system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Could humanity, if it was so inclined, blow up the earth?
gpt
No. But to add to the other answers, here are some (rough) numbers!

The Earth is held together by gravity, so to blow it apart you need to "unbind" the Earth. This means you need to input a chunk of energy larger than the gravitational binding energy of the Earth.

The binding energy for a sphere of constant density is U=-3GM^2 /5R. The Earth doesn't have constant density, but then again when you input this energy as a bomb it won't all go into gravitational energy for various reasons - this is just an approximate calculation to figure out vaguely how large a number we need (i.e. millions vs billions instead of 11.2 vs 11.3).

Plugging in the numbers for the Earth, the binding energy is around U=-10^32 J. A megaton of TNT is a few times 10^15 J. The Tsar Bomba was supposed to be able to get up to around 50 megatons, which is about 10^17 J. So to blow up the Earth, you'd need 10^15 of the largest nuclear bomb ever constructed. That is, over a hundred thousand Tsar Bombas for every single person on the planet.

The Tsar Bomba weighed 27,000 kg, so that would be about 10^19 kg of Tsar Bombas. That is close to the mass of all the rings of Saturn, and larger than one of its moons.

So... it's not likely any time soon :) It's probably "easier" to shift the orbit of an asteroid so that it collides with us than it would be to just blow up the Earth directly.

**Edit 2**: Looking at the numbers (see scottmcu below), an asteroid impact would not be big enough to destroy the Earth, unless you artificially accelerated it. Essentially, you need to produce the energy to give to the asteroid anyway, in which case you could either (a) move the Earth's orbit or (b) build a giant death laser.

**Edit**: What about Death Lasers? Well, a quick look on wiki tells us the entire power consumption of the Earth is something like 15.8 terawatts ~ 10^13 W. So to produce 10^32 J, it would take the entire world's power generation for 10^26 years. The universe is only 10^10 years old. So it would require 10^16 Earths to do it within the length of the universe. That is, if everybody on the surface of the Earth (all ~10^10 of us) has their own Earth, and each of those Earths produced the same power as our Earth, and within each of those Earths, every person in say, Nova Scotia, also has their own Earth (ridiculous Russian doll situation), which all produces as much power as our own Earth, then we would just have enough power to destroy the Earth within the lifetime of the entire universe so far.

**Edit 3**: Can we throw the Earth into the Sun? Not likely either, "unfortunately"... We would need to shed basically all of our planet's kinetic energy - otherwise we will just have a near-miss as we plummet towards the Sun. So that energy is 1/2 * m * v^2 . The Earth moves at 30 km/s around the Sun, and weighs about 10^25 kg. That gives a kinetic energy of 10^33 J. Check the binding energy of the Earth above. Yes, that's right, it takes less energy to *blow the Earth apart* than it does to fling it into the Sun.

It's actually worse than this. We have to take conservation of momentum into account. We have to fire mass in the direction of our motion to get the Earth to stop. We can do this with large mass at slow speed, or small mass at high speed. It would kinda defeat the point of throwing the Earth into the Sun if we could just split the Earth into two chunks flying in opposite directions, so let's say we'll fire a small mass at high speed into space, much like a rocket does. While this has the benefit of not completely destroying the Earth before we even get slow enough to hit the Sun, it actually takes *more* energy. This is due to the v^2 term in kinetic energy - everytime we half the mass we are launching, we must double the speed it's been fired out at. The v^2 means the speed counts twice, so we have half * double * double = double. So (speaking approximately), if we fire only 1/100 of the Earth's mass away, it would need to have 10^37 J of energy, instead of 10^33 J.

So funnily enough, it's apparently easier to blow up the Earth than to throw it into the Sun.

**Edit 4**: For anyone still reading this, it would take something like 10^15 kg of antimatter, similar to Deimos (the small moon's of Mars). Or alternately, every person on Earth has 100 tonnes of antimatter.

**tl;dr:**

**1) We will never have enough nukes to blow apart the Earth**

**2) Even an asteroid impact from the largest asteroid in our solar system couldn't blow apart the Earth - unless it was accelerated to a ridiculous speed**

**3) It would take far more energy than we have ever generated to blow apart the Earth with a laser (or anything that comes from any sort of power source we have access to)**

**4) It takes even more energy to stop the Earth in its tracks and let it fall into the Sun.**

**5) Even if antimatter were as common as uranium you'd need a ridiculous amount.**