Behold the usefulness of the Internet. Last night I stumbled across a site that describes, in detail, several ways to possibly destroy planet Earth. You find your method of choice at ned.ucam.org.

Here’s and example:

2. Existence negated via time travel

• You will need: a time machine, heavy rock-moving equipment/explosives
• Method: Using your time machine, travel back in time just over 4,500,000,000 years to shortly (i.e. a few billenia) before the formation of the Earth. What you should find in its place is a young Sun and an accretion disc formed of the dusty/rocky material that will later become our Solar System. Find the patch of material that is likely to condense into the Earth. Now blow up, split apart and otherwise stir up the material so that it never gets a chance to come together and form the Earth. Return forwards in time in several hundred-million-year jumps, repeating the process each time so that no planet of any kind ever forms at roughly 1 AU from the Sun. If you make an error, simply go back in time and try again.
• Earth’s final resting place: When you finally return to the present day, you will be left with a largish asteroid belt where Earth should be. Alternatively, you may find that the matter has been assimilated into the bodies of other planets or the Sun.
• Current feasibility rating: 0/10. Nonsense.
• Comments: My good friend Rob rightly informs me that this course of action does not strictly speaking “destroy” the Earth – there is no actual destruction event in which the Earth goes from existing to not existing. What one ends up with instead is a universe in which the Earth does not and never did exist.Destroying Rob proved remarkably easy.