Could We Completely Destroy the Earth?

[@stephanybrown3226]

Simon ranting at farmers made my morning. As a 'damn farmer' s daughter I feel special 😂 Genetically engineered super predator you mean like....

[@benitojarezmeow]

I’d really love to see collaborations between Simon and XKCD writer Randall Monroe, what he did with his what if books and especially this channel would sink up perfectly with extra crazy scenarios

[@EyeoIsis]

Simon, you had waaay too much fun making this video....You supervillan 😉

[@birdnird]

9:44 I believe GrayStillPlays has covered this multiple times in Universe Sandbox 2. There’s a whole playlist

[@cleverusername9369]

The editing on this channel is spectacular

[@xXScissorHandsXx]

Facts.

[@sirius4k]

Simon fishing for genocidal ideas was a good one indeed.

[@AramisNailz]

This is the kind of content I'm here for.

[@badluck5647]

*Suggestion: Attack of the Clones* Is it possible to make an army of clones to take over the galaxy or to make an endless number of KZbin channels?

[@IgabodDobagi]

the answer is yes. this channel is hosted by Simon # 2248. Brain Blaze is hosted by Simon # 1403. They're only doing the youtube thing until they have enough followers and enough clones to form their Grand Army of the Republic. Cloning isn't cheap, but youtube money sure helps in funding it.

[@terryenby2304]

This channel is like my brain as a nerdy kid when I had millions of questions about science, except I never asked “is this ethical?” Lol I love thought experiments and hypothetical things!

[@nickconner2101]

Since one megaton of tnt is approx. 4.184 petajoules (4.184 x 10^15), the energy required to kill all life on earth is roughly 143 quadrillion tons of tnt. For context, the largest theoretical nuke was a 10 gigaton bomb which would have been about 10 billion tons of tnt

[@nickconner2101]

To destroy the earth entirely would be 143 sextillion tons of tnt

[@julianaylor4351]

Asteroids unleashed more energy on our ancient Earth, including the one that finished off the non avian dinosaurs, than our bombs currently can. You would have to explode all of them, total madness....see other KZbin channels.

[@sarahlovell2]

😮

[@benrockefeller6334]

​@@nickconner2101Which is hilarious because the Earth only weighs around 6.6 sextillion tons.

[@DanitaCrosby-wu3kn]

All hail Simon Whistler, undisputed king of the podcasts. Long live the king! 😊

[@chasehedges6775]

💯

[@CatsMeowPaw]

When you see Simon fleeing to his bunker, you know it's time 😂

[@josephcronin2965]

ha ha that Simon in the boat part and he was in the boat for a long time I couldn't concentrate on what he's even saying it just looks funny 😂

[@ignitionfrn2223]

0:45 - Chapter 1 - Destroy all humans 3:45 - Chapter 2 - The end of the world as we know it 8:50 - Chapter 3 - Annihilation of planet earth & the beginning of merciless damnation 10:55 - Wrap up

[@jofbeats11]

All we can is hope that in order to prevent "grey goo" from ever happening in the far future, we could tell our scientists to start restrict/regulate to the potential use a nanotechnology to a minimum so our goal isn't cheap mass production of things and for grey goo to remain as nothing but a hypothetical (hopefully never will happen) low probability apocalypse.

[@julianaylor4351]

Simon's guide to disaster film scenarios.....🙏 they never come true. 😱

[@amaccama3267]

This sounds like a job for Zap Brannegan

[@julianaylor4351]

😁

[@mrmr446]

No one looks for life on Venus so changing our atmosphere to have a feedback loop increasing the temperature until everything boils sounds easier to me.

[@JustJanitor]

In 2013 a meteor entered our atmosphere and blew up in the air. It did enough damage to be scary and i dont think we saw it coming. Worth a google

[@julianaylor4351]

Broke loads of windows in the Russian city, next to the lake it landed in.

[@SabreArchon]

The only way that I know of to actually shatter a planet is to destabilize the core.

[@iowafarmboy]

As a farmer from Iowa, sorry to be a thorn in the "kill all humans" goal 😅

[@RockyPeroxide]

As a hippie from the Netherlands, I thank ye. Agriculture is the base of society ^^

[@85priesty]

Being from Tasmania, there's a reason why they put a big black box in the south west of the state...anywhere in America is a lot more populated or targeted than our Island left of half the world's maps....haha,

[@mwolkove]

If they targeted you farmers first, that would take us city dwellers out REAL quick.

[@THE-X-Force]

Yeah .. but, can being a farmer in Iowa really be called _"living"_ ?

[@iowafarmboy]

@@THE-X-Force yes. But, feel free to think otherwise. Doesn't bother me 🙂

[@altareggo]

Alrighty....grey goo it is then!!! Bring on the nanobots. // That said, life on earth has survived 4 billion years of snowball earth, oxygen catastrophies, shield vulcanism and stuff we probably don't even know about yet. Let's just wait until the sun swallows our little planet up and does the job properly, ok?

[@StephenMcGregor1986]

Grey Goo... you mean REPLICATORS

[@scipio109]

This video makes me strangely hopeful 😂

[@joeanrachelmiller6529]

6:00 space x seems to be working on stripping the atmosphere

[@cjtaylor1977]

Rather than grey goo I have always preferred the idea of death by paperclip.

[@laurenpeck77]

I actually feel better after watching this. I thought humanity was a lot more fragile. 😂

[@jeffdroog]

Well,it is super fragile,this is just about taking things to the next level of difficulty for every living thing.The majority of humans could wiped out super easily,it's just the last 1-10% of life that's super hard to kill,and humans aren't even likely to make it to that last 1% of living things anyhow...

[@DTredecim]

Is Kevin one of Kyle Hill's Kevins? This seems like the kind of thing he would have them working on.

[@ahetzel9054]

12 thousand nukes you say? What if we dug down as far as we could go, stuck all 12k nukes in one spot and then blew them up? Would that disrupt the core of the earth? Messing with our magnetosphere? Not to mention the earthquakes and tsunamis that would reign destruction across the land. But also would that at all affect Earth's orbit? Just wondering what would happen if we did that

[@MrG9002]

As far down as we can dig isn't very far. Simon has a video on the deepest hole, of course he does.

[@adrianishtar0]

No; even as powerful as nukes are the amount of energy needed to destroy the earth is on a completely different scale. It would take millions of nukes to do it.

[@benrockefeller6334]

The deepest hole in the Earth gets about 12 kilometers into the Earth. The Earth is around 4,000 miles in radius, or ~6,000 kilometers. So the deepest you're going is around 1/500 of the radius of the Earth. I don't think I need to tell you that won't be deep enough.

[@froqwo4851]

Yes

[@Paladiea]

How about we recreate the P-Tr extinction event? LOL oh wait we're already doing that.

[@Hetouchesfish]

1:46 by last i think u mean current. Because the previous ice age ended 260mya. (At least five major ice ages have occurred throughout Earth's history: the earliest was over 2 billion years ago, and the most recent one began approximately 3 million years ago and continues today (yes, we live in an ice age!). Currently, we are in a warm interglacial that began about 11,000 years ago.) Source : utah geological survey (.gov)

[@joelb8653]

Life finds a way.

[@jasontoddman7265]

I always thought Charlton Heston's line from Planet of the Apes (which is what Simon quotes at the very start of the video) was awfully ironic considering he was the one who far more literally blows it all up for good at the end of the next movie Beneath the Planet of the Apes, as he is the one who sets off the Omega Bomb that wipes out all life still left everywhere on the planet. So who's the maniac *now,* Charlton Heston?

[@sage4365]

This video is...surprisingly comforting. That being said, we still need to stop fucking up our planet.

[@jimmydepersis3130]

Why am I so disturbed by a talking Simon head on a fisherman?

[@donovanwebb1576]

Here's the thing.... any energy you get out of a kinetic impactor, you're first going to have to put in. Now, that's not strictly true, because you can use gravitational slingshots for some free energy..... but that'll only get you so far and it's nowhere near enough. If you have the tech to generate that much energy, functionally destroying Earth becomes trivial.

[@jeffdroog]

One could argue,that by the time we have fully developed such technologies,we would also have likely done most of everything that makes worth living,and likely won't mind the extinction so much.

[@rvgdustin1670]

Well this actually makes me feel better about Armagedon/doomsday predictions.

[@multiyapples]

I would be surprised if humans didn’t do this at some point in the future.

[@jacobwilson6296]

Push/Pull the Earth into the sun. First remove the moon then it gets easier after that. Gravitational drag should do the rest, but if not use giant mirrors to use the suns energy to heat up a specific side of the earth. This in turn will destabilize the orbit and send it into the sun. Using the major gas giant's gravity in tandem with the sun's will help as well. Timing is everything.

[@benrockefeller6334]

If you're already removing the Moon, just chuck it into the Earth. Surely that would already be plenty enough to kill everything on it, or even destroy it if you move it fast enough.

[@Whykickamoocow]

Destroy All Humans. I loved that game. Go Crypto 👽

[@ulftnightwolf]

the best way would be to recreate the runaway greenhouse effect from venus . or move the sun faster than the orbital resonance can correct for and hope to get flung out . well that would not destroy earth just all life.

[@julianaylor4351]

Great Planet Of The Apes, Charlton Heston line.....on seeing a half buried damaged Statue Of Liberty ...bet there was an audible gasp from the first cinema audiences who saw that film. Good one Simon. ❤

[@jasontoddman7265]

Heston's line is especially ironic / hypocritical considering what he does at the end of the following Apes movie. :) If the audience gasped though, it was probably more from the characters virulent swearing, as most of us who watched the movie back then had already had the ending spoiled for us by someone else before we saw it ourselves in theaters. I still remember when my family saw it at a Drive-In in 1968 and were discussing where on earth the Forbidden Zone was because of the various canyon scenes and so on.

[@julianaylor4351]

@@jasontoddman7265 I'm from the UK, where spoiling the endings of films, didn't used to be a thing, back in the 1960s and 1970s. If you saw a film in the cinema, during its initial run, you didn't spoil it for others and film critics didn't do so either. If fact that habit only came to our shores with the dawn of VHS tapes and recorders and video hiring.

[@jasontoddman7265]

@@julianaylor4351 It was not common here in the US either, I don't think. But Planet of the Apes was very popular among us kids at the time (I was 12 back then), and kids do not tend to very discreet about spoilers I fear. Actually I am not sure how I found out ahead of time; I just knew I knew and so did my brother and both parents. I don't think I am the one who told them though; possibly they're who told me. But tbh I don't remember *how* I knew.

[@julianaylor4351]

@@jasontoddman7265 The sequels ending was much more final, but got retconed, by other sequels and a television series, and now the Tim Burton versions. But oddly enough the original source material a science fiction novel is nothing like the movies. They should have left it as one movie or the pair as in the first and second one. They flogged the concept to death.....goddamn you all to hell! 😁

[@jasontoddman7265]

@@julianaylor4351 Yes I suppose they did, but I was a teenager at the time and I thoroughly enjoyed the POTA franchise - even the low-budget cartoon, the live-action TV series, and the comic book series that Marvel Comics was doing at the time. But my standards were a lot lower at the time too. Then again I suppose so was everyone's. I read the original novel by Pierre Boulle as well, but frankly I liked the 1968 movie a whole lot better.

[@scholtif]

With these Governments?! of course it is!

[@narrator69]

He forgot the Vogons

[@Russo-Delenda-Est]

There are microbes miles under the surface and miles into the sky. You would need to liquify the crust and remove the entire atmosphere to get rid of all life. So, just wait a billion years and the sun will do exactly that.

[@jeffdroog]

This is what we are currently doing with our ozone layer.When it's gone,and we are fully exposed to solar radiation,and everything else we are currently protected from,it won't take long for everything to burn.

[@vincevanced7796]

Can't we just push the moon enough somehow, just enough for it to boop the Earth?

[@sarahlovell2]

Turns out hoomans still couldn’t complete the job - we are a joke all hail the animals 😂

[@hookedentertainment9089]

What if you just sent 6250 nukes at each of the poles?

[@susanhawkins2386]

The planet throwing a fit and flip its poles that will do .

[@baggieknight8411]

Ok if we could pull that many asteroids to the Earth to try and alter the orbit!!!!!! Why not just hurl the rocks directly at the planet instead???? That makes alot more sense to me!!!! Cause the amount of asteroids you'd need to move the Earth would be more than enough to wipe out Earth

[@lilesmw]

How many writers do you have?!?!

[@ERKNEES2]

Im so happy Simon is on this channel! Im thankful this channel wasn't owned by you know who

[@Lngbrdninjamasta]

I was thinking the same thing. Not that the other guy is doing badly, I just love Simon's particular brand of narration. 🎉❤

[@jedidiahhenry6020]

Who is the other guy?

[@philly83]

Agreed. My former subscriptions to those other channels were primarily for Simon's presentation.

[@KawaiiKasai]

She who shall not be named? Or he who shall not be named?

[@catman422]

To be frank, if anyone else had to present besides Simon, I’m okay with Karl.

[@scy1038]

My girlfriend hates my guts, pretty sure she's having an affair. Got sick 7 years ago, still issues finding out what's wrong. We've been together for 14 years, but after I got sick she started showing "commitment issues". Watching science videos is the only thing that makes me feel better. Thanks for the distraction.

[@julianaylor4351]

Call the Daleks, the Borg, Skynet....but in real life some dumb lunatic terrorists or dictator.

[@BigMobe]

This video made me feel warm inside.

[@TheMalkavianmadman]

I knew it, Simon's a super villain

[@julianaylor4351]

Duh, duh, duhhhh.....🎶😁

[@BojanMilic84]

didn't even had doubt that video about absolutely and intentionally trashing entire planet would be very popular. everybody had a Monday with precisely that thought.

[@littlestevie4745]

What a berk.

[@lilesmw]

The animations are painful. Just let him read from his flat

[@julianaylor4351]

Go watch the old black and white British science fiction/horror movie, The Day The Earth Caught Fire. Two simultaneously nuclear tests knock the Earth out of its orbit, sending it spiralling towards the Sun. The film ends in a terrifying cliffhanger. 🎞️😳

[@glenjennett]

I find it a bit disturbing that we are comfortable enough to contemplate whether or not it's possible to eliminate all life on the planet. Is this something you are considering an attempt at? It seems a little negative to even think about. Of course, the possibility exists, but why dwell on that? Seems depressing.

[@garydevine605]

You forgot a runaway greenhouse effect. That would more than do it and it more than doable. I asked Venus but everything there is dead.

[@Silanael]

What about de-orbiting the moon (like in B5:TRH)? Would the increased mass make up for lower velocity?

[@ryanpennington9592]

No! The Earth got hit by a rock about the size of Mars about 4.5 billion years ago, which is actually what caused the formation of the Moon in the first place! It would melt the Earth, but it wouldn’t actually shatter it.

[@julianaylor4351]

Or throwing it out of orbit, like in Space: 1999.

[@DaremoTen]

At this point, I just assuming I'm being automatically subscribed to the latest Simon Whistler channel as they incessantly spring into being.

[@sekaramochi]

Please please please never stop ♥️

[@dougpopson5734]

blow that moon up

[@madcow3417]

Challenge accepted. I don't think it would take too much energy to tweak the velocity of large asteroids to hit the moon and push it slowly toward the earth. It may take 1,000 years. Is there a time limit?

[@RHCole]

😶

[@southcoastinventors6583]

Yeah that was my thinking as well, crashing the moon into earth would most likely do it although if you could do it then that would mean humanity had already established space colonies

[@RHCole]

​@@southcoastinventors6583It would require insane amounts of energy to do it, tho.

[@StarShine-Ranch]

No asteroid is big enough to change the moon's orbit, and no power we have could move a big asteroid.

[@96smittyjr]

I love the number of times that the answer is hit it really really hard with a really really massive item

[@brendakrieger7000]

We're trying hard🌎🙀

[@demonprincess5634]

just remove all the air

[@GeraldBlack1]

We have truly infested the planet!

[@julianaylor4351]

Like the dinosaurs before us, etc. Just evolution.

[@francisfischer7620]

Isn't that the truth!

[@MikeHughey728]

Two Everests traveling at 99.5% the speed of light... which is smaller than the largest asteroid in our solar system. Okay, neat! The logical follow-up questions, then, are "how big is the largest asteroid in our solar system?" (is it still Ceres, or is that considered a dwarf planet instead of an asteroid these days?) and "at what percentage of lightspeed would THAT need to be traveling to destroy the Earth?" Don't leave me hanging here!

[@vic5015]

Depends on what you mean. Could we render Earth an uninhabitable hellscape? Perhaps. Could we physically destroy the planet? Probably not.

[@IgabodDobagi]

destroying the planet is remarkably easy actually. We just have to drill holes as deep as possible all along the equator or some other line and detonate nukes at the bottom of each of those holes. You'd crack the planet in half.

[@debralittle1341]

I hope not.

[@suphommy]

Bleach! Coat the entire planet with bleach - credit: the onion

[@tinaroberts5858]

Lol. No one wants to destroy all life on earth, ergo it won't happen unless through some catastrophic event from space. Imo

[@richardaustin5796]

I'm in favor of full armageddon as long as I can still watch Simon's video's every day.

[@InvasionAnimation]

Surprised no black hole bombs were mentioned.

[@southcoastinventors6583]

Maybe because he wasn't talking about space magic but potentially feasible technology

[@StarShine-Ranch]

Of course black holes were not mentioned. We CANNOT make one.

[@InvasionAnimation]

@@southcoastinventors6583 To my knowledge we can create very tiny blackhole that lasts a fraction of a second. I am sure we can expand the length of time and feed the growth.

[@InvasionAnimation]

@@StarShine-Ranch We can't move an asteroid either, yet that was said.

[@southcoastinventors6583]

@@InvasionAnimation We can't don't believe the science hype its same with antimatter.

[@particles343]

Simon must have genetically enhanced vocal chords that do not skip leg day. I can read out loud for only so long before my throat starts hurting.

[@darkdragonguardian8505]

Yay we did it the earth went boom

[@MrJoncovert]

Cobalt salted nuclear weapons with triple digit megaton yields could absolutely wipe out all life as the radiation spreads.

[@sirius4k]

nope.. nothing humans have today can wipe all life on Earth. Humans? Maybe, however not instantly, but all life? No way.

[@julianaylor4351]

Are you an evil Bond villian? 😁

[@MrJoncovert]

No I’m not… (yet) lol

[@vincekramer4141]

I'm surprised I didn't hear Cobalt bombs mentioned.

[@sekaramochi]

Simon we just finished watching you to miss watching you. Brain nuked

[@Metallic-Sun]

Gonna comment before watching. No, no humans will completely destroy the Earth.

[@xenos_n.]

Can anyone list all of Simon's channels? I want to make sure I'm not missing any. He hasn't made any new ones fairly recently, has he?

[@Terpe75]

www.youtube.com/@scienceunbound460/channels

[@thormalakowsky]

I wouldn't think you'd have to accelerate an asteroid at Earth. Instead send it behind Earth and accelerate it in Earth's orbit going the opposite way. That would allow you to subtract Earth's orbital velocity from the speed needed.

[@Jayjay-qe6um]

"Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth." -- Albert Schweitzer

[@elizabethagudelo7179]

how'd you research this without getting arrested

[@kefhomepage]

Yes ..that’s my answer. Just carry on as we are

[@Henchman_Holding_Wrench]

What if we send all nukes to the core Dr Evil style?

[@StarShine-Ranch]

Q: "Could we completely destroy the Earth?" A: *NO.* Humans and their tech are FAR too puny, and Earth is MUCH too balanced and able to compensate, for people to destroy (or SAVE) the planet. Nature ALWAYS *WINS.*

[@RHCole]

Humans are a part of nature, tho.

[@HikuroMishiro]

Impossible. I've been assured we have completely obliterated the balance of nature and all life on the planet will be dead soon. Of course it was supposed to be dead by the year 2000 and we're still here, but don't question it.

[@jrgaskin01]

there used to be enough bombs. good times.

[@JohnDrummondPhoto]

I suggest we just wait for the sun to go Nova. It'll only take another 5 billion years or so, which is sooner than most of the tech discussed in this video will be available.

[@wowplayer160]

Our sun probably won't supernova. There isn't enough mass there.

[@JohnDrummondPhoto]

@@wowplayer160 I said nova. Not supernova. There's a difference.

[@airiannawilliams3181]

The long endgame. Send a craft into a sizable chunk of space rock. Oh about 10 km wide, just like the dart mission, but at just the right point to stop or seriously slow rotation. The resulting jet would act like a stable thruster, far enough out that it will pick up speed as it falls inward towards the sun, might have to do it a few times, but the main target would be a space rock at least 125 km wide, which in turn would target Ceres to hit just right to send it to Earth. Ceres is 946 km wide (almost 588 miles) That would be a repeat of Theia. But to really put the umpf into it, have it collide with the moon, and slow the moon making it fall to Earth, then Earth and Theia will be only one! (que Highlander theme song)

[@LHGII]

Sounds like COVID 205 to me😂

[@romeomike5375]

No mention of "hothouse earth" (which will probably happen in the next century)?

[@scottmoore6131]

In Star Trek TNG Wesley crusher the dr’s. Genius kid creates grey goo on accident!

[@quaiacka]

i got the second like! and the first comment apparently😅

[@mr.burn-out6553]

Yeah, as long as there's a place where life could exist then there's no point, they real goal is to undo the universe, parallel universes and reality. Permanently delete información and energy.

[@robertcross7734]

The question should be, could we not destroy the planet