Let's End the World!

Six items, out of a few thousand years of existence. I say it's time to wrap it up. Let's just destroy the earth and see what the afterlife is like.

How do we destroy the earth? Oh, any number of ways will do just fine. It depends on how you want to go. Atomic war? I'm down. World-wide infection of dysentery? Not too pleasant, but it'll do the trick. Drilling a hole to the core of the earth and jumping in, one by one? A little time-consuming, but trust me, the wait will be worth it.

And then there's my preferred method of destroying the planet. Plunging the Earth into the sun. Since that firey ball of death is going to engulf the world eventually, let's do the job for it. And since so many people are convinced that global warming is going to kill us all, this way we guarantee that they're right.

Now the big question- how would we hurl our little rock into the sun? Well I got this gem of an idea from a book I was reading about space and astrophysics. The author mentioned that all sorts of things affect the earth's orbit of the sun, like passing meteorites, changes in the moon's orbit (apparently it's getting a centimeter further away every year), and launching rockets into space. None of this has a strong enough effect to actually plunge us into the sun, and our orbit is stable enough to right itself pretty well.

But then I started thinking about launching rockets into space, which quickly enough turned into launching upside down rockets. Here's how this would work- we build the standard space-rocket, but we place it upside down, embedded into some firm ground. Build the rocket for excellent vertical strength, maybe add a few strong support pillars. Then "launch" the sucker right around midnight.

Now some brainiac is reading this and saying "Johnny, one space rocket isn't enough to get the job done", and you're right. That's why I'm thinking of a few hundred rockets. Line them up around the equator, and start firing in the dead of night. The earth rotates a bit, fire off the next rocket in line. If we keep this up for a while, sooner or later our orbit will destabilize. Once that's done, it may take a few hundred years for the Earth to actually plummet into the sun, but we can just keep firing rockets to speed up the process. Don't want to be burned to death? Set off the rockets at noon and we can freeze to death instead.

Another interesting note about the sun- we're currently facing a slightly higher than normal chance of the sun burning us all to a crisp. A while back the sun hit a record low number of sunspots, which is always followed by a higher amount of plasma bursts spraying off of the sun. Now it'll take a very powerful burst at the precise timing and angle to actually fry the Earth, but it's definitely possible. Man, I hope we get toasted by the sun.

I, however, am not the kind of guy to just sit and wait for a stray solar flare to roast us. I can hope, but I'd like to be more proactive then that. Might as well wait for a gamma ray burst to hit us from another star. Sure, we'd be dead, but it could be a thousand years before that happens. So just in case my readers aren't satisfied with the rocket-into-the-sun option, I've thought up option two as a handy backup. Particle accelerators.

Physicists have been theorizing that a particle accelerator might end the world, usually by accidentally creating a black hole. I ask, why "accidentally"? Why not really push these accelerators to their full potential and make a black hole on purpose? It's pretty simple, really. We already have these scientists surrounding the particle accelerators, put them to work on whipping up a good sized black hole. Once the accelerator does the trick, we sit back and wait to get sucked in. No more planet Earth, we're all part of the singularity now.

If I felt like doing some research, I could probably come up with plenty more ways for us to eradicate the planet. But why should I have all the fun? Go ahead and put your minds to it. Maybe you can some up with something simpler. We're all in this together, we might as well all go out together.