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How to Destroy the Earth (2006)
- bryanrasmussen 6y agoI think most of us would just be satisfied with rendering the Earth a lifeless husk. If gntm thinks that inadequate I submit they may be letting the worst become the enemy of the bad. on edit: changed he to they.
- Aperocky 6y agoProbably easier than you think, just add a few more ATM of CO2 and it will work out to be just like Venus. Though -- it's actually a lot of CO2, for starters burning absolute every last bit of fossil fuel would probably contribute to ~0.1% of the amount needed for a runaway greenhouse event.
- gshubert17 6y agoBurning all the fossil fuel reserves we have (know about), would add over 200 ppm CO2 to the atmosphere (mostly from 1 trillion tons of coal). The additions from oil and gas are smaller. We'd then have over 500 ppm CO2. "Recoverable" coal is about 20 times proven reserves, so burning all that would add 4000 ppm CO2. Now the total would be 4500 ppm CO2, or almost 0.5 percent! Likely to be quite unhealthy. https://knoema.com/infographics/smsfgud/bp-world-reserves-of-fossil-fuels https://knoema.com/infographics/smsfgud/bp-world-reserves-of... https://inspectapedia.com/hazmat/Carbon_Dioxide_Hazards.php https://inspectapedia.com/hazmat/Carbon_Dioxide_Hazards.php
- djrogers 6y agoAll the while you’re doing that, plant life would be booming, and after a sufficient period of time would capture enough of that CO2 again to make it possible for non-plant life to once again flourish.
- sbierwagen 6y ago"A sufficient period of time" is underselling it a little. Coal is only formed if wood is buried without rotting first. If we burned all the coal we can find, it would take tens of millions of years to be replaced.
- perl4ever 6y agoI had a vague impression that the processes that produced fossil fuels would probably not renew in due time, because the existing layers have something to do with the inability of microbes to break down lignin long ago. Once the capability evolved, the same process can't repeat even if one waits a long time?
- jacobr1 6y agoThis paper has an interesting take on the history: https://www.pnas.org/content/113/9/2442 https://www.pnas.org/content/113/9/2442
- Ekaros 6y agoI have been wondering about that. Hasn't all of the carbon now in fossil-fuels been in atmosphere at some point? Or has more of it been freed from earth's crust or arrived as meteors since formation of the fossil-fuels? So in the end wouldn't worst case scenario be of around time when they formed?
- thgaway17 6y agoShhh. Some of us are trying to make a living selling green energy.
- sudhirj 6y agoThis seems to be a weird misconception about climate change, that the earth getting hotter will somehow end all life. That’s very doubtful. All the plants will love the new greenhouse, lots of energy in the atmosphere, rain every day, the whole planet a tropical paradise. It’s the humans and some other species who’ll be heavily inconvenienced. Solving climate change is mostly so we can stay comfortable and not have to deal with more ecological crises and refugees.
- jbay808 6y agoNot necessarily a tropical paradise, if it goes the way of the end-permian mass extinction: http://burro.case.edu/Academics/USNA229/impactfromthedeep.pdf http://burro.case.edu/Academics/USNA229/impactfromthedeep.pd...
- guenthert 6y agoOnly if it get just a little warmer. Photosynthesis is temperature dependent however and its maximum is at a modest 20 degree C, above 40 degree C its efficiency falls rapidly [1]. If it gets much warmer than that, and a run-away greenhouse effect would ensure that, only algae and some bacteria survive a while longer. Once the oceans are boiling, it's hard to imagine any life surviving though. There doesn't seem consensus on whether Earth could truly reach a runaway greenhouse state or would rather just settle at a higher temperature. In any case, only the ecological (and consequently economic) crises and refugees problem are the ones currently living people will be affected by, but that ought to be enough to take action. [1] https://sciencing.com/effect-temperature-rate-photosynthesis-19595.html https://sciencing.com/effect-temperature-rate-photosynthesis...
- dnautics 6y agoYou do understand that even burning all of the oxygen in the atmosphere currently to produce CO2 would yield less than an ATM
- rriepe 6y agoOnly 70 more though and you're right there at Venus' pressure.
- perl4ever 6y agoWell, presumably something happened on Venus to convert large amounts of carbonate rocks to CO2? How would we rule out the possibility of that happening here?
- Aperocky 6y agoYes. That's why someone need to break down all the carbonate rocks and release all the CO2, that will probably work out to a few more ATM.. Easier said than done.
- vaduz 6y agoWe would do better with methane (100-year GWP 25), or even better with nitrous oxide - with added bonus that both N2 and O2 to produce it can be taken straight out of atmosphere (100-year GWP 298), though they would not last very long.
- nikanj 6y agoVenus is ~100 million kilometers from the sun, Earth about 150 million km. No matter of greenhouse gases is going to compensate for that difference in radiation heating. Because radiation dissipates to the distance squared, we get around 40-50% of the heating Venus does.
- perl4ever 6y agoYou may be right in your conclusion, but your logic seems like it would imply Venus can't be hotter than Mercury, either?
- philipkglass 6y agoThe Earth doesn't receive enough radiant energy from the sun to enter a Venus-like state from increased atmospheric CO2. At least not without waiting hundreds of millions of years for the sun's energy output to increase, in which case you might as well just choose one of the high-patience destruction options. As a much nearer term goal, the Earth could be rendered all but sterile by removing and permanently sequestering carbon from the atmosphere to break the carbon cycle [0]. 1) Direct air capture of CO2 from the atmosphere. 2) Conversion of CO2 to carbon with electrolytic hydrogen [1]. 3) Reaction of carbon with silicon dioxide in an electrical furnace to form silicon carbide [2]. 4) Surface storage of ever-increasing quantities of silicon carbide to end the Earth's carbon cycle and life itself. Bulk silicon carbide is effectively inert to biological or geological decomposition under surface conditions on Earth. It can break down if subducted into high temperature regions of the mantle, so it will need a watchful eye to keep geology at bay until the sun's expansion destroys the Earth completely. You'll need some basic clanking replicators (e.g. strictly earthbound von Neumann machines) to accomplish this. 99% of the life-elimination process can be finished in mere thousands of years. Either nuclear breeder reactors or paving the world's great deserts with solar panels can provide enough energy for the project. Silicon carbide can also oxidize in a furnace, so human civilization must be neutralized. But if you have a fleet of von Neumann machines dedicated to eliminating life that's one of the first problems to solve anyway. "Won't falling atmospheric CO2 trigger a new glacial maximum and greatly retard the rate at which environments can be decarbonized/sterilized, once ice cover impairs carbon cycling to the atmosphere?" Great question! You don't want a lot of frozen water on Earth because that will make it harder for CO2 to circulate through the atmosphere where it's easy to capture. It takes thousands of years for the ocean to fully overturn and exchange with the atmosphere under present climate conditions; there's no sense in making it even slower with sea ice. Nor is hiding soil under glacier cover a sustainable solution to the life problem. But you also don't want to leave CO2 in the atmosphere just to keep things warm and freely circulating. Some small portion of the replicators' effort can go toward manufacturing potent non-carbon-bearing greenhouse gases such as nitrogen trifluoride or sulfur hexafluoride. They are so much more potent than CO2 that just a bit added to the atmosphere should keep the Earth comfortably warm even as CO2 becomes too scarce to support photosynthetic life. In only 10,000 years most multicellular life can be eliminated by carbon starvation. Some remnants of life will remain deep underground and near hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor. The machines must continue to eliminate CO2 as it is emitted by natural geological processes and maintain the mountains of silicon carbide so that they remain intact into deep time. Otherwise there could be another large scale outbreak of life before the sun finishes Earth. [0] https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/Carbon+Cycle https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/Carbon+Cycle [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosch_reaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosch_reaction [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_carbide#Production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_carbide#Production
- afterburner 6y ago> I think most of us would just be satisfied with rendering the Earth a lifeless husk. You're probably right. I mean, have you seen Factorio?
- megablast 6y agoAgreed. That is what most of us are aiming to do.
- tzs 6y agoIf we start a little smaller, setting our sights on just wiping out most current terrestrial animal life including humans, look to what happened with the pesticide DDT. DDT did not come anywhere near wiping out more than at most a few species, but it illustrates what could happen if we got unlucky (or someone deliberately set out to do maximal damage). The problems with DDT were that (1) it could last a long time before breaking down, (2) it spread much more widely in the environment than was intended, and (3) it was not narrowly targeted to only affect pests. When you are making a pesticide that is not narrowly targeted [1], you really want it to break down fast and to not spread much beyond where you specifically apply it. Just make a pesticide that like DDT spreads far and wide and persists, but unlike DDT make it so one of the things it kills is nitrogen fixing bacteria. That would wipe out almost all of the base of terrestrial animal food chain. [1] You make a narrowly targeted pesticide by basing it on the hormones that control the target's life cycle. You find some specific behavior of the target, such as its "mate and die" behavior, that is triggered by a specific hormone, and make your pesticide trigger that. Then all you need to do is apply the pesticide when the insect isn't yet sexually mature or when the weather is too cold for eggs to survive, and the insects mate and die, with no offspring produced.
- perl4ever 6y agoThere's an old science fiction story, where the aliens invade, not with flying saucers and ray guns, or hypervelocity near-C projectiles but by spreading what is essentially a pesticide globally that is tailored to affect human behavior and so nobody realizes what is really happening. There's no spaceship hanging around to hack into like in Independence day, there isn't even anyone willing to consider the idea that what is happening might be extrinsic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Screwfly_Solution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Screwfly_Solution Same author wrote a short story about a scientist who developed a tailored virus to save the earth from ecological destruction: https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/last-flight-doctor-ain/ https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/last-flight-docto... "The tape recorder they put by his bed functioned right on through, but if anybody had been around to replay it they would have found little but babbling. “Gaea Gloriatrix,” he crooned, “Gaea girl, queen . . .” At times, he was grandiose and tormented. “Our life, your death!” he yelled. “Our death would have been your death, too, no need for that, no need.” At other times, he was accusing. “What did you do about the dinosaurs?” he demanded. “Did they annoy you? How did you fix them? Cold. Queen, you’re too cold! You came close to it this time, my girl,” he raved. And then he wept and caressed the bedclothes and was maudlin."
- marshmallow_12 6y agothe mere annihilation of all life is not very ambitious. It is achievable with todays technology. There is only excitement in originality, wiping out humanity may not give the same level of satisfaction.
- aminozuur 6y agoI will link this the next time someone says "we're destroying Earth", when they mean "life on Earth". Earth is 4.5B years old, and will likely continue to exist for quite some time. That's called the "Lindy effect" (old things will likely continue to exist).
- andi999 6y agoWhy did nobody tell the dinosaurs about the Lindy effect?
- jacquesm 6y agoMaybe someone did, who's to say...
- paulryanrogers 6y agoWhat do you hope to accomplish responding to a life-on-earth concern with an article exploring how to destroy the celestial body?
- aminozuur 6y agoThat people say "life on earth", and not "earth". I'm a bit autistic when it comes to language.
- gcheong 6y agoI think the term is pedantic.
- HelloMcFly 6y agoThis only thing this accomplishes is making you look like a jerk, with maybe a 10% chance of getting a chuckle out of the right person.
- ttt0 6y agoWith the extreme environments that some animal species live in, I'm not even considered about destroying the life on Earth. It doesn't seem like an easy thing to pull off.
- KarlKemp 6y agoIt’s like XKCD, but without the lightness, humor, and general affection for humankind.
- NateEag 6y agoI thought it was hilarious. Opinions will vary, I suppose.
- Sotosaywhat 6y agoWell that may be Ot an emotional driven but... somehow related comic://i.ibb.co/Kzrkg97/23243-en-CONCLUSION-FINAL-Mail.png (-;
- sharkweek 6y agoThis is such a great read. It’s fun to think about on a humankind scale how hard it is to destroy (as in obliterate entirely) the earth, while at the same time pretty trivial on a universal scale. We’d have a pretty hard time blowing this entire rock up ourselves, but the universe sure wouldn’t. Then again, maybe in 100ish years it becomes trivial for us too. I’d bet someone in the 1800s had a hard time imagining one bomb being able to wipe an entire city off the map.
- Ekaros 6y agoIt's fun to really think about these scales. Earth has been around quite a while since big bang. Actually a one-third is pretty amazing number when you start to think about that. That is age of Earth is about third of age of Universe... And then Universe will be around for a very very long time after the planet is unrecognisable. On other hand Earth is just tiny thing in solar system, which is tiny thing in galaxy which is small thing around general area which is tiny thing in great scale of things...
- vaduz 6y ago> On other hand Earth is just tiny thing in solar system, which is tiny thing in galaxy which is small thing around general area which is tiny thing in great scale of things... Don't go down that route - down that route lies the Total Perspective Vortex, and that is something you don't come back from.
- vagrantJin 6y agoYeah. Some roads you just don't go down.
- zxcvbn4038 6y agoSounds like tourist brochure for Detroit.
- 0_____0 6y agoThere's an anthology that Douglas Hofstadter put together that is chock full of stories like this. When I started reading this story I knew basically where it was going.... Give DH's thing a read, it's called "The Mind's I"
- erik_landerholm 6y agoJust remove like half the electrons in your body at once. Honestly, that’s probably overkill.
- avaldeso 6y agoAuthor forgot an easy one: death by strangelet catalyzation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangelet#Dangers https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangelet#Dangers
- it 6y agoEven this didn't do it: https://grahamhancock.com/ancient-cataclysm-hancock/ https://grahamhancock.com/ancient-cataclysm-hancock/
- vpribish 6y agohe had me going until "...that made us a species with amnesia and wiped out almost all traces of a former high civilisation of prehistoric antiquity" This summarizes the evidence nicely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesi...
- yalogin 6y agoThis is just wonderful. If the internet were filled with articles and posts of this kind the world would be a wonderful place. I love how the author took the thing from the movies just to the next logical step, that itself is something most won’t think about. I mean most people jod just take the destruction of all life forms as the end and stop thinking there.
- lolive 6y ago"How to destoy living things" is the current show we are attending. Honestly, each season is getting better. The villains of that show are just disgusting selfish assholes!!! George Martin to the next level. Plus IT'S REAL!!!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- flobosg 6y agoRelated: The Centre for Applied Eschatology - https://www.appliedeschatology.com/ https://www.appliedeschatology.com/ We’re working for no tomorrow, today.
- morpheos137 6y agoCheerful. I wonder when this kind of art project crosses the line into terrorist conspiracy.
- oli5679 6y agoI am wondering if this is a satire? Sentences such as the below do not seem serious to me. "Totalitarian states Not an extinction scenario or a global catastrophe in the familiar sense, a global takeover by a ruthless totalitarian state could irreversibly mire the world in endless enslavement and crushing brutality. Current disintegration of liberal democracies around the world, as well as the rapid advances in surveillance and data management technologies make this a direction of growing promise." https://www.appliedeschatology.com/research https://www.appliedeschatology.com/research
- bondarchuk 6y agoIt's funny because it's true.
- jhardy54 6y ago
- qndreoi 6y ago"Cooked in a solar oven You will need: Means for focusing a good few percent of the Sun's energy output directly on the Earth." Mirrors don't work that way. Mirrors can't focus to a black body temperature higher than that of the the light source.
- andi999 6y agoSo you say the max temp on earth by this method is the sun's temperature. Why wouldn't this be enough?
- qndreoi 6y agoIt may, but source says "You will need: Means for focusing a good few percent of the Sun's energy output directly on the Earth.", then posits using mirrors to do this. Mirrors could get Earth to something approaching 5800 kelvin, but that is nowhere near "a few good percent of the sun's energy output."
- aflag 6y agoHow much energy is a good few percent?
- qndreoi 6y agoThe sun has surface area of 6 x 10^18 m^2. Earth has surface area of 5 x 10^14 m^2. Earth can not be bombarded by more than the ratio of these to numbers with solar radiation using only mirrors. <<1 percent.
- yongjik 6y agoI see what you mean, but it seems like a self-correcting problem. Focus enough of the sun's energy on Earth, and it will be shrouded with a rapidly expanding ball of hot plasma, at which point its surface area would be much greater. Now you can focus even more of the sun's energy on it without conjuring Maxwell's demons.
- neurobashing 6y agoFans of the Xeelee Sequence are probably thinking, Meh, just go find a Starbreaker, and take out all of the system!
- 29athrowaway 6y agoThe easiest way to destroy the Earth is to create a religion based on this: God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and every creature that crawls upon the earth." Genesis 1:28 It basically tells you: - Multiply without limits. - You are more important than the environment and other species. - Every species of plants and animals exist for your benefit. These are profoundly destructive beliefs, and the root cause of how we arrived to our current mess, the Anthropocene extinction event. There was a time when the Americas were populated by people that believed in living in harmony with the environment, but unfortunately they were all murdered and the ones that remained were forced to convert. 500 years later, a significant portion of what was carefully preserved for 10,000 years is gone. If humanity is going to survive, you have to abandon such beliefs. You are not here to multiply without limits and, quite honestly, you are not more important than the environment. Stop with the overconsumption, the excessive travelling and all that nonsense. You are not as important as you think.
- drdeca 6y agoArticle is about destroying the planet itself, as in, making it cease to be as a planet, not merely destroying all life.
- spaetzleesser 6y agoSometimes I wonder how the world would look if that wasn't in the bible. Would people have behaved differently?
- 29athrowaway 6y agoLikely, I would be posting this from a flying car on Mars if it wasn't for the church. This now defunct website put it beautifully: https://web.archive.org/web/20050314130905/http://www.superstringtheory.org/history/history1.html https://web.archive.org/web/20050314130905/http://www.supers... The church forced people to believe in the Geocentric model, they murdered Hypatia of Alexandria, they harassed the fuck out of Galileo, Kepler's family, and countless other scientists. Now they're all about preaching about forgiveness and altruism, but before they ruled people's lives with an iron fist. You cannot discover gravity if you believe in Geocentrism. Without gravity it's harder to get to the laws of motion. Without laws of motion you have no physics. And so on, so forth.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- megablast 6y agoWhy would you need to create an equivalent size amount of antimatter to destroy the planet, when you would need a lot less since it releases so much energy?
- porphyra 6y agoIf you scroll down there is a section about blowing Earth up with an antimatter bomb made of a lot less antimatter.
- Transfinity 6y ago> At a million tonnes of mass driven out of the Earth's gravity well per second, this would take 189,000,000 years. I love how this takes an incomprehensibly large number (mass of the earth) and decomposes it into 3 exceptionally large but kind of comprehensible numbers (million tones / second, 30 million seconds / year, 189 million years). The earth is _big_.
- chc4 6y agoThe sequel to this, "To destroy the Earth"[0], is also very good. 0: https://qntm.org/destro https://qntm.org/destro
- f_allwein 6y ago> on September 10, 2008, the Earth has been destroyed https://qntm.org/board https://qntm.org/board Did I miss something there?
- qbasic_forever 6y agoWe actually have the technology to destroy life on the planet with one thing, the cobalt bomb: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_bomb It's a salted nuclear bomb made to throw an enormous cloud of radioactive cobalt into the atmosphere of a planet. It would be as if hundreds of Chernobyl powerplants exploded in the air and the fallout would circle the globe, fall on all the people and plants and slowly kill them over a few years. The ecosystem would be devastated and the planet would become unlivable for some time. Luckily we decided hydrogen and neutron bombs were about as bad a device as we wanted to build and left cobalt bombs on the drawing board.
- tpmx 6y agoObvious clarification: Destroying life on earth isn't the same as destroying the earth. Edit: Also, please don't bring up Chernobyl like that, without any comparison to modern nuclear tech. Modern safe nuclear power is necessary for avoiding dramatic climate change, which would hurt a lot of humans (but not earth).
- overboard2 6y agoWhile I agree that nuclear power is important, I also think that trying to get people to include tangentially relevant opinions as context is a bad idea. While pushing your opinion on Chernobyl every time you mention Chernobyl might help to push that opinion, it decreases the signal to noise ratio of what you're trying to primarily convey. Additionally, it can introduce unnecessary opinions into otherwise neutral or slightly opinionated comments.
- legulere 6y agoWhy do you think nuclear is necessary? Nuclear is stagnating at just 10% of global electricity and renewables are rapidly growing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation
- tpmx 6y agoThere is no remotely efficent way to store very large volumes of electricity. Wind power works great sometimes, but we need electricity that works all of the the time. > Nuclear is stagnating at just 10% of global electricity At the moment the slack is increasingly being picked up by burning coal or oil. That's bad.
- hikerclimber 6y agohopefully this happens in my lifetime.
- nicbou 6y agoThis is the kind of internet I like, and the reason why I visit this website. Thanks for sharing
- kbr2000 6y agoAlso, this classic 2001 website, for your entertainment: Exit Mundi ... A collection of end-of-world scenarios [0] [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120918050149/http://www.exitmundi.nl/exitmundi.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20120918050149/http://www.exitmu...
- jaakl 6y agoCan we be even sure that earth (and everything else from universes to ourselves) exists in the first place? Maybe we are just very complicated simulation faking it? Is or can we possibly have any strong proof for it? Stronger than Occam’s razor for example.
- hoppla 6y agoWe better not... do not want The Operator to destroy our Earth.
- stjo 6y agoAnother story by the same author on the topic: https://qntm.org/responsibility https://qntm.org/responsibility
- jaakl 6y agoYep, just saw it also. This speculates that we are fake. My curiosity is whether it is possible to prove or falsify it. Descartes had quite strong proof that we do exist (cogito...), but also he was not able to say are we real, or what we really are.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> Descartes had quite strong proof that we do exist (cogito...) Well, no, Descartes’ argument only applies in the first-person-singular of the person evaluating the argument, not the first-person-plural.
- hntrader 6y agoThis is the "brain in a vat" thought experiment in philosophy. Also the simulation hypothesis. In short, I don't believe it's falsifiable or testable. We can just reason about likelihoods. Relevant to this is solipsism. We also don't have and can't have specific evidence that another being is conscious. At best we can just say that it's likely that they are.
- hikerclimber 6y agohopefully earth gets destroyed within my lifetime.
- joshspankit 6y agoI like this, but there’s an important component missing: (Assuming you had the resources in-hand) how much time would each one take? Like, the micro singularity: are we talking minutes, hours, millennia? Longer?
- CamelCaseName 6y agoShouldn't the title read (2003) not (2006)?
- swayvil 6y agoI read of a scifi tech that rotated a photon through the hoopajoo dimension, thus converting a 1.0c massless particle into a 0.9c particle that weighs a couple grams. So we set up such a converting lens between the sun and earth and let our downshifted photons blast it to bits over a couple months.
- swayvil 6y agoCreate the intergalactic equivalent of a superpopular sitcom, like Friends. Make random reference to Earth (and its location) in conversation between Ross and Phoebe. Earth suddenly has massive value to fans of the show. Rabid alien fans swarm in and steal Earth away in flyingsaucer-portable chunks.
- jl6 6y agoI didn’t see this one: Death by planetary obesity. Kind of the opposite of meticulously deconstructing the planet, instead bring more and more mass to Earth - souvenirs, visitors, imports, a few hundred trillion quadrillion kilograms of precious metals... doesn’t matter what, just keep hoarding more and more stuff. Eventually Earth will either change orbit and sink into the sun, or it will become a sun itself, or it will become a black hole.
- zachrip 6y agoIs this actually possible? We're already dwarfed by other planets that are fine?
- Filligree 6y agoWell, in principle. It wouldn't sink into the sun, unless you use a interstellar lithobraking for all your souvenirs to deliberately do it, but you could perfectly well turn Earth into a black hole that way. Of course it's not very practical, and also it'd turn into a star much earlier in the process, at which point it arguably isn't a planet anymore anyway.
- jacobr1 6y agoAre there any nearer-term concerns? Imagine we have large scale asteroid mining within the next century. Is there a point where the extra-mass matters on any reasonable timescale (hundreds of years) similar to the impact of industrialization with Co2 and climate change? Other odd side effects from landing the material?
- jl6 6y agoNo, no near term concerns at all. It’s a very silly sci-fi scenario. You could smash the mass of Mount Everest into Earth a hundred times a day for a thousand years and it wouldn’t even increase the planet’s mass by 1%.
- ravel-bar-foo 6y ago
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dfranke 6y agoOldie but goodie! I remember submitting this to very early Reddit, getting seven upvotes, and this keeping it at the #1 spot on the page for multiple days. I'm a credited contributor and sometimes I list this on résumés as a gag.
- mnw21cam 6y agoThat's a good idea. I should start doing that.
- guardiangod 6y agoAs an aside, one of my favorite phrases to use when making fun of someone's idea is 'all-surpassing patience.' I've forgotten where I've first read that phrase. When I saw the the headline I immediately remember that I read this when I was in high school (2002-5) and that the phrase came from here. Thank you for making me remember again.
- dfilppi 6y agoBlack hole, or collide with something much bigger. Simple.
- Tepix 6y agoFlinging earth into space would qualify (it no longer orbits a star) and seems to be among the easiest options. Just get Jupiter to do it somehow. It would require less energy than most of the other options i guess.
- sillysaurusx 6y agoThat actually wouldn't destroy the earth. There's plenty of heat near the bottom of the ocean; life would survive down there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rltpH6ck2Kc&ab_channel=Vsauce https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rltpH6ck2Kc&ab_channel=Vsauc...
- dang 6y agoIf curious, past threads: How to destroy the Earth (2006) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11808723 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11808723 - May 2016 (44 comments) How to destroy the Earth (completely) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1446612 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1446612 - June 2010 (73 comments) How to destroy the earth - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=998734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=998734 - Dec 2009 (35 comments) Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=121624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=121624 - Feb 2008 (3 comments)