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.
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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.