Is there anyway to destroy a planet?

Question

besides lanching missles at it,

Answer 1

      Put humans on it.  Just look at what they did to Earth.

Answer 2

Yes, the Starship Enterprise could zap any planet out of existence...  

Answer 3

i'm sure i don't know. anything explosive might become fuel. i think the idea about knocking it out of orbit might work. why would you want to know a way to destroy something that could do you no harm and probably helps protect you?

Answer 4

No way you can.

There is no missile that can do that.  

Answer 5

I think we're doing a pretty good job of doing it right now.

Answer 6

well there are asteroids big enough to completely destroy the earth so i would say with one of those

Answer 7

who would wanna do that?

Answer 8

you can throw a really fat person at it

[you came to the right place...lol]

Answer 9

It's not easy.

Answer 10

yes, keep on polluting the world and cutting down trees.

it's working just fine now.

Answer 11

Yup, follow the human example.

Answer 12

yea h bomb or blocking out the sun

Answer 13

I don't know. But before you decide to destroy the planet let me know. So I can take the next space shuttle to Mars.  

Answer 14

it is highly questionable as to whether you could destroy a planet, no matter how big of an asteroid you hit it with. The best way to destroy a planet would be to knock it out of its orbit, so that it gets dragged into the sun. But I have no idea how you could accomplish that.

Answer 15

Nothing in our arsenal could possible destroy Jupiter, or any planet for that matter.

The best way I could think of would be to slowly chip away at the planet with multiple missiles/bombs. It would take hundreds, if not thousands of years, but that would probably be one of the only ways to do it.

One more radical theory would be to dig a hole into it's core, and blow that thing up. The increased pressure would upset the hydrostatic equilibrium, and would make the job a whole lot easier. If we kept bombing the core, then it wouldn't have a time to pull back together with gravity, and would start to break the interior of the planet, and make it crack. Then we could start bombing surface, and then it might break apart more easily.

But why we would want to blow up a planet I would not know. But I completely understand the inner mad scientist calling :)

But this idea would only work for a rocky planet.

For a gas giant, I am at a complete loss seeing as they are huge. The best way I could think of would be to drag another star into the picture. That would also work for destroying rocky planets.

Interesting question though. It seems like a simple task when in fact it isn't. We could probably blow pluto up with the power of a couple hundred thousand H-bombs.

And if you want to go the old fashioned way, you could pick at it yourself. :)

EDIT: Oh my gosh, this completely slipped my mind. Hurtilling a huge object towards it would definately start to break it apart.

Answer 16

global warming?

or

pollution but that takes a lot of time

Answer 17

Again through sheer ignorance of all things space, someone gets the scale of things completely wrong.

The Earth is 6 billion trillion tonnes. You could destroy it by firing something the size of the moon at it, if you had the unlimited energy to move the moon.

H Bombs – garbage.  The asteroid that hit the dinos delivered the energy of 100,000 atomic bombs -  that did a pretty bad job on the atmosphere, but did nothing to the Earth as a whole.  

Sonny, you have no concept of the size of a planet.  Nor have most of the other answerers.  

_____________________________________

Asteroids – people get confused with “destroying life” and “destroying the world”.  Most of the asteroids that could threaten us have at most the potential for causing extinctions.  Other than that, they will not bother the planet as a whole.

Please folks, remember you live in a very thin gaseous envelope called the atmosphere.  That is what is threatened by asteroid impact, not the solid Earth.

The Earth represents about 1.2 million times tha mass of its atmosphere.

Answer 18

Get a Death Star?

it depends on whether you want to obliterate it of just render it uninhabitable...

Answer 19

Yes... Simultaneous human gas combustion...