How to Destroy the Earth

[tealin]

Sometimes you stumble upon pure gold. This is from a website by Sam Hughes:

Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe.

You've seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You've heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing hideous quantities of pollution into the atmosphere threatens to end the world.

Fools.

The Earth is built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you've had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy.

This is not a guide for wusses whose aim is merely to wipe out humanity. I (Sam Hughes) can in no way guarantee the complete extinction of the human race via any of these methods, real or imaginary. Humanity is wily and resourceful, and many of the methods outlined below will take many years to even become available, let alone implement, by which time mankind may well have spread to other planets; indeed, other star systems. If total human genocide is your ultimate goal, you are reading the wrong document. There are far more efficient ways of doing this, many which are available and feasible RIGHT NOW. Nor is this a guide for those wanting to annihilate everything from single-celled life upwards, render Earth uninhabitable or simply conquer it. These are trivial goals in comparison.

This is a guide for those who do not want the Earth to be there anymore.

SEE IT

Comments

[ari-enchanted.livejournal.com]

"Cooked in a solar oven" gives me a very funny mental picture.

[tannhaeuser.livejournal.com]

[trashcanbaby.livejournal.com]

I saw that the other day. It's pretty awesome!

[(Anonymous)]

How do you go about _finding_ stuff like this?

[ardys-the-ghoul.livejournal.com]

*busts a gut laughing*

That is the greatest thing ever.

[maggiebloome.livejournal.com]

Oh, Sam's great. I'm using the Cheesecake Challenge on my legal sudies exam in a few weeks, cos I'm dropping the subject afterwards and I want to see the expression on the teachers face. It's an oral exam.

[disneyboy.livejournal.com]

Ok...when I started reading this, i thought,"Hmmm - this is interesting - kinda funny in a rather morbid vein!" then about a third of the way (what, about an hour later?) down the article, I get this queasy feeling - I know these are all mereley theoretical, extremely impractical ideas, but even thinking about so many ways that the planet, or the Sun or the Solar System, etc. could cease to exist starts to make me feel rather vulnerable and doomed and wishing I had some sort of personal spacecraft just in case (preferably a tardis - Dr.?)...and after a while of scanning through this interminable but undeniably thorough and clever list, I'm numb to all the big numbers and calculations and disturbibg descriptions of the end of all things, and I think to myself, "Hmm. Yeah - that could work..."

[(Anonymous)]

Lovely.
Hi. I lurk.
I sent the page to my AP Pysics teacher who thought it was funny. XD

[(Anonymous)]

This is officially the niftiest thing this side of the North Pole. To make it better, he quotes Terry Pratchett and gives a link to the official site for "World Jump Day" (i.e. what would happen if 600000000 people all over the globe jumped at once, which I would like to try, personally).

[http://users.livejournal.com/_ashuri_/]

Heh...that article is going to be in my university's newspaper (more like magazine).

^_^