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Top 10 Ways to Destroy Planet Earth - Here is what you need  
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Tags: science, earth, apocalypse, planet, end of the world, destroy

A host of methods for ending the planet as we know it, presented by Sam Hughes.

1.	Hurled Into The Sun. You will need: earth moving equipment. Method: Hurl the earth into the sun, or at least close enough to the sun that the earth will be deep fried for 4 months in every 8. Currently impossible at our technical level, but will be possible one day. In the meantime, may happen by freak accident if something comes out of nowhere and randomly knocks Earth in precisely the right direction.
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 under Earth's crust. Planet Earth will, terrifyingly soon, be entirely eaten up and turned into a swarm of potentially sextillions of machines.
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: Essentially, anything can be destroyed if you hit it hard enough. ANYTHING.
4.	Meticulously and systematically deconstructed. You will need: a powerful mass driver, or ideally lots of them; ready access to roughly 2*10^32J. 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 tons of it
5.	Sucked Into a Giant Black Hole. You will need: a black hole, extremely powerful rocket engines, and, optionally, a large rocky planetary body. 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.
6.	Destroyed by vacuum energy detonation. You will need: a light bulb. Method: Contemporary 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. Therefor, the volume of space enclosed by a light bulb contains enough vacuum energy to boil every ocean in the world. Vacuum energy could prove to be the most abundant energy source of any kind. Which is where you come in. All you need to do is figure out how to extract this energy and harness it in some kind of power plant - this can easily be done without arousing too much suspicion - then surreptitiously allow the reaction to run out of control.
7.	Blown up by matter/antimatter reaction. You will need: 2,500,000,000,000 tons of antimatter. Method: The gravitational binding energy of Earth is more energy than the sun puts out in a week. Once you've generated the appropriate amount of anti-matter, 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.
8.	Sucked into a microscopic black hole. You will need: a microscopic black hole. Creating one 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. 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
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 the RHIC 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.
10.	Total Existance Failure.You will need: nothing. 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 occurring are considerably greater than a googolplex to one.

Lister: diperniac
Source: LiveScience.Com- Top Ten Ways to Destroy Earth

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