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Hole Drilled to Bottom of Earth's Crust
AtariAmarok writes "A new article is up on LiveScience about a hole drilled into the Earth's crust to explore the layers of our planet's substrate. The hole gets closer to the mantle than any other efforts that have gone before. The hole might reach the "Moho" (division between Earth's brittle outer crust and the hotter, softer mantle) within a few years." From the article: "The depth of the Moho varies. This latest effort, which drilled 4,644 feet (1,416 meters) below the ocean seafloor, appears to have been 1,000 feet off to the side of where it needed to be to pierce the Moho, according to one reading of seismic data used to map the crust's varying thickness."
Why waste all that time and money drilling a new hole, when they could just use the one that leads straight to hell, AKA Dick Cheney's "undisclosed location" bunker? Just look under the rock he crawled out from.
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make install -not war
And what about terrorism. If someone who was hell bent on one HUGE suicide bomb, what is to stop a country from picking 4 or 5 places around the world, dig deep, and pack a nuke. Blow up the nuke, and the earth is rearranged. Best case scenerio you just redistributed a ton of molten lava. Worst case scenereo and the USA is relocated to the moon.
One last question, to the lawyers. When I buy land, and I get mineral rights, just how deep into the eart are my digging rights?
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Please be my guest. Just let me close the door behind you.
Are you trying to tell me that this whole damn time, we've never broken through the earth's crust and seen the mantle for ourselves? We can send something 8.7 billion miles away but we can't drill two miles down? Doesn't this strike people as a bit odd or disconcerting?
We are already destroying the planet. All we need is to find ways to get deeper in it. Maybe we can make new garbage dumps down there, and the molten lava will consume it like a huge furnace.
But I don't like it, not one bit.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Actually the idea isn't totataly without merrit. One concept that has been floated in some s.f. stories is of drilling long tunnels that are completely straight between various cities and evacuating them and running high speed vehicles down them. At the same speeds comercial air travel uses today you would find these tube much faster as they DON'T follow the curve of the earth, but rather go straight through.
By way of example imagine poking a big needle or simular through a cantelope, but at an angle so the entry and exit points are only an inch or two apart.
You don't actually go through the mantle, but at mid point you could be quite a bit underground.
Think of the Chunnel as warm up to something crossing a couple thousand kilometers/miles. LA to Chicago for one leg, Chicago to DC for the other?
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
So how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? *crunch*
The only exception is...
Yes, braniac.
And when we drill all the way down to the mantle, it's more likely that we'll have a hole that itself is pressurized (and thus able to, y'know, fit drilling equipment) than a hole that fills up with rock and dirt as we drill down.
The moral of the story: Don't try to play God, or you'll have an appointment with the devil. Lord save us.