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Let's just all switch to UTC and be done with the current mess already.

So You Want To Abolish Time Zones

To summarize (for people without the inclination to read the whole thing):

Abolishing time zones brings many benefits, I hope. It also:

• causes the question "What time is it there?" to be useless/unanswerable
• necessitates significant changes to the way in which normal people talk about time
• convolutes timetables, where present
• means "days" are no longer the same as "days"
• complicates both secular and religious law
• is a staggering inconvenience for a minimum of five billion people
• makes it near-impossible to reason about time in other parts of the world
• does not mean everybody gets up at the same time, goes to work at the same time, or goes to bed at the same time
• is not simpler.

As long as humans live in more than one part of the world, solar time is always going to be subjective. Abolishing time zones only exacerbates this problem.

https://qntm.org/ra

Suicide Linux; where any typo (as in resulting in command not found) instigates a full 'sudo rm -rf /'. Available as a debian package. https://qntm.org/suicide

http://qntm.org/destroy

The site "Things of Interest" (qntm.org) has a pair of better articles:

• How to destroy the Earth
• Geocide in fiction

The site "Things of Interest" (qntm.org) has a pair of better articles:

• How to destroy the Earth
• Geocide in fiction

Might I suggest The Database Engineering Perspective on Gay Marriage, which humorously explores the formal, structural similarities and differences between different kinds of marriage (straight, gay, poly, intransitive... asymmetrical? reflexive? etc) in a milieu that readers of this site should appreciate.

"The production of tiny black holes is one of the predictions. "
Man I hope they know what they are doing.

Microscopic black holes disappear quickly due to Hawking radiation. So if your goal is to destroy the earth, creating a microscopic black hole is not the way you want to go.

The bigger a black hole is, the more slowly it evaporates. So if you want your black hole to do any damage, it'll have to be more than a certain threshold size. Turns out that minimum-size black hole you'll need to destroy Earth is roughly the mass of Mt Everest.

If we take the density of such a black hole to be 3 * 10^18 kg/m^3, then our black hole will look like a ball with a radius of about 12 cm, i.e. it looks like a soccer ball.*

See here for more details.

* no idea if my density assumption is reasonable. I'm not a physicist -- I got the number from 20 seconds of googling. The volume of your black hole may vary.

Link: Suicide Linux

lol.

Things Of Interest Blog
Suicide Linux
You know how sometimes if you mistype a filename in Bash, it corrects your spelling and runs the command anyway? Such as when changing directory, or opening a file.

no. never. really?

any time - you type any remotely incorrect command, the interpreter creatively resolves it into rm -rf / and wipes your hard drive.

freaky idea anyway, can't say i don't like it.

Link: Suicide Linux

You advocate a

( ) overly simplistic

approach to calendar reform. Your idea will not work. Here is why:

( ) having months of different lengths is irritating
( ) having one or two days per year which are part of no month is stupid

Specifically, your plan fails to account for:

( ) humans
( ) rational hatred for arbitrary change
( ) unpopularity of weird new month and day names

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) nobody is about to renumber every event in history
( ) good luck trying to move the Fourth of July
(x) the history of calendar reform is horrifically complicated and no amount of further calendar reform can make it simpler

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) sorry, but I don't think it would work
( ) this is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it

You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform. Your idea will not work. Here is why:

Standard Reply Form for Your New Calendar System Idea

Helpful diagram

Just wanted to connect the point on people deciding what senses or body shapes/capacities to have to what we were discussed a couple days ago on: "Do-It-Yourself Brain Stimulation Has Scientists Worried"
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3862853&threshold=0&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=44012505

Related themes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
http://xkcd.com/597/

Here is a fable I wrote about thirty years ago about a knight who becomes whatever he wrote in a book -- sort of like many self-defined Transhumanists aspire to:
"The Problems of Being Self Determining"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-problems-of-being-self-determining.html

I'm since thinking that the human mind/body/brain/spirit seems to act as if it has a bunch of layers, where there seem to be safeguards built-in to the lower layers (shaped by evolution?) which may limit the ease of radical changes which are sometimes (but not always) in practice self-destructive acts. Those lower layers may also be related to communications links with other humans, to maintain the functioning of the group (stuff like a sense of fairness, compassion, etc. as well as probably status issues too from another direction).

Which connects to this story on simulated universes, math and infinite convergences:
"I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility. Short story, Sam Hughes (2007)."
http://qntm.org/responsibility

I made artificial life simulations myself in the 1980s, and started thinking about the moral implications....

James P. Hogan has some related books too, like Entoverse, and Realtime Interrupt.

technically it's not that difficult.

It actually is simple. All you need to do is destroy the planet. And I don't mean just kill all life on the planet. I mean make it so that the planet Earth no longer exists. (see here: http://qntm.org/destroy )

You're right.

Here's an interesting essay that examines the feasibility of destroying the Earth by various means.

I read this oddball and rather fascinating tongue-in-cheek article about the same subject a few years back:

http://qntm.org/destroy

It goes from the sublime to the ridiculous; hopefully this research will be just as entertaining!

http://qntm.org/board

I think the gameboy one stopped speeding up and some point, letting you play forever, well at least until you ran into a batch of randomness that gave you too many bad pieces.

The NES one, on the other hand, was actually impossible after a certain level... the blocks fell faster than you could get them to the edges of the screen.

There was a version of tetris someone made, maybe from here... that always gave you the worst possible piece.
Googling 'ragetris' tells me it was called 'hatetris'.

Not entirely related to things being NP-hard, but yeah.

Furthermore ... how the fuck is a planet supposed to vanish?

You should ask this guy.

You mean, like this ?

We'll just have to find a way to speed up earth orbit.

There's a well known How To for this. Apparently, it's very difficult.

http://qntm.org/pointnine

This reminded me of this story. http://qntm.org/responsibility

http://qntm.org/responsibility

Your comment reminded me of this short story that was posted to Slashdot a while back.

In 50,000 years, humans will probably not even be on Earth anymore.

I bet $100 that you are wrong!
Unless someone manages to follow one of the guides on How to destroy the Earth then I suspect that there will be humans in some form around here in well over 100,000 years to come.

And people still continue to say we can blow up the world.

No, they don't. At least not if you mean "blow up the planet". But if you're content with killing every human on it, and scorching every populated area, there's all those nuclear weapons. Although most of us prefer not to think or talk of them, they're still there.

Same thing with any pollution.

Oh sure, life will go on, in some form or another. But I'm kind of sentimental about stuff like, I don't know, mammals, which are certainly not capable of dealing with anything we can throw on them/us.

Try P vs NP for dummies

This is surely overkill in that it's the energy needed to push all the earth's mass to escape velocity. Probably less than 1% of this energy would suffice to crack the planet into pieces. Would this count as blowing the earth up?

Well, I would take the stance of the authoritative guide to destroying the earth, and say that cracking the planet into pieces/rubble that will eventually re-coalesce doesn't count.

Plus, "There's no kill like overkill".

In truth, it does always bother me how easy it seems to 'blow up' planets in fiction. If you think about it, the amount of energy required to blow up a planet would be equivalant to launching every bit of the earth into space, think about the amount of energy involved in just getting the tiny space shuttle into space, then think about doing that for mount everest, then think about doing that for mount everest about 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 times. That is how hard it is to blow up a planet (very roughly)

http://qntm.org/destroy has some more good information on destroying the earth.

England is not the same thing as Britain, Britain is not the same thing as England.

You can save this diagram for educating people in the future.

I guess that means that CERN's precautionary destruction of the earth in 2008 was for naught!

The comet was only a few kilometres across and plowed into the solid planet at over a dozen kilometres per second, so it pulverised itself out of existence in less than a second, hurling black-grey-brown-red-white spurts of material off from the impact point in arcs, most of them directed in the direction of impact, themselves leaving lines of smaller impacts around the edge of the planet, while a visible black ripple spread out from the origin. FOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM was how Jex and Yuo's onboard videoaudio sound effect generator chose to interpret this.

The last but one question by Sam Hughes

For me it's as simple as survival. As long as humanity is confined to a single planet, we're vulnerable to being wiped out by a planetary scale disaster.

Okay, but we're a long, looong way from having 100% completely self-sufficient off-world colonies that it doesn't even make sense to start. The chain of technologies necessary to allow a human to survive in space is ridiculously long and at the moment completely infeasible to implement outside of the hospitable environment of our home planet. And that even applies after some global disaster. It pretty much would take the destruction of the earth for it to be less suitable for human life than any other rock in the solar system.

Certainly a "get to Mars in 10 years" plan makes zero sense in this context, since such a rushed mission would absolutely not be the foundation for a permanent off-world colony, much less a self-sufficient one.

And any colony that isn't self sufficient isn't a back-up to preserve the human species in case the earth is destroyed. It's just a place to recreate a really depressing novel in a sci-fi setting.

Personally, even for the purpose of eventually giving humans another place to live besides earth, the current plan is much better than one with the specific goal of reaching Mars. New propulsion systems, in-space construction and assembly, these are things we will need for a future off-world colony to be feasible. Trying to implement such a colony starting today would be silly. Wait until we can at least access LEO cheaply before worrying about landing habitats on Mars or building them in space.

That always bugged me too. The idea that we should be exploring other planets in case we screw this one up just doesn't work... how badly would be have to screw this one up that starting from scratch would be easier than fixing this one???

Basically by implementing one of the concepts on this page to destroy the earth utterly.

Seriously, there's practically nothing we could do that would make earth less habitable than Mars. Global Thermonuclear War? Even if Ferris Bueller had failed to talk down that computer, the end result would be a planet far more suitable than human life. Gigantic meteor impact? They've happened before. Mass extinction followed, but the biosphere itself pressed on, as did the oxygen atmosphere it created. On post-KT-repeat earth, you could still walk around and breath the air, maybe with the help of a dust mask, and maybe find some resilient plants and animals to eat. As opposed to requiring a massive infrastructure just to keep you from dying in moments on the surface of Mars. We could poison and kill every ecosystem on earth and what remained would still be a better starting point for 'rebooting' than any other heavenly body we know of.

And you're right, we're probably much better off preventing these situations from happening in the first place than trying to move off-world in case they happen.

On the other hand, I do believe that in the very long term self-sustaining off-world colonies are both possible and desirable.

It's just the idea that we could actually pull that off, yet not be able to pull off keeping the earth habitable even in the aftermath of severe catastrophe, seems pretty silly to me.

Sorry, but my results differ

http://qntm.org/?board

Destroying the earth is notoriously difficult.

It isn't actually as easy as all that as some others have stated. There was actually an interesting website set up just for this sort of thinking though:

http://qntm.org/?destroy

We have enough nukes to kill all of mankind, and probably even a majority of the complex species as well (complete sterilization would be difficult as there are certain bacteria that thrive in radioactivity and would probably survive). But to actually rend a 5.793e21 ton ball of iron in two would require some serious energy beyond just our current nuclear arsenal.

Uuum... From what I read, our nukes have no problem splitting the earth in two. I'd call that pretty much uninhabitable. ;)

Where did you read that? Reality is not quite Star Wars... The earth is a 12000km ball of molten iron held together by gravity; setting off a few firecrackers on the crust won't do a lot!

If I'm not mistaken, you'd need to accelerate about 3*10^21 tonnes (half the earth's mass) to 10+ km/sec (escape velocity) to overcome the gravity well and split the earth permanently... You'd need trillions of tons of antimatter to do it. Today's weapons are not quite there yet.

Is here. Share and enjoy.

Sounds like Anne Poole.

http://qntm.org/?ashmore

That is all.

You're thinking of "The British Isles"

You can see the semantics explained in the form of a Venn diagram here - http://qntm.org/?uk

Looks like we all need to check the Euler Diagram of the UK

http://qntm.org/?uk

The Great British Venn Diagram

Personally, I quite like the fact that I live in a country that needs a four-colour diagram to adequately describe. It neatly fits in with my concept of how the world actually works.

My first thought from reading the summary is that essentially we're at a point in technology or whatever that we could, POSSIBLY, destroy the planet in a literal sense

I came across this site some time ago and found it well written and pretty interesting (especially in a mad scientist sort of way). Assuming you're not one of the "wusses whose aim is merely to wipe out humanity", I'm not sure we really do have the tech to destroy the planet "in a literal sense."

Too bad :(

According to the International Earth-Destruction Advisory Board, the current "Earth-Destruction Alert Level" is "RED". Which means that the Earth has been destroyed.
A quote from the FAQ:

My baby's in there!

Your baby has most likely been destroyed.

----

Anyway, for you deluded fools who think the Earth is still around, take head of this warning:

The Earth is built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you've had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy.

Obviously it's a little out of date now, 'cause those rascals at CERN managed the job, but still...

I note that the fools from the article don't actually want to destroy the Earth (well maybe one or two of the scenarios might break it apart or something), otherwise they would have come up with some scenarios like:

• Annihilated by an equivalent quantity of antimatter
• Cooked in a solar oven
• Meticulously and systematically deconstructed

(Quote and methods from How to destroy the Earth.)

Fools, I'll show them all!

Your information is marginally correct, but flawed. The earth was not destroyed by the LHC; actually, it was destroyed before the LHC was tested, as a precautionary measure. This was over two months ago. Reference: http://qntm.org/?board

Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe.

You've seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You've heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing hideous quantities of pollution into the atmosphere threatens to end the world.

Fools.

The Earth is built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you've had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy.

http://qntm.org/?board

I wish to point you to the International Earth-Destruction Advisory Board. According to these fine persons, the earth has all ready been destroyed. Certainly not by the LHC (and so that site you linked to is still correct), but as a pre-emptive measure.

Evidence is still being collated, but preliminary results suggest that the Earth was destroyed pre-emptively by scientists at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, before the commencement of their experiments to locate the Higgs Boson, as a precautionary measure to ensure that the experiment itself could not result in the destruction of the Earth.