How to destroy the earth (theoretically speaking of course)

Posted on March 30, 2005 at 12:08 AM

"Destroying the Earth is not as easy as pressing a big red button. It takes decades of hard work."

So, you've got your mind set on destroying the earth, or at least enslaving it's inhabitants to do your bidding. There's no changing your mind, no second guesses. It's apart of your five year plan. But where do you start? How does someone go about destroying the Earth?

Where to start?

First you need a plan, a mission statement, or if you will, a memo. Enter the Evil Plan Generator. What you do is simply fill out the form and use it as a rough outline of what you might envision your evil master plan to be. Or you can just scroll to the bottom of the page and hit the random button to automatically generate one. Here's the Evil Plan that I just threw together:

Congratulations on being the creator of a new Evil Plan (tm)!

Your objective is simple: Destroy the Earth.

Your motive is a little bit more complex: Power

Stage One

To begin your plan, you must first incapacitate a diplomat. This will cause the world to sign up for life insurance policies, bewildered by your arrival. Who is this despoiler of all that is good and nice and true? Where did they come from? And why do they look so good in a corporate suit?

Stage Two

Next, you must destroy the Moon (ooh, tides!). This will all be done from a underground secret headquarters of doom, a mysterious place of unrivaled dark glory. Upon seeing this, the world will wet their pants, as countless hordes of ninjas hasten to do your every bidding.

Stage Three

Finally, you must send forth your thermonuclear missiles, bringing about an unending cacophony of screams. Your name shall become synonymous with fuzzy bunnies, and no man will ever again dare interrupt your sentences. Everyone will bow before your mind-boggling insanity, and the world will have no choice but to give you control of the planet.

Research methodologies

OK, now we have a better idea of what our objective is and possible ways of achieving our goals. But the Earth, as we all know, is rather large. It will take vast amounts of economic resources, intelligence, and strategic planning to destroy it. Should you need assistance in this area I suggest you read the quintessential guide on How to destroy the Earth. This humorous yet interesting read is a filled with well thought-out hypotheses and facts to illustrate the likelyhood of Earth's demise. Pick a scenario that best suits your current situation, goals, and monetary status.

A few notes of interest I found throughout the article that would be quite helpful:

• "You should always, always, always have an escape route."
• "Take a camera. Most of the methods listed above are incredibly spectacular and witnessing them will probably be once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for you, so remember to capture the moment."

Another tip I think would be helpful for all you Earth destroyers out there is something I learned from watching the Incredibles which is "Don't monologue". I can see it now, there you are poised to destroy the Earth. Everything is going according to plan until you stop to deliver your monologue. Something along the lines about how powerful you are and how weak everyone else is and how you've been wronged in the past and now are going to seek your revenge. Just remember, if you feel the sudden urge to monologue, DON'T! Just try to block out the temptation and move forward with your plans. No need to let all your planning and resources go to waste on a worthless monologue. Only amateurs monologue.

Start a blog detailing your Earth destroying plans

With all the work and planning that would go into destroying the Earth you should at least attempt to document your efforts. So if for some reason you fail, an up-and-coming nerr do well will be able to benefit from the knowledge you've provided and might be able to learn from the mistakes you've made. Naming the blog would be easy. The guide on How to destroy the Earth is full of enigmatic, cool, hip, nonsensical, words and phrases that would be great for a blog detailing your Earth destroying plans. Just don't be a loser and use something stupid like your name as the title of the blog (oh dammit) I suggest the following:

would-be-earth-destroyer
stable strangelet
strange matter
media hoo-hah
pretty much zero
worryingly plausible
ripped asunder
total existence failure

Another tip would be to go with a free service like blogger to host your evil how-to. There's no sense wasting money on a blog when those funds could go to more practical things like Von Neumann machines, Relativistic Heavy Ion Colliders, antimatter or black holes. Those things can't be cheap.

Also if you followed my advice and plan on taking some pictures of your follies, be sure to put them up on Flickr so the rest of us can see your progress.

Practice, Practice, Practice!

So hopefully by now you have a good idea of what needs to be accomplished to achieve your evil plans. Since the average person probably doesn't have experience with things like meteors or nuclear weapons, I recommend practicing your skills using Netdisaster. It allows you to get practical hands-on experience in a virtual environment. This is a great tool because, let's face it, if you were out in the real world hurtling asteroids at the Earth someone might notice.

At your disposal are meteors, nuclear bombs, alien attacks, or gigantic cups of hot coffee just to name a few. You can get started by entering a website name, select your method, set the repair level to massive (if available), set the control to mouse (which will allow you to hone your aiming skills) and hit go. I took the liberty of documenting one of my attempts so you the reader can get a glimpse of what this great tool has to offer. Here are some before, during, and after screen shots. (No Kadavys were harmed during course of this exercise)

Caveat: This website allegedly does not work on browsers made for the Mac (something about transparency yadda-yadda...) Since I do not own a Mac I am not able to try it. If anyone could confirm this I would greatly appreciate it.

Conclusion and some final thoughts

I hope to have given you some insight on how to destroy the Earth. It appears to be somewhat of a daunting task, but if you put your mind to it you can accomplish anything. Don't let 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000 metric tons of dirt and metal intimidate you.

Disclaimer: The JoeSchmidt.com legal department won't even touch this one so the usual the "Don't try this at home" disclaimers apply. I accept no responsibility for the destruction of the Earth or any other celestial body. If you plan on using the above information to destroy the Earth just give me some advanced notice so I can make preparations to leave the planet. Or if time becomes an issue, at least appoint me to a position within your post-apocolyptic cabinet. (It would be the least you could do)

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