least the more mass you take away the easier it'll be to get to space because the Earth will have less mass and thus less gravity.

[dudefinal]

Step 1: Travel to another dimension with radically diffrrent and dangerous physical constants such as a lower entropy.

Step 2: Figure out how to contain these physical constants and bring them over to our dimension.

Step 3: Release these physical constants into our dimension and observe reality fail.

Got this idea from here lol http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-2700

Edited September 13, 2015 by dudefinal

[NuclearNut]

Actually that sounds like that was taken from an Asimov story.

Also, there are no "other dimensions" with different physiucal constants. The only dimensions used refer to the measurements of an object (length, width, height, etc.)

____

The best way to exterminate the pesky organisms on the planet earth would be to use salted bombs, but if you want that place removed completely, use a large quantity of antimatter, or even better, (and making massive assumptions on certain physical constants) dropping a sufficiently large to be stable-ish amount of strange matter on earth.

Edited September 13, 2015 by NuclearNut

[GeneralVeers]

The easiest way to destroy Earth is this:

Start a thread on a web site where people discuss ways to destroy entire planets. Alien races spying on us see the discussion, and are horrified at how warlike humans are. So they aim a Novalith our way and blow up the Earth.

How's that for metagame?

[dudefinal]

Remove the struts...

[Fisk02]

You could use a quadrillion tsar bombs

[cubinator]

Build an army of self-replicating nanobots and disassemble the planet into individual atoms, then turn those into more nanobots. Then have the nanobots assemble themselves into a giant rocket and fly to the next planet.

[Layereddiagram]

Put enough energy into one place so that region collapses into a lower ground state. This would cause the region to nucleate and create a bubble with radically different physical constants that would expand at the spend of light. A vacuum metastability event. (This only works if the ground energy state of the universe isn't the lowest it can get)

@Dudefinal. I just realized this is almost exactly what you said.

Edited September 13, 2015 by Layereddiagram

[MajorLeaugeRocketScience]

Plan A: Get 50 pounds of antimatter.

Plan B: Make a blackhole.

Plan C: Politics

[legoclone09]

Easy, throw a few nails into the Sun. Very easy and very fast.

[PB666]

you can not destroy the sun by throwing nails into it.

Deep sea vent life will survive for eons, even if you block the suns light and complex would spead all over the surface not soon after the block was removed.

OK, redirect ceres from it current orbit into a polar orbit about the sun, then shrink it apo to just above mars with a pe that intersects earth say 1000 years in the future, the impact zone should be mid pacific. Althiugh ceres is a fraction of earths size, the is sufficient kinetic energy in the differential orbits to heat everything on earth by a few 1000'. Oceans would boil, nothing could survive, earth would be immediately thrown from orbit about the moon and if timed properly the moon would later collide with earth. Even so some life spore would survive on ejecta and fall back to earth starting evolution all over again.

Do you folks sit around all day long thinking up morbid destructive ideas?

[Rakaydos]

Build a fusion rocket into Neptune, using neptune's atmosphere as fuel.

fly neptune past earth to slingshot it below the sun's roche limit.

[StrandedonEarth]

Use a resonance torpedo to make the Sun go nova. You might need a Sun Crusher to do it.

[YNM]

Ensure a CME in the direction of the planet. Not quite obliterating the whole thing, but these things are very powerful, even there have been suggestion that some nazca drawings are from the birkeland currents of a CME impact. And depictions of CMEs with sky being ablaze is not that uncommon in medieval times.

Either that, or an electron Moon.

[p1t1o]

Relevant:

http://qntm.org/destroy

[Tex_NL]

Easy, throw a few nails into the Sun. Very easy and very fast.

you can not destroy the sun by throwing nails into it.

...

I belief what legoclone is referring to (or at least I belief he thinks he's referring to it) is that a star is doomed as soon as solar fusion starts producing iron. It is the actual production of iron that saps the reaction from its energy, not simply having some iron in the core.

If it really was that easy stars would implode all over the place all the time. If a few nails would kill a star an iron rich asteroid would most certainly do the same. But they don't.

[StrandedonEarth]

It is the actual production of iron that saps the reaction from its energy,

It's not the production of iron that saps energy. It's when a (massive) star tries to fuse iron; it takes more energy to fuse iron than is released in the reaction. When a star tries to fuse iron, it cools down and starts to collapse. The collapse heats the star; more iron fusion occurs, the star cools and collapses further. Eventually the outer layers of the star rebound off the core of heavy metals in a supernova. The heaviest stars leave neutron stars or black holes as remnants.

Of course, the star must have run out of lighter fuels in the core, then cooled and collapsed enough to heat the core up enough to fuse iron.

That's why elements produced by iron fusion are rarer than iron and lighter elements

[Tex_NL]

I did it from memory. As far as I knew it was the fusion of lighter elements to form iron but it might just as well be the fusion of iron into heavier elements. I don't know the exact details so I will not argue about it.

Still, dropping a few nails (or an entire asteroid) into a star won't kill it.

[Rakaydos]

Ill say it again- float a fusion drive in any gas giant, using the atmosphere as a fuel tank. Your TWR is going to be crap, but its good ISP and your fuel fraction is literally astronomical. Then just flythe gas giant into earth.

[justidutch]

The easiest way to obliterate the planet?

Do nothing but continue down the path we already are on.