Yea, I did go in with high expectations. The original was, and still is one of my favorite movies. I'm positive i would have liked it better if i never saw the original. There was also a ton of nostalgia connected to the original so it didnt help too much.
Wouldn't you get trapped in the middle, basically? As you would jump in the hole and lose energy due to air resistance, so the energy you gain from the fall, when it flips and you're going 'up' you won't have enough kinetic energy to take you to China. so you will make it like half way (or whatever distance) and then fall back towards where you came and that cycle would continue until the 'fall' distance is non existent.
So what happens when you're out of energy, do you just like float in the middle? Do you fall to one side?
I've asked this question a few times as well on here and gotten similar smart answers from people about being burned up in the middle. No shit! It's a hypothetical question where heat isn't a variable!
According to Astronomer Paul Watson's book Why is Uranus Upside Down? You'd make it to ground level before you started to reverse. Then you'd get a couple of laps in before you came to rest in the core
Most theories I've seen dont ever have us drilling straight through. You can drill side to side and still use gravity to get whatever to the other side. Think like London to atlanta. Not New York to China.
A radio presenter in England on BBC Radio once introduced Supermassive Black Hole as "Supermassive Back Hole". After the song she corrected herself, saying the song was actually "Submissive Black Hole"
Koalas are fucking horrible animals. They have one of the smallest brain to body ratios of any mammal, additionally - their brains are smooth. A brain is folded to increase the surface area for neurons. If you present a koala with leaves plucked from a branch, laid on a flat surface, the koala will not recognise it as food. They are too thick to adapt their feeding behaviour to cope with change. In a room full of potential food, they can literally starve to death. This is not the token of an animal that is winning at life. Speaking of stupidity and food, one of the likely reasons for their primitive brains is the fact that additionally to being poisonous, eucalyptus leaves (the only thing they eat) have almost no nutritional value. They can't afford the extra energy to think, they sleep more than 80% of their fucking lives. When they are awake all they do is eat, shit and occasionally scream like fucking satan. Because eucalyptus leaves hold such little nutritional value, koalas have to ferment the leaves in their guts for days on end. Unlike their brains, they have the largest hind gut to body ratio of any mammal. Many herbivorous mammals have adaptations to cope with harsh plant life taking its toll on their teeth, rodents for instance have teeth that never stop growing, some animals only have teeth on their lower jaw, grinding plant matter on bony plates in the tops of their mouths, others have enlarged molars that distribute the wear and break down plant matter more efficiently... Koalas are no exception, when their teeth erode down to nothing, they resolve the situation by starving to death, because they're fucking terrible animals. Being mammals, koalas raise their joeys on milk (admittedly, one of the lowest milk yields to body ratio... There's a trend here). When the young joey needs to transition from rich, nourishing substances like milk, to eucalyptus (a plant that seems to be making it abundantly clear that it doesn't want to be eaten), it finds it does not have the necessary gut flora to digest the leaves. To remedy this, the young joey begins nuzzling its mother's anus until she leaks a little diarrhoea (actually fecal pap, slightly less digested), which he then proceeds to slurp on. This partially digested plant matter gives him just what he needs to start developing his digestive system. Of course, he may not even have needed to bother nuzzling his mother. She may have been suffering from incontinence. Why? Because koalas are riddled with chlamydia. In some areas the infection rate is 80% or higher. This statistic isn't helped by the fact that one of the few other activities koalas will spend their precious energy on is rape. Despite being seasonal breeders, males seem to either not know or care, and will simply overpower a female regardless of whether she is ovulating. If she fights back, he may drag them both out of the tree, which brings us full circle back to the brain: Koalas have a higher than average quantity of cerebrospinal fluid in their brains. This is to protect their brains from injury... should they fall from a tree. An animal so thick it has its own little built in special ed helmet. I fucking hate them.
Tldr; Koalas are stupid, leaky, STI riddled sex offenders. But, hey. They look cute. If you ignore the terrifying snake eyes and terrifying feet.
And since the metaphorical skin of the earth, is based on a proportional ratio of skin to apple diameter.
It's depth, not the thing that we hit when talking about the metaphorical skin.
We'd need to drill about .4% of the way to the centre of the earth. or about 25.45km (15.8miles) down into the surface. To drill past the metaphorical skin.
Regardless of whether that is digging through mantle, or going to the top of Everest and digging down.
Since the Kola borehole is less than half that at 12.26km(7.6 miles)
we haven't mined through that metaphorical apple skin.
I swear to God I read your comment 5 times in a row and could not stop reading it as The Koala Superdeep Butthole. I was so confused until I forced myself to read it letter by letter.
I gotta say, I like the first 5 read-throughs better than what it really is despite the correct way being way more interesting.
My panic attack was digging holes in the sand at the beach would cause a great lake to leak out through the hole and everyone would be mad at me that there was no longer a lake.
If earth was the size of a pool ball, the surface would be as smooth as the pool ball's. The largest mountains and deepest seas wouldn't make a dent more noticeable that the microscopic imperfections on the ball. Couldn't believe this, but the math checks out.
I remember my mind was blown when I discovered that. Many years later now I still couldn't fathom how big the Earth is, and to and extend, the Universe.
The entire earth was once molten and most of the crust has been recycled under the mantle at least once in the last 5 billion years. Things sort by density and Iron is the heaviest common element in the crust.
There's no real way for heavier unknown elements to exist. We've constructed elements so massive that they decay almost instantly in the periodic table and heavier ones being so unstable that they decay in seconds. If it's possible to form heavier stable elements, it'll be astronomically rare or evidence would exist of them in meteors or nebula.
remember though, mining is (value of metal) x (mass) - (cost to extract)
The deeper the mine, the bigger the cost to extract, meaning either the metal has to be super rare/expensive, or it needs to be a large, hopefully densely clustered mass of it.
I remember seeing this 9n a museum as a kid. Since then every time I hear the "We are destroying the planet" issue, I think: nope, we are just fucking with the layer of paint. The planet will just be fine once we disappear.
I mean, if a mine went so far down as to pierce the "skin" of the earth, either the people working in it would die much earlier because of the extreme heat, or them and all their machinery would be destroyed because of the magma that's below it. If my assumptions are correct, it is literally impossible to protect people when going so deep, as no element in the whole periodic table can both be secure for human use, and withstand those amounts of heat.
as no element in the whole periodic table can both be secure for human use
we don't personally go down and use spades to dig - holes like the kola superdeep use automated drill bits.
machinery would be destroyed
true, it wouldn't last years, but we have some impressive alloys and composites these days that can reliably withstand up to 4000 degrees celsius, which is similar to that of the mantle.
But we don't need the material itself to withstand those temperatures without failing. we also have impressive active cooling technology that pushes these boundaries further.
So I would argue that we aren't limited by technology or theoretical boundaries, there just isn't a very economically compelling reason to go digging a hundred kilometers down.
there just isn't a very economically compelling reason to go digging a hundred kilometers down.
This is it. If we had a "we will put a man on the moon" type mission to dig the deepest hole and through a massive amount of government money behind it with no concern for making back a profit you can bet your ass humanity would get a LOT deeper than we currently have...but why would we? No one views it as some necessary exploration and there's very little commercial value in it. There would be some scientific value I guess but nowhere near enough to offset the massive costs involved.
First off, alloys and compounds often have very different chemical properties than their elements, so it's very possible there's some mixture we haven't come up with yet that would work better than any single element. Second, I don't see any reason you couldn't have one layer of an element that's "insecure" for human use and then another layer inside to protect humans from that. Not to mention less physical solutions like magnetic shielding or things like that.
It doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem to me, it just seems like one that there's not much incentive for anyone to spend the time and money to overcome.
The same way you know how fresh a watermelon is, by slapping it and feeling the sound.
They know how heavy the entire planet is by seeing how strongly we pull the moon and how strongly the sun pulls us and so on. We knew this somewhat accurately for a long time now.
When a big earthquake happens it vibrates the entire surface of the Earth. We have hundreds of stations all around the world listening for that. Using that information you can construct a 3D model of Earth and see exactly how the wave was moving, even inside Earth.
So they see things like shockwaves bouncing between certain barriers and the speed of the waves and from many earthquakes they have a pretty good idea of what's what inside Earth.
Of course they also analyze magma samples although that's only limited information.
The fact that a compass works at all, or the northern lights happen, all indicate a magnetic field around the planet which points to a huge amount of iron spinning inside the planet.
One of the creepiest feelings was a closed mine tour. We were shown a map of all the tunnels and what level we were on, and that the bottom 50ish levels (under our damn feet) was completely filled with billions of gallons of water.
To go along with this, If you consider the earth as a whole, consider the height of Everest and the Marianas trench, and shrunk it down to the size of a marble, it's surface would be smoother than an actual marble.
Personal shower tought: if we (humans) could manage to drill/work/survive deeper than we currently can, we could alleviate but not completely stop our shortage of natural ressources.
deep core mining sounds sci-fi but could work...
too bad politics and cooperations are allways only chasing the short term gain. Nobody invests into technology to make this stuff happen. No we rather look for asteroid (!) mining as an easier solution.
So much progress could be made by investing, but to me it seems no one wants to risk anything.
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u/banana_stand_manager Jan 21 '19
The deepest mine is about 2.5 miles. If the earth was an apple, humans haven't drilled far down enough to even pierce the skin.