Massive particle collider passes first key

tests
GENEVA – The world's largest particle collider passed its first major tests by firing two
beams of protons in opposite directions around a 17-mile (27-kilometer) underground
ring Wednesday in what scientists hope is the next great step to understanding the
makeup of the universe.

After a series of trial runs, two white dots flashed on a computer screen at 10:26 a.m.
(0826 GMT) indicating that the protons had traveled clockwise along the full length of
the 4 billion Swiss franc (US$3.8 billion) Large Hadron Collider — described as the
biggest physics experiment in history.

"There it is," project leader Lyn Evans said when the beam completed its lap.

Champagne corks popped in labs as far away as Chicago, where contributing and
competing scientists watched the proceedings by satellite.

Five hours later, scientists successfully fired a beam counterclockwise.

Physicists around the world now have much greater power to smash the components of
atoms together in attempts to learn about their structure.

"Well done, everybody," said Robert Aymar, director-general of the European

Organization for Nuclear Research, to cheers from the assembled scientists in the
collider's control room at the Swiss-French border.

The organization, known by its French acronym CERN, began firing the protons — a
type of subatomic particle — around the tunnel in stages less than an hour earlier, with
the first beam injection at 9:35 a.m. (0735 GMT).

Eventually two beams will be fired at the same time in opposite directions with the aim of
recreating conditions a split second after the big bang, which scientists theorize was the
massive explosion that created the universe.

"My first thought was relief," said Evans, who has been working on the project since its
inception in 1984. "This is a machine of enormous complexity. Things can go wrong at
any time. But this morning has been a great start."

He didn't want to set a date, but said that he expected scientists would be able to conduct
collisions for their experiments "within a few months."

The collider is designed to push the proton beam close to the speed of light, whizzing
11,000 times a second around the tunnel.
Scientists hope to eventually send two beams of protons through two tubes about the
width of fire hoses, speeding through a vacuum that is colder and emptier than outer
space. The paths of these beams will cross, and a few protons will collide. The collider's
two largest detectors — essentially huge digital cameras weighing thousands of tons —
are capable of taking millions of snapshots a second.

The CERN experiments could reveal more about "dark matter," antimatter and possibly
hidden dimensions of space and time. It could also find evidence of the hypothetical
particle — the Higgs boson — which is sometimes called the "God particle" because it is
believed to give mass to all other particles, and thus to matter that makes up the universe.

The supercooled magnets that guide the proton beam heated slightly in the morning's first
test, leading to a pause to recool them before trying the opposite direction.

The start of the collider came over the objections of some who feared the collision of
protons could eventually imperil the Earth by creating micro-black holes, subatomic
versions of collapsed stars whose gravity is so strong they can suck in planets and other
stars.

"It's nonsense," said James Gillies, chief spokesman for CERN.

CERN was backed by leading scientists like Britain's Stephen Hawking , who declared
the experiments to be absolutely safe.

Gillies told the AP that the most dangerous thing that could happen would be if a beam at
full power were to go out of control, and that would only damage the accelerator itself
and burrow into the rock around the tunnel.

Nothing of the sort occurred Wednesday, though the accelerator is still probably a year
away from full power.

The project organized by the 20 European member nations of CERN has attracted
researchers from 80 nations. Some 1,200 are from the United States, an observer country
that contributed US$531 million. Japan, another observer, also is a major contributor.

Some scientists have been waiting for 20 years to use the LHC.

The complexity of manufacturing it required groundbreaking advances in the use of

supercooled, superconducting equipment. The 2001 start and 2005 completion dates were
pushed back by two years each, and the cost of the construction was 25 percent higher
than originally budgeted in 1996, Luciano Maiani, who was CERN director-general at the
time, told The Associated Press.

Maiani and the other three living former directors-general attended the launch
Wednesday.
Smaller colliders have been used for decades to study the makeup of the atom. Less than
100 years ago scientists thought protons and neutrons were the smallest components of an
atom's nucleus, but in stages since then experiments have shown they were made of still
smaller quarks and gluons and that there were other forces and particles.

Will the Large Hadron Collider Destroy

Earth?
The potential for the world's largest atom smasher to destroy Earth is one question
weighing on the minds of some lay people as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) prepares
to go online Wednesday.

Don't worry, say the experts, who are more concerned with whether the 17 mile-long
particle accelerator underground at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear
Research near Geneva, Switzerland, will work as planned and, perhaps, reveal the
existence of the so-called God particle.

All that in mind, here are answers to several questions buzzing around on the eve of the
LHC's inaugural run:

So, will a black hole consume the planet?

Some people have suggested that a microscopic black hole, spawned by the powerful
crash of subatomic particles racing through the LHC's tunnels, could potentially suck up
the Earth.

But physicists say these fears are unfounded. For one, creating a black hole at LHC is
extremely unlikely based on the laws of gravity alone, CERN officials say. But even if it
did happen, as a few highly speculative theories suggest, the miniscule black hole would
be so unstable it would disintegrate immediately before it had time to gobble up any of
the matter on Earth.

Will a 'strangelet' destroy us?

Another wild idea: The LHC might produce something called a strangelet that could
convert our planet into a lump of dead "strange matter."

This hypothesis is equally unlikely, experts say, because the same worries were raised
eight years ago before the opening of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a
particle accelerator at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. Since RHIC
has been operating safely for years, and it's set-up made it even more likely to produce
strangelets if such creation were possible, then the LHC poses little risk of converting us
into strangelings.
Although worrywarts have gone so far as to file suit in Federal District Court in Hawaii
and in the European Court of Human Rights to stop the LHC (as they also did before
RHIC), the project will go ahead as planned.

"The LHC will enable us to study in detail what nature is doing all around us," said
CERN Director General Robert Aymar. "The LHC is safe, and any suggestion that it
might present a risk is pure fiction."

Just how big is this thing?

The LHC is an underground ring about 17 miles (27 kilometers) long, running through
parts of both Switzerland and France. Inside are 9,300 magnets guiding two beams of
particles around the circle in opposite directions until they smash into each other,
spewing out loads of energy and hopefully some new and exciting particles.

How fast will the particles go?

The speeding particles will travel the full LHC ring 11,245 times a second, travelling at
99.99 percent the speed of light. At this rate, some 600 million collisions will take place
every second.

Don't we already have a bunch of atom smashers? What's so special about this one?

The LHC will be the mother of all atom smashers: the largest, the most powerful, with
the biggest and most sophisticated detectors ever built. Although there are a number of
particle accelerators around the world, each was built for a unique purpose. Scientists are
hoping the LHC will be able to answer some of our most puzzling outstanding questions
about the nature of the universe, including how stuff gets mass, what makes up dark
matter, and why the universe is made up of matter and not anti-matter.

How much does it cost?

The facility cost $8 billion, $531 million of which was contributed by the United States.
More than 8,000 scientists from almost 60 countries will collaborate on LHC
experiments.

How long have they been working on this?

The green light for the project was given 14 years ago, though some physicists have been
planning the LHC since the 1980s.

Why does it have to be underground?

The planet shields the accelerator from radiation that could interfere with the
experiments. Not to mention buying that much land aboveground would have been really
expensive!
By the way, what's a hadron?

Hadrons are particles made up of bound quarks. A quark is a building block of larger
particles such as protons and neutrons. The LHC will manipulate two kinds of hadrons -
either protons or lead ions - because a) they are charged (this allows them to be
accelerated by the electromagnetic forces created in the machine) and b) they do not
decay and are heavy so they will not lose too much energy as they are accelerated along
the ring.

And what's a 'God particle'?

The God particle is the nickname given to the theoretical Higgs boson, a particle thought
to explain why some things are more massive than others. The Higgs is one of the holy
grails of physics, though its existence has yet to be proven.

Will the LHC find the God particle?

While many are hoping that Higgs bosons will pop out of the powerful collisions created
by the LHC, the famous British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking is betting it won't. He's
wagered $100 (70 euros) that LHC won't produce the elusive God particle and physicists
will have to go back to the drawing board.

"I think it will be much more exciting if we don't find the Higgs," Hawking told BBC
radio. "That will show something is wrong, and we need to think again."

Scientists: Nothing to Fear From Atom-

smasher
MEYRIN, Switzerland (AP) - The most powerful atom-smasher ever built could make
some bizarre discoveries, such as invisible matter or extra dimensions in space, after it is
switched on in August.

But some critics fear the Large Hadron Collider could exceed physicists' wildest
conjectures: Will it spawn a black hole that could swallow Earth? Or spit out particles
that could turn the planet into a hot dead clump?

Ridiculous, say scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by
its French initials CERN — some of whom have been working for a generation on the
$5.8 billion collider, or LHC.

"Obviously, the world will not end when the LHC switches on," said project leader Lyn
Evans.

David Francis, a physicist on the collider's huge ATLAS particle detector, smiled when
asked whether he worried about black holes and hypothetical killer particles known as
strangelets.

"If I thought that this was going to happen, I would be well away from here," he said.

The collider basically consists of a ring of supercooled magnets 17 miles in

circumference attached to huge barrel-shaped detectors. The ring, which straddles the
French and Swiss border, is buried 330 feet underground.

The machine, which has been called the largest scientific experiment in history, isn't
expected to begin test runs until August, and ramping up to full power could take months.
But once it is working, it is expected to produce some startling findings.

Scientists plan to hunt for signs of the invisible "dark matter" and "dark energy" that
make up more than 96 percent of the universe, and hope to glimpse the elusive Higgs
boson, a so-far undiscovered particle thought to give matter its mass.

The collider could find evidence of extra dimensions, a boon for superstring theory,
which holds that quarks, the particles that make up atoms, are infinitesimal vibrating
strings.

The theory could resolve many of physics' unanswered questions, but requires about 10
dimensions — far more than the three spatial dimensions our senses experience.

The safety of the collider, which will generate energies seven times higher than its most
powerful rival, at Fermilab near Chicago, has been debated for years. The physicist
Martin Rees has estimated the chance of an accelerator producing a global catastrophe at
one in 50 million — long odds, to be sure, but about the same as winning some lotteries.

By contrast, a CERN team this month issued a report concluding that there is "no
conceivable danger" of a cataclysmic event. The report essentially confirmed the findings
of a 2003 CERN safety report, and a panel of five prominent scientists not affiliated with
CERN, including one Nobel laureate, endorsed its conclusions.

Critics of the LHC filed a lawsuit in a Hawaiian court in March seeking to block its
startup, alleging that there was "a significant risk that ... operation of the Collider may
have unintended consequences which could ultimately result in the destruction of our
planet."

One of the plaintiffs, Walter L. Wagner, a physicist and lawyer, said Wednesday CERN's
safety report, released June 20, "has several major flaws," and his views on the risks of
using the particle accelerator had not changed.

On Tuesday, U.S. Justice Department lawyers representing the Department of Energy and
the National Science Foundation filed a motion to dismiss the case.
The two agencies have contributed $531 million to building the collider, and the NSF has
agreed to pay $87 million of its annual operating costs. Hundreds of American scientists
will participate in the research.

The lawyers called the plaintiffs' allegations "extraordinarily speculative," and said "there
is no basis for any conceivable threat" from black holes or other objects the LHC might
produce. A hearing on the motion is expected in late July or August.

In rebutting doomsday scenarios, CERN scientists point out that cosmic rays have been
bombarding the earth, and triggering collisions similar to those planned for the collider,
since the solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago.

And so far, Earth has survived.

"The LHC is only going to reproduce what nature does every second, what it has been
doing for billions of years," said John Ellis, a British theoretical physicist at CERN.

Critics like Wagner have said the collisions caused by accelerators could be more
hazardous than those of cosmic rays.

Both may produce micro black holes, subatomic versions of cosmic black holes —
collapsed stars whose gravity fields are so powerful that they can suck in planets and
other stars.

But micro black holes produced by cosmic ray collisions would likely be traveling so fast
they would pass harmlessly through the earth.

Micro black holes produced by a collider, the skeptics theorize, would move more slowly
and might be trapped inside the earth's gravitational field — and eventually threaten the
planet.

Ellis said doomsayers assume that the collider will create micro black holes in the first
place, which he called unlikely. And even if they appeared, he said, they would instantly
evaporate, as predicted by the British physicist Stephen Hawking.

As for strangelets, CERN scientists point out that they have never been proven to exist.
They said that even if these particles formed inside the Collider they would quickly break
down.

When the LHC is finally at full power, two beams of protons will race around the huge
ring 11,000 times a second in opposite directions. They will travel in two tubes about the
width of fire hoses, speeding through a vacuum that is colder and emptier than outer
space.

Their trajectory will be curved by supercooled magnets — to guide the beams around the
rings and prevent the packets of protons from cutting through the surrounding magnets
like a blowtorch.

The paths of these beams will cross, and a few of the protons in them will collide, at a
series of cylindrical detectors along the ring. The two largest detectors are essentially
huge digital cameras, each weighing thousands of tons, capable of taking millions of
snapshots a second.

Each year the detectors will generate 15 petabytes of data, the equivalent of a stack of
CDs 12 miles tall. The data will require a high speed global network of computers for
analysis.

Wagner and others filed a lawsuit to halt operation of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider,
or RHIC, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York state in 1999. The courts
dismissed the suit.

The leafy campus of CERN, a short drive from the shores of Lake Geneva, hardly seems
like ground zero for doomsday. And locals don't seem overly concerned. Thousands
attended an open house here this spring.

"There is a huge army of scientists who know what they are talking about and are
sleeping quite soundly as far as concerns the LHC," said project leader Evans.

Despite Rumors, Black Hole Factory Will

Not Destroy Earth
Scientists could generate a black hole as often as every second when the world's most
powerful particle accelerator comes online in 2007.

This potential "black hole factory" has raised fears that a stray black hole could devour
our planet whole. The Lifeboat Foundation, a nonprofit organization devoted to
safeguarding humanity from what it considers threats to our existence, has stated that
artificial black holes could "threaten all life on Earth" and so it proposes to set up "self-
sustaining colonies elsewhere."

But the chance of planetary annihilation by this means "is totally miniscule,"
experimental physicist Greg Landsberg at Brown University in Providence, R.I., told
LiveScience.

Black holes possible

The accelerator, known as the Large Hadron Collider, is under construction in an

underground circular tunnel nearly 17 miles long at the world's largest physics laboratory,
CERN, near Geneva.
At its maximum, each particle beam the
collider fires will pack as much energy as a
400-ton train traveling at 120 mph. By
smashing particles together and investigating
the debris, scientists hope to help solve Black holes are among a handful of
mysteries such as the origin of mass and why threats to the planet. But Earth is more
there is more matter than antimatter in the resilient than you might think. >>>
universe.

If theories about the universe containing extra dimensions other than those of space and
time are correct, the accelerator might also generate black holes, Landsberg and his
colleague Savas Dimopoulos at Stanford University in California calculated in 2001.
Physicists Steve Giddings at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Scott
Thomas at Stanford University in California reached similar conclusions.

Black holes possess gravitational fields so strong that nothing can escape them, not even
light. They normally form when the remains of a dead star collapse under their own
gravity, squeezing their mass together. Although black holes can't be seen, astronomers
infer their existence by the gravitational effects they have on gas and stars around them.

Making black holes

A number of models of the universe suggest extra dimensions of reality exist that are
each folded up into sizes ranging from as tiny as a proton, or roughly a millionth of a
billionth of a meter, to as big as a fraction of a millimeter. At distances comparable to the
size of these extra dimensions, gravity becomes far stronger, these models suggest. If this
is true, the collider will cram enough energy together to initiate gravitational collapses
that produce black holes.

If any of the models are right, the accelerator should create a black hole anywhere from
every second to every day, each roughly possessing 5,000 times the mass of a proton and
each a thousandth of a proton in size or smaller, Landsberg said.

Still, any fears that such black holes will consume the Earth are groundless, Landsberg
said.

For one thing, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking calculated all black holes should
emit radiation, and that tiny black holes should lose more mass than they absorb,
evaporating within a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, "before they could
gobble up any significant amount of matter," Landsberg said.

Not destroyed yet

CERN spokesman and former research physicist James Gillies also pointed out that Earth
is bathed with cosmic rays powerful enough to create black holes all the time, and the
planet hasn't been destroyed yet.
"Still, let's assume that even if Hawking is a genius, he's wrong, and that such black holes
are more stable," Landsberg said. Nearly all of the black holes will be traveling fast
enough from the accelerator to escape Earth's gravity. "Even if you produced 10 million
black holes a year, only 10 would basically get trapped, orbiting around its center,"
Landsberg said.

However, such trapped black holes are so tiny, they could pass through a block of iron
the distance from the Earth to the Moon and not hit anything. They would each take
about 100 hours to gobble up one proton.

At that rate, even if one did not take into account the fact that each black hole would slow
down every time it gobbled up a proton, and thus suck down matter at an even slower
rate, "about 100 protons would be destroyed every year by such a black hole, so it would
take much more than the age of universe to destroy even one milligram of Earth
material," Landsberg concluded. "It's quite hard to destroy the Earth."

If the Large Hadron Collider does create black holes, not only will it prove that extra
dimensions of the universe exist, but the radiation that decaying black holes emit could
yield clues that help finally unite all the current ideas about the forces of nature under a
"theory of everything."

Top 10 Ways to Destroy Earth

Total existence failure

You will need: nothing

Method: No method. Simply sit back and twiddle your thumbs as, completely by chance,
all 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms
making up the planet Earth suddenly, simultaneously and spontaneously cease to exist.
Note: the odds against this actually ever occurring are considerably greater than a
googolplex to one. Failing this, some kind of arcane (read: scientifically laughable)
probability-manipulation device may be employed.

Utter, utter rubbish.

Gobbled up by strangelets

You will need: a stable strangelet

Method: Hijack control of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Brookhaven National
Laboratory, Long Island, New York. Use the RHIC to create and maintain a stable
strangelet. Keep it stable for as long as it takes to absorb the entire Earth into a mass of
strange quarks. Keeping the strangelet stable is incredibly difficult once it has absorbed
the stabilizing machinery, but creative solutions may be possible.

A while back, there was some media hoo-hah about the possibility of this actually
happening at the RHIC, but in actuality the chances of a stable strangelet forming are
pretty much zero.

Earth's final resting place: a huge glob of strange matter.

Sucked into a microscopic black hole

You will need: a microscopic black hole. Note that black holes are not eternal, they
evaporate due to Hawking radiation. For your average black hole this takes an
unimaginable amount of time, but for really small ones it could happen almost
instantaneously, as evaporation time is dependent on mass. Therefore you microscopic
black hole must have greater than a certain threshold mass, roughly equal to the mass of
Mount Everest. Creating a microscopic black hole is tricky, since one needs a reasonable
amount of neutronium, but may possibly be achievable by jamming large numbers of
atomic nuclei together until they stick. This is left as an exercise to the reader.

Method: simply place your black hole on the surface of the Earth and wait. Black holes
are of such high density that they pass through ordinary matter like a stone through the
air. The black hole will plummet through the ground, eating its way to the center of the
Earth and all the way through to the other side: then, it'll oscillate back, over and over
like a matter-absorbing pendulum. Eventually it will come to rest at the core, having
absorbed enough matter to slow it down. Then you just need to wait, while it sits and
consumes matter until the whole Earth is gone.

Highly, highly unlikely. But not impossible.

Earth's final resting place: a singularity of almost zero size, which will then proceed to
happily orbit the Sun as normal.

Source: "The Dark Side Of The Sun," by Terry Pratchett. It is true that the microscopic
black hole idea is an age-old science fiction mainstay which predates Pratchett by a long
time, he was my original source for the idea, so that's what I'm putting.

Blown up by matter/antimatter reaction

You will need: 2,500,000,000,000 tons of antimatter

Antimatter - the most explosive substance possible - can be manufactured in small

quantities using any large particle accelerator, but this will take some considerable time
to produce the required amounts. If you can create the appropriate machinery, it may be
possible - and much easier - simply to "flip" 2.5 trillion tons of matter through a fourth
dimension, turning it all to antimatter at once.

Method: This method involves detonating a bomb so big that it blasts the Earth to pieces.

How hard is that?

The gravitational binding energy of a planet of mass M and radius R is - if you do the
lengthy calculations - given by the formula E=(3/5)GM^2/R. For Earth, that works out to
roughly 224,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Joules. The Sun takes nearly a
WEEK to output that much energy. Think about THAT.

To liberate that much energy requires the complete annihilation of around

2,500,000,000,000 tonnes of antimatter. That's assuming zero energy loss to heat and
radiation, which is unlikely to be the case in reality: You'll probably need to up the dose
by at least a factor of ten. Once you've generated your antimatter, probably in space, just
launch it en masse towards Earth. The resulting release of energy (obeying Einstein's
famous mass-energy equation, E=mc^2) should be sufficient to split the Earth into a
thousand pieces.

Earth's final resting place: A second asteroid belt around the Sun.

Earliest feasible completion date: AD 2500. Of course, if it does prove possible to

manufacture antimatter in the sufficiently large quantities you require - which is not
necessarily the case - then smaller antimatter bombs will be around long before then.

Destroyed by vacuum energy detonation

You will need: a light bulb

Method: This is a fun one. Contemporary scientific theories tell us that what we may see
as vacuum is only vacuum on average, and actually thriving with vast amounts of
particles and antiparticles constantly appearing and then annihilating each other. It also
suggests that the volume of space enclosed by a light bulb contains enough vacuum
energy to boil every ocean in the world. Therefore, vacuum energy could prove to be the
most abundant energy source of any kind. Which is where you come in. All you need to
do is figure out how to extract this energy and harness it in some kind of power plant -
this can easily be done without arousing too much suspicion - then surreptitiously allow
the reaction to run out of control. The resulting release of energy would easily be enough
to annihilate all of planet Earth and probably the Sun too.

Slightly possible.

Earth's final resting place: a rapidly expanding cloud of particles of varying size.
Earliest feasible completion date: 2060 or so.

Source: "3001: The Final Odyssey," by Arthur C. Clarke

Sucked into a giant black hole

You will need: a black hole, extremely powerful rocket engines, and, optionally, a large
rocky planetary body. The nearest black hole to our planet is 1600 light years from Earth
in the direction of Sagittarius, orbiting V4641.

Method: after locating your black hole, you need get it and the Earth together. This is
likely to be the most time-consuming part of this plan. There are two methods, moving
Earth or moving the black hole, though for best results you'd most likely move both at
once.

Very difficult, but definitely possible.

Earth's final resting place: part of the mass of the black hole.

Earliest feasible completion date: I do not expect the necessary technology to be

available until AD 3000, and add at least 800 years for travel time. (That's in an external
observer's frame of reference and assuming you move both the Earth and the black hole
at the same time.)

Sources: "The Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy," by Douglas Adams; SPACE.com

Meticulously and systematically deconstructed

You will need: a powerful mass driver, or ideally lots of them; ready access to roughly
2*10^32J

Method: Basically, what we're going to do here is dig up the Earth, a big chunk at a time,
and boost the whole lot of it into orbit. Yes. All six sextillion tons of it. A mass driver is a
sort of oversized electromagnetic railgun, which was once proposed as a way of getting
mined materials back from the Moon to Earth - basically, you just load it into the driver
and fire it upwards in roughly the right direction. We'd use a particularly powerful model
- big enough to hit escape velocity of 11 kilometers per second even after atmospheric
considerations - and launch it all into the Sun or randomly into space.

Alternate methods for boosting the material into space include loading the extracted
material into space shuttles or taking it up via space elevator. All these methods,
however, require a - let me emphasize this - titanic quantity of energy to carry out.
Building a Dyson sphere ain't gonna cut it here. (Note: Actually, it would. But if you
have the technology to build a Dyson sphere, why are you reading this?) See No. 6 for a
possible solution.
If we wanted to and were willing to devote resources to it, we could start this process
RIGHT NOW. Indeed, what with all the gunk left in orbit, on the Moon and heading out
into space, we already have done.

Earth's final resting place: Many tiny pieces, some dropped into the Sun, the remainder
scattered across the rest of the Solar System.

Earliest feasible completion date: Ah. Yes. At a billion tons of mass driven out of the
Earth's gravity well per second: 189,000,000 years.

Source: this method arose when Joe Baldwin and I knocked our heads together by
accident.

Pulverized by impact with blunt instrument

You will need: a big heavy rock, something with a bit of a swing to it... perhaps Mars

Method: Essentially, anything can be destroyed if you hit it hard enough. ANYTHING.
The concept is simple: find a really, really big asteroid or planet, accelerate it up to some
dazzling speed, and smash it into Earth, preferably head-on but whatever you can
manage. The result: an absolutely spectacular collision, resulting hopefully in Earth (and,
most likely, our "cue ball" too) being pulverized out of existence - smashed into any
number of large pieces which if the collision is hard enough should have enough energy
to overcome their mutual gravity and drift away forever, never to coagulate back into a
planet again.

A brief analysis of the size of the object required can be found here. Falling at the
minimal impact velocity of 11 kilometers per second and assuming zero energy loss to
heat and other energy forms, the cue ball would have to have roughly 60% of the mass of
the Earth. Mars, the next planet out, "weighs" in at about 11% of Earth's mass, while
Venus, the next planet in and also the nearest to Earth, has about 81%. Assuming that we
would fire our cue ball into Earth at much greater than 11km/s (I'm thinking more like
50km/s), either of these would make great possibilities.

Obviously a smaller rock would do the job, you just need to fire it faster. A
10,000,000,000,000-tonne asteroid at 90% of light speed would do just as well. See the
Guide to moving Earth for useful information on maneuvering big hunks of rock across
interplanetary distances.

Pretty plausible.

Earth's final resting place: a variety of roughly Moon-sized chunks of rock, scattered
haphazardly across the greater Solar System.

Earliest feasible completion date: AD 2500, maybe?

Source: This method suggested by Andy Kirkpatrick

Eaten by von Neumann machines

You will need: a single von Neumann machine

Method: A von Neumann machine is any device that is capable of creating an exact copy
of itself given nothing but the necessary raw materials. Create one of these that subsists
almost entirely on iron, magnesium, aluminum and silicon, the major elements found in
Earth's mantle and core. It doesn't matter how big it is as long as it can reproduce itself
exactly in any period of time. Release it into the ground under the Earth's crust and allow
it to fend for itself. Watch and wait as it creates a second von Neumann machine, then
they create two more, then they create four more. As the population of machines doubles
repeatedly, the planet Earth will, terrifyingly soon, be entirely eaten up and turned into a
swarm of potentially sextillions of machines. Technically your objective would now be
complete - no more Earth - but if you want to be thorough then you can command your
VNMs to hurl themselves, along with any remaining trace elements, into the Sun. This
hurling would have to be achieved using rocket propulsion of some sort, so be sure to
include this in your design.

So crazy it might just work.

Earth's final resting place: the bodies of the VNMs themselves, then a small lump of
iron sinking into the Sun.

Earliest feasible completion date: Potentially 2045-2050, or even earlier.

Source: "2010: Odyssey Two," by Arthur C. Clarke

Hurled into the Sun

You will need: Earthmoving equipment

Method: Hurl the Earth into the Sun. Sending Earth on a collision course with the Sun is
not as easy as one might think; even though you don't actually have to literally hit the Sun
(send the Earth near enough to the Sun (within the Roche limit), and tidal forces will tear
it apart), it's surprisingly easy to end up with Earth in a loopy elliptical orbit which
merely roasts it for four months in every eight. But careful planning can avoid this.

This is impossible at our current technological level, but will be possible one day, I'm
certain. In the meantime, may happen by freak accident if something comes out of
nowhere and randomly knocks Earth in precisely the right direction. Earth's final resting
place: a small globule of vaporized iron sinking slowly into the heart of the Sun.
Earliest feasible completion date: Via act of God: 25 years' time. Any earlier and we'd
have already spotted the asteroid in question. Via human intervention: given the current
level of expansion of space technology, 2250 at best.

Source: "Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers," by Grant Naylor