"Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe.

"You've seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You've heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing hideous quantities of pollution into the atmosphere threatens to end the world.

"Fools.

"The Earth is built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you've had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy."

- Sam Hughes, "How to destroy the Earth" - http://qntm.org/destroy

I think when people say "destroy the Earth" they are talking more about it's habitability than what a Death Star can do.

Well, it recovered pretty well after a 6 mile wide rock going millions of miles per hour hit it right in the face and cause one of the biggest extinction events in its history.

If that didn't destroy its habitability for good, I'm not sure we'd be able to do it.

> "If that didn't destroy its habitability for good, I'm not sure we'd be able to do it."

But we sure can make it a lot more miserable to live on.

Sure, but by this point we've redefined "destroying the Earth" to mean "making someone less comfortable."

"If that didn't destroy its habitability for good, I'm not sure we'd be able to do it"

You have a pretty stunted imagination for what we are able to do to the planet.

For good or not, I would like to spend the rest of my natural life without these artificial challenges, as fun as they may be ;)

Nothing that happens is artificial. Humans are part of nature, just as enriched plutonium is.

Indeed they are, which is why I asked about _that_ on Quora some time ago:

http://www.quora.com/Is-it-technically-possible-for-current-...

Solving it quite literally requires boiling the ocean.

OTOH:

"The momentum would be enough to knock the Earth into a different orbit—but the Earth is no more. The energy deposited is ten thousand times greater than the planet’s gravitational binding energy, and the planet is blown into an expanding cloud of plasma, with a particularly energetic streamer extending away from the far side of the impact site, out into space."

-- http://whatif.xkcd.com/20/

So many things to say, but really not the right forum.

Sigh. I laughed at this, it's a fun and smart response targeted to a sub-community that barely broke the threshold to get that response.

But let's be real. If your standard of 'blowing up the planet' is somewhat lesser than 'the Republicans'...it might make you feel better to say it but history shows both of them are plenty happy dropping bombs for no justifiable reason.

I am afraid that history doesn't show that we wage wars "for no justifiable reason".

How about the Mexican-American war, where US soldiers crossed the Mexican border, Mexican troops chased them away, the US decided this was a Mexican invasion, the US declared war, then we took the entire South-Eastern United States from Mexico. All because WE invaded THEM first.

Ah, but it was the Manifest Destiny of the USA to conquer North America and Mexico happened to be in the way. How much more justification do you need?

(Note, I grew up in Canada, which became a single country for mutual defense in case the USA wanted to repeat the incident on its northern border. Details are a bit more complicated than that, but that is the gist of it.)

How about the most recent US-Iraq war? The one justified by "OMG WMDs and Al-Qaeda", and a vial of scary stuff waved around at the UN by our Secretary of State?

Merely saying a few things and seeing what might stick in order to justify your actions doesn't automatically qualify them as justified or reasoned.

One can justify anything. However narrowing that statement to "for difficult to justify reasons" leads to list of wars likely in double figures.

I know its a political site, but please stay away from politics as shown in the guidelines.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Unless its Chuck Hagel or Rand Paul.

Cute, but excessively and erroneously partisan.