How far are we from drilling through the Earth's crust? Say across the thicker continental shell? If this becomes possible then today's network style energy infrastructure becomes obscolate, and every community can simply drill for its total local energy resources. Is technology very far from this?
The earth's crust is 35 to 70 km thick under the continents, thinning to 5-10 km under the deepest ocean basins. http://scign.jpl.nasa.gov/learn/plate1.htm The deepest mine in the world is about 4 km deep. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/11/071106-africa-mine.html Since we can't drill at the bottom of the ocean, we are a long, long way from drilling through the crust. And drilling gets more difficult the deeper you go. As the link above notes, at 4km down, the ambient temperature is about 100 degrees, and rock shatters like glass. The temperature and odd physics only get worse as you go down, since the upper mantle itself has a temperature of between 900 and 1600 degrees.
Wow, looks like we need a different technology for this, not even that of mining. Plasma science comes to mind. Very few solids show good mechanical stability even at 500 degrees. And steel melts soon above 1200 degrees (depending on carbon content). I guess even the diamond drill would fail under those glass like mechanical conditions. I think this is amazing.
Fun fact...the farther down you go, the less you will weigh. If you could survive the temperatures and pressures at the center of the Earth, you would be completely weightless. Because there is the same amount of mass around you in every direction.
Yeah I saw something about this on nova science now and if you fell through a hole all the way to the other side of the planet you would shoot out of the hole slow down, stop for a split second then drop right back into the hole. It's like an orbit on a flat plane.
