If you want to destroy Earth, you have many options—at least when it comes to the extinction of humanity. Nuclear war, climate crisis or species extinction: over the course of human history, we have unfortunately found plenty of ways to destroy ourselves. But the planet doesn’t really care.

To actually destroy the planet, you would have to work a little harder. A collision with a large asteroid, for example, could make it uninhabitable and melt Earth’s crust, but even that wouldn’t destroy the Earth. If you wanted to pulverize it completely so that nothing remained, you would have to use the following formula:

EG = 3GM2⁄5R

This equation describes gravitational binding energy. It corresponds to the energy required if the components of a body held together by gravitational force are to be moved infinitely far apart.