MONEY INCORPORATED DIGEST #49 RELEASED 17 JULY 1995 COMPILED (PLAGARIZED) BY: SLEEPY TODAY'S TOPIC: THE MEANING OF LIFE...(FOR MYC THAT IS...) MONEY INCORPORATED ARE: SLEEPY SONIC FURY CCRIDER THE BIG CHEESE JULIO OFFICER FRIENDLY SEXECUTIONER Well, sorry about my drought of files lately, but I haven't had much time to write, so I thought I'd share the FAQ for my favorite newsgroup with everyone...enjoy! PART I THE CHARTER & HISTORY OF ALT.DESTROY.THE.EARTH The Beginning of the End ------------------------ Alt.destroy.the.earth was created by a group calling itself Society for Human Immigration from Terra (SHIT). The name should, of course, have read 'emigration' (leaving one's home/country/planet/etc for a new one) instead of immigration, which means quite the opposite, and the newsgroup became very silent for a while after the error was publicly noted. However, showing their profound liking of their acronym, the society promptly changed its name to Society of Humans for an Impure Terra and continued operation. [The name 'Society for Emigration from Terra', SET, was suggested, both because of an Egyptian deity and because of the acronym's potential for slogans, eg. "Get SET to go!", but it did not catch on at that time.] The agenda of SHIT was simple: for their various reasons the members wanted to see humanity take to its wings and reach the stars, or at least manage self-supporting space habitats in the near future. The SHITheads, as they called themselves, wanted to hasten Man's progress into space by creating a need for emigration through making the Earth inhospitable. This was to be done with all due haste because the population was rapidly using up planetary resources and it was speculated that the critical point after which humanity couldn't manage a massive space effort was no more than a few decades away. However, the method of enviromental destruction was not to be overtly radical, or needlessly destructive: humanity was meant to survive and be able to colonize the solar system. After a few months the group fell silent again for a long period and was then revived by the destructionalists. The Destructionalists, or How I Learned to Love the Bomb -------------------------------------------------------- The destructionalist approach to alt.destroy.the.earth is literal; Earth is to be destroyed one way or the other. The reasons behind this conviction vary from individual to individual and include for example such matters as thorough disappointment in the human race and aesthetic pleasure. Schools of destructionalism disagree on the extent and the methods of the havoc to be wrought - both because of ideological preferences, as some merely want to do away with the human race and leave the animals, others to demolish the whole planet, and due to practical concerns, for humanity is not able to annihilate the planet as of yet, and a sufficient technological breakthrough in the near future is extremely unlikely. The major destructionalist approaches to destroying the Earth can be classified as follows: 1. Destruction of all civilization. 2. Destruction of all humans. 3. Destruction of all surface-dwelling animals. 4. Destruction of all animals. 5. Destruction of all life. 6. Destruction of the entire planet. When discussing methods of achieving 3., 4. or 5., ways of preventing re-evolution are usually mentioned. "The meek shall die out" ------------------------ The Elitists plot to destroy mankind, except for a few selected, high- quality specimes, ie. themselves and those they consider fit to survive, or just plain necessary for their comfort. On the remains of the old, decadent, weak civilization they plan to build their own proud culture to suit the 'overmen'. The Elitists have been very silent lately. The Satirical Viewpoint, or the 'Evil Twin' ------------------------------------------- A fourth way of looking at alt.destroy.the.earth is as the refuge of persons tired with today's rampant ecohysteria, a den of a somewhat macabre variety of humor, a safe haven where you can cheerfully cry out that you like to spray CFCs about just for the hell of it, declare your love for the fur of some particularly rare animal, gloat over the extinction of some miserable, unfit to survive species that everyone else seems to be mourning for, publish designs of new, innovative methods of messing up recycling operations, delight us all with ridiculous results of "enviromental thinking" (the 33 step procedure for changing a light bulb in a nuclear power plant is an excellent example) etc etc. A.d.t.e is the evil twin to alt.save.the.earth, and it should look the part. This is the place for those enviromentally unsound ideas, twisted tales of destruction, parodies of "green" thought, cheerful discussions on the more spectacular uses of nuclear physics, and the like. We welcome you to participate, to look at the quest for preserving the status quo of the ecosphere from a different angle, and to share your wicked designs. PART II THE ETIQUETTE OF A.D.T.E. x^n --- Hard figures are always appreciated, especially in destructionalist essays. Many postings have suffered from a lacking sense of proportion and sometimes even from VERY bad science. ("If we could just change this natural constant...") The Earth is VAST. Look at the numbers. Radius: 6370 km Equatoric circumference: 40 075 km Mass: 6 * 10^24 kg Please bear in mind that the Earth is not exactly a sphere - the radius given is a median value. For a more extensive list of relevant data, constants and equations, have a look at an encyclopedia and/or some basic texts on physics and chemistry. A.d.t.e. is in dire need of people with solid knowledge on geology and meteorology. Bacteriology, physics and astronomy would also come in handy. "We will all go together when we go" ------------------------------------ Asking a destructionalist whether or not he or she intends to be included in the destruction is pointless and rude. A true destructionalist's answer is "Of course". As a matter of fact, asking ANY poster on a.d.t.e. publicly whether or not he or she is serious is pointless and rude. "Oh! You monsters!" ------------------- Postings declaring the a.d.t.e:ers in general to be evil, sick, infantile, demented, sexually frustrated, godless heathens et cetera ad nauseam are not appreciated. The same goes for the "Get a Life"-school of posters and the unholy practises celebrated in alt.cascade. If you feel any need to respond to such drivel, please do it via private e-mail to keep the group clean and the offender's mailbox messy. People posting queries about a.d.t.e:ers' enviromental attitudes deserve everything they get. APPENDIX A Suggested Reading Science fiction in general: Piers Anthony: Chton Pthor Isaac Asimov: Foundation and Earth Pebble in the Sky Robots and Empire Greg Bear: Eon Eternity (Sequel to Eon) The Forge of God Anvil of Stars Blood Music The Wind from a Burning Woman (A short story in a collection by the same name) John Brunner: Stand on Zanzibar The Sheep Look Up Samuel Butler: Erehwon Karel Capek: War with the Newts Arthur C. Clarke: Childhood's End Philip K. Dick: Dr. Bloodmoney C.S. Friedman: In Conquest Born Mary Gentle: Ancient Light David Gerrold: War Against the Chtorr R.A. Heinlein: The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress Stephen King: The Stand Megan Lindholm: Alien Earth Larry Niven: A World Out of Time Protector At the Core (in 'Neutron Star') Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle: Footfall Lucifer's Hammer Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle & Michael Flynn: Fallen Angels Michael Reaves & Steve Perry: Dome Fred Saberhagen: The Berserker novels E.E. "Doc" Smith: The Lensmen series Michael Swanwick: Vacuum Flowers Stations of the Tide Kurt Vonnegut: Cat's Cradle Walter Jon Williams: Aristoi John Wyndham: Day of the Triffids Out of the Deeps (a.ka. Kraken) Black holes: David Brin: Earth James P. Hogan: Thrice Upon a Time The Genesis Machine Larry Niven: The Hole Man (in a collection named 'A Hole in Space') John Varley: Lollipop and the Tar Baby (in a collection named 'The Barbie Murders') [?]: The Krone Experiment Nonfiction: K. Eric Drexler: Engines of Creation & Chris Peterson, with Gayle Pergamit: Unbounding the Future J.B. Haldane: Daedalus, or Science and the Future * Kevin Kelley: Out of Control James Lovelock: The Ages of Gaia Lynn Margolis: Microcosmos John McPhee: The Curve of Nuclear Binding Energy Richard Rhodes: The Making of the Atomic Bomb Robert Serber: The Los Alamos Primer: the First Lectures on How to Build an Atomic Bomb * = An essay available via FTP from ocf.berkeley.edu, directory /pub/Library/Literature under the name Daedalus or on the Web as http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~lizi/Daedalus.html APPENDIX B Movies of global destruction and related matters Nuclear Warfare and Joyous Accidents: The Bedford Incident By Dawn's Early Light Day After Dr. Strangelove Fail Safe Miracle Mile Testament All Things Bacterial: The Omega Man Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Twilight of the Dead Andromeda Strain Science Fiction in General: Calossus: the Forbin Project Dark Star Silent Running Terminator Terminator 2: Judgement Day The Thing This Island Earth (1954) Unclassified: The Quiet Earth ---RRRRrr "Oh, sorry, Mr. Endangered Species of Squirrel" rrRRR--- As usual, comments, suggestions and spelling & grammar flames are welcome. Most questions regarding the Charter and the a.d.t.e. way of thinking should be directed into the newsgroup itself, as the answers here will be more representive. -- Esa Perki| "I should honor you? Why?" eperkio@cc.helsinki.fi - Prometheus to Zeus according to Goethe IRCer Shade Here is the list of possibilities (0.0.5): 1. Nuclear explosions. This is a relatively easy way but not very thorough. At least ten pro cent of the population survives. But the bang is something some people don't want to go without. The problem is getting the world leaders to blow up the world. 2. Equip all nuclear power plants and military installations with pentiums(with bug). Hoping one processor can destroy the installation. 2. Throwing asteroids on earth. One proposal is attaching rockets to the asteroids and making a game of it. This should be fun. The problem is getting there. Maybe somebody out there has a few rockets to spare. 3. Letting the aliens do it. The only problem is finding dangerous aliens and getting them to destroy the earth. The advantage is we don't have to do it ourselves. But doing it ourselves is more fun. By the way we are working on this. The NASA is looking for aliens and television has reached such a level that every sane alien that sees it should want to destroy us. The problem is they still aren't here. 4. Pulling the moon into the earth. I think this would destroy a lot. The added bonus is longer days, so we can do more every day. The problem is where to get the rope(Dupont is proposed but it is too expensive to buy their total production for 6 years). The rope should be very strong maybe even kevlar isn't strong enough. I don't know about this. I'm not familiar with material sciences. 6. Making a self reproducing machine that eats the earth. It can be possible but the problem is how to create a machine from just any kind of junk found in the earth. What to do if the machine is in a region where some material it needs is scarce. 7. Using advanced genetics, create a being which will dig itself a couple of miles underground. It will then create a small explosion. Each little piece of its body left by the explosion would then turn into a new "burrower," which would then explode, creating many many more. Eventually, the entire world would collapse due to all the underground explosions. This has the same problem as the proposal above. (The ranking is lower because genitics and blowing up is a strange combination (I think)) 8. Pushing the earth into the sun by using mirrors. If you put mirrors to deflect the sun's rays and solar wind in the right direction then you should slow down the earth and it will fall into the sun. The problem is it happens very slow. By the way this is happening already by the Poynting- Robertson-draft. But this effect isn't very big. 9. Burning the earth with mirrors. This can be done in principle. Now we only have to find a way to put up the mirrors in orbit around the earth. Maybe we should first paint the earth black. There are people who are busy with just that. These pavers will drive around over the surface so they will burn first. The painting of the earth alone is enough to get the temperature up to a few hundred degrees centigrade so this will kill all people to. 10.Wait about 50-100 billion years. The sun will definitely die, but that doesn't destroy the earth (unless it gets big enough during its red giant stage). However, later on the universe either dies the heat death (boo) or cycles back into the Big Crunch (yay). Well, 2 out of 3 ain't too bad. 11.Creating a virus. This will probably not kill all people. It will just create a lot of suffering. A proposition is using an existing one : smallpox. But still it needs a second go to kill the rest of the people. 12.Build this Really Big Rocket and thrust the Earth towards the galactic center (there's supposed to be the Mother Of All Black Holes there). 13.Hope that a big alien boy will think "Wow, what a neat rock; it looks just like a marble on a rocket!" while the Really Big Rocket is thrusting the Earth towards the Galactic Center. 14.Jumping up at noon. If the sun is above you and you jump up you push yourself closer. If you are closer you are attracted more (the gravitational field is bigger there) so the earth is pulled in the direction of the sun. Don't expect to see the effect. It is so little maybe it gets lost in quantum fluctuations. The effect can be enlarged by working in the daytime in sky scrapers and sleeping at night on the first floor. 15.Make your own black hole. You take a lot of mass and compress it very hard. At some point it will suck up material out of the earth and suck up the whole of the earth. After this the Hawking radiation will destroy the black hole. There are only two problems with this. You have to compress the material to super-nuclear densities if you want to do it with a mass less than a few solar masses. ( if you have a mass bigger than 1.5 solar masses you have solved this problem but this mass can't be found in the solar system). You can try and look for little black holes but they evaporate very fast. Maybe someone knows a solution to this. That would make this proposal a very good one. 16.Use cow flatulence. Let all cows in the world fart at the same time. I don't know how to get enough gases to blow up the earth. 17.Make a time machine and copy the earth. The problem is the time machine. And one big enough to copy the earth. 18.Building many mass accelerators on a place with very good energy access, e.g. Mercury, to produce large amounts of anti-matter. When enough is produced, transport it to Earth and turn off the containment devices for the anti-matter and watch the fireworks. The obvious problem is getting there and doing it (Needs lot's of support). And handling anti-matter isn't easy so we have to find a place where it doesn't get annihilated before use. 19.Stop thinking. Descartes said "I think therefore I am" so if we stop thinking we will stop being. If we stop the thinking of the earth it will stop existing. This is a very long shot and it will not be effective. 20.Take a electron accelerate it and shoot it at the sun. If we accelerate it to a speed little under the light speed (c) it will be accelerated to light speed in the free fall. This makes it's mass explode and if we make sure the path crosses earth it will collide on earth. The electron is by this time so heavy it destroys it. Relativistic physics says this doesn't work. Classical physics says the electron doesn't get hevier. So this is one of the "I don't understand physics ideas" 21.Destroying the enviroment. This is something apte wants to do so this has to be discouraged. (It won't destroy the earth) And people will survive this together with the cock-raoch. 22.Shrink the earth. The problem is we don't have a shrinkage beam or something like that. 23.Getting God to do it. Sin away and maybe he will destroy the earth. The problem is according to the bible this has been done and God saved some people to repopulate the earth. 24.Split the earth up in lots of tiny bits. This is difficult because the gravity works against it. 25.Put 6 billon people on earth and give them the possibility they will destroy the earth. We are workin on this. But probably the cockroaches will survive. That would be a shame so the more destructive plans are advised. 26.Blow up the moon with nukes. The litter from the moon will destroy all life. Needs support. The nukes have to be fired. 27.Making the information super-highway. If we send out information one way around the world we send energy around and therefore we send mass around. This way we create a reaction effect that rotates the earth harder. This makes it eventualy blow up. The way to make everybody sending information the same way is telling them it goes faster if you send it that way. This idea needs lots of support because information isn't very heavy. 28.Make a vodoo doll of the earth and rolling it down an elevator. I think this won't work but maybe somebody can make a witch doctor so mad he would try it. The advantage is it doesn't need much support. 29.Make solopsist doctines the universal law by letting a few politicians sign it. Then kill the solopsists. They state everything (including earth) exists only in their minds. So everything will get destroyed. This is cheap, needs little support and what do we have to loose. 30.Use total conversion of matter into energy as a powerfull weapon. The total conversion of between 1 and 10 kg of matter would be enough to burn the earth. This is according to E=MC^2. The problem is to produce between 0.5 and 5 kg of antimatter to create te total conversion. If we want to destroy the earth this way we need a lot of mass to convert. 31.If you get drunk everything gets hevier. If everybody gets drunk maybe the earth will collapse. This plan might not work but it certainly will create funny effects and will destroy society (not because the gravity effect btw) 32.Speed up the earth using rockets. If the day is reduced to 3 minutes the earth will blow apart. The rockets by the way will create a belt aroud the earth that takes care of the momentum problem. (the band sould be in space to prevent friction that puts back the momentum. 33.Shoot the moon into the earth with rockets. The problem is the number of rockets, or the size of the explosion. 34.Making the earth resonate by producing enough noise. I don't know if this can be done because you need a high quality factor. And i don't think the quality factor of the earth is high enough to make it resonate with all the radios in the world. - Ok the last piece of information: A few facts about the earth: The earth is 6*10^24 kg radius :6400 km energy needed to create an extra asteroid belt aroud the sun : 2.3*10^31 J blow the earth away from the sun : 5.4*10^36 J blow something from the earth into space : 6*10^7 J/kg Energy sources Earth's kinetic energy : 1.2*10^31 J ---end the beautiful .faq file :)--- -- "When I collect two solar masses of AOL Disks, I will use them to detonate the Sun" Web Page URL: ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/po/poulosio/poulosio.html Mad Max, Ensign, TRES Corps, Jihad. Finger for more.