Could we destroy ALL life on Earth if we wanted?

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@slaphead

I think humanity would struggle even to eliminate all life from e.g. the island of Manhattan, never mind the whole planet. Trying to set up and maintain a completely sterile environment even in a purpose-designed building is pretty challenging. In the open it would be horribly difficult. Even without taking microbes into consideration, imagine trying to eliminate cockroaches, ants and flies on a planetary basis. Not easy.

Again, this is why I’m thinking of an environmental, not a chemical, change. I can easily kill any cockroaches in my oven just by turning it on.

The layer of livable temperature in the atmosphere is a good point. Maybe we can combine three different methods? Temperature via greenhouse-effect-run-amok, chemical via mass-production of some broad-spectrum biocide, and how about robotic, if we can design some self-replicating nanite that devotes all energy to reproduction and uses carbon as a base building block? As long as the nanite isn’t defined as alive, that triple threat might do it.

[joemama24_98]

@Ranchoth

Do we want to use actual poisons into the oceans to kill the plankton, or should we go with biological agents (granted, I don’t think anything’s been specifically designed for ocean-area denial), or radiological warfare? Nuking the oceans might be less efficient than building new reactors dedicated solely to contaminating them.

Still, good luck killing every last damn microbe on the planet, though. Realistically, the asteroid route’s probably the best way to go—and no screwing around with it, either. The last extinction event caused by an asteroid impact didn’t finish the job, after all.

I’ve read if you really deplete the ozone than the sun will do it for you - the plankton is pretty much the foundation of the food chain, and if it goes just *about *everything else does, too. But everything - mostly your more complex organisms. Microbes and the lot will still survive, especially those below the surface.

I suppose the only way to do this is to move the earth off axis, or some how pop it out of orbit. Not sure if/how we could do either.

[Sunspace]

@Der_Trihs

How to Destroy The Earth; so you don’t need to search for them !

That site says that the earth has already been destroyed. Did I miss something?

[Superfluous_Parentheses]

@Sunspace

That site says that the earth has already been destroyed. Did I miss something?

yes

[Skald_the_Rhymer]

Yep. It’s official, folks. Between this thread and this one, I appear to have budded.

[Der_Trihs]

@Sunspace

That site says that the earth has already been destroyed. Did I miss something?

What Superfluous Parentheses links to is a joke they put in referring to the panic by certain people over the LHC. I didn’t realize they’d left in in, actually.