Top 10 ways to destroy Earth.

[PlutonianEmpire]

http://www.livescience.com/technology/d ... th_mp.html



Pretty neat though.

[eburacum45]

These scenarios are interesting, particularly those involving black hole and strangelets; most tiny black holes evaporate immediately (in theory) so would be harmless, but if a hole was made with a mass greater than Mount Everest (say from a small asteroid) it would persist long enough to grow and swallow the Earth.

Additionally, most strangelets (if they exist) would be unstable, but a negatively charged strangelet would persist long enough to convert the whole Earth into strange matter.

So is this likely to happen accidently, say as a result of high energy experiments on Earth?
This paper says not;
http://www.bnl.gov/rhic/docs/rhicreport.pdf

in order to examine the possibilities of such disasters, the incidence of very high cosmic ray collisions on the Moon was considered.
Some of these collisions over the history of the Moon will have been much mre energetic than any high-energy event expected at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (the inspration for this study), yet the Moon is still there;

the conclusion is that none of these dangerous species (including runaway black holes or negatively charged strangelets) are likely to occur accidentally.

[Beowulf01]

Personally i like hitting earth With a chunk of mater moving at a significant percentage of the speed of light!...
gives me some good data on a story i intended to write.

[MKruer]

I love these types of questions. Looks like they got all my ideas.

[Wayne Smith]

You know, I always thought it would be a global pandemic that would get us first. Like the Black Death which killed of most of Europe during the middle Ages. I'm sure there are plenty of flesh eating nasties in labs around the world waiting to escape but mother nature could always cook something up herself.

Now it looks like Global Warming and Dimming are leading the death march.

[mindless]

Well, I like the idea from building an hypergalactic highway through our galaxy, and of course the Earth will be the first planet predestinated to be destroyed

However, to be honest we are currently doing the first step of destroying the Earth. In few hundred years, the time will come ....

[Eveningwind]

I would say people will destroy everything themselves without any scenarios...we are rather unwise at times which can last for centuries..

[Tech Sgt. Chen]

I think we're doing a pretty thorough job on our current path. Another 50 to 100 years and we will know for sure.

[bdm]

I would destroy the Earth by finding a convenient body outside the solar system, and deflecting it toward the inner solar system so that the orbit of the Earth is disrupted. The Earth would either be thrown into the sun, be ejected from the solar system, or be destroyed by a direct collision.