MONEY INCORPORATED DIGEST #49
RELEASED 17 JULY 1995
COMPILED (PLAGARIZED) BY:  SLEEPY

TODAY'S TOPIC:  THE MEANING OF LIFE...(FOR MYC THAT IS...)

MONEY INCORPORATED ARE: SLEEPY
                        SONIC FURY
                        CCRIDER
                        THE BIG CHEESE
                        JULIO
                        OFFICER FRIENDLY
                        SEXECUTIONER


Well, sorry about my drought of files lately, but I haven't had much time
to write, so I thought I'd share the FAQ for my favorite newsgroup with
everyone...enjoy!


                          PART I

       THE CHARTER & HISTORY OF ALT.DESTROY.THE.EARTH


The Beginning of the End
------------------------

Alt.destroy.the.earth was created by a group calling itself
Society for Human Immigration from Terra (SHIT).  The name
should, of course, have read 'emigration' (leaving one's
home/country/planet/etc for a new one) instead of immigration,
which means quite the opposite, and the newsgroup became very
silent for a while after the error was publicly noted.  However,
showing their profound liking of their acronym, the society
promptly changed its name to Society of Humans for an Impure
Terra and continued operation.

[The name 'Society for Emigration from Terra', SET, was
suggested, both because of an Egyptian deity and because
of the acronym's potential for slogans, eg. "Get SET to go!",
but it did not catch on at that time.]

The agenda of SHIT was simple: for their various reasons the
members wanted to see humanity take to its wings and reach
the stars, or at least manage self-supporting space habitats
in the near future.  The SHITheads, as they called themselves,
wanted to hasten Man's progress into space by creating a need
for emigration through making the Earth inhospitable.  This was
to be done with all due haste because the population was rapidly
using up planetary resources and it was speculated that the
critical point after which humanity couldn't manage a massive
space effort was no more than a few decades away.  However, the
method of enviromental destruction was not to be overtly radical,
or needlessly destructive: humanity was meant to survive and be
able to colonize the solar system.

After a few months the group fell silent again for a long period
and was then revived by the destructionalists.


The Destructionalists, or How I Learned to Love the Bomb
--------------------------------------------------------

The destructionalist approach to alt.destroy.the.earth is literal;
Earth is to be destroyed one way or the other.  The reasons behind
this conviction vary from individual to individual and include for
example such matters as thorough disappointment in the human race
and aesthetic pleasure.

Schools of destructionalism disagree on the extent and the methods
of the havoc to be wrought - both because of ideological
preferences, as some merely want to do away with the human race and
leave the animals, others to demolish the whole planet, and due
to practical concerns, for humanity is not able to annihilate the
planet as of yet, and a sufficient technological breakthrough in
the near future is extremely unlikely.


The major destructionalist approaches to destroying the Earth
can be classified as follows:

   1. Destruction of all civilization.
   2. Destruction of all humans.
   3. Destruction of all surface-dwelling animals.
   4. Destruction of all animals.
   5. Destruction of all life.
   6. Destruction of the entire planet.

When discussing methods of achieving 3., 4. or 5., ways of preventing
re-evolution are usually mentioned.


"The meek shall die out"
------------------------

The Elitists plot to destroy mankind, except for a few selected, high-
quality specimes, ie. themselves and those they consider fit to
survive, or just plain necessary for their comfort.  On the remains
of the old, decadent, weak civilization they plan to build their own
proud culture to suit the 'overmen'.

The Elitists have been very silent lately.


The Satirical Viewpoint, or the 'Evil Twin'
-------------------------------------------

A fourth way of looking at alt.destroy.the.earth is as the refuge
of persons tired with today's rampant ecohysteria, a den of a somewhat
macabre variety of humor, a safe haven where you can cheerfully cry out
that you like to spray CFCs about just for the hell of it, declare your
love for the fur of some particularly rare animal, gloat over the
extinction of some miserable, unfit to survive species that everyone
else seems to be mourning for, publish designs of new, innovative
methods of messing up recycling operations, delight us all with
ridiculous results of "enviromental thinking" (the 33 step procedure
for changing a light bulb in a nuclear power plant is an excellent
example) etc etc.


A.d.t.e is the evil twin to alt.save.the.earth, and it should look
the part.  This is the place for those enviromentally unsound ideas,
twisted tales of destruction, parodies of "green" thought, cheerful
discussions on the more spectacular uses of nuclear physics, and the
like.  We welcome you to participate, to look at the quest for
preserving the status quo of the ecosphere from a different angle,
and to share your wicked designs.



                          PART II

                 THE ETIQUETTE OF A.D.T.E.


x^n
---

Hard figures are always appreciated, especially in destructionalist
essays.  Many postings have suffered from a lacking sense of proportion
and sometimes even from VERY bad science.  ("If we could just change
this natural constant...")  The Earth is VAST.  Look at the numbers.

Radius: 6370 km
Equatoric circumference: 40 075 km
Mass: 6 * 10^24 kg

Please bear in mind that the Earth is not exactly a sphere - the radius
given is a median value.  For a more extensive list of relevant data,
constants and equations, have a look at an encyclopedia and/or some
basic texts on physics and chemistry.

A.d.t.e. is in dire need of people with solid knowledge on geology and
meteorology.  Bacteriology, physics and astronomy would also come in
handy.


"We will all go together when we go"
------------------------------------

Asking a destructionalist whether or not he or she intends to be
included in the destruction is pointless and rude.  A true
destructionalist's answer is "Of course".

As a matter of fact, asking ANY poster on a.d.t.e. publicly whether
or not he or she is serious is pointless and rude.


"Oh! You monsters!"
-------------------

Postings declaring the a.d.t.e:ers in general to be evil, sick,
infantile, demented, sexually frustrated, godless heathens
et cetera ad nauseam are not appreciated.  The same goes for the
"Get a Life"-school of posters and the unholy practises celebrated
in alt.cascade.

If you feel any need to respond to such drivel, please do it via
private e-mail to keep the group clean and the offender's mailbox
messy.

People posting queries about a.d.t.e:ers' enviromental attitudes
deserve everything they get.



                             APPENDIX A
                          Suggested Reading

Science fiction in general:

Piers Anthony:  Chton
                Pthor

Isaac Asimov:  Foundation and Earth
               Pebble in the Sky
               Robots and Empire

Greg Bear:  Eon
            Eternity (Sequel to Eon)
            The Forge of God
            Anvil of Stars
            Blood Music
            The Wind from a Burning Woman
            (A short story in a collection by the same name)

John Brunner:  Stand on Zanzibar
               The Sheep Look Up

Samuel Butler:  Erehwon

Karel Capek:  War with the Newts

Arthur C. Clarke:  Childhood's End

Philip K. Dick:  Dr. Bloodmoney

C.S. Friedman:  In Conquest Born

Mary Gentle:  Ancient Light

David Gerrold:  War Against the Chtorr

R.A. Heinlein:  The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

Stephen King:  The Stand

Megan Lindholm:  Alien Earth

Larry Niven:  A World Out of Time
              Protector
              At the Core (in 'Neutron Star')

Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle:  Footfall
                                Lucifer's Hammer

Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle & Michael Flynn:  Fallen Angels

Michael Reaves & Steve Perry:  Dome

Fred Saberhagen:  The Berserker novels

E.E. "Doc" Smith:  The Lensmen series

Michael Swanwick:  Vacuum Flowers
                   Stations of the Tide

Kurt Vonnegut: Cat's Cradle

Walter Jon Williams:  Aristoi

John Wyndham:  Day of the Triffids
               Out of the Deeps (a.ka. Kraken)


Black holes:

David Brin:  Earth

James P. Hogan:  Thrice Upon a Time
                 The Genesis Machine

Larry Niven:  The Hole Man (in a collection named 'A Hole in Space')

John Varley:  Lollipop and the Tar Baby (in a collection named
              'The Barbie Murders')

[?]:  The Krone Experiment

Nonfiction:

K. Eric Drexler:  Engines of Creation

& Chris Peterson, with Gayle Pergamit:  Unbounding the Future

J.B. Haldane:  Daedalus, or Science and the Future *

Kevin Kelley:  Out of Control

James Lovelock:  The Ages of Gaia

Lynn Margolis:  Microcosmos

John McPhee:  The Curve of Nuclear Binding Energy

Richard Rhodes:  The Making of the Atomic Bomb

Robert Serber:  The Los Alamos Primer: the First Lectures on How to
                Build an Atomic Bomb

* = An essay available via FTP from ocf.berkeley.edu, directory
    /pub/Library/Literature under the name Daedalus or on the
    Web as http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~lizi/Daedalus.html


                             APPENDIX B
            Movies of global destruction and related matters

<The following list is in its infancy and as of yet contains names
 only.  The final format of this list is undecided, and suggestions
 and additional data about the films in question are welcomed.
 Years of production and director names are appreciated very much -
 I haven't yet taken the time to visit a library and don't have
 film encyclopaedias at hand.>

Nuclear Warfare and Joyous Accidents:
The Bedford Incident
By Dawn's Early Light
Day After
Dr. Strangelove
Fail Safe
Miracle Mile
Testament

All Things Bacterial:
The Omega Man
Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Twilight of the Dead
Andromeda Strain

Science Fiction in General:
Calossus: the Forbin Project
Dark Star
Silent Running
Terminator
Terminator 2: Judgement Day
The Thing
This Island Earth (1954)

Unclassified:  <Help!>
The Quiet Earth




---RRRRrr "Oh, sorry, Mr. Endangered Species of Squirrel" rrRRR---

As usual, comments, suggestions and spelling & grammar flames are
welcome.  Most questions regarding the Charter and the a.d.t.e.
way of thinking should be directed into the newsgroup itself, as
the answers here will be more representive.


--
Esa Perki|               "I should honor you?  Why?"
eperkio@cc.helsinki.fi      - Prometheus to Zeus according to Goethe
IRCer Shade


Here is the list of possibilities (0.0.5):
1. Nuclear explosions. This is a relatively easy way but not very thorough.
   At least ten pro cent of the population survives. But the bang is something
   some people don't want to go without. The problem is getting the world
   leaders to blow up the world.
2. Equip all nuclear power plants and military installations with pentiums(with
   bug). Hoping one processor can destroy the installation.
2. Throwing asteroids on earth. One proposal is attaching rockets to the
   asteroids and making a game of it. This should be fun. The problem is
   getting there. Maybe somebody out there has a few rockets to spare.
3. Letting the aliens do it. The only problem is finding dangerous aliens and
   getting them to destroy the earth. The advantage is we don't have to do
   it ourselves. But doing it ourselves is more fun. By the way we are working
   on this. The NASA is looking for aliens and television has reached such a
   level that every sane alien that sees it should want to destroy us. The
   problem is they still aren't here.
4. Pulling the moon into the earth. I think this would destroy a lot. The
   added bonus is longer days, so we can do more every day. The
   problem is where to get the rope(Dupont is proposed but it is too expensive
   to buy their total production for 6 years). The rope should be very strong
   maybe even kevlar isn't strong enough. I don't know about this. I'm not
   familiar with material sciences.
6. Making a self reproducing machine that eats the earth. It can be possible
   but the problem is how to create a machine from just any kind of junk found
   in the earth. What to do if the machine is in a region where some material
   it needs is scarce.
7. Using advanced genetics, create a being which will dig
   itself a couple of miles underground. It will then create a small
   explosion. Each little piece of its body left by the explosion would
   then turn into a new "burrower," which would then explode, creating many
   many more. Eventually, the entire world would collapse due to all the
   underground explosions. This has the same problem as the proposal above.
   (The ranking is lower because genitics and blowing up is a strange
   combination (I think))
8. Pushing the earth into the sun by using mirrors. If you put mirrors to
   deflect the sun's rays and solar wind in the right direction then you
   should slow down the earth and it will fall into the sun. The problem is
   it happens very slow. By the way this is happening already by the Poynting-
   Robertson-draft. But this effect isn't very big.
9. Burning the earth with mirrors. This can be done in principle. Now we only
   have to find a way to put up the mirrors in orbit around the earth. Maybe
   we should first paint the earth black. There are people who are busy with
   just that. These pavers will drive around over the surface so they will burn
   first. The painting of the earth alone is enough to get the temperature up
   to a few hundred degrees centigrade so this will kill all people to.
10.Wait about 50-100 billion years.  The sun will definitely die,
   but that doesn't destroy the earth (unless it gets big enough
   during its red giant stage).  However, later on the universe
   either dies the heat death (boo) or cycles back into the
   Big Crunch (yay).  Well, 2 out of 3 ain't too bad.
11.Creating a virus. This will probably not kill all people. It will just create
   a lot of suffering. A proposition is using an existing one : smallpox.
   But still it needs a second go to kill the rest of the people.
12.Build this Really Big Rocket and thrust the Earth towards the
   galactic center (there's supposed to be the Mother Of All
   Black Holes there).
13.Hope that a big alien boy will think "Wow, what a neat rock;
   it looks just like a marble on a rocket!" while the Really
   Big Rocket is thrusting the Earth towards the Galactic
   Center.
14.Jumping up at noon. If the sun is above you and you jump up you push yourself
   closer. If you are closer you are attracted more (the gravitational field is
   bigger there) so the earth is pulled in the direction of the sun. Don't
   expect to see the effect. It is so little maybe it gets lost in quantum
   fluctuations. The effect can be enlarged by working  in the daytime in
   sky scrapers and sleeping at night on the first floor.
15.Make your own black hole. You take a lot of mass and compress it very hard.
   At some point it will suck up material out of the earth and suck up the whole
   of the earth. After this the Hawking radiation will destroy the black hole.
   There are only two problems with this. You have to compress the material to
   super-nuclear densities if you want to do it with a mass less than a few
   solar
   masses. ( if you have a mass bigger than 1.5 solar masses you have solved
   this problem but this mass can't be found in the solar system). You can try
   and look for little black holes but they evaporate very fast. Maybe someone
   knows a solution to this. That would make this proposal a very good one.
16.Use cow flatulence. Let all cows in the world fart at the same time. I don't
   know how to get enough gases to blow up the earth.
17.Make a time machine and copy the earth. The problem is the time machine. And
   one big enough to copy the earth.
18.Building many mass accelerators on a place with very good energy
   access, e.g. Mercury, to produce large amounts of anti-matter. When enough
   is produced, transport it to Earth and turn off the containment devices for
   the anti-matter and watch the fireworks. The obvious problem is getting there
   and doing it (Needs lot's of support). And handling anti-matter isn't easy
   so we have to find a place where it doesn't get annihilated before use.
19.Stop thinking. Descartes said "I think therefore I am" so if we stop thinking
   we will stop being. If we stop the thinking of the earth it will stop
   existing. This is a very long shot and it will not be effective.
20.Take a electron accelerate it and shoot it at the sun. If we accelerate it
   to a speed little under the light speed (c) it will be accelerated to light
   speed in the free fall. This makes it's mass explode and if we make sure the
   path crosses earth it will collide on earth. The electron is by this time so
   heavy it destroys it. Relativistic physics says this doesn't work. Classical
   physics says the electron doesn't get hevier. So this is one of the "I don't
   understand physics ideas"
21.Destroying the enviroment. This is something apte wants to do so this has to
   be discouraged. (It won't destroy the earth) And people will survive this
   together with the cock-raoch.
22.Shrink the earth. The problem is we don't have a shrinkage beam or something
   like that.
23.Getting God to do it. Sin away and maybe he will destroy the earth. The
   problem is according to the bible this has been done and God saved some
   people to repopulate the earth.
24.Split the earth up in lots of tiny bits. This is difficult because the
   gravity works against it.
25.Put 6 billon people on earth and give them the possibility they will destroy
   the earth. We are workin on this. But probably the cockroaches will survive.
   That would be a shame so the more destructive plans are advised.
26.Blow up the moon with nukes. The litter from the moon will destroy all life.
   Needs support. The nukes have to be fired.
27.Making the information super-highway. If we send out information one way
   around the world we send energy around and therefore we send mass around.
   This way we create a reaction effect that rotates the earth harder. This
   makes it eventualy blow up. The way to make everybody sending information
   the same way is telling them it goes faster if you send it that way.
   This idea needs lots of support because information isn't very heavy.
28.Make a vodoo doll of the earth and rolling it down an elevator. I think
   this won't work but maybe somebody can make a witch doctor so mad he would
   try it. The advantage is it doesn't need much support.
29.Make solopsist doctines the universal law by letting a few politicians sign
   it. Then kill the solopsists. They state everything (including earth) exists
   only in their minds. So everything will get destroyed. This is cheap, needs
   little support and what do we have to loose.
30.Use total conversion of matter into energy as a powerfull weapon.
   The total conversion of between 1 and 10 kg of matter would be enough to
   burn the earth. This is according to E=MC^2.
   The problem is to produce between 0.5 and 5 kg of antimatter to create
   te total conversion. If we want to destroy the earth this way we need a lot
   of mass to convert.
31.If you get drunk everything gets hevier. If everybody gets drunk maybe the
   earth will collapse. This plan might not work but it certainly will create
   funny effects and will destroy society (not because the gravity effect btw)
32.Speed up the earth using rockets. If the day is reduced to 3 minutes the
   earth will blow apart. The rockets by the way will create a belt aroud the
   earth that takes care of the momentum problem. (the band sould be in space
   to prevent friction that puts back the momentum.
33.Shoot the moon into the earth with rockets. The problem is the number of
   rockets, or the size of the explosion.
34.Making the earth resonate by producing enough noise. I don't know if this
   can be done because you need a high quality factor. And i don't think
   the quality factor of the earth is high enough to make it resonate with all
   the radios in the world.
-

Ok the last piece of information:
A few facts about the earth:

The earth is 6*10^24 kg
radius      :6400 km

energy needed to
create an extra asteroid belt aroud the sun : 2.3*10^31 J
blow the earth away from the sun            : 5.4*10^36 J
blow something from the earth into space    : 6*10^7 J/kg

Energy sources
Earth's kinetic energy : 1.2*10^31 J
---end the beautiful .faq file :)---




--
"When I collect two solar masses of AOL Disks, I will use them to detonate
the Sun" Web Page URL: ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/po/poulosio/poulosio.html
            Mad Max, Ensign, TRES Corps, Jihad. Finger for more.
 
