“8 Billion Names of God” by Arthur C. Clarke if memory serves…
In the story, it works. Stupid computer programmers, ya make
me look bad.:smack:
Let’s take off the budget constraints. For instance, a new political party takes power in the US and decides to destroy the universe. Could this group using all resources of the US government destroy the universe? How about just the earth? And by destroying the Earth, I don’t mean just launching nuclear weapons and killing almost everyone, I mean true destruction.
Bad news. Avis doesn’t rent F-250’s, I just checked their website. The Suburban can be had for an unknown amount, they seem to be either N/A or sold out at the locations I checked. The Mad scientist may look pretty silly towing a singularity behind a family sedan. Think of what all the other Mad Scientists would say? Solution? Test drive an F-250 from your local dealership, then suck up the dealership first so they can’t report it missing (the truck, not the dealership). If a salesperson insists on riding along, make sure you select the hottest babe you can find, so you, for the sake of science, can also test out the “last man on Earth” theory.
Hmm… Would you be satisfied with just changing the laws of physics of the entire Universe in unpredictable ways? There’d still (presumably) be something left over, but it wouldn’t be what we’ve got now.
If so, I’d say that your best bet is a thunderbolt hole. The two main problems with this is that A, we don’t know if such things are possible, and B, even if they are, we don’t know how to make them for 83 bucks.
The basic idea is this: We know that black holes evaporate, and shrink at an ever-increasing rate. We don’t know where this process ends. The three prevalent schools of thought are
A: It just disappears. Boring.
B: Once it gets small enough, it becomes stable, and you’re left with a sub-sub-submicroscopic black hole that doesn’t really do much of anything
C: It leaves behind a naked singularity
It’s this last possibility that interests us here. You see, as the Universe “sees” a naked singularity, it’s presumed that it goes through a sort of state change, doing unpredictable things to all the laws of nature. This would result in a spherical region of effective destruction, expanding outwards from the hole at the speed of light, what Hawking referred to as a thunderbolt effect. And although there are distant regions of the Universe receding from us at greater than c, it’s still impossible to escape something moving at the speed of light, because as it reaches more distant regions expanding away at high speeds, it’s still travelling at c in those regions. So, any given point in the Universe will eventually be confronted by this singularity front.
The only way I can think of currently would be to take all the nukes we have and bury them in deep holes (say 2-3 miles down) evenly spaced about the earth. Once done detonate all the nukes simultaneously. I’m guessing we don’t have enough nukes currently so we may need to make more for this. Still, it should be possible to put enough of these in holes that if they all went FOOM at the same time you just might destroy the earth (consider what happens when the shockwave from all these explosions simultaneously arrive at the earth’s core…I don’t know what would happen but I would suppose it should be something spectacular).
Would the earth break apart? I doubt it. Even if it did crack all the way through it’d probably mostly hold together in its orbit but you can be certain it would mean something pretty awful for life on earth.
We can make antimatter today. In fact, they have some sitting in a magentic bottle at Fermilab outside of Chicago. All you need is an atom smasher but unfortunately I think they run a bit more than $83. They just haven’t gotten an economy of scale working to reduce costs for those things yet.
Also, although they have some antimatter, they don’t have very much. Last I heard if we increased worldwide production of antimatter a thousandfold over today’s production it’d take something on the order of 1,000 years to produce enough antimatter to lift the space shuttle into orbit (1 ounce IIRC).
I asked in another thread recently how big of a BOOM I’d make if I met an equivalent amount of antimatter. I got two definitive answers that disagreed (by an order of magnitude) but came down in the 1,000 megaton and 10,000 megaton range (75Kg of matter and 75Kg of antimatter). Both are quite large explosions but neither is sufficient to totally destroy the earth. However, you might use this as a yardstick fro the amount of antimatter you’d need to collect once you figure out how big of a boom you’ll need.
But we already have the Republican Party! rimshot 
Nice post from Beeblebrox, but I think he glosses over the problem of how to keep the F-250 from being sucked into the singularity it’s towing.
Hmmmmm, maybe an F-350 would work. I do believe that at the minimum, the truck would have to be supercharged. Maybe you could tie a large stick horizontially across the bumper, that should stop the truck from being dragged in.
Actually, “The Nine Billion Names of God.”
Picky, I know, but that’s me.
You just have to say the Universe’s name 3 times to destroy it:
“Universe,”
“Universe,”
“Universe!”
Forget the CD’s, there are probably enough “infinitely dense” AOL users already. Saves you all the hassle of that rigorous exercise program. Better yet, compress these users into their own singularity, it’s like getting two infinite densities for the price of one.
The universe itself? Not likely. it’s too big, and we don’t have the technology…yet. (I’ll get to work on it. Give me a couple of weeks)
As for the Earth…Perhaps with the resources of the government, we could send out some spacecraft to install engines on a few asteroids (“NERVA” or “Orion” nuclear engines, I’d guess. Chemical Rockets wouldn’t have enough “bang”) and send them hurtling into the Earth at high rates of speed. We wouldn’t be able to move a single asteroid that’s the size of the moon…but we might be able to move a whole bunch of asteroids the size of skyscrapers. With enough time and effort, of course.
Ranchoth
(“Our people worked ourselves to death transforming Mars into a gigantic space vehicle.” “Why?” “Because it was cool!”)
HERE’S SOMETHING ORIGINAL! Why not use the cash to bribe China’s government to instruct all the Chinese to jump at once, thus knocking the earth out of its orbit? Ah, but of course, you folks are veterans of Cecil’s columns; more importantly, your IQs are probably higher than those of toadstools. You know this could NOT happen.
Let me tell you a story. My geography teacher, whom we’ll call Mrs. D, has a reputation for being about as bright as a wet match in Mammoth Cave. One day a few months ago, she mentioned in passing that we as a nation “needed to be afraid of the Chinese,” because if they all jumped at once, the earth would “fall over.” Yes. Not spiral into the sun, not fly out into space, but fall over. As though on a table. And she was quite serious, and informed her class of this terrifying fact with the utmost gravity. Having read the Straight Dope column on the matter, I raised my hand and very politely explained Mrs. D’s error. Did she gracefully accept my logic-based and scientifically correct answer? No. She took me out of the room and reprimanded me most harshly for correcting her in class, and proceeded to continue telling each successive class that day that if everyone in China jumped, armageddon would result.
So the next day, I bounced into her class with a neatly printed copy of Cecil’s column in my hand, anxious to show her that (A) I had my sources, and was not trying to imply that she was an idiot, and (B) she was an idiot.
She refused to read it.
I got three days detention.
And people look at me like I’m CRAZY when I say that blatant ignorance should be punishable by death.
[annoyed mom] You know BZ00000, it never ceases to amaze me how much time and energy you’ll waste trying to avoid the consequences of your procrastinatin’ ways. You had plenty of time to finish that project, and you just frittered it all away, lollygagging around with those worthless mad-scientist so-called “friends” of yours, and now look at the fix you’re in. [/anoyed mom]
Well, assuming you can get a 5% growth rate if you deposit the money in a bank, and assuming a penny weights about a gram or so, by my calculations, it should be about 4000 years or so until you have more money than the wieght of the universe (which is 10^82 kg BTW). Then, you could just go to your nearest bank and ask for your account in pennies and then invest all the money in a dotcom startup and watch all the money “disappear”. All gone, then entire universe.
The entire universe is everything you see, everything you hear, everything you sense. Nothing exists if you aren’t there to witness it; stop sensing and the universe ends.
Invest your $83 at the local drugstore. Save a few bucks for a chaser at the liquor store and you’re good to go.
Destroying the Earth with nukes? Asteroids? Pish-posh. Those solutions would certainly make the surface completely uninhabitable, but you’re going to need a lot MORE energy accelerating all the mass of the planet to escape velocity.
Dude, the bullshit in this post is, like, so fucking ZEN , man!
That number seems low to me. I thought there were approximately 10[sup]82[/sup] or so particles in the entire universe. Given that it takes a helluva lotta particles to make a kilogram I would think the universe was heavier than this.
Have you been misreading your Handbook for the Recently Deceased again?
I would to take this opportunity to announce the creation of a new political party: The People’s Federalist Party of Ultimate Destruction.
Our founding principle is to destroy the Earth by 2020 and the universe by 2050.
Here is what the party needs:
Volunteers (I only have $83)
Dedicated Candidates (Not someone who will sellout to corporate interests)
A really powerful weapon
A really really powerful weapon
A Website