Top Ten Ways to Destroy Earth!

      As you can imagine, as soon as I saw the title of this article, I could't resist the temptation to look at it...What I found out was amusing, fairly impossible - for now, at least - and fun to read.  The author of this article, Sam Hughes, states the name of the method of destruction, the probability of it happening, what you would need, and how you could do it.  So, lets begin with number ten...

NUMBER 10:    EXISTENCE FAILURE

Rating: 0/10

For this highly unlikely method, you would need absolutely nothing.  You would have to do absolutely nothing.  Just wait, and watch.  All that would happen would be that every single atom making up Earth (which is a lot!) would suddenly cease to exist.  Quick and easy, but it most probably won't happen.

NUMBER 9:    GOBBLED UP BY STRANGELETS

Rating: 1/10

In order to accomplish this, you need a stable strangelet.  Strangelets are particles that hold equal amounts of up, down, and strange quarks.  First of all, you would need to take control of (hijack!) the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider.  Then, all you have to do is create and maintain a strangelet.  Soon, a the strangelet will absorb the Earth into a "mass of strange quarks".  Finally, at the end, the Earth would look like a glob of strange matter.

NUMBER 8:    SUCKED INTO A MICROSCOPIC BLACK HOLE

Rating: 2/10

You would need a microscopic black hole to place on the surface of the Earth.  The black hole would eventually consume the Earth. 

NUMBER 7:    BLOWN UP BY MATTER/ANTIMATTER REACTION

Rating: 5/10

2,500,000,000,000 tons of antimatter would be needed in order to do this.  Antimatter is the most explosive substance possible and would have to be made into a bomb that could blast Earth to pieces.  Unfortunately, this method involves quite a lot of calculations, so would be hard to do for some... Anyway, this method could be the cause of the Earth's destruction if someone actually makes the antimatter.  It would lead to a second asteroid belt around the sun.

NUMBER 6:    DESTROYED BY VACUUM ENERGY DETONATION

Rating: 5/10

All you need is a light bulb for this!  You just have to figure out how to extract the vacuum energy and how to harness it in some kind of power plant.  The result would be a huge amount of energy that would easily destroy Earth and most probably the sun, too.  At the end, the Earth would have been reduced to a swiftly expanding cloud of particles of different sizes.

NUMBER 5:    SUCKED INTO A GIANT BLACK HOLE

Rating: 6/10

To accomplish this, you obviously need a giant black hole.  After locating it, you need to get it and the Earth together somehow.  Once you do all this, you let the black hole do the work for you and suck the Earth in.

NUMBER 4:    METICULOUSLY AND SYSTEMATICALLY DECONSTRUCTED

Rating: 6/10

For this method, you would need a powerful mass driver, preferably more than one.  You use them to simply dig up parts of the Earth and hurl them out to space!  What would remain of the Earth would be tiny pieces, scattered across the solar system.  

NUMBER 3:    PULVERIZED BY IMPACT WITH BLUNT INSTRUMENT

Rating: 7/10

A big heavy rock, something like Mars would be needed for this method.  All you do is accelerate the speed of your rock to an extremely high speed and smash it into Earth, obliterating our planet.  This would create a bunch of roughly moon sized chunks of rock, floating around in space.

NUMBER 2:    EATEN BY VON NEUMANN MACHINES

Rating: 8/10

A von Neumann machine is any device that is able to create an exact copy of itself given only the necessary raw materials.  Use this machine and release it into the Earth's crust.  Soon, there will be millions of them and Earth will be completely covered with the machines.

NUMBER 1:    HURLED INTO THE SUN

Rating: 9/10

In order to achieve this, you will need some kind of earthmoving equipment.  Using this, you have to somehow propel Earth into the Sun, thus causing Earth to eventually sink into the Sun.

        After reading this, I know that the destruction of Earth is fairly impossible until someone comes up with this kind of technology - and actually wanted to destroy Earth.  This was an extremely interesting and fun article to read.  I learned more about different kinds of substances, such as antimatter, and scientific objects, such as the von Neumann machines.  Although this article was meant to be humorous, I still learned a great deal of information from it.  I think this also proves that the "end of the universe" that is supposed to be 2012, most probably won't happen since there aren't a large amount of things that would be able to end the world, such as the ones in this article, that are easily obtained.  And besides, who'd want to end the world???  Even though there are multiple, numerous ways to pulverize Earth, all of them wouldn't happen unless someone wanted this planet's life to end.  Everything could be used as a weapon or in this case, a way to destroy planet Earth.  However, if we use the things we've been able to create and find out about safely and correctly, we won't have anything to worry about.  Basically, I think that these top ten ways to destroy Earth are all highly unlikely to happen, so we don't have to stress about them - for now.

The article I used was from here.  The first picture is from here.  The second picture is from here.  The third picture is from here.  The fourth picture is from here.

~Starflower794!