FINALLY!
As promised, here is my two-and-a-half-minute "pilot" for How To Destroy The Earth. It includes a very brief introduction and a discussion of just one method: antimatter.
- How To Destroy The Earth, Part One (2.29MB)
If you have problems viewing Quicktime movies or you just hate Quicktime generally (I sure do!) then I unreservedly recommend Media Player Classic. It does Real Media files too!
The five drawings that you'll briefly spot there are mainly included to act as a proof-of-concept of the whole crude-animation idea I discussed earlier. They are just about legible in the film, but if you want to study them more closely you can find scans of them here:
Credits
The film was written by, directed by and starred me, Sam Hughes.
Infinite, infinite credit must go to my partner-in-crime James Scholes for his camera work, his camera, and his ability to edit the apparently uneditable.
Comments
As for my personal thoughts on the film?
- Yes, the picture quality is very low and most of the time the Penning Trap is too small to see clearly. To be fair, it was shot on a camera phone. At least this makes for a relatively low file size. It also means you can't see the string on the anti-pebble.
- We could have used some better locations and visual aids. The field scenes were by far the best. Sitting cross-legged on a sofa though? With THOSE socks? What was I thinking?
- I'm not so good at remembering lines, even lines I wrote myself.
- Some of the edits didn't quite work as well as I imagined.
But on the other hand, the real reason I was asked to made this was to demonstrate my documentary-presenting skills to potential documentary-purchasing companies. I reworked the concept a little to make a self-contained episode out of it, but showcasing my "talents", such as they are, was the aim all along. And in this respect, well, mission accomplished, for better or worse. That's what I'm going to look like in front of a real camera if I do indeed end up in front of a real camera. That's Sam Hughes, television presenter.
Personally I'm more comfortable in front of a computer keyboard.
If there is a massive response to this then, documentary or no documentary, I may see if I can get around to making more.
Transcript
Some of the dialogue is a bit muffled, so here is the transcript of what I'm actually saying.
Ahhh. Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe. For example: look at this pebble. Could you destroy this pebble? Not with your bare hands, probably not by stepping on it. Maybe if you had tools, for example. This pebble would be pretty hard to destroy. Now imagine trying to destroy a pebble a million billion trillion times bigger. Luckily, even though there's no such thing as the Death Star, there are a couple of dozen ways we could destroy the Earth.
Here's one of them. This pebble is made of antimatter. (All right, all right, I know what it looks like, just play along.) Antimatter is the mirror image of ordinary matter. If this "anti-pebble" and this pebble met, they'd annihilate each other completely, leaving nothing but energy - as much energy, in fact, as a one-megaton nuclear bomb. Antimatter, you see, is the most explosive substance possible.
So here's your method: take a mountain-sized chunk of antimatter. Drop it on Earth from space. Or, if you want to be more efficient about it, carve a hole to the Earth's core and drop the antimatter down the hole, blowing the planet up from the inside. The result: a second asteroid belt around the Sun. Very simple.
The problems are twofold. Firstly, antimatter explodes if it touches anything made of ordinary matter. This anti-pebble would explode if it touched the sofa I'm sitting on, or the glass bottle that it's inside, or even made contact with ordinary air, because all of these things, like
everything in the known universe
are made from regular matter. The only way we can store antimatter is in a special device called a Penning Trap. A Penning Trap has a vacuum inside, which means there's no air for the anti-pebble to touch, and it also has special electromagnetic fields which keep the pebble inside, without ever touching the sides of the bottle. Unfortunately, Penning Traps are very difficult to make, and just trapping a few atoms of antimatter for a fraction of a second is the best we can with current technology.
The second problem is right now antimatter can only be manufactured very slowly in particle accelerators. To make a real anti-pebble, like the fake one I'm holding here, would take a hundred billion years. The mountain-sized chunks we're looking at would take ridiculous amounts of time, effort and, most importantly, money.
Make no mistake: this would work. But while the state of the art is improving, the technology we'd need is way beyond us right now, and is likely to remain that way forever. Feasibility rating? Let's say five out of ten.
