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This is one way of learning about our planet and other science stuff, more fun than some. - Perdita
SF Chronicle - Jon Carroll, February 28, 2005
You know, everyone talks about the world coming to an end, but no one ever does anything about it. At last, someone is changing that. His name is Sam Hughes, and he's a 21-year-old British person currently residing in Cambridge, home of the university that is not Oxford. He has written an essay offering career advice to any young would-be Earth destroyers out there.
On his Web page, Sam (I'll call him Sam because he calls himself Sam, and it gets me out of all ugly-looking possessives -- "Hughes's" ugh ) begins by dismissing alarmists:
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-ton 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.
Sam is not interested in merely destroying the human race. He wants to build scenarios in which the Earth itself will cease to exist as a planet. A lot of his ideas come from science fiction, but that's only because real scientists are so busy coming up with solutions that no one has time to create a really great problem.
Sam has come up with 16 possible scenarios. Most of them require either an unusual amount of something (patience, antimatter, strangelets, asteroids) or a machine that has not yet been built. I suppose that right there is reason for optimism, if you are on the pro-Earth side. However, my favorite of Sam's plans involves just a single light bulb. I'll let him explain it:
Contemporary scientific theories tell us that what we may see as vacuum is only vacuum on average, and is actually thriving with vast amounts of particles and antiparticles constantly appearing and then annihilating each other. It also suggests 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. 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. The resulting release of energy would easily be enough to annihilate all of planet Earth and probably the Sun too.
This method avoids the messy logistical details involved in, say, finding a black hole and dragging it near enough to Earth for the suckage to begin. Probably a couple of kids could do it in a basement, provided they had the right theoretical underpinnings. In fact, they could be your kids. You just better hope they're out there on some hormone-crazed fun run and not fooling around with light bulbs.
Of course, the world is going to end sooner or later. The sun could enter a Red Giant phase, flare out and swallow us whole. The downside is that none of us will be around to see it. Indeed, it is entirely possible that nothing resembling "us" will be around to see it. "Us" is really a curious biological quirk at this point; if we're around for 5 million years or so, then maybe the universe will drop by and talk about planning.
There's also the "Big Crunch" hypothesis, which is what happens when the Big Bang finally stops banging. Everything rushes back to the center, generating lots of heat and ripping up atoms. That would be pretty effective, but (a) it might not happen that way, and (b) it would take even longer to happen than the whole Red Giant thing.
Sam points out that Armageddon will not destroy the Earth, only a lot of people on it. The rest of them will live in a city roughly the size of Brazil. So you have Earth, you have people; really not a doomsday scenario at all.
Finally (well, not finally for him, but finally in this column), Sam deals with the idea that, if we just all stop thinking about it, Earth will cease to exist. Or, even better, if we all stop thinking period, which seems to be happening already. Sam quotes as refutation the words of the sage Philip K. Dick, who reminds us: "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
Or, in the words of someone else entirely: It's not all about you.
how to destroy the earth link
SF Chronicle - Jon Carroll, February 28, 2005
You know, everyone talks about the world coming to an end, but no one ever does anything about it. At last, someone is changing that. His name is Sam Hughes, and he's a 21-year-old British person currently residing in Cambridge, home of the university that is not Oxford. He has written an essay offering career advice to any young would-be Earth destroyers out there.
On his Web page, Sam (I'll call him Sam because he calls himself Sam, and it gets me out of all ugly-looking possessives -- "Hughes's" ugh ) begins by dismissing alarmists:
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-ton 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.
Sam is not interested in merely destroying the human race. He wants to build scenarios in which the Earth itself will cease to exist as a planet. A lot of his ideas come from science fiction, but that's only because real scientists are so busy coming up with solutions that no one has time to create a really great problem.
Sam has come up with 16 possible scenarios. Most of them require either an unusual amount of something (patience, antimatter, strangelets, asteroids) or a machine that has not yet been built. I suppose that right there is reason for optimism, if you are on the pro-Earth side. However, my favorite of Sam's plans involves just a single light bulb. I'll let him explain it:
Contemporary scientific theories tell us that what we may see as vacuum is only vacuum on average, and is actually thriving with vast amounts of particles and antiparticles constantly appearing and then annihilating each other. It also suggests 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. 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. The resulting release of energy would easily be enough to annihilate all of planet Earth and probably the Sun too.
This method avoids the messy logistical details involved in, say, finding a black hole and dragging it near enough to Earth for the suckage to begin. Probably a couple of kids could do it in a basement, provided they had the right theoretical underpinnings. In fact, they could be your kids. You just better hope they're out there on some hormone-crazed fun run and not fooling around with light bulbs.
Of course, the world is going to end sooner or later. The sun could enter a Red Giant phase, flare out and swallow us whole. The downside is that none of us will be around to see it. Indeed, it is entirely possible that nothing resembling "us" will be around to see it. "Us" is really a curious biological quirk at this point; if we're around for 5 million years or so, then maybe the universe will drop by and talk about planning.
There's also the "Big Crunch" hypothesis, which is what happens when the Big Bang finally stops banging. Everything rushes back to the center, generating lots of heat and ripping up atoms. That would be pretty effective, but (a) it might not happen that way, and (b) it would take even longer to happen than the whole Red Giant thing.
Sam points out that Armageddon will not destroy the Earth, only a lot of people on it. The rest of them will live in a city roughly the size of Brazil. So you have Earth, you have people; really not a doomsday scenario at all.
Finally (well, not finally for him, but finally in this column), Sam deals with the idea that, if we just all stop thinking about it, Earth will cease to exist. Or, even better, if we all stop thinking period, which seems to be happening already. Sam quotes as refutation the words of the sage Philip K. Dick, who reminds us: "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
Or, in the words of someone else entirely: It's not all about you.
how to destroy the earth link
