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Top 10 Ways to Destroy Earth  
SCARY 

Tags: earth, destruction, destroy, hurt, environment

Hundreds of movies have depicted the end of the world, but what kinds of Armageddon are really possible? Here are the 10 ten ways the earth will go down.

1.	Hurled into the Sun: You will need: Earthmoving equipment Method: Hurl the Earth into the Sun. 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 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. 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.
2.	Eaten by von Neumann machines: You will need: a single von Neumann machine Method: A von Neumann machine is any device that is capable of creating an exact copy of itself given nothing but the necessary raw materials. Create one of these that subsists almost entirely on iron, magnesium, aluminum and silicon, the major elements found in Earth's mantle and core. 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. Earth's final resting place: the bodies of the VNMs themselves, then a small lump of iron sinking into the Sun. Earliest feasible completion date: Potentially 2045-2050, or even earlier.
3.	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: 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 being pulverized out of existence. Earth's final resting place: a variety of roughly Moon-sized chunks of rock, scattered haphazardly across the greater Solar System. Earliest feasible completion date: AD 2500, maybe?
4.	Meticulously & systematically deconstructed: You will need: a powerful mass driver, or ideally lots of them; ready access to roughly 2*10^32J Method: Dig up the Earth, a big chunk at a time, and boost the whole lot of it into orbit. A mass driver is a sort of oversized electromagnetic railgun; you load it into the driver and fire it upwards in roughly the right direction. Earth's final resting place: Many tiny pieces, some dropped into the Sun, the remainder scattered across the Solar System. Earliest feasible completion date: At a billion tons of mass driven out of the Earth's gravity well per second: 189,000,000 years.
5.	Sucked into a giant black hole: You will need: a black hole, extremely powerful rocket engines, and a large rocky planetary body. The nearest black hole is 1600 light years from Earth. Method: There are two methods, moving Earth or moving the black hole, though for best results you'd most likely move both at once. Earth's final resting place: part of the mass of the black hole. Earliest feasible completion date: The necessary technology will not be available until AD 3000, and add at least 800 years for travel time.
6.	Destroyed by vacuum energy detonation: You will need: a light bulb Method: Contemporary scientific theories tell us that the volume of space enclosed by a light bulb contains enough vacuum energy to boil every ocean in the world. Therefore, vacuum energy could prove to be the most abundant energy source of any kind. All you need to do is figure out how to extract this energy and harness it in some kind of power plant then surreptitiously allow the reaction to run out of control. The resulting release of energy would easily be enough to annihilate all of planet Earth and probably the Sun too. Earth's final resting place: a rapidly expanding cloud of particles of varying size. Earliest feasible completion date: 2060 or so.
7.	Blown up by matter/antimatter reaction: You will need: 2,500,000,000,000 tons of antimatter Method: This method involves detonating a bomb so big that it blasts the Earth to pieces. Earth's final resting place: A second asteroid belt around the Sun. Earliest feasible completion date: AD 2500.
8.	Sucked into a microscopic black hole: You will need: a microscopic black hole. Method: place your black hole on the surface of the Earth and wait. The black hole will plummet through the ground, eating its way to the center 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 just wait, while it sits and consumes matter until the whole Earth is gone. Earth's final resting place: a singularity of almost zero size, which will then proceed to happily orbit the Sun as normal.
9.	Gobbled up by strangelets: You will need: a stable strangelet Method: Hijack control of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Brookhaven National Laboratory, Long Island, New York. Use to create and maintain a stable strangelet. Keep it stable for as long as it takes to absorb the entire Earth into a mass of strange quarks. Earth's final resting place: a huge glob of strange matter.
10.	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.

Lister: ListAfterList Wiki Contributors
Source: Live Science

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