How Can I Destroy The Planet

Step 1: Chuck it into something nasty

Strap a couple of really powerful rockets to the side of the earth and fire it towards either the sun or a black hole. We'd recommend the sun because the nearest black hole is 1600 light years away, whereas the sun's a mere 8 seconds away at light speed, and even if you miss it then the earth will probably be locked into a suicidally close orbit and fried.

Step 2: Eat it

A more complicated method is to build a Von Neumann machine. This is a thing that creates an exact copy of itself given nothing but the necessary raw materials. If you can build one that needs iron, magnesium, aluminum and silicon to get started, then all you need to do is set it off on the earth and it'll start reproducing, as those elements make up the majority of our planet's mantle and core. Watch and wait as it creates a second von Neumann machine, then they create two more, then they create four more. Pretty soon there'll be loads of Von Neumann machines and no planet.

Step 3: Smash it into lots of pieces

If you fancy something dramatic, then you could try smashing the Earth to bits with a gigantic hammer. As you're unlikely to find one big enough in your local DIY store you'll need to find a big lump of intergalactic rock. If you can find a way to smash your rock into the earth very fast, like 90% of light speed, you can get away with a something relatively small like a 10 thousand billion ton asteroid. If you're not confident of being able to swing your intergalactic hammer that fast, then you'll need something a bit bigger. Like Mars.

Step 4: Blow it up

The old favourite for evil genius' everywhere. Simply get hold of a load of explosive material and kaboom. Using this formula (E=(3/5)GM^2/R), we know that you'd need a lot (224,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Joules) of energy to do away with the earth. It takes the sun a week to produce that much, so you need to forget the dynamite and move on to the most explosive substance possible, antimatter. You'll still need about 2.5 trillion tons of the stuff but scientists are beavering away in particle accelerators to make it so shouldn't be long now. Then simply light the blue touch paper and retire a safe distance. Like Betelgeuse.

Step 5: Tear it apart

Theoretically – this is the easiest as the technology is in use now. All you need to do is dig up the Earth, a chunk at a time, stick the bits in the space shuttle and go up for some extra terrestrial fly tipping. The only problem is that the shuttle carries about 2 tons at a time and the earth weighs six sextillion tons. To give you an idea of how much work that is, imagine 1,000 space shuttles taking off every second of every day. It's still going to take 8.3 billion years to get rid of the earth. So you best get started.