That's JUST what I was thinking of, and this only uses fifty year old (gasp!) technology.Space ships, Death Stars, turbolasers and tractor beam projectors are fun, but far from factual. Please don't forget this particular sub-forum is for discussions of science facts, not speculations.
Thanks.
Thinking of "natural amplification" of current technologies, blowing a nuclear bomb at the Yellowstone supervolcano should be enough to "get it started."
If you don't have access to nuclear bombs, perhaps a large enough mass moving fast enough hitting the right place on Yellowstone might do it. A Saturn 5 Moonshot would do it, just replace the Command and Lunar Module areas with as much mass as you can boost up there. Not sure if it really needs to to a Moon shot turnaround, but that might make it easier to aim it with midcourse corrections and have it coming straight down through the atmosphere at 25,000+ mph. It would be an interesting heat shield design to keep it from burning up on the way down.
Getting back to the original question, this could be done on the Moon with a mass driver, enough payloads (one payliad hitting may not be enough, but MANY payloads sent one after another at slightly different speeds and precise midcourse corrections could add up to a substantial mass hitting all at once) and appropriate steering technology, which a long-term Lunar installation would surely already have to be able to ship things back to Earth. The payload control devices may need modifying so they can't be controlled from Earth on the way down, as that would surely be a safety feature if the Lunar launcher "accidentally" lost control and they were going to hit in the wrong place
Maybe an oil drilling rig going deep enough might start it off, but I imagine you'd get the attention of Mr. "Ranger" before you can drill too far.
Oh, wait, he's from Jellystone.
But if you're on the Moon and have the money and connections (and secure communications to reduce the chance of others finding out what you're doing), you could pay to have a drilling company somehow sneak in and start drilling at a remote location within Yellowstone.
The sun can shine on, but with space technology, it would only take a 1-mil or less reflective or absorptive film to stop all sunlight shining on the Earth, out at the L1 orbit between the Earth and Sun. This would be at least 8,000 (or larger due to paralax and the sizes of the Earth and Sun) miles in diameter, which could add up in mass, but this is just a little technology, not any new science. We've already got the James Webb Telescope being developed to capture a large amount of (very low-level) radiation in a precision way. All we want to do is block more of it.Have the sun die and let nature take its course.
It takes a while, but the planet will eventually be destroyed. Right along with the rest of the solar system.
Misa, who thinks big.
There's also some visceral fear about a solar eclipse, especially when it doesn't stop and the Moon is nowhere near the Sun in the sky...
I'd keep an eye on the news from CERN and see if they manage to make any baby black holes... if that becomes plausible, then I'd go with creating a temporary black hole in the center of the Earth.
I'd construct a black hole. Isn't the earth covered in teeny tiny ones already?
Also, those generated in accelerators have such low mass that they don't last long enough to absorb any other particles. They radiate away virtually instantly from Hawking radiation (as I understand, that radiation and its timing after the initial events is actually how they claim to have made a black hole). It's just not big enough to stick around, and particle accelerators don't have enough power to make them much bigger.I'll go even farther and say that a tiny black hole (assumed to be created by smashing two atomic nuclei together at mind-blowing energy levels) is even too tiny to absorb a single proton.
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So black holes -- at least subatomic ones -- are definitely out.
Depending on the energy you have to do it, driving the Moon into the Earth would take years, decades, or centuries or longer. Perhaps long enough for lots of people on Earth to escape, even with a few "Noah's Arks" of other life on Earth.Hmm... crash the moon into the Earth? Even if it doesn't completely destroy the Earth, if you do it right you could probably destabilize its orbit and send it spiraling towards the Sun. In which case, it would probably explode into tiny fragments. Just like the movies.
The time scale you'd be looking at may not fit your bill. But then again, steering the moon into the Earth would probably kill just about anything alive in the first few hours. The remaining bacteria/cockroaches probably wouldn't have time to develop the technology needed to reverse the planet's doomed trajectory before being vaporized in a giant molten nuclear furnace that practically defines "overkill".
The Moon wouldn't even have to hit, just get the orbit below the Roche Limit of either body. Either one breaking up would cause the destruction of at least the surface of the other.
They probably got 'em 100 to 1,000 times Little Boy, but getting them into a borehole might be a problem, though that's an interesting possibility.Okay then a cut holes with drills such as they use in oil rigs in strategic positions around the planet, such as fault lines, to the core as close as you can get, and place bombs that are 10 times stronger than Little Boy in them. Explode the bombs at the same time and that should cause a tectonic plate reaction that would possibly destroy the planet.
At first thought that sounds interesting and almost plausible Resonant frequencies of the Earth are already well known due to thousands of seismometers around the Earth, measuring every earthquake large enough to be detected. Here's a graph ofLike I said, you would have to scale this up a bit, but the science is basically sound. All solids (I believe for our purposes, you can consider the crust to be solid) have a natural structural resonance frequency. If you find out what the Earth's NSRF is, you could theoretically build a device that causes a sympathetic vibration.
http://www.unavco.org/community_science/science_highlights/2010/M8.8-Chile_RC_2010_8.8.pdf
The big earthquakes like the recent in Japan are already in the power range of the largest nuclear weapons, if not moreso. You should certainly be able to trigger some faults and/or supervolcanos with nuclear weapons causing great havoc on the surface virtually worldwide, but as far as making the whole Earth come apart, I don't believe it.
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