No, seriously. I've come up with a way to turn Earth into... Not Earth. When I am bored and idle, I am generally thinking of something that falls into one or more of these three categories: Video games, lightsaber battles, and the destruction of the human race. Ironic that this usually occurs when I'm in church.
Most methods of destroying a planet involve either 1) Hitting it very a very large object(like a rock) 2) Smashing it up(into little rocks). While these are all fine, workable(theoretically) ideas, there are several other more... Exotic...methods which one could use to eliminate this rock from the universe.
Do you think, perhaps, that one day we might be able to build a massive converging lens and place it in outer space? The entire point of this lens(which is going to measure roughly the diameter of the Earth itself) is to focus energy from the sun into a single point... Somewhere. For some reason.
Most probably destroying whatever the beam is focused on. Just like the Death Star from Star Wars, but without the weakness of a two metre wide exhaust shaft which a jedi could fire a couple of proton torpedos into.
When the sun's light is focused upon a planet(like Earth, for example), a few things will happen very quickly. Firstly, the area under the beam of light would instantly ignite. The soil would literally explode, melting and reacting to form compounds that would normally take billions of years to appear naturally. About one tenth of a second later, the air in the immediate region would be heated beyond imagination, and soon the entire atmosphere would ignite, turning the earth into a flaming ball of sheer awesome.
All life on the planet would be incinerated very quickly. The very mountains would melt, and the oceans would evaporate. If we're "lucky" we would still have an atmosphere. Of superheated plasma, that is. The earth would probably become rounder than it has ever been.
Okay, just think about it. Only about one billionth of the sun's energy reaches earth. If there was a way to tap into one percent of the sun's total output, we would never have to worry about energy shortages again.
Especially if that one percent was used to incinerate everyone on the planet.
Alternatively we could just blow the earth up. But that isn't as easy as it sounds. Because the earth is something like 6000000000000000000000000 kilograms of rock and other stuff. Even if we put our entire nuclear arsenal into the centre of the earth and blew them up all at once, nothing would happen. Even if we somehow inserted a nuclear warhead in a lattice pattern throughout the earth, using all the nuclear warheads on this planet, we wouldn't do anything other than create a mild instability.
This earth has survived much, much more than what humans have thrown at it. Think about it: This planet has been abused by countless meteors and asteroids the size of Africa being thrown at its surface. It has endured about that many solar flares and magnetic pole swaps, and whatever else goes on in planetary bodies.
More likely, we're going to need to use a more innovative method of destroying the planet. There's been talk of self-replicating nanobots being able to eat up just about anything, and turn them into more nanobots. True, you could possibly turn the entire planet into a mass of nanobots, but what then? You've still got an entire planet, of nanobots! Unless you give them some sort of mechanism to eject into space after the entire process is done, you've still got a big object with sufficient mass to achieve hydrostatic equilibrium(become round due to its own gravity), is in orbit around the sun, and doesn't have anything blocking it in its orbit. Thus, it is still a planet. It is still earth, just that it's grey and gooey and converts anything that steps onto it into more of its mass...
Sounds like some kind of devouring planet from a book that I read a long time ago...
So here's the plan. We somehow manufacture a large amount of antimatter. We don't need the entire earth's mass of antimatter. Rather, we just need a small fraction. Enough so that annihilation with the earth's mass would produce a blast about 5000 times stronger(just an estimate) than all the bombs that ever existed on earth. Given that antimatter annihilation is something like the most efficient conversion of matter into energy known to man, the actual number would be tiny in comparison to the mass of the earth.
But would still take an ass-long time to create, and it would be a real hassle to keep all your antimatter floating in a massive cannister, never touching the air, the floor, or anything that isn't antimatter, for that matter. Pun intended.
Also, there would be the trouble, as always, of watching the earth turn into our solar system's second asteroid belt. Generally you die when your planet blows up.
The reason why that's funny lies in the wording. Of hitting something.
-Joe