End of the Earth VI: Nanobot destruction

Let's destroy the earth with technology.

A while ago, I read the novel Postsingular by Rudy Rucker, and in the first chapter the Earth gets destroyed, and then undestroyed, and then the novel unfolds and the Earth's likelihood is threatened again, and it looks like the Earth will be destroyed, but it isn't.

How does all of this craziness happen you might ask: nanobots! The story revolves around little self-replicating robots. The story explores what it would be like to live in a world where every surface on Earth was coated in little computers, all of which were networked together. It's certainly a neat idea, but whenever you have self-replicating things, you need to worry a bit about what might happen if they get out of control.

End of the Earth V: There Goes the Sun

The Sun [photo courtesy of NASA]

People that know me well know that I have a lot in common with Robert Frost.  We both were born in March and we both employ rural New England settings to explore complex social and philosophical themes in our poetry.  We also like the same rap groups.

In honor of my literary doppelganger, I will now, having already had the world end in fire, try my hand at ice.

Let's try to answer the question:  "If the sun blinks out of existence this instant, what is the temperature of the Earth as a function of time?"

End of the Earth IV - Shocking Destruction

Earth day is upon us once more.  So many other namby-pamby bloggers out there (don't hurt me!) are writing about how wonderful the earth is and how great earth day is.  We here at The Virtuosi take a more hardline approach.  Today I'm going to tell you how to destroy the earth.  Completely and totally.  Unlike last year's methods, this one should work.

Why Black Holes from the Large Hadron Collider Won't Destroy the World

Hi everyone. As this is my first post, I thought I'd introduce myself. Like the rest of the Virtuosi, I'm a graduate student in physics at Cornell University. I work in experimental particle physics, in particular on the Compact Muon Solenoid, one of the detectors at the Large Hadron Collider. I'll post more on what I actually do at some point in the future, but I thought I'd start with a post in the spirit of some of the other fun calculations that we've done. My goal is to convince you that black holes created by the LHC cannot possibly destroy the world.

To start with, the main reason no one working on the LHC is too concerned about black holes is because of Hawking radiation. While we usually think of black holes as objects that nothing can escape from, Stephen Hawking predicted that black holes actually do emit some light, losing energy (and mass) in the process. In the case of the little bitty black holes that the LHC could produce, they should just evaporate in a shower of Hawking radiation.

That's great you say, but Hawking radiation has never actually been observed. What if Hawking is wrong and the black holes won't evaporate? Well, the usual next argument is that cosmic rays from space bombard the earth all the time, producing collisions many times more energetic than what we'll be able to produce at the LHC. To me, this is a fairly convincing argument. However, let's pretend we don't know about these cosmic rays and that there's no Hawking radiation. We can calculate what effect black holes produced by the LHC would have on the earth if they do stick around.

End of the Earth II - Blaze of Glory

In honor of earth day today, many bloggers are posting things about how to save the earth, or retrospectives on earth days past. We here at The Virtuosi decided, what better way to celebrate the earth than to figure out how to destroy it? So that is exactly what we intend to do. This post will focus on the destruction of the earth by a laser beam. This is a familiar concept. Whether it is Marvin the Martian or the Death Star, destroying planets with lasers (or threatening to) is a common theme.



We will be considering two questions today.  The first is fairly obvious:  how much power would the death star need to destroy the earth?  The second relates to a topic of continuing interest of mine: how much would the death star recoil upon firing?

The End of Earth Physics I

I was reading the Wikipedia page for the Hitchhiker's Guide books the other day and found that it started as a series of radio shows called "The Ends of Earth." At the end of each episode, the Earth would be destroyed. Since I feel like this is the best way to end any TV show/movie/book/news broadcast/Mayan calendar, I will shamelessly steal the idea.

Since this is the first End of the Earth post, we will start small and just consider the boiling off of all the world's oceans. To be precise, we will consider how much energy it would take to turn all the world's water at 0 degrees Celsius to water vapor at 100 degrees Celsius.