How do I get rid of the Earth or local Solar System?
Assuming interstellar travel, and self-sufficient colonies in other star systems, what are some methods of destroying the Earth while leaving minimal impact on the colonies?
Context
I would like to keep Earth-based culture and languages intact, without having to deal with "modern" (modern being relative to the story being told) baggage of maintaining Earth's politics and needs.
In short, I'd like to keep things like English, without forcing the inhabitants of the universe to be concerned with resources on Earth, or protecting Earth, or revisiting Earth, etc etc
What I've Considered:
I think the most probable way to knock off Earth is to wipe out the local Solar system with it. In my limited scientific knowledge, this would probably require knocking out the Sun.
Waiting for the Sun to die naturally could leave too much time for colonies to advance, significantly changing the technology, culture, and a myriad of other things.
The question then became, how do I make the Sun kick the bucket early? Perhaps collision with another body, perhaps another Star, or planet? What are the repercussions of such a collision?
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2 answers
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A few easy steps to destroying Earth:
- Get hold of a fairly massive celestial body. It could be a star, a rogue planet (as PipperChip mentioned), or something completely different.
- Put it in a position so that it is orbiting the galaxy at the same rate the solar system does - except much higher up or lower down perpendicular to the galactic plane.
- Propel the thing in a direction perpendicular to the galactic plane. Perhaps you could accelerate it using a black hole. (This happens to stars near the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. Unfortunately, the supermassive black hole isn't directly above or below the solar system, but we can make do with a smaller one.)
- Make sure the thing hits Earth - or passes by it on the side, perturbing it enough to chuck it out of the plane of the solar system.
Alternatively, you could (well, not in our universe) do what Hactar did in Life, the Universe and Everything, the third (but not final) book in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy: Create a junction connecting the heart of every star, turning the universe into a supernova. In this case, you could simply connect the Sun to another star, or - even better - the Earth to another star.
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This method seems a bit extreme... if you want to destroy Earth's politics but keep their culture, there are far easier methods. However, some solutions anyway:
Nova Bombs
In Andromeda, all Commonwealth warships carry Nova Bombs. These are bombs powerful enough to cause a star to nova by negating its own gravity, thus causing a nova due to the pressure and a lack of gravity containing it. According to the wiki, this nova causes an explosion of hydrogen undergoing fusion, which obliterates everything in its path, destroying the entire solar system. There is a theoretical way to do this, using a rotating ceramic disc above powerful electromagnets, although whether it could be done on stellar scale is doubtful.
Scaling down...
Planetary Destruction
There are plenty of fictional weapons capable of destroying entire planets, most notably in the Star Trek series. For example, the Xindi superweapon was a directed energy beam capable of collapsing entire planets. However, my personal favourite idea for destroying planets is a Doomsday device, which would kill all life and render the planet uninhabitable for a few centuries at least, but it leaves the option to re-settle the planet later.
Keeping Culture Alive
If you want to keep Earth's cultures, you need their people. There's no doubt about that. So perhaps you should take a few (say 5) people of each culture you want from Earth to survive the annihilation and come with you. You could even select these people by posing as a human for a few years and running a high-tech selection program on Earth's inhabitants.
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