Top 10 Ways to Destroy Earth

Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe.

You've seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You've heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing hideous quantities of pollution into the atmosphere threatens to end the world.

Fools.

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.

The ways

NASA Achieves Breakthrough In Black Hole Simulation

NASA scientists have reached a breakthrough in computer modeling that allows them to simulate what gravitational waves from merging black holes look like. The three-dimensional simulations, the largest astrophysical calculations ever performed on a NASA supercomputer, provide the foundation to explore the universe in an entirely new way.

According to Einstein's math, when two massive black holes merge, all of space jiggles like a bowl of Jell-O as gravitational waves race out from the collision at light speed.

Previous simulations had been plagued by computer crashes. The necessary equations, based on Einstein's theory of general relativity, were far too complex. But scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., have found a method to translate Einstein's math in a way that computers can understand.

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Black hole mergers produce copious gravitational waves, sometimes for years, as the black holes approach each other and collide. Black holes are regions where gravity is so extreme that nothing, not even light, can escape their pull. They alter spacetime. Therein lies the difficulty in creating black hole models: space and time shift, density becomes infinite and time can come to a standstill. Such variables cause computer simulations to crash.

full article

Computer glitch hits climate prediction project

A software error has hit one of the world's most sophisticated climate simulations. Participants in the BBC-sponsored project, which uses spare time on home computers to predict Britain's climate in 2080, will have to wait longer than expected to see their work on television.

Researchers at climateprediction.net tracked the problem down to a mistake in how the predicted levels of sulphate aerosols — tiny particles that block sunlight and cause 'global dimming', cooling the Earth — were entered into the model. They told confused users that they would be have to start again from scratch.

"After much soul-searching, we've decided to start everyone over again," says the project's principal investigator, Myles Allen.


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Spore

Spore is, at first glance, a 'teleological evolution' game: the player molds and guides a single-celled species across many generations, until it becomes intelligent, at which point the player begins molding and guiding a society into a spacefaring civilization. Spore's main innovation, the basis of its scope and open-endedness, is that Wright has returned to procedural generation.

In a speech on procedural generation at the 2005 Game Developers Conference, Wright revealed the game to the public, saying "I didn't want to make players feel like Luke Skywalker or Frodo Baggins. I wanted them to be like George Lucas or J.R.R. Tolkien."

in wikipedia

watch GDC2k5 Video Demonstration of Spore - full version of the GDC presentation by Will Wright