12 Ways Humanity Could Destroy The Entire Solar System

We humans are doing a bang-up job of messing up our home planet. But who’s to say we can’t go on to screw things up elsewhere? Here, not listed in any particular order, are 12 unintentional ways we could do some serious damage to our Solar System, too.

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Tau.Neutrino said:

12 Ways Humanity Could Destroy The Entire Solar System

We humans are doing a bang-up job of messing up our home planet. But who’s to say we can’t go on to screw things up elsewhere? Here, not listed in any particular order, are 12 unintentional ways we could do some serious damage to our Solar System, too.

more…

Knee Jerk reaction. Nope. Humanity could destroy Earth as we know it, if it tried really really hard for a length of time. Never inadvertently.

The way I’ve found to most thoroughly destroy the Earth is to drop a Kuyper belt object on it. You need a lot of hydrogen bombs to even budge such an object out of its normal orbit.

The second most thorough way for humanity to destroy the Earth would be to turn the entirety of Earth’s oceans into a single hydrogen bomb.

Anything else doesn’t destroy even life on Earth, let alone Earth itself.

In a nutshell, you couldn’t destroy any part of the Solar System without a lot of hydrogen bombs. And by a lot, I mean millions of times as powerful as at the height of the cold war.

mollwollfumble said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

12 Ways Humanity Could Destroy The Entire Solar System

We humans are doing a bang-up job of messing up our home planet. But who’s to say we can’t go on to screw things up elsewhere? Here, not listed in any particular order, are 12 unintentional ways we could do some serious damage to our Solar System, too.

more…

Knee Jerk reaction. Nope. Humanity could destroy Earth as we know it, if it tried really really hard for a length of time. Never inadvertently.

The way I’ve found to most thoroughly destroy the Earth is to drop a Kuyper belt object on it. You need a lot of hydrogen bombs to even budge such an object out of its normal orbit.

The second most thorough way for humanity to destroy the Earth would be to turn the entirety of Earth’s oceans into a single hydrogen bomb.

Anything else doesn’t destroy even life on Earth, let alone Earth itself.

In a nutshell, you couldn’t destroy any part of the Solar System without a lot of hydrogen bombs. And by a lot, I mean millions of times as powerful as at the height of the cold war.

OK, past the knee jerk reaction now. They do have a point. Or many of them. A startlingly good article.

I have four scales of impossible: theoretically impossible, technically impossible, financially impossible and politically impossible. Something that is theoretically impossible can’t be done with any amount of future technological advancement. Something that is technically impossible can’t be done even if you throw an infinite amount of money at it. eg. creating a stable wormhole is theoretically impossible, stellar engineering is technically impossible, a particle accelerator disaster is only financially impossible.

1) A particle accelerator disaster
As they say, was evaluated in “2011 report published by the LHC Safety Assessment Group”. Higher energy and greater luminosity means higher risk. Safe for now, but not necessarily in future.

2) A stellar engineering project gone horribly wrong
Yep. “Attempts to prolong their lifespans, extract material, or create new stars. To make a star burn less rapidly, and thus last longer, future stellar engineers would work to remove its excess mass (big stars expend fuel faster)”. Doing that is impossible at present, even in theory. Even the much easier task of extracting material from Jupiter is impossible at present. Extracting material from the Sun using a Sundipper (a spacecraft on a hyperbolic trajectory) is safe. Using a solar-synchronous space elevator ditto, but you do need to know how to safely dispose of the extracted material.

3) A failed attempt to stellify Jupiter
Why would you? OIC, that’s one way to make Jupiter’s moons more habitable, not the best way. It wouldn’t destroy life on Earth, Jupiter is too far away from us and as a star it would only shine like Proxima Centauri, one thousandth of the brightness of the Sun.

4) Screwing up the orbital dynamics of the planets
This one is more of a concern. At present it’s difficult to predict the orbital dynamics of the solar system for even as short a period of time as millions of years into the future. One curious thought that just occurred to me it that a stellar engineering project could actually save a solar solar system whose orbital dynamics had been screwed up – ask me how.

5) The reckless manoeuvring of a warp drive
This is “known as an Alcubierre engine”, yes. The power of such an engine would be negligible, relying as it does upon the Casimir effect. Forget any idea of attaching it to a spacecraft.

6) An artificial wormhole accident
Making a stable wormhole is theoretically impossible. But that wouldn’t necessarily stop idiots from trying. Simplified, even an unstable wormhole could not be created within this solar system, it requires a supernova to create it.

7) A catastrophic Shkadov thruster navigational error
A what? “The Shkadov Thruster setup is simple (in theory): It’s just a colossal, arc-shaped mirror, with the concave side facing the sun. Builders would place the mirror at an arbitrary distance where gravitational attraction from the sun is balanced out by the outward pressure of its radiation. The mirror thus becomes a stable, static satellite in equilibrium between gravity’s tug and sunlight’s push.” They’re right, that would work. Slow and expensive, but not theoretically impossible.

8) Attracting evil aliens
Hmm. A hypervelocity bullet.

9) The return of mutated von Neumann probes
“Say we send out a fleet of exponentially self-replicating von Neumann probes to colonise the Galaxy. They could mutate over time and transform into something quite malevolent.” Hmm. I would never program it that poorly, but …

10) An interplanetary grey goo disaster
“an uncontrollable swarm of nanobots” Hmm.

11) An artificial superintelligence run amok
Better to say an artificial stupidity run amok. “The oft-cited paperclip scenario, in which a poorly programmed AI converts the entire planet into paperclips, conveys the urgency of the problem.” I haven’t heard that cited.

12) Making the solar system meaningless by going extinct
Only we would go extinct, not all life on Earth. Life would start again in a new cycle of advancement.

I was going to rate each of the 12 by what kind of impossible it is, but I need to think more before doing that.

mollwollfumble said:

mollwollfumble said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

12 Ways Humanity Could Destroy The Entire Solar System

We humans are doing a bang-up job of messing up our home planet. But who’s to say we can’t go on to screw things up elsewhere? Here, not listed in any particular order, are 12 unintentional ways we could do some serious damage to our Solar System, too.

more…

Knee Jerk reaction. Nope. Humanity could destroy Earth as we know it, if it tried really really hard for a length of time. Never inadvertently.

The way I’ve found to most thoroughly destroy the Earth is to drop a Kuyper belt object on it. You need a lot of hydrogen bombs to even budge such an object out of its normal orbit.

The second most thorough way for humanity to destroy the Earth would be to turn the entirety of Earth’s oceans into a single hydrogen bomb.

Anything else doesn’t destroy even life on Earth, let alone Earth itself.

In a nutshell, you couldn’t destroy any part of the Solar System without a lot of hydrogen bombs. And by a lot, I mean millions of times as powerful as at the height of the cold war.

OK, past the knee jerk reaction now. They do have a point. Or many of them. A startlingly good article.

I have four scales of impossible: theoretically impossible, technically impossible, financially impossible and politically impossible. Something that is theoretically impossible can’t be done with any amount of future technological advancement. Something that is technically impossible can’t be done even if you throw an infinite amount of money at it. eg. creating a stable wormhole is theoretically impossible, stellar engineering is technically impossible, a particle accelerator disaster is only financially impossible.

1) A particle accelerator disaster
As they say, was evaluated in “2011 report published by the LHC Safety Assessment Group”. Higher energy and greater luminosity means higher risk. Safe for now, but not necessarily in future.

2) A stellar engineering project gone horribly wrong
Yep. “Attempts to prolong their lifespans, extract material, or create new stars. To make a star burn less rapidly, and thus last longer, future stellar engineers would work to remove its excess mass (big stars expend fuel faster)”. Doing that is impossible at present, even in theory. Even the much easier task of extracting material from Jupiter is impossible at present. Extracting material from the Sun using a Sundipper (a spacecraft on a hyperbolic trajectory) is safe. Using a solar-synchronous space elevator ditto, but you do need to know how to safely dispose of the extracted material.

3) A failed attempt to stellify Jupiter
Why would you? OIC, that’s one way to make Jupiter’s moons more habitable, not the best way. It wouldn’t destroy life on Earth, Jupiter is too far away from us and as a star it would only shine like Proxima Centauri, one thousandth of the brightness of the Sun.

4) Screwing up the orbital dynamics of the planets
This one is more of a concern. At present it’s difficult to predict the orbital dynamics of the solar system for even as short a period of time as millions of years into the future. One curious thought that just occurred to me it that a stellar engineering project could actually save a solar solar system whose orbital dynamics had been screwed up – ask me how.

5) The reckless manoeuvring of a warp drive
This is “known as an Alcubierre engine”, yes. The power of such an engine would be negligible, relying as it does upon the Casimir effect. Forget any idea of attaching it to a spacecraft.

6) An artificial wormhole accident
Making a stable wormhole is theoretically impossible. But that wouldn’t necessarily stop idiots from trying. Simplified, even an unstable wormhole could not be created within this solar system, it requires a supernova to create it.

7) A catastrophic Shkadov thruster navigational error
A what? “The Shkadov Thruster setup is simple (in theory): It’s just a colossal, arc-shaped mirror, with the concave side facing the sun. Builders would place the mirror at an arbitrary distance where gravitational attraction from the sun is balanced out by the outward pressure of its radiation. The mirror thus becomes a stable, static satellite in equilibrium between gravity’s tug and sunlight’s push.” They’re right, that would work. Slow and expensive, but not theoretically impossible.

8) Attracting evil aliens
Hmm. A hypervelocity bullet.

9) The return of mutated von Neumann probes
“Say we send out a fleet of exponentially self-replicating von Neumann probes to colonise the Galaxy. They could mutate over time and transform into something quite malevolent.” Hmm. I would never program it that poorly, but …

10) An interplanetary grey goo disaster
“an uncontrollable swarm of nanobots” Hmm.

11) An artificial superintelligence run amok
Better to say an artificial stupidity run amok. “The oft-cited paperclip scenario, in which a poorly programmed AI converts the entire planet into paperclips, conveys the urgency of the problem.” I haven’t heard that cited.

12) Making the solar system meaningless by going extinct
Only we would go extinct, not all life on Earth. Life would start again in a new cycle of advancement.

I was going to rate each of the 12 by what kind of impossible it is, but I need to think more before doing that.

It’s really quite difficult for me to say which of these are theoretically impossible, which are technologically impossible, and which are merely financially impossible. To distinguish them I can say that accelerating a human to twice the speed of light is theoretically impossible. Accelerating a human to 99% of the speed of light is technologically impossible, no amount of future technological advancement will make it possible. Accelerating a gold nanoparticle to 99% of the speed of light is financially impossible.

1) A particle accelerator disaster
Financially impossible

2) A stellar engineering project gone horribly wrong
Technologically impossible

3) A failed attempt to stellify Jupiter
Technologically impossible

4) Screwing up the orbital dynamics of the planets
Financially impossible. There are two ways of thinking of this. One is that the planets are already in a minimum energy configuration so the orbital paths are unconditionally stable against perturbation. The other is that the situation may be chaotic, where a small perturbation may grow exponentially with time. It’s possible to have both at the same time, ie. that the orbital perturbations grow exponentially but are limited to a very small maximum perturbation.

5) The reckless manoeuvring of a warp drive
Theoretically impossible.

6) An artificial wormhole accident
Theoretically impossible.

7) A catastrophic Shkadov thruster navigational error
Technically impossible. The mass of the thruster would have to be as big as a major planet.

8) Attracting evil aliens
The probability of this is dropping rapidly as time progresses. From the possibility of UFOs landing on Earth 60 years ago we’re now down to nothing significant in the visible universe.

9) The return of mutated von Neumann probes
Technologically impossible, or only financially impossible?

10) An interplanetary grey goo disaster
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say theoretically impossible. Replicating nanobots cannot be dominantly inorganic, and that limits their destruction of the solar system to Earth.

11) An artificial superintelligence run amok
Technologically possible, there’s no question of that. But is it financially impossible or only politically impossible?

12) Making the solar system meaningless by going extinct
Possible for extinct humanity. But financially impossible to wipe out all life on Earth,

So the ones we need to look out for (technologically possible) are numbers 1, 4, 8, 11 and 12.