How to destroy the world

Разработка к видеоматериалу How to destroy the world. Food (Как разрушить мир. Еда)

На заре веков жизнь протекала среди хаоса (chaos) и убийств (murder). Это была кровавая битва за выживание (A bloody fight for survival). Все были голодны, и всё было едой (Everyone was hungry and everything was food). Включая нас (Including us). Сейчас мы охотимся в супермаркетах и загородных торговых центрах (Nowadays we hunt in supermarkets and out-of-town malls), а ученые постоянно модифицируют еду, чтобы сделать ее лучше, удобнее и привлекательнее. Но насколько она полезна (healthy) для человека?

Доктор Шелли была очень увлечена созданием умной еды (smart food), которая легко выращивается (easy to grow), сама собирается (self-picking), сама доставляется (self-delivering) и счастлива, что ее съедят (happy to be eaten). Изобретательница совсем не учла, что у умной еды есть инстинкт выживания (survival instinct). Люди были захвачены врасплох (People were taken by surprise)…

Предлагаем задания к видеоролику о том, как ученые пытались перехитрить природу (outwit the nature) и что из этого вышло. Упражнения №1 и №2 выполняются до просмотра ролика. Задание №5 рассчитано на работу в классе, так как предполагает составление и обыгрывание диалогов.

Previewing

Если вы нашли ошибку, пожалуйста, выделите фрагмент текста и нажмите Ctrl+Enter.

Разработка к видеоматериалу How to destroy the world. Rubbish (Как разрушить мир. Мусор)

Обсуждая проблемы защиты окружающей среды, мы непременно затрагиваем виды и источники загрязнения (types and sources of environmental pollution). Наиболее распространенный источник – бытовые отходы (domestic waste) или мусор (rubbish). Мы рассказываем, какой вред свалки (landfill sites) могут нанести окружающей среде, что отходы должны перерабатываться (should be recycled) и т. п. Тема достаточно серьезная как с точки зрения обсуждаемых проблем, так и лексического наполнения. Казалось бы, здесь нет места юмору. Однако авторы серии мультипликационных роликов How to destroy the world показывают, что все-таки есть! Говоря с юмором о серьезных проблемах, они заставляют нас по-настоящему задуматься. Можно долго говорить о том, что сорить плохо, но лучше один раз увидеть то, к чему это может привести.

Rubbish (Мусор) – так называется первая часть серии мультфильмов How to destroy the world. Ролик продолжительностью 2 минуты можно использовать на уроке английского языка for warming up (для разминки), так как просмотр и обсуждение займут не более 10 минут. Перед просмотром рекомендуется выполнить задание № 1 и 2.

Previewing

How to destroy the world

Думаю, что такой подход к проблеме засорения нашей планеты мусором никого не оставит равнодушным. Если люди будут продолжать засорять Землю с таким же энтузиазмом, как это происходит сейчас, то увидеть the tin-can nebula (туманность из консервных банок), white goods constellation (созвездие из крупных бытовых приборов) instead of milky way (вместо млечного пути), a garbage eclipse (мусорное затмение), a rubbish shower (мусорный дождь), a rubbish storm (мусорный град) – это реальность! Mind how you go!🙂

Если вы нашли ошибку, пожалуйста, выделите фрагмент текста и нажмите Ctrl+Enter.

How to Destroy the Earth in Three Easy Steps

By Paul Sutter published 22 January 19

Mad scientists through the ages have dreamed of holding the world hostage by threatening to destroy the whole thing, demanding riches, power and fame, and respect from their peers. But if you’re going to play this game yourself, you’d better do it right — and doing it right means doing your homework.

Destroying our planet is no easy task. Sure, you could bomb us back to the stone age, introduce a plague to wipe out all complex life or whip up some sort of nanomachine to completely eliminate the entire biosphere. But in all those cases, the rock we stand on would still remain, lifelessly circling the sun for billions of years to come. [Six Cosmic Catastrophes that Could Wipe Out Life on Earth]

So let’s be serious. If you want to destroy the planet, you have to really aim to destroy the actual planet.

Step 1: Get the math right

Our planet is held together by its own gravity. You can think of it like a massive, rocky onion. The gravity of the innermost core holds the next layer onto it. Then their combined gravitational attraction keeps the next layer glued. Then their total weight grips the next layer. I think you get the idea, but this process repeats until the entire might of the Earth — all 5.972 x 10^24 kilograms of it — holds you to your seat and attracts a thin atmosphere to top it all off.

So if you want to blow up the Earth, you need to unpeel that onion, one layer at a time. You need to send every layer, every chunk of rock and speck of dirt and shovelful of molten magma into space. And not just into space temporarily — you need to make sure that stuff completely escapes the gravitational pull of the (remaining) Earth for all eternity.

In other words, you need to accelerate all the parts of the Earth to escape velocity. That’s no easy feat: We typically use giant rockets to hurl a few measly tons into orbit and beyond.

Although once you get started, the going gets easier. With every kilogram sent into the void, that’s one less kilogram that’s holding back the next kilogram. As you unpeel the Earth, layer by layer, the gravitational pull gets weaker and each layer is easier than the last to launch. By the time you’re nearly done and you’re packing our iron core into interstellar moving boxes, it’d be no different than doing the same to a small moon.

This entire process can be summarized by a handy equation that relates the energy needed to destroy a planet (or in more polite terms, «unbind» it) to its mass and radius. (The equation assumes a uniform density of the planet under consideration, allowing for a rough estimate.) For the Earth, you need somewhere around 10^32 joules.

Step 2: Find a source of energy

That’s a lot of energy. To give you some sense of the enormity of that number, in 2013 the entire human race consumed a measly 10^20 joules of energy to power everything humans use: wood-burning fires, engines, alarm clocks, TVs, electronic article-reading devices and more. So if you were to somehow capture all the energy output of our nuclear power plants, hydroelectric dams, coal plants, solar panels and wind farms — leaving absolutely nothing else for anybody else — you would need to wait a trillion years to reach the amount we’re talking here.

A trillion years to collect enough energy to completely rip apart the Earth. If you want to be taken seriously as a threatening mad scientist, you need a new plan. After all, our sun will burn out in only 5 billion years, and there wouldn’t be much point in destroying the Earth after that, would there?

What about the sun? The sun is big and bright and emits a lot of energy. Every second of every day, our star chews through about 4 million tons of hydrogen, fusing it into helium and releasing energy in the form of radiation. That radiation escapes (eventually) and blasts its way through space.

Most of it is simply lost, doing nothing interesting or useful at all, but some of it strikes the Earth, where it can be harnessed. Algae and plants learned this lesson billions of years ago, and learned how to harness that energy for their own purposes. That energy eventually winds its way up the food chain into your Saturday morning breakfast cereal. So there’s a lot of energy from the sun … but is it enough?

Step 3: Wait

If you were to coat the entire surface of the Earth in solar panels, absorbing 100 percent of all that juicy, incoming radiation, it would take you … 18 million years to collect enough energy to unbind our planet. That’s certainly a significant step up from the trillion years needed by relying on human-made energy sources, but it’s still quite a long haul. Let’s hope no superhero finds your secret lair in that time.

But only a tiny, tiny fraction of the sun’s energy strikes the Earth. What if you could — somehow — capture all the solar output? In that case, you would need only one week to collect enough energy to do the deed.

One week! That’s not bad at all. Now all the people of the Earth will take your threats seriously.

Except, if you’re handy enough to construct a device that collects all the sun’s energy … what are you still doing on Earth?

Learn more by listening to the episode «What happens when galaxies collide?» on the Ask A Spaceman podcast, available on iTunes (opens in new tab) and on the Web at http://www.askaspaceman.com. Thanks to @BatCruRon5 for the questions that led to this piece! Ask your own question on Twitter using #AskASpaceman or by following Paul @PaulMattSutter and facebook.com/PaulMattSutter. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook. Original article on Space.com.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com.

Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at SUNY Stony Brook and the Flatiron Institute in New York City. Paul received his PhD in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2011, and spent three years at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics, followed by a research fellowship in Trieste, Italy, His research focuses on many diverse topics, from the emptiest regions of the universe to the earliest moments of the Big Bang to the hunt for the first stars. As an «Agent to the Stars,» Paul has passionately engaged the public in science outreach for several years. He is the host of the popular «Ask a Spaceman!» podcast, author of «Your Place in the Universe» and «How to Die in Space» and he frequently appears on TV — including on The Weather Channel, for which he serves as Official Space Specialist.

11 действительно интересных фильмов о проблемах экологии

Завершился пятый ежегодный и, пока что единственный в Москве кинофестиваль о проблемах экологии Ecocup Film Festival. Мы попросили его основательницу, Анастасию Лаукканен, рассказать о лучших, по ее мнению, фильмах.

Неудобная правда (An Inconvenient Truth)

Режиссер Дэвис Геггенхайм, при участии бывшего вице-президента США Эла Гора. США, 2006

Ученые спорили между собой о глобальном потеплении и до этого фильма. Но спорили между собой, в специализированных журналах и серьезных конвенциях, обмениваясь диаграммами и расчетами. Эл Гор сделал удивительное – он разъяснил все это доступным языком. Он собрал факты, мнения, результаты исследований, добавил красивых картинок и анимации, вставил хорошую музыку (песня к этому фильму выиграла Оскар), и у него получилось то, что Американский институт кино назвал его одним из крупнейших событий года.

Фильм получил еще один Оскар в номинации «Лучший документальный фильм», а самого Эла Гора, в итоге, наградили Нобелевской премией мира «за изучение последствий глобальных климатических изменений, вызванных деятельностью человека, и выработке мер по их возможному предотвращению».

После «Неудобной правды» документальное кино на экологические темы становится все более и более популярным жанром. Хотя мнения экспертов-экологов до сих пор делятся как за, так и против работы Гора.

История вещей (Story of stuff)

Режиссер Анни Леонард. США, 2007 год

Это двадцатиминутный мультик, который с 2007 года доступен онлайн, в том числе, и на русском языке. Мультик откровенно осуждает чрезмерное потребительство и мягко намекает на устойчивое развитие. Фильм – поразительный по своей простоте и фактам, сегодня показывают в школах, университетах, корпоративных тренингах. Создатели подсчитали, что уже к 2009 году фильм показали в 228 странах, где его посмотрели более 12 миллионов человек.

Как и любой фильм, который обнажает острую тему, «История вещей» до сих пор вызывает споры. В 2009 году The New York Times посвятил ему первую полосу. В США, пока в одних школах учителей награждали за показ этого фильма, в других обвиняли учителей в «левой» пропаганде и не уважении к американским ценностям.

Дом (Home)

Режиссер Ян Артус-Бертранд, Люк Бессон. Франция, 2009 год

5 июня 2009 года во Всемирный день окружающей среды фильм «Дом» одновременно показали на открытых площадках в 87 странах мира. Ян Бертранд – известный фотограф – снял весь фильм с борта вертолета. Его команда облетела 53 страны, показывая и рассказывая о том как красива наша планета с высоты птичьего полета, и как она беззащитна перед человеческой деятельностью. Некоторые кадры настолько откровенно доказывали, что государства могут сделать со своей землей, что, например, в Индии половину материала конфисковали, в Аргентину съемочную команду посадили на неделю в тюрьму, а в Саудовской Аравии и Китае просто отказали в проведении съемки. Сам Бертранд говорит, что все комментарии в фильме основаны на известных и доступных фактах и цифрах.

ВАЛЛ-И (WALL-E)

Режиссер Эндрю Стэнтон. США, 2008 год

Научно-фантастический мультик, который слишком часто всплывет в голове, когда начинаешь рассуждать о будущем. Тут тебе и Земля, на которой из-за огромного количества неперерабатываемых отходов нельзя жить, и люди, которые проводят 24 часа, уставившись в крошечный экранчик перед ними, не могут ни ходить, ни работать. Красивый и смешной мультик, который не хочется, чтобы стал реальностью.

Мусорные мечты (Garbage dreams)

Режиссер Май Искандер. Египет/США, 2009 год

Лиричный, трогательный и искренний фильм про окраины Каира и людей, чья работа и жизнь зависят только от мусора. Фильм про их судьбы и мечты получил 24 награды на кинофестивалях по всему миру.

Обутылочные (Tapped)

Режиссер Стефанни Сохниг. США, 2009 год

Один из самых ярких фильмов, посвященных миллионам пластиковых бутылок, которыми мы пользуемся каждый день. Факты о «бутылочной индустрии» и ее последствиях, которые заставляют задуматься дважды, перед тем, как купить (и выбросить) такую бутылку.

Солнечное такси (Solar taxi)

Режиссер Эрик Шмитт. Германия, 2010 год

Совершенно потрясающее и вдохновляющее кино о школьном учителе из Швейцарии, который построил автомобиль на солнечных батареях и проехал на нем вокруг всего света.

Жизнь после людей (Life after people)

Сериал. США, 2010 год

Это сериал – ожившие теории ученых о том, как Земля будет выглядеть после исчезновения людей. Провокационные сценарии, нарисованные на компьютере, перемежаются с реальными примерами, такими, как Чернобыль или остров Пасхи. Сильнейшее ощущение, когда масштаб осознания роли человечества смещается.

Как уничтожить мир (How to destroy the world)

Режиссер Пит Бишоп. Великобритания. 2010 год

Очень-короткометражный анимационный сериал про разные способы уничтожить мир: транспорт, мусор, еда, компьютерные игры и другие. Смешно, но удивительно логично. Название стало мемом в интернете, а финальная фраза «Mind where you are going» привязывается надолго.

Больше чем мед (More than honey)

Режиссер Маркус Имхуф. Швейцария/Германия, 2012 год

Один из лучших фильмов о том, почему, все-таки, по всему миру гибнут пчелы, как сбор меда дошел до промышленного масштаба, что при этом происходит с самим медом, и как пчелы могут мстить. Фильм будет интересен даже тем, кто не любит сам мед. Вы никогда не видели пчел так близко.

Потерянные реки (Lost rivers)

Режиссер Каролин Бакл. Канада, 2012 год

Режиссер фильма отыскивает реки, которые были давным-давно запрятаны под землю во всех больших индустриальных городах в развитом мире. Это смелый и красивый фильм о том, что природа продолжает жить, даже если мы забываем о ней. Увлекательно, неожиданно и очень красиво.

How to destroy the world

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.

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 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.

Contents

Mission statement

For the purposes of what I hope to be a technically and scientifically accurate document, I will define our goal thus: by any means necessary, to change the Earth into something other than a planet or a dwarf planet.

The International Astronomical Union defines a planet as:

and a dwarf planet as:

Since «celestial body» does not include the Earth, we shall assume for the sake of pedantry that the IAU meant to say «astronomical body».

We are left, therefore, with the challenge of significantly altering the Earth’s physical structure, or else reducing its mass such that it can maintain a shape which is not round. For example: blowing it up, turning it into a dust cloud, merging it with a larger body, et cetera.

Current Earth-Destruction Status

Methods for destroying the Earth

To be listed here, a method must actually work. That is, according to current scientific understanding, it must be possible for the Earth to actually be destroyed by this method, however improbable or impractical it may be.

Several methods involve moving the Earth a considerable distance off its usual orbital track. This is an essay in itself, so a separate page has been created for it.

Annihilated by an equivalent quantity of antimatter

You will need: An entire planet Earth made from antimatter

Method: Once you’ve generated your antimatter, probably in space, just launch it en masse towards Earth. The resulting release of energy (obeying Einstein’s famous mass-energy equation, E=mc 2 ) is equivalent to the amount the Sun outputs in some 89 million years. Alternatively, if your matter-flipping machinery is a little more flexible, turn half the Earth into antimatter (say, the Western Hemisphere) and watch the fireworks.

Earth’s final resting place: When matter and antimatter collide, they completely annihilate each other, leaving nothing but energy. All that would be left of Earth is a scintillating flash of light expanding across space forever. This method is one of the most permanent and total on this list, as the very matter which makes up the Earth ceases to exist, making it virtually impossible to even reassemble the planet afterwards.

Feasibility rating: 2/10. It IS possible to create antimatter, so, technically, this method IS possible. But since the proposed matter-to-antimatter flipping machine is probably complete science fiction, we’re looking at stupid, stupid amounts of time to pull this off.

Source: This method suggested by Thomas Wootten.

Fissioned

You will need: a universal fission machine (e.g. a particle accelerator), an unimaginable amount of energy

Method: Take every single atom on planet Earth and individually split each one down to become hydrogen and helium. Fissioning heavier elements to become hydrogen and helium is the opposite of the self-sustaining reaction that powers the Sun: it requires you to put energy in which is why the energy requirements here are so vast.

Earth’s final resting place: While Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are gas giants composed primarily of hydrogen and helium, they are massive enough to actually hold on to their tenuous atmospheres. The Earth is not; the gases would dissipate away. You’d get a wispy mess of gas where there should have been a planet.

Feasibility rating: 2/10. Technically possible, but, again, hopelessly, mind-bogglingly inefficient and time-consuming. You’re looking at billions of years minimum, folks.

Source: This method suggested by John Routledge.

Sucked into a microscopic black hole

You will need: a microscopic black hole.

Note that black holes are not eternal, they evaporate due to Hawking radiation. For your average black hole this takes an unimaginable amount of time, but for really small ones it could happen almost instantaneously, as evaporation time is dependent on mass. Therefore your microscopic black hole must have greater than a certain threshold mass, roughly equal to the mass of Mount Everest.

Creating a microscopic black hole is tricky, since one needs a reasonable amount of neutronium, but may possibly be achievable by jamming large numbers of atomic nuclei together until they stick. This is left as an exercise to the reader.

Method: simply place your black hole on the surface of the Earth and wait. Black holes are of such high density that they pass through ordinary matter like a stone through the air. The black hole will plummet through the ground, eating its way to the centre of the Earth and all the way through to the other side: then, it’ll oscillate back, over and over like a matter-absorbing pendulum. Eventually it will come to rest at the core, having absorbed enough matter to slow it down. Then you just need to wait, while it sits and consumes matter until the whole Earth is gone.

Earth’s final resting place: a singularity with a radius of about nine millimetres, which will then proceed to happily orbit the Sun as normal.

Feasibility rating: 3/10. Highly, highly unlikely. But not impossible.

Comments: 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!

Source: The Dark Side Of The Sun, by Terry Pratchett. It is true that the microscopic black hole idea is an age-old science fiction mainstay which predates Pratchett by a long time, he was my original source for the idea, so that’s what I’m putting.

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.

What I’m talking about here is: mirrors, and lots of them. Intercept several decent sized asteroids for raw materials and start cranking out kilometre-square sheets of lightweight reflective material (aluminised mylar, aluminium foil, nickel foil, iron foil or whatever you can scrape together). They need to be capable of changing focus direction at will because, while a few may be placed at the Earth-Sun system’s Lagrangian points, the vast majority cannot be stationary in space and the relative positions of the Earth and Sun will be shifting as time passes, so attach a few manoeuvering thrusters and a communications and navigation system to each sheet.

Preliminary calculations suggest you would need roughly two trillion square kilometres of mirror.

A variation on this method involves turning the Sun into a gigantic hydrogen gas laser.

Earth’s final resting place: A gas cloud.

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? Unless the amount of heat put in was really immense, all you’d get is a gas planet at best, and a temporary one at that. Moving the Earth towards the Sun (see later) is likely to be a far more viable method.

Source: This method suggested by Sean Timpa.

Overspun

You will need: some means of accelerating the Earth’s rotation.

Accelerating the Earth’s rotation is a rather different matter from moving it. External interactions with asteroids might move the Earth but won’t have a significant effect on how fast it spins. And certainly it won’t spin the Earth fast enough. You need to build rockets or railguns at the Equator, all facing West. Or perhaps something more exotic.

Source: This method suggested by Matthew Wakeling.

Blown up

You will need: 25,000,000,000,000 tonnes of antimatter.

Method: This method involves detonating a bomb so big that it blasts the Earth to pieces.

How hard is that?

If you do the lengthy calculations you find that to liberate that much energy is equivalent to the complete annihilation of around 1,246,400,000,000 tonnes of antimatter. That’s assuming zero energy loss to heat, neutrinos and radiation, which is unlikely to be the case in reality: You’ll probably need to up the dose by at least a factor of twenty. Once you’ve generated your antimatter, probably in space, just launch it en masse towards Earth. The resulting release of energy (obeying Einstein’s famous mass-energy equation, E=mc 2 ) should be sufficient to split the Earth into a thousand pieces.

Earth’s final resting place: A second asteroid belt around the Sun.

Comments: trembling writes, «I still think that antimatter is crazy s**t, i.e. wouldn’t want it on my flapjacks». Charles MacGee presents a very well-realised alternate source of explosives in his blog; this method involves generating the explosive energy by fusing together the lighter elements of Earth’s mantle (magnesium and oxygen). Of course, this would involve the invention of an efficient magnesium fusion bomb. And then turning all of the Earth’s mantle into bombs. How implausible! Well. Implausibility is a relative thing.

Feasibility rating: 4/10. Just about slightly possible.

Sucked into a giant black hole

You will need: a black hole, extremely powerful rocket engines, and, optionally, a large rocky planetary body. The nearest black hole to our planet is 1600 light years from Earth in the direction of Sagittarius, orbiting V4641.

Method: after locating your black hole, you need get it and the Earth together. This is likely to be the most time-consuming part of this plan. There are two methods, moving Earth or moving the black hole, though for best results you’d most likely move both at once. See the Guide to moving Earth for details on how to move the Earth. Several of the methods listed can be applied to the black hole too, though obviously not all of them, since it is impossible to physically touch the black hole, let alone build rockets on it.

Earth’s final resting place: part of the mass of the black hole.

Feasibility rating: 6/10. Very difficult, but definitely possible.

Sources: The Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, by Douglas Adams; space.com.

Comments: It’s clear that dropping the Earth into a singularity is massive overkill. A reasonably strong gravitational field, such as might be associated with any body between Jupiter and a neutron star, would be sufficient to rip the Earth apart via tidal forces. These possibilities are dealt with further down.

Meticulously and systematically deconstructed

At a million tonnes of mass driven out of the Earth’s gravity well per second, this would take 189,000,000 years. One mass driver would suffice, but ideally, lots (i.e. trillions) would be employed simultaneously. Alternatively you could use space elevators or conventional rockets.

Method: Basically, what we’re going to do here is dig up the Earth, a big chunk at a time, and boost the whole lot of it into orbit. Yes. All six sextillion tonnes of it.

Earth’s final resting place: Many tiny pieces, some dropped into the Sun, the remainder scattered across the rest of the Solar System.

Feasibility rating: 6/10. If we wanted to and were willing to devote resources to it, we could start this process RIGHT NOW. Indeed, what with all the gunk left in orbit, on the Moon and heading out into space, we already have done.

Source: this method arose when Joe Baldwin and I knocked our heads together by accident.

Comment: Could this also be achieved with a titanic, solar-powered electromagnet?

Pulverized by impact with blunt instrument

You will need: a big heavy rock, something with a bit of a swing to it. perhaps Mars.

A brief analysis of the size of the object required can be found here. Falling at the minimal impact velocity of 11 kilometres per second and assuming zero energy loss to heat and other energy forms, the cue ball would have to have roughly 60% of the mass of the Earth. Mars, the next planet out, «weighs» in at about 11% of Earth’s mass, while Venus, the next planet in and also the nearest to Earth, has about 81%. Assuming that we would fire our cue ball into Earth at much greater than 11km/s (I’m thinking more like 50km/s), either of these would make great possibilities.

Earth’s final resting place: a variety of roughly Moon-sized chunks of rock, scattered haphazardly across the greater Solar System.

Feasibility rating: 7/10. Pretty plausible.

Source: This method suggested by Andy Kirkpatrick

Comments: Earth is believed to have been hit by an object the size of Mars at some point in the distant past before its surface cooled. This titanic collision resulted in. the Moon. You can download a simulated video of the impact from this page. While the Mars-sized object in question obviously didn’t hit Earth nearly as hard as we’re proposing with this method, this does serve as a proof of concept.

Many useful planetary facts can be found here.

Hurled into the Sun

Method: Hurl the Earth into the Sun, where it will be rapidly melted and then vaporized by the Sun’s heat.

Sending Earth on a collision course with the Sun is not as easy as one might think. Contrary to popular opinion, Earth’s orbit is not «unstable» and Earth will not begin to spiral into the Sun if we give it the slightest of nudges (otherwise, you can bet it would have happened already). 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.

There is at least one way of moving the Sun itself. Although the Sun is much bigger, and the Earth would be carried along by its gravity, it might be possible accelerate the Sun hard enough that it eventually catches the orbiting Earth, with the same net result.

Earth’s final resting place: a small globule of vaporized iron sinking slowly into the heart of the Sun.

Comments: As far as energy changes are concerned, this method is inferior to the next one.

This method is essentially a variation on the Solar Oven method listed above, wherein you bring the Sun to the Earth (in a manner of speaking).

Feasibility rating: 9/10. Impossible at our current technological level, but will be possible one day, I’m certain. In the meantime, may happen by freak accident if something comes out of nowhere and randomly knocks Earth in precisely the right direction.

Ripped apart by tidal forces

Method: When something (like a planet) orbits something else (like the Sun), the closer in it is, the faster it orbits. Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun, moves faster along its path than Earth, which in turn moves faster than Neptune, the furthest planet.

Now, if you move Earth close enough to the Sun, you’ll find that it’s close enough that the side of the Earth facing the Sun wants to orbit the Sun faster than the side pointing away from it. That causes a strain. Move Earth close enough, within an imaginary boundary called the Roche Limit, and the strain will be great enough to literally tear the planet Earth apart. It’ll form one or more rings, much like the rings around Saturn (in fact this may be exactly where Saturn’s rings came from). So our method? Move the Earth to within the Sun’s Roche limit. Or, better, move it out, to Jupiter.

Moving the Earth out to Jupiter is much the same as moving the Earth in towards the Sun, the most obvious difference being your choice of vectors. However, there is another important consideration, and that is energy. It takes energy to raise or lower an object through a gravity field; it would take energy to propel the Earth into the Sun and it would take energy to propel it into Jupiter. When you do the calculations, Jupiter is actually rather preferable; it takes about 38% less energy.

Alternatively, it may be simpler to move Jupiter to Earth. The theory works like this: build a massive free-standing tower or «candle», with its lower end deep inside Jupiter’s depths and its upper end pointing into space. Put machinery inside the tower to pull hydrogen and helium gases in as fuel, through ports in the middle section, and vent these elements out through fusion thrusters at the top and bottom. The tower is called a «candle» because it burns at both ends, see? Now: the flame directed downwards into Jupiter serves to keep the tower afloat (although some secondary thrusters would be needed to also keep it stable and upright). But this lower flame has no direct effect on the Jupiter/candle system as a whole, because all the thrust from the flame is absorbed by Jupiter itself. The two objects are locked together, as if the candle is balanced on a spring or something. The top flame, therefore, can be used to push both the candle and Jupiter along. The top flame pushes the candle which pushes the planet. This is a little unorthodox, and it only works on gas giants, but as means for moving planets it’s at least as plausible as the mass-driver and gravity-assist methods described on the earthmoving page.

Earth’s final resting place: lumps of heavy elements, torn apart, sinking into the massive cloud layers of Jupiter, never to be seen again.

Feasibility rating: 9/10. As before, impossible at our current technological level, but will be possible one day, and in the meantime, may happen by freak accident if something comes out of nowhere and randomly knocks Earth in precisely the right direction.

Source: Mitchell Porter suggested this method. Daniel T. Staal clued me in on the fusion candle technique, which he got from this Shlock Mercenary comic, which in turn was inspired by the novel «A World Out Of Time» by Larry Niven.

Fall-back methods

If your best efforts fail, you needn’t fret. Nothing lasts forever; the Earth is, ultimately, doomed, whatever you do. The following are ways the Earth could naturally come to an end. (They’re no longer in feasibility order since it reads better this way.) Bear in mind that none of these will require any activity on your part to be successful.

Total existence failure

You will need: nothing

Method: No method. Simply sit back and twiddle your thumbs as, completely by chance, all two hundred thousand million million million million billion trillion atoms making up the planet Earth suddenly, simultaneously and spontaneously cease to exist. Note: the odds against this actually ever occuring are considerably greater than a googolplex (10 10 100 ) to one. Failing this, some kind of arcane (read: scientifically laughable) probability-manipulation device may be employed.

Current feasibility rating: 0/10. Even if you look at the significantly greater probability of the Earth randomly rearranging itself into separate two planets, this is utter, utter rubbish.

Source: Life, The Universe And Everything, by Douglas Adams.

Written off in the backlash from a stellar collision

You will need: another star. White dwarf is good, but we’re not fussy.

Method: Crash your star into the Sun.

Earth’s final resting place: burnt pieces.

Hmm. That’s actually pretty high for this list. Make it 5/10.

Source: This method suggested by Eric Thompson.

Comments: See the supernova entry below for more about this Andromeda collision.

Swallowed up as the Sun enters red giant stage

You will need: patience

Earth’s final resting place: Boiling red iron in the heart of the Sun.

Feasibility rating: 8/10. It is possible that the increasing solar wind combined with the Sun’s decreasing mass will result in the Earth gradually moving out to a wider, cooler, safe orbit, but most recent work suggests that this method is sound.

Crunched

You will need: considerably more patience

Method: Our universe is rapidly expanding in all directions. It will likely continue to do so for a very, very long time. After that time, if the density of matter in the universe is greater than a certain critical value, the universe will slow to a stop due to mutual gravitational attraction, and, roughly 42,000,000,000 years from now, collapse back together again, in a reversal of the Big Bang called the Big Crunch. Conditions during the Big Crunch will be similar to those during the Big Bang: mind-boggling heat, matter ripped to subatomic particles, fundamental forces such as gravitation and electromagnetism merging back together, that sort of thing. Yes, Earth would be destroyed. So would the rest of the universe. A tiny sphere of iron stands little chance against conditions like that.

Earth’s final resting place: Quark-gluon plasma? Pure energy? Part of the next universe?

Feasibility rating: 8/10. Plausible. Assumes that the Big Crunch will actually occur at all, which is currently in question.

Source: Nick Snell suggested this method.

Torn a new one

You will need: about half as much patience

Earth’s final resting place: HAH! If I knew that, I wouldn’t need aftershave.

Feasibility rating: 8/10. Likely. Assumes the Big Rip theory is correct, which it probably is, but might not be.

Source: a theory proposed by Robert R. Caldwell, Marc Kamionkowski, and Nevin N. Weinberg in February 2003. Read it here (PDF warning! Also, dense, difficult physics!). Brought to my attention by Jonah Safar and nanite.

Decayed

You will need: all-surpassing patience

Method: If the Big Crunch doesn’t happen, and the Big Rip doesn’t happen either, then we come back to the third option: the Big Chill. For this, the universe will just expand, forever. The laws of thermodynamics take over. Every galaxy becomes isolated from its neighbours. All the stars burn out. Everything gets colder until it’s all the same temperature. And after that, nothing ever changes in the universe. For eternity.

A lot can happen in an eternity. Protons, for example, while incredibly stable, are believed to eventually decay like any other particle. So simply wait for a period of time of the order of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years, and roughly half of the constituent particles of Earth will have decayed into positrons and pions. If that’s still too much like a planet for you, you could wait for another 10 36 years, leaving only a quarter of the original Earth. Or wait even longer. Eventually there will be as little of Earth left as you wish.

Earth’s final resting place: Miscellaneous positrons and gamma radiation (pions decay almost instantly into gamma ray photons) scattered thinly across the entire universe.

Comments: It’s interesting to compare this method with the one right at the top (total existence failure). What we are essentially doing here is almost exactly the same thing, only instead of expecting every particle to disappear at once, we are waiting patiently for a significant proportion of them to disappear, one at a time, over the course of an unimaginable period of time. Essentially we’ve come full circle. The scientific theories involved are the same, it’s just the time scale being considered which changes the feasibility rating from «astoundingly improbable» to:

Feasibility rating: 9/10. If all else fails, this one would be essentially unstoppable.

Source: This method suggested by Joseph Verock.

Bobby Florea suggested to me the intriguing idea that «Evolve an Earth-destructive form of life» might count as an additional natural method for destroying the Earth. Given that we are here, and you are reading this article, it seems like this is the plan which is furthest along at the moment. Of course, this could simply be taken to be «step zero» in all the artificial methods listed above, and not an original method at all.

Other, less scientifically probable ways that Earth could be destroyed

Here are kept the methods which sound good on paper, but might not necessarily actually work, because the science they are based on isn’t necessarily valid. Read on.

Whipped by a cosmic string

You will need: a cosmic string and a whole lotta luck

Earth’s final resting place: String.

Feasibility rating: 1/10. Mind-bogglingly unlikely. Even if cosmic strings do exist, which they may not, there are probably only about ten of them left in the ENTIRE UNIVERSE. And they can’t be steered, unless you have godlike powers, in which case you might as well chuck the Earth into the Sun and have done with it, so you’re relying entirely on luck. This. Will. Never. Happen.

Source: this method suggested by Dan Winston.

Gobbled up by strangelets

Strange matter is a phase of matter which is even more dense than neutronium. It’s theorized to form in particularly massive neutron stars when the pressure inside them becomes just too great for even neutronium to exist: the individual neutrons comprising the neutronium are instead broken down into strange quarks. The neutron star then becomes a «strange star» which is essentially a single gigantic nucleon.

Some theories suggest that a lump of strange matter («strangelet») could remain stable outside of the intense pressure which created it. This would make it theoretically possible for strangelets of sizes all the way down to the atomic scale to exist. It’s further theorized that the gravitational field of a microscopic strangelet would be enough to gobble up anything it comes in contact with, turning it into more strange matter.

Method: Hijack control of a particle accelerator. I suggest the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Brookhaven National Laboratory, Long Island, New York. Use the RHIC to create a strangelet large enough to remain stable. Once created, your job is done: relax and wait as the strangelet plummets through to the Earth’s core, where it will eventually swallow up the entire Earth.

Earth’s final resting place: a tiny glob of strange matter, perhaps a centimetre across.

Feasibility rating: 3/10. Evidence for the existence of strange matter is sketchy at best; there are a few neutron stars which look too small to be made of neutronium, there are a few earthquakes which might have been caused by a microscopic strangelet passing through the Earth at high speed, but that’s about it. And even if it were possible that small stable strangelets could exist and swallow matter up in the manner described, the odds of forming one in a particle accelerator are pretty much zero.

The Supernova Method

Shaken to pieces

Reduced to true vacuum

You will need: An expanding bubble of true vacuum decay.

Some scientific theories tell us that what we may see as vacuum is only vacuum on average, and actually thriving with vast amounts of particles and antiparticles constantly appearing and then annihilating each other. However, it’s postulated that at any time a small bubble of this «false vacuum» could spontaneously decay into genuinely empty «true vacuum». Usually such a bubble would contract to nothingness instantly, but under the right conditions it could expand forever, eventually destroying the entire universe.

Method: There’s no method here because such bubbles are quantum effects which can only really come into existence spontaneously, not by human machinations. You just have to wait for it to happen.

Earth’s final resting place: Unknown.

Feasibility rating: 1/10. Firstly, this might be total bunk. Secondly, if it isn’t total bunk, the odds against this ever happening are clearly astronomical. It’s never happened at any time in the last 13.7 billion years; it seems unlikely to happen anytime soon.

Source: This method suggested by Adam Mansbridge.

Wormholed

You will need: A stable Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen bridge, a.k.a. a wormhole.

Method: Depending on how powerful your technology is, there are a variety of possible methods. Bridging the centre of the Earth with the centre of the Sun would do the trick very efficiently, with the Sun’s million-degree heat instantly boiling the Earth from the inside.

Alternatively, open a large wormhole at the Sun’s core and the other end in deep space, rapidly venting all the Sun’s fuel and hastening its transition to the Red Giant stage. Drain all this fuel rapidly enough and you might even be able to cause a supernova.

Earth’s final resting place: Variable.

Feasibility rating: 2/10. Wormholes probably aren’t actually scientifically possible, and even if they are: opening one at the centre of the Sun? Come on.

Source: This method suggested by Daniel Swartzendruber.

Existence negated via time travel

You will need: a time machine, heavy rock-moving equipment/explosives.

Method: Using your time machine, travel back in time just over 4,500,000,000 years to shortly (i.e. a few billenia) before the formation of the Earth. What you should find in its place is a young Sun and an accretion disc formed of the dusty/rocky material that will later become our Solar System. Find the patch of material that is likely to condense into the Earth. Now blow up, split apart and otherwise stir up the material so that it never gets a chance to come together and form the Earth. Return forwards in time in several hundred-million-year jumps, repeating the process each time so that no planet of any kind ever forms at roughly 1 AU from the Sun. If you make an error, simply go back in time and try again.

If your time machine is more resilient, or you don’t mind dying, you could consider going further back in time. The further you go, the less you need to change the universe to prevent the Earth ever forming. Go back to a few billionths of a second after the universe began and just by being there you’ll completely alter the face of the universe to come. although it was pretty hot back then.

Earth’s final resting place: When you finally return to the present day, you will be left with a largish asteroid belt where Earth should be. Alternatively, you may find that the matter has been assimilated into the bodies of other planets or the Sun.

Feasibility rating: 1/10. This method relies on fictional technology and has no basis in real events or scientific theory. Time travel in this way is almost certainly impossible.

Destroying Rob proved remarkably easy.

Destroyed by God

You will need: God

Method: Far be it from me to dictate whether God does or does not exist, but if he did, and was omnipotent, then no doubt he could destroy the Earth at a mere thought if he should decide to. Of course, the question arises of how we persuade him to do this.

The first idea which springs to mind is to simply bring about the Apocalypse described in the Christian Bible. Assuming the book of Revelation is an accurate, literal depiction of future events, verse 1 of chapter 21 reads «Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea».

It seems astounding that the complete destruction of an entire planet (and heaven too) would only be worth a single sentence in this lengthy account of the End Times. But on the other hand, verse 5 of the 104th Psalm reads «He [God] set the Earth on its foundations; it can never be moved», and there are other verses like this, so maybe:

In all three cases, the new Earth would still need destroying for real.

Another suggestion, should Judaic mythology turn out to be correct, is finding and killing one or more of the Lamed Vav Tzadikim, 36 righteous men whose role in life is to justify the purpose of mankind in the eyes of God. If even one of these is missing, it is said the world would come to an end. Practically speaking, it would probably be easier to wipe out humanity than to find one of these individuals, who do not themselves know who they are.

Comments: It is of course entirely possible that the means God would choose to use to destroy the Earth would be a natural, non-miraculous event such as one of those listed above.

Earth’s final resting place: potentially any form, anywhere.

Feasibility rating: this, naturally, is entirely subjective.

Mike Trainor writes, «Just because we don’t have the technology to destroy the planet doesn’t mean no one else in the universe does. What you need to do is to point our most powerful radio-telescope transmitters at likely solar systems and taunt them. ‘The girly-beings in your miserable solar system could never destroy a planet as cool as this one. ‘» Thanks, Mike. We’ll get SETI on it.

Methods from fiction

This section got too big for its shell so I moved it to a separate page.

Things which will NOT destroy the Earth

Chilled

You will need: The capability to reduce the entire planet Earth to the microscopic temperatures necessary to cause it to revert to a Bose-Einstein condensate.

Method: It’s well known and reasonably well-understood that substances at extremely low temperatures can get to the point where quantum phenomena start to have macroscopic, i.e. visible, effects. For example, it can just climb right out of a container, defying gravity. As to why, you would need some quantum physics under your belt.

Could the same work for a whole planet? Could a sufficiently cold body (if it were shielded from the heat of the Sun and ambient background microwave radiation) just spontaneously begin to dissipate into space?

Another idea is to use strong magnetic fields on the condensate to cause it to display what is currently referred as an unusual characteristic, undergoing something approximating a stellar supernova on a tiny scale: imploding on itself and then exploding, with a substantial fraction of the atoms involved disappearing entirely!

Feasibility rating: 4/10. The first idea may work, but the second one probably won’t. This is because the experiment specifically used rubidium-85 atoms having a «negative atom-atom scattering length». I don’t know what that is, but it sounds unusual for an atom, and we know for a fact that most of Earth is not made up of rubidium-85. Plus, the «disappeared» atoms didn’t actually vanish, they just escaped the experiment system under high enough energy that they weren’t detected escaping. And of course, generalising quantum phenomena to gigantic scales is never a great idea.

Gamma Ray Burst’d

You will need: a star in Earth’s stellar neighbourhood with >40 solar masses. Such massive stars are hard to come by; even Betelgeuse has only 20 solar masses. The best candidate I know of is Eta Carinae, which has over 120 solar masses but is

7500 light years away.

Feasibility rating: 0/10. This method was originally listed above, but astronomer Stephen Thorsett set me straight. It wouldn’t work. Even in the titanic quantities described above, gamma rays wouldn’t make a dent in Earth’s actual, physical structure.

Sources: Lycurgus suggested this method. Further information from nasa.gov.

Burned away by muon-catalyzed fusion of the oceans

You will need: a supply of muons.

Method: The theory runs like this. A muon is a negatively-charged particle somewhat like an electron. If you dump a load of muons into some hydrogen, then some of the muons will replace the electrons in the hydrogen atoms. Because of the mass difference, the hydrogen atoms will suddenly get much smaller, causing the hydrogen molecules to be much closer together; enough that the probability of the hydrogen nuclei just randomly fusing with each other is high.

So, if you instead poured your muons into the oceans, they could cause the deuterium chemically combined with the water in the oceans to spontaneously begin undergoing fusion reactions. In theory, the amount of heat/energy released by the fusion of all the water in the world would be enough to destroy it by a good few orders of magnitude.

Sources: Muon-catalyzed fusion was theorized in the late 1940s by Andrei Sakharov, and brought to my attention by Jef Poskanzer.

Comments: This method was never listed as plausible, but I put it up here anyway because the idea itself is intriguing, even if it wouldn’t work.

Blown up by vacuum energy detonation

You will need: some means of extracting huge amounts of energy from the vacuum.

Earth’s final resting place: a rapidly expanding cloud of particles of varying size.

Feasibility rating: 0/10. This method was originally listed as plausible, but Alan Thomas set me straight: there are about five different ways to calculate the energy of the vacuum, all giving different answers. The methods which give the answers «large» or «infinite» are predicated on dodgy mathematics and almost certainly wrong.

Allowing George W. Bush to continue to exercise his will on the world. If you think this, you’re completely missing the point. The power to destroy the Earth does not currently exist, and Bush’s administration is not actively seeking to create such technology. Whatever Bush does, whatever the backlash from his policies on Iraq and oil and global warming, he cannot destroy the planet.

Paradoxes as described in Back To The Future Part II. By definition, a paradox cannot actually come into existence.

Ceasing all thought (if the Earth is not observed, then how can it exist?). Philip K. Dick said it best: «Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.»

Semantics. A few people suggested exploiting a loophole in my mission statement and moving the Earth into orbit around a gas giant, making it a moon rather than a planet, or hurling it into interstellar space where it would become a wandering interstellar object. Yeah, yeah, very clever. Get back to work.

Adding enough material to the planet Earth to cause it to undergo gravitational collapse and become a star instead of a planet. The main problem I have with this is that the Earth is made mainly from heavy, pre-fused elements. Most of it is iron which simply won’t undergo fusion at all. The amount of material you’d have to add to the Earth would be massive enough to be a star in its own right, and at the end of X billion years when it stops shining you’d still have a core of iron remaining in orbit around the Sun!

Of course, someone suggested you could add still more material until it becomes a star heavy enough to go supernova, so I’m going to come clean here: I have an irrational dislike of this method. It’s not going in. Sorry.

Detonating all the nuclear weapons ever created simultaneously, either all at one location or strategically placed around the globe. This will irradiate pretty much the entire globe and kill an awful lot of people, animals and plants, but will actually destroy very little of the planet itself.

Proving that 1=0.

If 1 did indeed equal 0, so it is reasoned, then since there is 1 Earth, there must be 0 Earths. so, if one could prove it, the Earth would cease to exist. This is specious logic. Finding a proof in mathematics does not magically change a fact from being false to being true. It merely verifies rigorously as true a fact that always was true. Thus, if 1=0 could be proved, then it would always have been true and the Earth should never have existed. But Earth is still here. QED.

In fact it would be impossible for there to even exist a universe in which 1 was equal to 0. For any mathematical system in which 1=0, it is extremely trivial to prove, in addition, that 1=2, 2=3, and in fact that every number is equal. Or, in other words, the mathematical system has only one number in it, 0. In a universe which obeyed such laws, there would be nothing at all.

General geocide strategy

Destroying the Earth is not as easy as pressing a big red button. It takes decades of hard work.

Planning

Assuming, of course, that you and whatever trusted advisors you will allow to side with you do not intend to «go down with the ship», it is particularly advisable to make plans for alternate living arrangements before you embark on a course of action which may result in the destruction of the Earth. Since in most cases the hypertechnology required to actually destroy the Earth is ridiculously advanced, access to an interstellar spacecraft, a space station or another habitable planet is likely to be well within your grasp, but this is not something you want to start making assumptions about.

Careers

At this point you need to make a very significant decision: are you going to design your doomsday machinery (all of the above methods except Total Existence Failure require a greater or lesser amount of machinery) yourself, or are you going to employ somebody else to do it for you? Unless you are an extremely gifted scientist and you really can destroy the Earth from your laboratory (which is not impossible; see the Strangelet or Von Neumann Machine methods), you’re fairly likely to pick the latter.

If you do decide to design (and possibly build) this thing yourself, you’d be advised to pursue mainly sciences, with the main emphasis on physics (quantum, atomic, and astrophysics in particular), but also some electronic and mechanical engineering, mathematics and possibly robotics. After this, get a job working with the technology you hope to harness, build your doomsday machine in your lab, and bam, you’re done.

If you don’t decide to design your doomsday device yourself, and from here on, I’ll assume that this is what you decided, then the plan becomes rather more complicated and your career choices will be very different. Your time in secondary and higher education would probably be best invested studying finance, economics and politics, brushing up your management, speaking and people skills, honing your powers of persuasion, and learning to exude charisma. Charisma is a big one. These skills will enable you to hopefully ascend to a position where you have access to three things:

If this is a lab project as described above then you’ll need relatively little of all of these; enough money to run a lab, resources to keep it stocked, and manpower in the form of one or more brilliant scientists to (knowingly or otherwise) construct your doomsday device. That suggests that the best place to seek employment would be at a research institution for the areas of science you hope to employ, or maybe an organization like Boeing or NASA. failing that, found the organization yourself!

If this is a big, possibly space-based project then you will need MUCH more to work with. You need to either work in politics or the armed forces. Politics would be an excellent choice. I say without cynicism that today, of all the people in the world, the President of the United States of America would be the person most likely to be able to destroy the Earth should he decide to. If you feel you lack the ability to make it in politics (knowledge of your weaknesses is a strength), you should join the armed forces and shoot for Supreme General or whatever the highest rank is.

Of course, by the time it becomes even possible to destroy the Earth, Madagascar might be the dominant superpower, or the whole world might be unified as a single nation, or maybe the whole galaxy is full of humans, there’s no such thing as money, and solid platinum asteroids and robot workers are plentiful. I don’t know. Whatever you can manage. Anyway, once you have everything you need at your disposal, make the calls, submit your proposals, and set the project in motion.

Your base

At this point you will probably need to set up some sort of base of operations. It should be at a safe distance from Earth. Lurking at least one AU out of range of whatever terrible destructive force you are about to unleash is strongly recommended in most cases, but for the supernova particularly you’ll want to put as much as a thousand light years between yourself and the Earth when it happens. If you have to be physically on Earth to begin the destruction process (e.g. hurled into Sun, antimatter blast), then set a countdown. Make sure the countdown timer is a) thoroughly tested and b) tamper-proof. The same goes for your escape route offplanet.

Some methods are much easier to cover up than others, and this should have been a major factor in your initial choice of method. If absolutely nobody apart from you knows the true purpose of your supernova-inducer until two hours after it becomes too late to turn it off, so much the better. Despite this, you should plan for (and construct your base in preparation for) your project to ultimately become public. This could occur at any time, you might have months, hours or seconds to go. This is actually the biggest potential stumbling block, and a situation you’ll have to prepare for very, very carefully. Depending on how much time your opponents have to act, how powerful they are, and whether you know they know or not, they might make anything from a very desperate move (launching nukes at your space station regardless of the thousand innocent hostages on board) to a very subtle one (invisibly manipulating you into employing one of their undercover agents in your laboratory security forces). Your base will therefore need very strict security procedures, many layers of defence, and multiple redundancy and carefully programmed emergency overrides for every system, critical or not. You’ll need weapons. And doors. Heavy doors. Assuming the worst, you personally should always be armed. If your base is in space you should permanently be wearing your space suit under your clothes. In case of betrayal, you should be able to run the entire show single-handedly from your locked-down control room, from which you should of course have an escape route.

You should always, always, always have an escape route.

See also The Evil Overlord list for lots more general advice on building bases, planning escape routes, handling enemy incursions, and other tangentially related topics.

Finally

If the method you choose can be tried more than once (e.g. hurled into Sun, vacuum energy detonation), and your budget will stretch, you could consider practicing on smaller astronomical bodies and working your way up. For example, consider destroying Mercury, or Ceres. Don’t forget to take notes on what went particularly well, what didn’t work, what was unnecessary, etc., just so everything goes as smoothly as possible on the big day.

Take a camera. Most of the methods listed above are incredibly spectacular and witnessing them will probably be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for you, so remember to capture the moment.

And lastly, if all your efforts fail, don’t give up! Remember, nobody has ever successfully destroyed the Earth.