Top 10 Ways to Destroy the Earth (Wizbang Pop!)

This, my friends, is pure genius. Scientists actually taking the time to construct a list that everyone can appreciate. It just makes sense.

The Earth was 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.

10) Total existence failure

You will need: nothing

Method: No method. Simply sit back and twiddle your thumbs as, completely by chance, all 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms making up the planet Earth suddenly, simultaneously and spontaneously cease to exist. Note: the odds against this actually ever occurring are considerably greater than a googolplex to one. Failing this, some kind of arcane (read: scientifically laughable) probability-manipulation device may be employed.

Utter, utter rubbish.

9) Gobbled up by strangelets

You will need: a stable strangelet
Method: Hijack control of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Brookhaven National Laboratory, Long Island, New York. Use the RHIC to create and maintain a stable strangelet. Keep it stable for as long as it takes to absorb the entire Earth into a mass of strange quarks. Keeping the strangelet stable is incredibly difficult once it has absorbed the stabilizing machinery, but creative solutions may be possible.

A while back, there was some media hoo-hah about the possibility of this actually happening at the RHIC, but in actuality the chances of a stable strangelet forming are pretty much zero.

Earth's final resting place: a huge glob of strange matter.

Complete list below, but see Livescience.com for break downs and probabilities.

8) Sucked into a microscopic black hole
7) Blown up by matter/antimatter reaction
6) Destroyed by vacuum energy detonation
5) Sucked into a giant black hole
4) Meticulously and systematically deconstructed
3) Pulverized by impact with blunt instrument
2) Eaten by von Neumann machines
1) Hurled into the Sun