Fun With: Ruining a World

[Sky Captain]

I suggest diverting all available industry into making the biggest and dirtiest nukes possible and do it for some 50 years. Then place them where they would produce maximum pollution and detonate simultaneously. For added bonus if possible try to trigger eruptions of largest active volcanoes.

While making nukes also mass produce the most toxic chemicals possible and spill them everywhere the same time when blowing nukes.

That should ruin the planet at least for higher life forms.

[Swindle1984]

So, basically, just make a bunch of cobalt bombs and chemical weapons.

[Akhlut]

Option 1: Culture as much C. botulinum as possible and ensure that it produces as much botulin as possible. Collect it, aerosolize it, and dispense it over as much of the earth as possible.

Option 2: Create as much methylmercury as possible and aerosolize it. It will kill pretty much anything with a brain on land and will probably kill most ocean life as well.

Option 3: Make a bunch of plutonium spheres as possible and surround them with beryllium spheres in order to make fatal radiation emitters.

[The Yosemite Bear]

make George Bush ruler of the planet.

[MKSheppard]

Build millions of tons of nuclear fusion/fission explosives.

Fly them to moon. Land on Dark Side of Moon.

Begin Project SUPER ULTIMATE FUCKING ORION.

Smash Moon into Earth.

[rhoenix]

Build millions of tons of nuclear fusion/fission explosives.

Fly them to moon. Land on Dark Side of Moon.

Begin Project SUPER ULTIMATE FUCKING ORION.

Smash Moon into Earth.

You know Shep, I have to hand it to you - this option has the awesome factor going for it.

[Michael Garrity]

I would begin with manufacturing 8,000 devices the size and power of the Tsar Bomba (at its full 150 megaton yield); each device would have its casing made of a cobat/strontium alloy to further increase (by several orders of magnitude) the truly insane amounts of fallout generated when even a single such device detonates. Each of the 8,000 bombs would be placed so as to bracket as wide an area as possible. All bombs would be fused to detonate at the exact same moment, so that none of them would be destroyed by the explosion of its nearest neighbors.
After all the bombs have gone off, large numbers of UAVs would be employed to spray weaponized anthrax, tetra-chloro diethyl dioxin (TCDD) and persistent nerve gas as widely as possible.
If I could figure a way to trigger the Yellowstone supervolcano, I would do that too (just to be bloody-minded)


Mike

[RedImperator]

After reading Zodiac, I have another genetically-engineered superbug to ruin a planet:
Spoiler

How about a bacterium which metabolizes PCBs out of saltwater, turning an entire planetary ocean into toxic waste?

[rhoenix]

After reading Zodiac, I have another genetically-engineered superbug to ruin a planet:
Spoiler

How about a bacterium which metabolizes PCBs out of saltwater, turning an entire planetary ocean into toxic waste?

Works for me - but what are PCB's? Polychlorinated biphenyl?

If so, that works nicely - I need the ocean to be gone from this planet (without turning it into Venus and baking the water out), so I think this would work.

[Junghalli]

Build millions of tons of nuclear fusion/fission explosives.

Fly them to moon. Land on Dark Side of Moon.

Begin Project SUPER ULTIMATE FUCKING ORION.

Smash Moon into Earth.

Hmm, how much resources will that take?

The moon has an average orbital velocity of 1.022 km/s. So we need to decellerate it by that much to deorbit it. Let's assume we can get an exhaust velocity comparable to 1st Gen 1959 Orion; 39 km/s. I calculate we need to burn up roughly 2.7% of the moon's mass as propellant.

The moon's mass is a little less than 7.348 X 10^22 kg. 2.7% of that is ~1.98 X 10^21 kg. Let's plug that into the kinetic energy equation:

1/2(1.98 X 10^22)(39000^2) = ~1.5 X 10^31 joules, or ~3.585 billion teratons.

That's about 70 trillion Tsar Bombas, which assuming they're all Tsar Bomba duplicates is ~1.9 quadrillion tons of bombs.

Of course, this assumes the propellant is accelerated with 100% efficiency, which is ridiculous. The actual requirement will be much larger. On the plus side the sort of civilization actually capable of undertaking such a project will probably be able to build significantly better bombs than Tsar Bomba.

You may or may not be able to get better results by trying to nudge the moon into Earth instead of deorbiting it, I don't know enough about astrophysics to say.

[The Yosemite Bear]

I still say just give control of the planet and it's resources including labour to unrestricted capitolism, for a cut of the obscene profits....

[starslayer]

You may or may not be able to get better results by trying to nudge the moon into Earth instead of deorbiting it, I don't know enough about astrophysics to say.

Let's examine both approaches:

The direct approach: To get the Moon to hit Earth, you need it to lose all of its angular momentum wrt Earth, discounting its own rotational energy. Using your numbers, and a mean distance of 3E8 m from the system barycenter, and from there assuming the Earth is fixed wrt the Moon, the Moon has approximately 2.1E31 J*s of angular momentum. It's linear momentum at any one time is 7E22 N*s. This means you need that much retrograde impulse to get it to fall "straight down." Let's say we apply of a force of 7E22 N over one second to accomplish this. Ordinarily, the Moon would travel about one kilometer in that time; let's use that distance as an approximate figure for how much work we will do on the Moon. Using that, we will do 7E25 J of work on the Moon to stop it. This amount of work will not change for any method we use to achieve the total impulse required; the longer the time it takes, the smaller the force, and the longer the distance covered. Upon completion of this, the Moon will impact the Earth in about a week, at which point the Earth melts completely (the Moon did so when we were busy stopping it so quickly).

The indirect approach: This time, let's try using orbital mechanics instead to get an impact. What we want to do here is nudge the Moon into a highly elliptical orbit, such that the Earth and Moon's surfaces collide. The best way to do this is to point your lunar thrusters towards Earth (the exact direction you want, I'm not sure), and wait. If you aimed well, the Moon and Earth will collide at an oblique angle, with much the same results as before, but the Earth will get a new, smaller moon out of the bargain. Exactly how much energy this would take I do not know. It should take less, but it might take more; I'm not sure.

[RedImperator]

After reading Zodiac, I have another genetically-engineered superbug to ruin a planet:
Spoiler

How about a bacterium which metabolizes PCBs out of saltwater, turning an entire planetary ocean into toxic waste?

Works for me - but what are PCB's? Polychlorinated biphenyl?

If so, that works nicely - I need the ocean to be gone from this planet (without turning it into Venus and baking the water out), so I think this would work.

Yes, it's polychlorinated biphenyl. Keep in mind, this won't turn the oceans into PCBs, just contaminate them with incredibly high concentrations of it. In the novel, the bacterium could also infect people directly, lodging in the GI tract and converting their own bodily fluids into PCBs, though it could also be killed with antibiotics.

[Straha]

Send up a bunch of rockets and fling a decent sized asteroid at high speed towards the Antarctic. Damage from the impact aside if you get it fast enough you'll melt a fair bit of the water there and cause sea levels to raise very suddenly, rendering a fair bit of the globe inhabitable. But don't stop there! Get two more asteroids and aim them for geographic hotspots and for, say, the Indian Ocean and you can cause massive flooding to pick off everyone you missed before and massive volcanic activity to kick even more dust up into the sky. It'd make life very unpleasant for a couple centuries, if done right.

[rhoenix]

Yes, it's polychlorinated biphenyl. Keep in mind, this won't turn the oceans into PCBs, just contaminate them with incredibly high concentrations of it. In the novel, the bacterium could also infect people directly, lodging in the GI tract and converting their own bodily fluids into PCBs, though it could also be killed with antibiotics.

That's utterly perfect. Just toss in something so this nasty little big can hibernate when it doesn't get enough to feed on, and this will fit my needs for that aspect perfectly.

Now, all I need are other ways to make the surface weather conditions more hell-like, and its all good.

[Questor]

Build millions of tons of nuclear fusion/fission explosives.

Fly them to moon. Land on Dark Side of Moon.

Begin Project SUPER ULTIMATE FUCKING ORION.

Smash Moon into Earth.

Have you read any of the Starfire series by David Weber?

He does this to a planet in The Shiva Option

[Samuel]

It was an asteroid, not a moon.

[Darth Wong]

After reading Zodiac, I have another genetically-engineered superbug to ruin a planet: Spoiler

How about a bacterium which metabolizes PCBs out of saltwater, turning an entire planetary ocean into toxic waste?

Is that an endothermic reaction or an exothermic one? If it's an endothermic reaction, then good luck making a bacterium which lives off it. For that matter, you have to make sure you have the right ingredients to make the reaction possible at all. Unless someone has actually written up the chemical reaction equation to make sure this tracks, it seems like an idea that could potentially make the author look really silly.

[RedImperator]

After reading Zodiac, I have another genetically-engineered superbug to ruin a planet: Spoiler

How about a bacterium which metabolizes PCBs out of saltwater, turning an entire planetary ocean into toxic waste?

Is that an endothermic reaction or an exothermic one? If it's an endothermic reaction, then good luck making a bacterium which lives off it.

Turning ionic chlorine (salt) into covalent chlorine (the kind in PCBs) is endothermic. However, PCBs consist of one or more chlorine atoms in a benzene ring, and the production of benzene rings is exothermic. I don't know how the math works out. It does open up the possibility your PCB-making superbug will be outcompeted by a mutant strain which skips the chlorine process, though it will still be releasing benzene as a waste product.

[PainRack]

Generate a couple of bio-weapons targeted at killing off insect populations such as bees, ants and etc.

Watch as the world eco-systems go out of whack. And since humans won't be noticing the loss of insects, even though earthworms, lack of insect diversity screwed up the bio-domes and also killed the scientists inside, it probably WOULD work.

As for oceans.... that might be more difficult since I have no idea how feasible bio-weapons are against algae:D Still, massive nutrient run-off from dead plants and the rivers may cause massive algae blooms and the resulting effects on oceanic life.