| Subject: Re: How to Destroy the Earth, part 1 |
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Sam
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Date Posted: 17:52:18 12/03/05 Sat
In reply to:
CtarSevenOhFour
's message, "How to Screw Up Your Computer" on 19:43:38 11/22/05 Tue
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 was 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.
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. Any of the following forms could represent success: two or more planets; any number of smaller asteroids; a dust cloud; a more exotic object such as a quantum singularity. But the list does not end here.
Current Earth-destruction Status
Number of times the Earth has been destroyed: 0
Information courtesy of the International Earth-Destruction Advisory Board
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. This is a recent (2005|03|03) clarification of the rules intended to facilitate greater scientific accuracy. Up until now the rules were "I'll add it if I feel like it" and things were getting untidy. As a result of this change, several long-standing methods have been relegated to the "less scientifically probable" list.
Methods are ranked in order of feasibility.
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.
Gobbled up by strangelets
You will need: Some strange matter.
Strange matter is a phase of matter which is even more dense than neutronium. (Wow.) 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 (revised): 2/10. 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.
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 you 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: 2/10. Highly, highly unlikely. But not impossible.
Comments: Getting closer!
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.
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.
Method: The theory is, if you spin the Earth fast enough, it'll fly apart as the bits at the Equator start moving fast enough to overcome gravity.
To do this the Earth will need to be spinning very fast indeed. Currently it rotates completely on its axis once every 24 hours. You'll need to spin it fast enough to perform a complete rotation once every 84 minutes.
Comments: This assumes that the Earth won't distort as it spins faster, which it will - the poles will flatten and the Equator will expand. It's also completely unknown what will happen once the rotation actually reaches the kind of speed we're looking at here. Will a ring of matter spontaneously lift off from the Equator and expand outwards? Will lumps of matter fly off at a tangent? If they do, will they come back down again? Will some other exchange of angular momentum occur to slow the planet down? The only thing we can be sure of is that Earth will not simply just fly apart into pieces. It'd take some computer modelling to find out what would actually happen.
Earth's final resting place: presumably, various lumps of matter expanding away from each other.
Feasibility rating: 3/10. Improbable, difficult, messy, and possibly not even workable.
Source: This method suggested by Matthew Wakeling.
Blown up by matter/antimatter reaction
You will need: 1,300,000,000,000 tonnes of antimatter
Antimatter - the most explosive substance possible - can be manufactured in small quantities using any large particle accelerator, but this will take some considerable time to produce the required amounts. If you can create the appropriate machinery, it may be possible - and much easier - simply to "flip" 1.3 trillion tonnes of matter through a fourth dimension, turning it all to antimatter at once.
Method: This method involves detonating a bomb so big that it blasts the Earth to pieces.
This, to say the least, requires a big bomb. All the explosives mankind has ever created, nuclear or non-, gathered together and detonated simultaneously, would make a significant crater and wreck the planet's ecosystem, but barely scratch the surface of the planet. There is evidence that in the past, asteroids have hit the Earth with the explosive yield of five billion Hiroshima bombs - and such evidence is difficult to find. It is, in short, insanely difficult to significantly alter the Earth's structure with explosives. This is not to mention the gravity problem. Just because you blasted the Earth apart doesn't mean you blasted it apart for good. If you don't blast it hard enough, the pieces will fall back together again under mutual gravitational attraction, and Earth, like the liquid metal Terminator, will reform from its shattered shards. You have to blow the Earth up hard enough to overcome that attraction.
How hard is that?
If you do the lengthy calculations you find that to liberate that much energy requires the complete annihilation of around 1,246,400,000,000 tonnes of antimatter. That's assuming zero energy loss to heat 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 ten. 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=mc2) should be sufficient to split the Earth into a thousand pieces.
Greg Bear's novel, "The Forge Of God", contains an interesting refinement of this technique. Here, the antagonist instead generates antimatter in the form of a "slug" of anti-neutronium - superdense material massing a billion kilograms per cubic centimetre. This is fired into the Earth's core. Neutronium passes through ordinary matter as easily as a ball flies through the air, so the anti-neutronium slug doesn't annihilate immediately; rather, it builds up a protective sheath of plasma around it as it plunges downwards towards the Earth's core. It's then followed up by a slug of regular neutronium, which also falls into the core, at a time calculated to meet the first slug head-on at the exact centre of the Earth, where they annihilate themselves, and soon afterwards, the Earth itself. Highly space-efficient, and with the added bonus of all the energy being released at the Earth's core, where it can do the most damage. In the book, the antagonists simultaneously detonate nuclear warheads in certain oceanic trenches, to weaken the crust and allow the planet to be blown apart more easily.
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"
Feasibility rating: 5/10. Just about slightly possible.
Earliest feasible completion date: AD 2500. Of course, if it does prove possible to manufacture antimatter in the sufficiently large quantities you require - which is not necessarily the case - then smaller antimatter bombs will be around long before then.
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 along 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.
Earliest feasible completion date: I do not expect the necessary technology to be available until AD 3000, and add at least 800 years for travel time. (That's in an external observer's frame of reference and assuming you move both the Earth and the black hole at the same time.)
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
You will need: a powerful mass driver, or ideally lots of them.
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. A mass driver is a sort of oversized electromagnetic railgun, which was once proposed as a way of getting mined materials back from the Moon to Earth - basically, you just load it into the driver and fire it upwards in roughly the right direction. We'd use a particularly powerful model - big enough to hit escape velocity of 11 kilometres per second - and launch it all into the Sun or randomly into space.
We will ignore atmospheric considerations. Compared with the extra energy needed to overcome air friction, it would be a relatively trivial step to completely burn away the Earth's atmosphere before beginning the process.
Alternate methods for boosting the material into space include loading the extracted material into space shuttles or taking it up via space elevator. All these methods, however, require a - let me emphasize this - titanic quantity of energy to carry out. Building a Dyson sphere ain't gonna cut it here. (Note: Actually, it would. But if you have the technology to build a Dyson sphere, why are you reading this?)
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.
Earliest feasible completion date: Ah. Yes. At a billion tonnes of mass driven out of the Earth's gravity well per second: 189,000,000 years.
Source: this method arose when Joe Baldwin and I knocked our heads together by accident.
Pulverized by impact with blunt instrument
You will need: a big heavy rock, something with a bit of a swing to it... perhaps Mars
Method: Criminal, really, that this blindingly obvious method was overlooked for so long. Essentially, anything can be destroyed if you hit it hard enough. ANYTHING. The concept is simple: find a really, really big asteroid or planet, accelerate it up to some dazzling speed, and smash it into Earth, preferably head-on but whatever you can manage. The result: an absolutely spectacular collision, resulting hopefully in Earth (and, most likely, our "cue ball" too) being pulverized out of existence - smashed into any number of large pieces which if the collision is hard enough should have enough energy to overcome their mutual gravity and drift away forever, never to coagulate back into a planet again.
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.
Obviously a smaller rock would do the job, you just need to fire it faster. Taking mass dilation into account, a 5,000,000,000,000-tonne asteroid at 90% of light speed would do just as well. See the Guide to moving Earth for useful information on manoeuvring big hunks of rock across interplanetary distances.
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.
Earliest feasible completion date: AD 2500, maybe?
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.
Frazzled by solar plasma
You will need: an extremely large, heat-insulated ring, lots and lots of wire, lots and lots of electricity
Method: Anybody who knows anything about the Sun, or has at least seen the opening titles of Star Trek: Voyager, knows that the Sun frequently erupts with huge rings of plasma called coronal rings and even huger rings of plasma called prominences. These, and sunspots, are caused by changing magnetic fields. Big prominences can break apart and cause coronal mass ejections, bursts of plasma which erupt into space and which can occasionally reach the Earth itself, where they can disrupt radio communications and cause blackouts.
Place your ring in as low an orbit over the Sun as you can manage. Now run an extremely powerful electrical current around the rim of the ring. High school physics will tell you that this will cause a powerful magnetic field passing through the middle of the ring. Carefully steered, you can use this ring to artificially induce a gigantic prominence and eject a much, much larger-than-average discharge of coronal plasma towards Earth. It'd probably be too much to expect just one carefully aimed CME to destroy the planet completely, but you can repeat the process over and over again, burning off layer after layer until the planet is gone.
Factors you will have to contend with include heat damage to your ring, targeting, and heat dissipation as the coronal plasma spreads out and crosses the gulf between the Sun and the Earth. You will want to fire as much plasma as you possibly can and focus it as tightly as you possibly can on the Earth. You could consider using other rings in higher orbits to focus the plasma after it's first ejected from the Sun, and further rings as relay stations en route. And these rings need to be BIG. Hundreds or thousands of kilometres across.
Earth's final resting place: Cooling lumps of matter, spread across the greater solar system.
Feasibility rating: 7/10. Excitingly plausible, though impossible with current space technology.
Earliest feasible completion date: AD 3000.
Source: This method suggested by "Thane".
Eaten by von Neumann machines
You will need: a single von Neumann machine, which subsists almost entirely on iron, magnesium, aluminium and silicon, the major elements found in Earth's mantle and core. A von Neumann machine is any device that is capable of creating an exact copy of itself given nothing but the necessary raw materials.
Theoretically, if it will be truly a von Neumann Machine, then its size doesn't matter: it can be any size from microscopic to planet-sized (though if you have the technology to take a body the size of the Moon apart and make a machine out of it, you have the technology to take the Earth apart and leave it in pieces), but it seems that miniature, molecular-scale nanobots, capable of building other nanobots and/or dedicated nanobot factories (nanoassemblers) would be the best way to go. It need not even be mechanical; all living things are technically biological von Neumann machines. Scott Lujan writes, "Through processes of directed evolution, perhaps beginning with diatomaceous microbes (capable of silicon processing) and choice natural subterranean extremophiles (can respire, i.e. oxidize, various heavy metals or live at extreme pressures and heats), one could conceivably create a strain of lithovores that would process earthly matter."
Method: Once you have your von Neumann machine built, release it into the ground under the Earth's crust and allow it to fend for itself. Watch and wait as it creates a second von Neumann machine, then they create two more, then they create four more. As the population of machines doubles repeatedly, the planet Earth will, terrifyingly soon, be entirely eaten up and turned into a swarm of potentially sextillions of machines.
Technically your objective would now be complete - no more Earth - but if you want to be thorough, then you can command your VNMs to hurl themselves, along with any remaining trace elements, into the Sun. This hurling would have to be achieved using rocket propulsion of some sort, so be sure to include this in your design. If you find yourself unable to design a VNM strong enough to stay intact at the core, you may need to do this in stages; consume a layer of the planet, launch into space, repeat.
Earth's final resting place: the bodies of the VNMs themselves, then a small lump of iron sinking into the Sun.
Feasibility rating: 8/10. So crazy it might just work.
Earliest feasible completion date: Potentially 2045-2050, or even earlier.
Source: 2010: Odyssey Two, by Arthur C. Clarke
Hurled into the Sun
You will need: Earthmoving equipment.
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; even though you don't actually have to literally hit the Sun (send the Earth near enough to the Sun (within the Roche limit), and tidal forces will tear it apart), it's surprisingly easy to end up with Earth in a loopy elliptical orbit which merely roasts it for four months in every eight. But careful planning can avoid this.
As far as energy changes are concerned, this method is inferior to the next one.
Earth's final resting place: a small globule of vaporized iron sinking slowly into the heart of the Sun.
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.
Earliest feasible completion date: Via act of God: 25 years' time. Any earlier and we'd have already spotted the asteroid in question. Via human intervention: given the current level of expansion of space technology, 2250 at best.
Source: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, by Grant Naylor
Torn apart by Jupiter
You will need: Earthmoving equipment.
Method: Hurl the Earth into Jupiter, where it will be torn apart by tidal forces.
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.
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.
Earliest feasible completion date: As before, via act of God: 25 years' time. Any earlier and we'd have already spotted the asteroid in question. Via human intervention: given the current level of expansion of space technology, 2250 at best.
Source: Mitchell Porter suggested this method.
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 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 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 (1010100) 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.
Whipped by a cosmic string
You will need: a cosmic string and a whole lotta luck
Method: Cosmic strings are hypothetical 1-dimensional defects in spacetime, left over from earlier phases of the universe, somewhat like cracks in ice. They are potentially universe-spanning objects, thinner than a proton but with unimaginable density - one Earth mass per 1600m of length! All you need to do is get a cosmic string near Earth, and it'll be torn apart, shredded, and sucked in. Probably the entire rest of the solar system would be too.
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 into the Earth in 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.
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.
The interactions between the two stars in this very violent stellar event will cause more fusion to occur inside the Sun than normally does in 100,000,000 years. The result is not unlike a supernova explosion, though slower - a staggering amount of matter and energy is released outwards, burning the Earth to a crisp and firing it into interstellar space at best, completely incinerating it at worst.
Earth's final resting place: burnt pieces.
Feasibility rating: 4/10. This is listed under natural methods because there is absolutely no way you can move a star. Well, there are ways and means, but if you can move a star, why not move the Earth into that star? And the chances of this happening - even considering that in two billion years' time the Milky Way is going to collide with Andromeda - are very, very slim. Calculations suggest that the number of actual stellar collisions that are likely to occur in that exchange will be SIX. Six chances in about a hundred billion.
Hmm. That's actually pretty high for this list. Make it 5/10.
Source: This method suggested by Eric Thompson.
Swallowed up as the Sun enters red giant stage
You will need: patience
Method: Simply wait for roughly 5,000,000,000 years. During its natural progress along the Main Sequence, the Sun will exhaust its initial reserves of hydrogen fuel and expand into a red giant star - swallowing up Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars in the process.
Earth's final resting place: Boiling red iron in the heart of the Sun.
Feasibility rating: 8/10. The problem here is that current scientific theories predict the Earth will probably survive. The increasing solar wind combined with the Sun's decreasing mass will result in the Earth gradually moving out to a wider, cooler, safer orbit.
Earliest feasible completion date: AD 5,000,000,000
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 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? Honestly, I don't know. But it won't be a planet anymore.
Feasibility rating: 8/10. Plausible. Assumes that the Big Crunch will actually occur at all, which is currently in question.
Earliest feasible completion date: AD 42,000,000,000, give or take
Source: Shields and Nick Snell both suggested this method.
Ripped asunder
You will need: about half as much patience
Method: Recent experimental results seem to show that the expansion of the universe is not slowing as one might imagine it would. In fact, the expansion is accelerating. It's a bit early to say with confidence why this is happening, though phrases like "dark matter" and "phantom energy" pop up pretty frequently, but anyway, it's conjectured that if the ratio w of dark energy pressure to dark energy density in the universe is negative enough (buh?), then the universe would expand, accelerating in its expansion until it was ripped apart at the seams. To quote Wikipedia's entry: "First the galaxies would be separated from each other, then gravity would be too weak to hold individual galaxies together. Approximately three months before the end, solar systems will be gravitationally unbound. In the last minutes, stars and planets will come apart, and atoms will be destroyed a fraction of a second before the end of time." Cool, eh?
Earth's final resting place: HAH! If I knew that, I wouldn't need aftershave.
Feasibility rating: 10/10. Likely. Assumes the Big Rip theory is correct, which it probably is, but might not be.
Earliest feasible completion date: AD 20,000,000,000, assuming w = -3/2 (could vary)
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 1036 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...
Earliest feasible completion date: AD 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
Source: This method suggested by Joseph Verock
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copyright by Sam Hughes - please do not copy without permission
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