How to Destroy the Earth

I found this website a few years back. I'm not really sure what I was searching for that led me to a site about methods to destroy the earth. I'm also not really sure what would inspire someone to spend this much time thinking about methods of destroying the earth. Here's the preamble to his presentation.

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.

The author of the site has tried to include every conceivable method of actually destroying the earth. One of the more feasible ideas:

Annihilated by an equivalent quantity of antimatter

You will need: An entire planet Earth made from antimatter

Comments: With a significantly smaller amount of antimatter, you can simply blow the Earth up - see later.

Also,

Cooked in a solar oven

You will need: Means for focusing a good few percent of the Sun's energy output directly on the Earth.

Preliminary calculations suggest you would need roughly two trillion square kilometres of mirror.

So, yeah, it's pretty hard to do. He does make a distinction between destroying the earth and killing off all the people on the earth. Killing off the human population is much easier.

Poke around his website. He's got a lot of interesting articles to read, like Things to consider when naming your child.