Here's the thing about trying to blow up the Earth: You probably don't comprehend the scale of what you're trying to do here.

To start with, let's talk about the Chicxulub Meteor Impact, the one that killed all the dinosaurs. The Big One. The K-T Extincter. The Ultimate Motherfucker. This thing was taller than the tallest possible mountain. At the moment its bottom hit the Earth, its top was outside the atmosphere. This was the Rock of Doom, and it smacked into the Earth at 20 kilometers per second, much faster than a speeding bullet, so fast it didn't even have time to slow down and heat up like a regular meteor. It just punched a hole in the atmosphere in the blink of an eye. If you were chilling on Earth a second before it hit, you were fucked the instant it arrived. BOOM.

And all that thing managed to do was make the atmosphere nearly unlivable for ten years. If it couldn't even shake the Earth, what the hell does it take?

Well, you might be in luck, because astrophysicists now believe Earth's moon was formed when an entire other planet smashed into proto-Earth and blew the Earth and itself apart, causing most of the debris to collapse back into a new Earth and the rest to coalesce as Earth's satellite. So there you go, if you want to smash the Earth to pieces you need to ram it into a planet of nearly the same size!

Except that the exact same thing would happen: the debris would condense at the center of the mass created by all the debris. The only way to utterly destroy the planet, short of pushing it into the Sun, is to hit it with so much force that all the debris goes flying away so fast and far that it never comes back together. Which would require even more power than the weight of an entire planet at celestial-body speeds can provide.

And that raises the question. If you actually have enough power to accomplish all this, why do you need to?

Log in or register to write something here or to contact authors.