February 20, 2005
The Earth is going down
It turns out that destroying the earth - literally destroying mind you, not rendering uninhabitable or sterile - is a lot harder than it looks. The earth weighs in at about 5.973 sextillion tons. That's 5.973e27, or 5,973,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons. Of mostly iron. Turns out that the only guaranteed ways of actually destroying the earth take about a year per ton of mass the earth possesses (which would take orders of magnitude longer than the current age of the universe), and the only fast ways take quantities of energy that a decent sized star would take a while to produce.
Ain't gonna happen folks.
Just in case anyone was worried about that. I'm just sayin' is all.
aren't you forgetting our sun still has yet to swell into a red giant which will undoubtedly consume the earth in fire. . . at temperatures that hot, the iorn planet will just turn into milkshake before being swallowed by the sun
Posted by: jeremy at February 20, 2005 8:22 PMmy bad - i just read the "being eaten by the sun" theory towards the bottom. haha - funny stuff.
Posted by: jeremy at February 20, 2005 8:37 PMdestrying the earth may be hard to destroy but the human race could be wiped out pretty easy.
Posted by: James at February 20, 2005 11:11 PMIt's interesting that he mentions Armageddon not destroying the earth near the bottom, since the Bible seems to suggest otherwise, what with the being consumed by fire and all.
Posted by: edonovan at February 21, 2005 2:15 AMthis is a wonderful resourse for us wanna be mad world dictator types. I printed out a copy of it and hung it on my wall. I can't wait till my army of grey goo nano-bots are finished.
Posted by: James at February 21, 2005 3:55 AMWhatever the Last Trump involves, the events described seem to be of a different kind than mere astrophysics and have more to do with the metaphysical "making all things new" rather than the actual physical destruction of a six sextillion ton chunk of mostly iron.
Posted by: ryan at February 21, 2005 2:28 PM