this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2026
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The bigger problem is Earth is gooey at scale. Seriously, the mantle, which is most of Earth's mass, is gooey rock. "shattering" as if it were solid simply isn't going to happen. Most of the Earth is like thick caramel or worse as far as "shattering" is concerned.
The best you could hope for is something like how the moon formed; an impact (very) roughly 10x less than the gravitational binding energy of the Earth itself (which is crazy in and of itself!). If you'll note, the Earth 'survived' that impact, but was forever changed in significant ways.
What's even crazier, is that Earth had single celled organisms growing on it less than 500 million years later! For reference, the oldest mountain ranges are 2-3x older in relative terms.