So as we all know it seems to be ridiculous easy to wipe out nearly all live on earth (nuclear war, asteroid impact, a new series of twilight movies) but let’s face it: earth would continue to exist.
And damn, it’s really hard to not just to destroy a planet but to completely wipe it out from existence.
I’ve found a nice article about some possibilities: http://qntm.org/destroy
Currently my favourits are “blown up by 25.000.000.000.000 tonnes of antimatter” and “Total existence failure”.
What do you think? Any other ideas how to get rid of this thing?
Id like to see a solar flare powerful enough to swap our magnetic poles, would be interesting to see the results 
@wezrule said:
Id like to see a solar flare powerful enough to swap our magnetic poles, would be interesting to see the results ^_^
Suddenly smart phones everywhere would be confused about orientation as all magnetic compasses would flip. CRT monitors would also get weird patches of odd color.
Also, the world would reel as Australia was no longer "Down under". Men at Work would have a revival tour to correct their hit song.
I mean, that's assuming that a flare strong enough to change the way Earth's core was flowing didn't already wipe out all life.
I'm more worried about why someone suddenly is curious how to destroy the whole earth. :) Is Pirate Hell not going well? :)
@wezrule said:
Id like to see a solar flare powerful enough to swap our magnetic poles, would be interesting to see the results ^_^
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_reversal
ah seems the last one was 780,000 years ago and we still standing :’(
/sigh
Edit: Oh, and ofc http://washington.cbslocal.com/2012/11/26/report-u-s-planned-on-blowing-up-moon-with-nuke-during-cold-war-in-1950s/
1 Like
@normen: hehe, I hope he had brought some movies to the moon to get some nice days before starving. Also according to one of the theories in the link in the first post if this meteor has nearly lightspeed it would be able to scatter earths parts far enough so that the gravity effects of its pieces are unable to reform earth.
Alternatively we just could build a death star and redo the alderaan happening.
@ceiphren said:
Alternatively we just could build a death star and redo the alderaan happening.
SPOIL!!!! :D
Chances of an impact, ANY impact going through Earth like the image above is simply not possible, even if it’s going at the speed of light. A small reminder: Earth’s core is 1,220 km (760 mi) in radius of SOLID NICKEL-IRON. That without counting on the upper strata that are very viscous, thick and mostly molten rock. That’s very hard to go though.
Would make a big hole on the upper mantle, sure, but it would stop there.
Makes a pretty picture though, I’ll admit. 
As far as a huge CME (coronal mass ejection), that wouldn’t affect life much because we’re protected by our atmosphere and the magnetosphere. Magnetic field inversion would bring problems to migratory bird (and butterfly) species mostly. It wouldn’t affect us much. If we can feel earth’s magnetism, it’s barely at best. And yes, this has happened quite a often in the past.
To completely destroy the earth, you’ll need BIG GUNS.
- Bring a neutron star close. (A tablespoon of neutron star weighs more than the earth itself). The gravity of such star would simply pull every atom from here and swallow it.
- A black hole… No need to explain.
- A supernova. Hot hot hot!
As far as destroying what’s on the Earth, well, humanity is on a good path directly leading to this where most of the “upper line” will simply vanish, but don’t count the smaller living things out. Microbes are goddamn resistant little buggers.
Odd are, the planet will remain fine until Sol expands and engulf it when it stretches its envelope in about 4.2B years.
Actually the magnetic field inversion could be a problem depending on how long it takes. The magnetic field is what protects us from solar radiation and its actually a pretty nasty stuff floating around up there…
The best mean to destroy earth is to wait.
Mankind will figure that out eventually.
1 Like
@zarch said:
The magnetic field is what protects us from solar radiation and its actually a pretty nasty stuff floating around up there...
Yes, a slow inversion would weaken the field by a quite lot, but it wouldn't disappear completely. CMEs also don't last for a very long period of time. Minutes long, or at the very worst, 12 - 18 hours long, but the brunt of it don't last THAT long. Because of that most of what would be affected would be on the daylight side of the planet.
But, at the end of the day, this is only speculation. Although the planet has been through this numeral times in the past, nobody left any scientific data for us to study, so in a way, any scenario is more or less plausible. :)
Indeed. Which is also why it’s impossible to say how long it will take. It could potentially be years.
I now feel the need to repost this link since it talks about magnetic reversal and the predicted potential effects in detail:
Thats a neutron star going through earth there ofc
@normen said:
Thats a neutron star going through earth there ofc ;)
At least it would be painless and we'd be oblivious to it happening. I'd take that over impending doom stretched over weeks and/or months any day. :D
@pspeed
Nice articles but these are all theories. Data is too scarce and too divergent to polarize the scientific community.
@madjack said:
At least it would be painless and we'd be oblivious to it happening. I'd take that over impending doom stretched over weeks and/or months any day. :D
@pspeed
Nice articles but these are all theories. Data is too scarce and too divergent to polarize the scientific community.
Yes, which is why I find it funny when a bunch of monkeys speculate about it.
Though the evidence seems to point to the fact that mass extinctions are not correlated to switches in polarity. I think it's funny that the correlation was stronger when they thought that polarity switches happened with regularity... which to me indicates that mass extinction happens with more regularity than polarity swaps. o_0
Well, if I remember right there were 3 mass extinctions that we are aware of. So no, it didn’t happen more often.
The thing is, it’s a whole lot easier to talk about something when there’s stuff lying around for us to pore over and analyze (tons of fossils and evidence all over the planet) than some iron-bearing magnetized rocks in some areas of the world that are not so easy to find.
You know that if the end of the world really occur on december 21, human kind will just blame that on us just because of this thread…
“I remember, there was a thread on JME.org on how to destroy the earth…I guess they finally found a way”
1 Like
@nehon said:
You know that if the end of the world really occur on december 21, human kind will just blame that on us just because of this thread...
"I remember, there was a thread on JME.org on how to destroy the earth....I guess they finally found a way"
Huh, end of the world = nobody left to blame anyone. :P