[HN Gopher] How to Destroy the Earth (2006)
___________________________________________________________________
How to Destroy the Earth (2006)
Author : NateEag
Score : 277 points
Date : 2021-02-20 15:40 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (qntm.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (qntm.org)
| jl6 wrote:
| I didn't see this one:
|
| Death by planetary obesity.
|
| Kind of the opposite of meticulously deconstructing the planet,
| instead bring more and more mass to Earth - souvenirs, visitors,
| imports, a few hundred trillion quadrillion kilograms of precious
| metals... doesn't matter what, just keep hoarding more and more
| stuff.
|
| Eventually Earth will either change orbit and sink into the sun,
| or it will become a sun itself, or it will become a black hole.
| zachrip wrote:
| Is this actually possible? We're already dwarfed by other
| planets that are fine?
| Filligree wrote:
| Well, in principle. It wouldn't sink into the sun, unless you
| use a interstellar lithobraking for all your souvenirs to
| deliberately do it, but you could perfectly well turn Earth
| into a black hole that way.
|
| Of course it's not very practical, and also it'd turn into a
| star much earlier in the process, at which point it arguably
| isn't a planet anymore anyway.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| Are there any nearer-term concerns? Imagine we have large
| scale asteroid mining within the next century. Is there a
| point where the extra-mass matters on any reasonable
| timescale (hundreds of years) similar to the impact of
| industrialization with Co2 and climate change? Other odd
| side effects from landing the material?
| jl6 wrote:
| No, no near term concerns at all. It's a very silly sci-
| fi scenario. You could smash the mass of Mount Everest
| into Earth a hundred times a day for a thousand years and
| it wouldn't even increase the planet's mass by 1%.
| ravel-bar-foo wrote:
| A piece of extraplanetary mass being brought to Earth only
| changes the planet's orbit insofar as its orbit on entry to
| Earth mismatches that of rest of the planet. Furthermore, it
| will only slow down Earth's orbit if it was initially slower in
| the orbital direction, which means it would have to originate
| from the inner solar system.
|
| Now, the retrieval of such mass to earth is (physically) an
| inslastic collision. Inellastic collisions usually dissipate
| energy, so the thermodynamic problem of overheating the Earth's
| atmosphere will be an issue before orbital changes or
| spontaneous nuclear fusion.
| justin66 wrote:
| > A piece of extraplanetary mass being brought to Earth only
| changes the planet's orbit insofar as its orbit on entry to
| Earth mismatches that of rest of the planet.
|
| No, the Earth's orbit would also be affected over time by the
| altered gravitational relationship with other bodies as a
| result of its increased mass.
| saagarjha wrote:
| At that point it would cease to be a recognizable "Earth"
| and be more of a sort of protostar.
| justin66 wrote:
| J6 floated an idea like that above, but a less drastic
| outcome where the earth takes on some very small fraction
| of one percent of additional mass, and the shape of its
| orbit merely changes a tiny bit, is also a possibility.
| sharkweek wrote:
| This is such a great read.
|
| It's fun to think about on a humankind scale how hard it is to
| destroy (as in obliterate entirely) the earth, while at the same
| time pretty trivial on a universal scale.
|
| We'd have a pretty hard time blowing this entire rock up
| ourselves, but the universe sure wouldn't.
|
| Then again, maybe in 100ish years it becomes trivial for us too.
| I'd bet someone in the 1800s had a hard time imagining one bomb
| being able to wipe an entire city off the map.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| There's an anthology that Douglas Hofstadter put together that
| is chock full of stories like this. When I started reading this
| story I knew basically where it was going.... Give DH's thing a
| read, it's called "The Mind's I"
| Ekaros wrote:
| It's fun to really think about these scales. Earth has been
| around quite a while since big bang. Actually a one-third is
| pretty amazing number when you start to think about that. That
| is age of Earth is about third of age of Universe... And then
| Universe will be around for a very very long time after the
| planet is unrecognisable.
|
| On other hand Earth is just tiny thing in solar system, which
| is tiny thing in galaxy which is small thing around general
| area which is tiny thing in great scale of things...
| vaduz wrote:
| > On other hand Earth is just tiny thing in solar system,
| which is tiny thing in galaxy which is small thing around
| general area which is tiny thing in great scale of things...
|
| Don't go down that route - down that route lies the Total
| Perspective Vortex, and that is something you don't come back
| from.
| vagrantJin wrote:
| Yeah. Some roads you just don't go down.
| zxcvbn4038 wrote:
| Sounds like tourist brochure for Detroit.
| megablast wrote:
| The universe has been trying for 5 billion years. No luck so
| far.
| yalogin wrote:
| This is just wonderful. If the internet were filled with articles
| and posts of this kind the world would be a wonderful place. I
| love how the author took the thing from the movies just to the
| next logical step, that itself is something most won't think
| about. I mean most people jod just take the destruction of all
| life forms as the end and stop thinking there.
| dfranke wrote:
| Oldie but goodie! I remember submitting this to very early
| Reddit, getting seven upvotes, and this keeping it at the #1 spot
| on the page for multiple days. I'm a credited contributor and
| sometimes I list this on resumes as a gag.
| mnw21cam wrote:
| That's a good idea. I should start doing that.
| Transfinity wrote:
| > At a million tonnes of mass driven out of the Earth's gravity
| well per second, this would take 189,000,000 years.
|
| I love how this takes an incomprehensibly large number (mass of
| the earth) and decomposes it into 3 exceptionally large but kind
| of comprehensible numbers (million tones / second, 30 million
| seconds / year, 189 million years). The earth is _big_.
| joshspankit wrote:
| I like this, but there's an important component missing:
|
| (Assuming you had the resources in-hand) how much time would each
| one take?
|
| Like, the micro singularity: are we talking minutes, hours,
| millennia? Longer?
| [deleted]
| erik_landerholm wrote:
| Just remove like half the electrons in your body at once.
| Honestly, that's probably overkill.
| lolive wrote:
| "How to destoy living things" is the current show we are
| attending.
|
| Honestly, each season is getting better.
|
| The villains of that show are just disgusting selfish assholes!!!
| George Martin to the next level.
|
| Plus IT'S REAL!!!
| [deleted]
| avaldeso wrote:
| Author forgot an easy one: death by strangelet catalyzation
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangelet#Dangers
| rriepe wrote:
| It's #2 on the honorable mentions list
| avaldeso wrote:
| You're right. Shame on me.
| rriepe wrote:
| Easy to miss too :)
| vaduz wrote:
| Requires strange matter to exist in the first place, and
| currently the evidence does not support the hypothesis.
| flobosg wrote:
| Related: The Centre for Applied Eschatology -
| https://www.appliedeschatology.com/
|
| _We're working for no tomorrow, today._
| caycep wrote:
| I was tempted to see if the Donation links actually worked...
| morpheos137 wrote:
| Cheerful. I wonder when this kind of art project crosses the
| line into terrorist conspiracy.
| jacquesm wrote:
| A long long long time after the petrochemical industry and
| the MIC do.
| [deleted]
| 4eor0 wrote:
| Oh I dunno, seems like it's an honest platform versus the
| euphemism and platitudes industrialists use.
| oli5679 wrote:
| I am wondering if this is a satire? Sentences such as the below
| do not seem serious to me.
|
| "Totalitarian states
|
| Not an extinction scenario or a global catastrophe in the
| familiar sense, a global takeover by a ruthless totalitarian
| state could irreversibly mire the world in endless enslavement
| and crushing brutality. Current disintegration of liberal
| democracies around the world, as well as the rapid advances in
| surveillance and data management technologies make this a
| direction of growing promise."
|
| https://www.appliedeschatology.com/research
| bondarchuk wrote:
| It's funny because it's true.
| jhardy54 wrote:
| > I am wondering if this is satire?
|
| Yep.
| samstave wrote:
| I had to stop trimming my bonzai kitty to come ask the
| same. Thanks.
|
| BTW anyone interested in Kid Swap?
| chc4 wrote:
| The sequel to this, "To destroy the Earth"[0], is also very good.
|
| 0: https://qntm.org/destro
| hikerclimber wrote:
| hopefully this happens in my lifetime.
| kbr2000 wrote:
| Also, this classic 2001 website, for your entertainment:
|
| Exit Mundi ... A collection of end-of-world scenarios [0]
|
| [0]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20120918050149/http://www.exitmu...
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| The easiest way to destroy the Earth is to create a religion
| based on this: God blessed them and said to
| them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and
| subdue it; rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of
| the air and every creature that crawls upon the earth."
| Genesis 1:28
|
| It basically tells you:
|
| - Multiply without limits.
|
| - You are more important than the environment and other species.
|
| - Every species of plants and animals exist for your benefit.
|
| These are profoundly destructive beliefs, and the root cause of
| how we arrived to our current mess, the Anthropocene extinction
| event.
|
| There was a time when the Americas were populated by people that
| believed in living in harmony with the environment, but
| unfortunately they were all murdered and the ones that remained
| were forced to convert. 500 years later, a significant portion of
| what was carefully preserved for 10,000 years is gone.
|
| If humanity is going to survive, you have to abandon such
| beliefs. You are not here to multiply without limits and, quite
| honestly, you are not more important than the environment. Stop
| with the overconsumption, the excessive travelling and all that
| nonsense. You are not as important as you think.
| drdeca wrote:
| Article is about destroying the planet itself, as in, making it
| cease to be as a planet, not merely destroying all life.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| Sometimes I wonder how the world would look if that wasn't in
| the bible. Would people have behaved differently?
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Likely, I would be posting this from a flying car on Mars if
| it wasn't for the church.
|
| This now defunct website put it beautifully:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20050314130905/http://www.supers.
| ..
|
| The church forced people to believe in the Geocentric model,
| they murdered Hypatia of Alexandria, they harassed the fuck
| out of Galileo, Kepler's family, and countless other
| scientists. Now they're all about preaching about forgiveness
| and altruism, but before they ruled people's lives with an
| iron fist.
|
| You cannot discover gravity if you believe in Geocentrism.
| Without gravity it's harder to get to the laws of motion.
| Without laws of motion you have no physics. And so on, so
| forth.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I think most of us would just be satisfied with rendering the
| Earth a lifeless husk.
|
| If gntm thinks that inadequate I submit they may be letting the
| worst become the enemy of the bad.
|
| on edit: changed he to they.
| tzs wrote:
| If we start a little smaller, setting our sights on just wiping
| out most current terrestrial animal life including humans, look
| to what happened with the pesticide DDT. DDT did not come
| anywhere near wiping out more than at most a few species, but
| it illustrates what could happen if we got unlucky (or someone
| deliberately set out to do maximal damage).
|
| The problems with DDT were that (1) it could last a long time
| before breaking down, (2) it spread much more widely in the
| environment than was intended, and (3) it was not narrowly
| targeted to only affect pests.
|
| When you are making a pesticide that is not narrowly targeted
| [1], you really want it to break down fast and to not spread
| much beyond where you specifically apply it.
|
| Just make a pesticide that like DDT spreads far and wide and
| persists, but unlike DDT make it so one of the things it kills
| is nitrogen fixing bacteria. That would wipe out almost all of
| the base of terrestrial animal food chain.
|
| [1] You make a narrowly targeted pesticide by basing it on the
| hormones that control the target's life cycle. You find some
| specific behavior of the target, such as its "mate and die"
| behavior, that is triggered by a specific hormone, and make
| your pesticide trigger that. Then all you need to do is apply
| the pesticide when the insect isn't yet sexually mature or when
| the weather is too cold for eggs to survive, and the insects
| mate and die, with no offspring produced.
| perl4ever wrote:
| There's an old science fiction story, where the aliens
| invade, not with flying saucers and ray guns, or
| hypervelocity near-C projectiles but by spreading what is
| essentially a pesticide globally that is tailored to affect
| human behavior and so nobody realizes what is really
| happening. There's no spaceship hanging around to hack into
| like in Independence day, there isn't even anyone willing to
| consider the idea that what is happening might be extrinsic.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Screwfly_Solution
|
| Same author wrote a short story about a scientist who
| developed a tailored virus to save the earth from ecological
| destruction:
|
| https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/last-flight-
| docto...
|
| "The tape recorder they put by his bed functioned right on
| through, but if anybody had been around to replay it they
| would have found little but babbling. "Gaea Gloriatrix," he
| crooned, "Gaea girl, queen . . ." At times, he was grandiose
| and tormented. "Our life, your death!" he yelled. "Our death
| would have been your death, too, no need for that, no need."
|
| At other times, he was accusing. "What did you do about the
| dinosaurs?" he demanded. "Did they annoy you? How did you fix
| them? Cold. Queen, you're too cold! You came close to it this
| time, my girl," he raved. And then he wept and caressed the
| bedclothes and was maudlin."
| marshmallow_12 wrote:
| the mere annihilation of all life is not very ambitious. It is
| achievable with todays technology. There is only excitement in
| originality, wiping out humanity may not give the same level of
| satisfaction.
| philipkglass wrote:
| The Earth doesn't receive enough radiant energy from the sun to
| enter a Venus-like state from increased atmospheric CO2. At
| least not without waiting hundreds of millions of years for the
| sun's energy output to increase, in which case you might as
| well just choose one of the high-patience destruction options.
|
| As a much nearer term goal, the Earth could be rendered all but
| sterile by _removing and permanently sequestering_ carbon from
| the atmosphere to break the carbon cycle [0].
|
| 1) Direct air capture of CO2 from the atmosphere.
|
| 2) Conversion of CO2 to carbon with electrolytic hydrogen [1].
|
| 3) Reaction of carbon with silicon dioxide in an electrical
| furnace to form silicon carbide [2].
|
| 4) Surface storage of ever-increasing quantities of silicon
| carbide to end the Earth's carbon cycle and life itself.
|
| Bulk silicon carbide is effectively inert to biological or
| geological decomposition under surface conditions on Earth. It
| can break down if subducted into high temperature regions of
| the mantle, so it will need a watchful eye to keep geology at
| bay until the sun's expansion destroys the Earth completely.
|
| You'll need some basic clanking replicators (e.g. strictly
| earthbound von Neumann machines) to accomplish this. 99% of the
| life-elimination process can be finished in mere thousands of
| years. Either nuclear breeder reactors or paving the world's
| great deserts with solar panels can provide enough energy for
| the project.
|
| Silicon carbide can also oxidize in a furnace, so human
| civilization must be neutralized. But if you have a fleet of
| von Neumann machines dedicated to eliminating life that's one
| of the first problems to solve anyway.
|
| "Won't falling atmospheric CO2 trigger a new glacial maximum
| and greatly retard the rate at which environments can be
| decarbonized/sterilized, once ice cover impairs carbon cycling
| to the atmosphere?"
|
| Great question!
|
| You don't want a lot of frozen water on Earth because that will
| make it harder for CO2 to circulate through the atmosphere
| where it's easy to capture. It takes thousands of years for the
| ocean to fully overturn and exchange with the atmosphere under
| present climate conditions; there's no sense in making it even
| slower with sea ice. Nor is hiding soil under glacier cover a
| sustainable solution to the life problem. But you also don't
| want to leave CO2 in the atmosphere just to keep things warm
| and freely circulating.
|
| Some small portion of the replicators' effort can go toward
| manufacturing potent non-carbon-bearing greenhouse gases such
| as nitrogen trifluoride or sulfur hexafluoride. They are so
| much more potent than CO2 that just a bit added to the
| atmosphere should keep the Earth comfortably warm even as CO2
| becomes too scarce to support photosynthetic life.
|
| In only 10,000 years most multicellular life can be eliminated
| by carbon starvation. Some remnants of life will remain deep
| underground and near hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor. The
| machines must continue to eliminate CO2 as it is emitted by
| natural geological processes and maintain the mountains of
| silicon carbide so that they remain intact into deep time.
| Otherwise there could be another large scale outbreak of life
| before the sun finishes Earth.
|
| [0] https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/Carbon+Cycle
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosch_reaction
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_carbide#Production
| afterburner wrote:
| > I think most of us would just be satisfied with rendering the
| Earth a lifeless husk.
|
| You're probably right. I mean, have you seen Factorio?
| Aperocky wrote:
| Probably easier than you think, just add a few more ATM of CO2
| and it will work out to be just like Venus.
|
| Though -- it's actually a lot of CO2, for starters burning
| absolute every last bit of fossil fuel would probably
| contribute to ~0.1% of the amount needed for a runaway
| greenhouse event.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I have been wondering about that. Hasn't all of the carbon
| now in fossil-fuels been in atmosphere at some point? Or has
| more of it been freed from earth's crust or arrived as
| meteors since formation of the fossil-fuels? So in the end
| wouldn't worst case scenario be of around time when they
| formed?
| kaybe wrote:
| Yes, that was the case about 500 million years ago. [0] The
| climate and planet was very different back then, and it
| took a long time for the CO2 to go down that much and for
| life to cause this/adapt to the changes. The life back then
| wouldn't be very happy if it was transported to today's
| planet either.
|
| In addition to the greenhouse effect, the location of the
| continents can also have a major influence on the climate
| due to the influence on ocean and air currents, the albedo,
| weathering speed of exposed rock in the tropics and
| different plant cover at different latitudes etc, thus it
| is hard draw good comparisons (only modelling is possible,
| and verification is hard).
|
| To be fair, I do not believe we are capable of life
| extinction on Earth. We are also not able to make the
| conditions on this planet worse than it is on any other
| planet we can reach so far. But we can cause a mass
| extinction easily and make life for ourselves much much
| harder. Our situation is so optimized for the current
| conditions that changes will cause great pain. (Just look
| at the locations of cities, or how agriculture is run.) If
| we developed with the climate of 500 million years ago we
| would be just fine with that. The problem is the fast and
| large change.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%2
| 7s_at...
|
| PS: One more point: CO2 causes some cognitive issues in
| humans in concentrations above 1000 ppm, which often occurs
| in meeting rooms and means the windows need to be opened
| regularly. It's not bad, you just get a little tired and
| dumber... so you take a break and open the windows. Now
| imagine the CO2 concentration outside is 5000 ppm
| (currently at ~415 ppm). We did not evolve for this.
| thgaway17 wrote:
| Shhh. Some of us are trying to make a living selling green
| energy.
| gizmondo wrote:
| There used to be trees in Antarctica just 15 million years
| ago, you know.
| gamegoblin wrote:
| > So in the end wouldn't worst case scenario be of around
| time when they formed?
|
| It's worth noting that the Earth's atmosphere would be
| incompatible with current life at various past levels of
| atmospheric carbon.
|
| In the past, Earth's atmosphere was almost entirely
| nitrogen and carbon dioxide[1], but at some point some
| plucky cyanobacteria learned how to photosynthesize and
| convert CO2 into O2, hugely changing the contents of the
| atmosphere [2] and killing a large amount of life that
| couldn't tolerate the new order.
|
| So if we were to burn all the fossil fuels, it's quite
| possible that this would cause a climate catastrophe that
| would kill a large majority of life on earth. But there's a
| decent chance that the cyanobacteria and friends would
| survive and, after hundreds of millions of years, restart
| the evolutionary process.
|
| Note that climate catastrophes take many forms, and the
| "greenhouse effect" does not even necessarily have to be
| involved. Take ocean acidification for instance.
| Atmospheric carbon raises the pH level of the ocean, which
| can cause cascading ecological collapse.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimatology
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification
| dTal wrote:
| >But there's a decent chance that the cyanobacteria and
| friends would survive and, after hundreds of millions of
| years, restart the evolutionary process.
|
| I think it's worth noting that on this timescale, we
| don't have forever:
|
| "In about one billion years, the solar luminosity will be
| 10% higher than at present. This will cause the
| atmosphere to become a "moist greenhouse", resulting in a
| runaway evaporation of the oceans. As a likely
| consequence, plate tectonics will come to an end, and
| with them the entire carbon cycle... Four billion years
| from now, the increase in the Earth's surface temperature
| will cause a runaway greenhouse effect, heating the
| surface enough to melt it. By that point, all life on the
| Earth will be extinct." - from
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth
|
| I submit that this is probably Earth's only chance at a
| spacefaring civilization, and therefore Earth life's only
| chance at escaping the planet (and thus surviving the
| death of the planet). If we flub it and cause a mass
| extinction without anything to show for it, it is the
| beginning of the end of Earth's story.
| [deleted]
| sudhirj wrote:
| This seems to be a weird misconception about climate
| change, that the earth getting hotter will somehow end all
| life. That's very doubtful. All the plants will love the
| new greenhouse, lots of energy in the atmosphere, rain
| every day, the whole planet a tropical paradise. It's the
| humans and some other species who'll be heavily
| inconvenienced. Solving climate change is mostly so we can
| stay comfortable and not have to deal with more ecological
| crises and refugees.
| guenthert wrote:
| Only if it get just a little warmer. Photosynthesis is
| temperature dependent however and its maximum is at a
| modest 20 degree C, above 40 degree C its efficiency
| falls rapidly [1]. If it gets much warmer than that, and
| a run-away greenhouse effect would ensure that, only
| algae and some bacteria survive a while longer. Once the
| oceans are boiling, it's hard to imagine any life
| surviving though.
|
| There doesn't seem consensus on whether Earth could truly
| reach a runaway greenhouse state or would rather _just_
| settle at a higher temperature. In any case, only the
| ecological (and consequently economic) crises and
| refugees problem are the ones currently living people
| will be affected by, but that ought to be enough to take
| action.
|
| [1] https://sciencing.com/effect-temperature-rate-
| photosynthesis...
| jbay808 wrote:
| Not necessarily a tropical paradise, if it goes the way
| of the end-permian mass extinction:
|
| http://burro.case.edu/Academics/USNA229/impactfromthedeep
| .pd...
| dnautics wrote:
| I for one am ready to bow down to our giant insect
| overlords (once the plants get happy they will make more
| O2 and enable surface diffusion breathers to become giant
| again)
| vaduz wrote:
| We would do better with methane (100-year GWP 25), or even
| better with nitrous oxide - with added bonus that both N2 and
| O2 to produce it can be taken straight out of atmosphere
| (100-year GWP 298), though they would not last very long.
| dnautics wrote:
| You do understand that even burning all of the oxygen in the
| atmosphere currently to produce CO2 would yield less than an
| ATM
| rriepe wrote:
| Only 70 more though and you're right there at Venus'
| pressure.
| perl4ever wrote:
| Well, presumably something happened on Venus to convert
| large amounts of carbonate rocks to CO2? How would we rule
| out the possibility of that happening here?
| gshubert17 wrote:
| Burning all the fossil fuel reserves we have (know about),
| would add over 200 ppm CO2 to the atmosphere (mostly from 1
| trillion tons of coal). The additions from oil and gas are
| smaller. We'd then have over 500 ppm CO2.
|
| "Recoverable" coal is about 20 times proven reserves, so
| burning all that would add 4000 ppm CO2. Now the total would
| be 4500 ppm CO2, or almost 0.5 percent! Likely to be quite
| unhealthy.
|
| https://knoema.com/infographics/smsfgud/bp-world-reserves-
| of...
|
| https://inspectapedia.com/hazmat/Carbon_Dioxide_Hazards.php
| djrogers wrote:
| All the while you're doing that, plant life would be
| booming, and after a sufficient period of time would
| capture enough of that CO2 again to make it possible for
| non-plant life to once again flourish.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| "A sufficient period of time" is underselling it a
| little. Coal is only formed if wood is buried without
| rotting first. If we burned _all_ the coal we can find,
| it would take tens of millions of years to be replaced.
| perl4ever wrote:
| I had a vague impression that the processes that produced
| fossil fuels would probably _not_ renew in due time,
| because the existing layers have something to do with the
| inability of microbes to break down lignin long ago. Once
| the capability evolved, the same process can 't repeat
| even if one waits a long time?
| jacobr1 wrote:
| This paper has an interesting take on the history:
| https://www.pnas.org/content/113/9/2442
| nikanj wrote:
| Venus is ~100 million kilometers from the sun, Earth about
| 150 million km. No matter of greenhouse gases is going to
| compensate for that difference in radiation heating.
|
| Because radiation dissipates to the distance squared, we get
| around 40-50% of the heating Venus does.
| perl4ever wrote:
| You may be right in your conclusion, but your logic seems
| like it would imply Venus can't be hotter than Mercury,
| either?
| megablast wrote:
| Agreed. That is what most of us are aiming to do.
| swayvil wrote:
| I read of a scifi tech that rotated a photon through the hoopajoo
| dimension, thus converting a 1.0c massless particle into a 0.9c
| particle that weighs a couple grams.
|
| So we set up such a converting lens between the sun and earth and
| let our downshifted photons blast it to bits over a couple
| months.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Most photons don't have nearly that much energy.
| swayvil wrote:
| Not to mention that the hoopajoo dimension requires an
| antiquark harmonic balancer to access. And the Klingons
| refuse to sell.
| it wrote:
| Even this didn't do it: https://grahamhancock.com/ancient-
| cataclysm-hancock/
| vpribish wrote:
| he had me going until "...that made us a species with amnesia
| and wiped out almost all traces of a former high civilisation
| of prehistoric antiquity"
|
| This summarizes the evidence nicely:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesi...
| f_allwein wrote:
| > on September 10, 2008, the Earth has been destroyed
|
| https://qntm.org/board
|
| Did I miss something there?
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, we had to restore you from a backup. That's why you missed
| it. But no worries, it looks like you were restored ok.
| Probably.
| jaakl wrote:
| Can we be even sure that earth (and everything else from
| universes to ourselves) exists in the first place? Maybe we are
| just very complicated simulation faking it? Is or can we possibly
| have any strong proof for it? Stronger than Occam's razor for
| example.
| hntrader wrote:
| This is the "brain in a vat" thought experiment in philosophy.
| Also the simulation hypothesis.
|
| In short, I don't believe it's falsifiable or testable. We can
| just reason about likelihoods.
|
| Relevant to this is solipsism. We also don't have and can't
| have specific evidence that another being is conscious. At best
| we can just say that it's likely that they are.
| hoppla wrote:
| We better not... do not want The Operator to destroy our Earth.
| stjo wrote:
| Another story by the same author on the topic:
| https://qntm.org/responsibility
| jaakl wrote:
| Yep, just saw it also. This speculates that we are fake. My
| curiosity is whether it is possible to prove or falsify it.
| Descartes had quite strong proof that we do exist
| (cogito...), but also he was not able to say are we real, or
| what we really are.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Descartes had quite strong proof that we do exist
| (cogito...)
|
| Well, no, Descartes' argument only applies in the first-
| person-singular of the person evaluating the argument, not
| the first-person-plural.
| Tepix wrote:
| Flinging earth into space would qualify (it no longer orbits a
| star) and seems to be among the easiest options. Just get Jupiter
| to do it somehow. It would require less energy than most of the
| other options i guess.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| That actually wouldn't destroy the earth. There's plenty of
| heat near the bottom of the ocean; life would survive down
| there.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rltpH6ck2Kc&ab_channel=Vsauc...
| dang wrote:
| If curious, past threads:
|
| _How to destroy the Earth (2006)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11808723 - May 2016 (44
| comments)
|
| _How to destroy the Earth (completely)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1446612 - June 2010 (73
| comments)
|
| _How to destroy the earth_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=998734 - Dec 2009 (35
| comments)
|
| _Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to
| believe_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=121624 - Feb 2008
| (3 comments)
| qndreoi wrote:
| "Cooked in a solar oven You will need: Means for focusing a good
| few percent of the Sun's energy output directly on the Earth."
|
| Mirrors don't work that way. Mirrors can't focus to a black body
| temperature higher than that of the the light source.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I don't think that is true. Energy can be focused to a smaller
| volume with a higher temp and you can keep adding energy. This
| is how laser fusion works.
| qndreoi wrote:
| Author doesn't speak of lasers. Author says to use mirrors.
| The sun takes up about 1/2 degree width as seen from Earth.
| This limits the focus you can get using mirrors. (see 2nd law
| of thermodynamics) You could put solar panels on every
| surface of a Dyson swarm, convert to laser light, and aim it
| all at Earth, but that is not what author proposes.
| qndreoi wrote:
| 2nd law says heat flows from hot to cold. Mirrors are
| passive, temperature of target, (Earth), must be lower than
| surface temperature of source (Sun).
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| The degrees dont matter and you dont need to convert to
| laser light. You can have a dyson sphere of mirrors to
| reflect the entire energy output of the sun.
|
| As you say, The sun has surface area of 6 x 10^18 m^2.
| Earth has surface area of 5 x 10^14 m^2 for a ratio of
| 10^4.
|
| IF you reflect all of this energy to the earth, the
| incoming energy _per meter_ on the earth will be 10^4
| higher than the energy _per meter_ leaving the surface of
| the sun.
|
| The surface of the sun is 5,700K and can use the Stefan-
| Boltzmann law to describe how hot the earth would have to
| be to radiate the same amount of energy. Earth would need
| 57,000K to match the the same output.
| qndreoi wrote:
| You can't reflect all the energy of the sun onto the
| earth with a mirror or a lens. Put a one million mile
| wide source 93 million miles from the earth. The photons
| from the left side of the sun will reflect off the mirror
| about 1/2 degree from those from the right side of the
| sun. Get more than about 1 million miles from earth, and
| the size of the reflection of sunlight off the mirror is
| already larger than the earth, i.e. many of those photons
| will miss the earth entirely. Optics obeys the 2nd law of
| thermodynamics like all other heat transfer mechanisms.
| The target must be cooler than the source.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think that helps. You're saying that because the sun is
| not a Point Source and the rays aren't parallel.
|
| Following that logic, couldn't you still put a dyson
| mirror around thesis and earth raising the sun and earth
| temp above 5700? This would raise the temp of both above
| 5700.
| qndreoi wrote:
| Interesting idea. I think if you put perfectly reflective
| mirrors inside a Dyson sphere larger in radius than
| Earth's orbit, the photons would bounce around until they
| hit the Sun, Earth, the Moon, Venus or Mercury. It seems
| before too long, (a few reflections), the radiation would
| be uniform from all directions throughout the volume of
| the sphere. The mirror would get as warm as all the
| planets, and would fail at some not too extreme
| temperature. Unless I'm missing something.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I Im not sure that the mirror has to be at the same
| temperature as a heat source. The area of a dyson sphere
| at earths orbit would be 2.8 _10^23 m^2 The area of the
| sun is 6_ 10^18 m^2.
|
| This is where my understanding of optics and reflections
| breaks down. How much heat/kinetic energy is transferred
| to a mirror when it reflects a photon?
|
| From a heat transfer perspective. the dyson sphere has
| 100,000X the surface area of the sun to radiate heat and
| 1/100,000 the photon flux hitting it's surface. Based on
| this I would expect it to be cooler.
| mnw21cam wrote:
| One of the main reasons why optics obeys the 2nd law of
| thermodynamics is because as the temperature of the earth
| approaches that of the sun, the earth starts emitting
| radiation approaching the same intensity, and the net
| influx of energy goes down towards zero.
|
| That temperature should still be enough to make a fair
| dent though.
| andi999 wrote:
| So you say the max temp on earth by this method is the sun's
| temperature. Why wouldn't this be enough?
| qndreoi wrote:
| It may, but source says "You will need: Means for focusing a
| good few percent of the Sun's energy output directly on the
| Earth.", then posits using mirrors to do this. Mirrors could
| get Earth to something approaching 5800 kelvin, but that is
| nowhere near "a few good percent of the sun's energy output."
| aflag wrote:
| How much energy is a good few percent?
| qndreoi wrote:
| The sun has surface area of 6 x 10^18 m^2. Earth has
| surface area of 5 x 10^14 m^2. Earth can not be bombarded
| by more than the ratio of these to numbers with solar
| radiation using only mirrors. <<1 percent.
| yongjik wrote:
| I see what you mean, but it seems like a self-correcting
| problem. Focus enough of the sun's energy on Earth, and
| it will be shrouded with a rapidly expanding ball of hot
| plasma, at which point its surface area would be much
| greater. Now you can focus even more of the sun's energy
| on it without conjuring Maxwell's demons.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| As a second point, even if mirros can't make the earth hotter
| than the sun, Why isnt the suns temperature enough to vaporize
| the the earth?
|
| The sun is a plasma bound together by gravity and earth does
| not have enough gravity to retain it's mass?
| [deleted]
| hikerclimber wrote:
| hopefully earth gets destroyed within my lifetime.
| swayvil wrote:
| Create the intergalactic equivalent of a superpopular sitcom,
| like Friends.
|
| Make random reference to Earth (and its location) in conversation
| between Ross and Phoebe.
|
| Earth suddenly has massive value to fans of the show. Rabid alien
| fans swarm in and steal Earth away in flyingsaucer-portable
| chunks.
| CamelCaseName wrote:
| Shouldn't the title read (2003) not (2006)?
| guardiangod wrote:
| As an aside, one of my favorite phrases to use when making fun of
| someone's idea is 'all-surpassing patience.' I've forgotten where
| I've first read that phrase.
|
| When I saw the the headline I immediately remember that I read
| this when I was in high school (2002-5) and that the phrase came
| from here. Thank you for making me remember again.
| neurobashing wrote:
| Fans of the Xeelee Sequence are probably thinking, Meh, just go
| find a Starbreaker, and take out all of the system!
| [deleted]
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| We actually have the technology to destroy life on the planet
| with one thing, the cobalt bomb:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_bomb It's a salted nuclear
| bomb made to throw an enormous cloud of radioactive cobalt into
| the atmosphere of a planet. It would be as if hundreds of
| Chernobyl powerplants exploded in the air and the fallout would
| circle the globe, fall on all the people and plants and slowly
| kill them over a few years. The ecosystem would be devastated and
| the planet would become unlivable for some time. Luckily we
| decided hydrogen and neutron bombs were about as bad a device as
| we wanted to build and left cobalt bombs on the drawing board.
| scarmig wrote:
| I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed, but I'm
| skeptical this would end all life on Earth, or even wipe out
| humanity. For one, it won't circulate evenly. Some places will
| be irradiated an order of magnitude more than average, but some
| places won't be irradiated at all. Simply adding more bombs and
| bigger bombs doesn't help here: you've got to point them at all
| the safe spots.
|
| Even ignoring those safe spots, some forms of life can probably
| exist in irradiated areas: Chernobyl's dead zone isn't by any
| means devoid of life.
|
| There are probably shelters that could provide a safe harbor,
| though I don't trust them functioning for more than a half life
| or two.
| perl4ever wrote:
| More interesting to me is, given that people (I'm not sure
| who) say that in principle a thermonuclear bomb can have
| unlimited stages and size, would it be practical to build a
| "regular" bomb _several_ orders of magnitude bigger than Tsar
| Bomba that would essentially blow up the whole planet. Let 's
| say > 10x the dinosaur killing projectile.
| Athas wrote:
| If you read the article, you'll find that the Earth is
| extremely hard to blow up. It's an enormous ball of iron,
| and almost any explosion at the surface is unlikely to
| affect it much. You'd have to detonate a bomb close to its
| centre, _and_ that bomb would have to be astronomically
| large. Remember that the Earth got hit with a presumed
| _Mars-sized_ object in the past, yet Earth is still around
| (the debris formed the Moon). Such a collision _might_
| eradicate all life, but it wouldn 't "blow up the planet".
| perl4ever wrote:
| Well, yeah, I would consider making the top mile or two
| of crust molten "close enough for government work". I
| didn't mean dispersing a cloud of debris to infinity.
|
| After the collision that created the Moon, I believe some
| research suggests that the Earth was literally as hot as
| the surface of the Sun, deduced from evidence of the
| effect of "earthshine" on the Moon.
|
| If the Chicxulub impactor resulted in a global rain of
| molten rock, I'd also consider that scale of explosion to
| be "enough" even though some living things survived.
| garaetjjte wrote:
| Related Kurzgesagt video:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyECrGp-Sw8
| scarmig wrote:
| It would need to be many, many orders of magnitude bigger.
| Chicxulub was approximately 10E6 more energetic than Tsar
| Bomba, and it didn't even manage to kill off all life. And
| that barely left a dent in the surface of the planet.
|
| Also worth noting is that bigger bombs don't scale
| particularly well in terms of damage. Double a bomb's size,
| and much of it immediately just goes to outer space.
| Another large part of it is reflected from the surface of
| the planet to go, again, to outer space. Damage at radius r
| ~ E^(1/5).
| guenthert wrote:
| > Chernobyl's dead zone isn't by any means devoid of life.
|
| Is that because of immigration or is it actually capable of
| sustaining (multi-cellular) life?
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| The latter:
|
| https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/060418-c
| h...
|
| I also have heard (from "a reliable source") that one of
| the best nature preserves in the US is not labeled a nature
| preserve. It's off limits because it's the area around a
| nuclear plant.
|
| With no people around, other life forms tend to thrive.
| Humans are lousy stewards of planet earth more often than
| not.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| It's absolutely habitable, there were even some people who
| refused to leave / came back. You are much more likely to
| get cancer, but it certainly is habitable.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaUNhqnpiOE
| XorNot wrote:
| This is why I'm skeptical the cobalt bomb would even do
| it.
|
| We'd have huge cancer rates and a drop in life
| expectancy, and a massive rise in birth defects, but
| eliminating the human race? Even substantially wiping out
| society?
|
| I'm kind of doubtful. We've kept having babies in
| conditions objectively far worse for our entire history.
| bottled_poe wrote:
| Turns out the radiation level is less harmful to life than
| human presence. Who would have guessed.
| tpmx wrote:
| Obvious clarification: Destroying life on earth isn't the same
| as destroying the earth.
|
| Edit: Also, please don't bring up Chernobyl like that, without
| any comparison to modern nuclear tech. Modern safe nuclear
| power is necessary for avoiding dramatic climate change, which
| would hurt a lot of humans (but not earth).
| legulere wrote:
| Why do you think nuclear is necessary? Nuclear is stagnating
| at just 10% of global electricity and renewables are rapidly
| growing
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation
| tpmx wrote:
| There is no remotely efficent way to store very large
| volumes of electricity.
|
| Wind power works great sometimes, but we need electricity
| that works all of the the time.
|
| > Nuclear is stagnating at just 10% of global electricity
|
| At the moment the slack is increasingly being picked up by
| burning coal or oil. That's bad.
| rurban wrote:
| There is, at that's exactly how we do it for that last
| 100 years. Pumped-storage hydroelectricity.
|
| About 80% efficiency, and 95% of electricity is stored
| this way. Burning fossils is of course stupid.
|
| > Pumped storage is by far the largest-capacity form of
| grid energy storage available, and, as of 2020, the
| United States Department of Energy Global Energy Storage
| Database reports that PSH accounts for around 95% of all
| active tracked storage installations worldwide, with a
| total installed throughput capacity of over 181 GW.
|
| Wikipedia
| rurban wrote:
| It is the same. Otherwise you would could live on Mars, where
| the atmosphere is gone, radiation strikes directly through,
| no life is possible.
|
| Modern nuclear tech obviously also could lead to such an
| outcome, that's why we banned them. But the biggest problem
| is politics, the assured strike-back policy, which almost
| destroyed earth a couple of times already. Plus corruption
| which led to the current climate crisis, leading to the
| destruction of the atmosphere. See Mars. Mars is dead, Earth
| just not yet.
| overboard2 wrote:
| While I agree that nuclear power is important, I also think
| that trying to get people to include tangentially relevant
| opinions as context is a bad idea. While pushing your opinion
| on Chernobyl every time you mention Chernobyl might help to
| push that opinion, it decreases the signal to noise ratio of
| what you're trying to primarily convey. Additionally, it can
| introduce unnecessary opinions into otherwise neutral or
| slightly opinionated comments.
| nicbou wrote:
| This is the kind of internet I like, and the reason why I visit
| this website. Thanks for sharing
| aminozuur wrote:
| I will link this the next time someone says "we're destroying
| Earth", when they mean "life on Earth".
|
| Earth is 4.5B years old, and will likely continue to exist for
| quite some time. That's called the "Lindy effect" (old things
| will likely continue to exist).
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| What do you hope to accomplish responding to a life-on-earth
| concern with an article exploring how to destroy the celestial
| body?
| aminozuur wrote:
| That people say "life on earth", and not "earth".
|
| I'm a bit autistic when it comes to language.
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| This only thing this accomplishes is making you look like a
| jerk, with maybe a 10% chance of getting a chuckle out of
| the right person.
| gcheong wrote:
| I think the term is pedantic.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| Carlin had something to say about that.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdSi9NW5u3E
| ttt0 wrote:
| With the extreme environments that some animal species live in,
| I'm not even considered about destroying the life on Earth. It
| doesn't seem like an easy thing to pull off.
| dennis_moore wrote:
| I'm not saying it isn't, but these organisms evolved over
| millions of years to adapt to these environments, whereas the
| extreme conditions caused by human activity are happening on
| a much shorter time scale, probably too short for organisms
| to be able to adapt.
| vaduz wrote:
| It is pretty hard to imagine any particular set of
| conditions short of total planetary surface destruction
| that would make all extremophiles go extinct - and as long
| there is enough of them, they will start spreading again.
|
| Any _particular_ species, _including humans_ that lives on
| Earth is unlikely to survive catastrophic changes - but
| life will come back and spread into the newly freed and
| opened niches, just as it did before multiple times.
| gcheong wrote:
| More specifically they mean human life. Almost nobody cares
| about an Earth incapable of supporting human life.
| ttt0 wrote:
| Are they? Some people I saw seem to be more considered about
| animals than humans.
| gcheong wrote:
| Some but that's what I mean by almost nobody. Even within
| that group I would say their concern about animals most
| likely takes human existence for granted.
| Isamu wrote:
| We probably can't destroy all life on earth either, because of
| the adaptations of microbes to the most inhospitable
| conditions. You'd have to remove the atmosphere and the oceans
| probably, or turn the earth into Venus.
|
| Likewise when people remark on the fragility of earth when
| looking at a whole earth image - no, it is we who are fragile,
| particularly when, as tiny as we are, we could make the earth
| inhospitable to us.
| bootlooped wrote:
| If somebody says they destroyed their car in an accident do you
| also point out that the car is fine and mostly in one piece,
| it's just totally unusable for human transportation?
|
| Everybody knows what is meant when people say this.
| aflag wrote:
| The car crash disfigured the car into something people
| wouldn't really call it a car anymore. However, even if earth
| stops supporting human life (or, more likely, greatly reduce
| the number of places on earth that humans can live on), no
| one would argue it is still a planet.
| bootlooped wrote:
| I think that assertion is disproven by thinking about what
| junkyards are full of: cars. It doesn't matter that they
| can't drive anymore, or even that they may be totally
| missing significant parts. People still generally think of
| them as cars.
| andi999 wrote:
| Why did nobody tell the dinosaurs about the Lindy effect?
| jacquesm wrote:
| Maybe someone did, who's to say...
| dfilppi wrote:
| Black hole, or collide with something much bigger. Simple.
| megablast wrote:
| Why would you need to create an equivalent size amount of
| antimatter to destroy the planet, when you would need a lot less
| since it releases so much energy?
| porphyra wrote:
| If you scroll down there is a section about blowing Earth up
| with an antimatter bomb made of a lot less antimatter.
| KarlKemp wrote:
| It's like XKCD, but without the lightness, humor, and general
| affection for humankind.
| NateEag wrote:
| I thought it was hilarious.
|
| Opinions will vary, I suppose.
| Sotosaywhat wrote:
| Well that may be Ot an emotional driven but... somehow
| related comic://i.ibb.co/Kzrkg97/23243-en-CONCLUSION-FINAL-
| Mail.png (-;
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-02-21 23:02 UTC)