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Planetary obliteration9/3/2023 It ends up that the rock you excavate becomes magma around the drill bit and damages it. If you still want to get to the core: the biggest hurdle we have nowadays is that we dig with drills, and our drill bits just don't work past a certain depth due to temperature and density of the rock. What are you, the rock police? I put 'em up my ass. Then where did you put the rock you excavated from that cave? We have another cave we excavated for rock storage. Where do you put the rocks you excavate? If you have any questions, feel free to ask the happy miners. We'll keep it up until the whole world is hollow. Trøgs have been excavating for generations. Unless you are collecting material to build a Dyson sphere there is just no sane way to dispose of all that rock, which makes me think of this scene from Disenchanted: There is also enough ore in the rock you dug to disrupt the economy of the Earth for lifetimes, so selling it is not really an option if you're still living in capitalism. The core of Mars is two orders of magnitude more massive than the whole asteroid belt combined, which means that if even just 1% of it comes out (on top of all the rocks you excavated to get there), you have enough material to build a few dwarf planets. A lot of core and you end up with a molten rock, smaller than Mars, that will eventually cool down into a new planet in a few hundred million years.Īnd then there is my favorite part about this plan. A little less core and you can break the crust into plates. I don't have the math in me, but whether it puts greater or lesser pressure on the layers above it, the whole mantle and crust of Mars will shift. Even if the remaining material still occupies the same volume, it will not offer the same resistance to basically the weight of a planet on top of it. Depending on how you do it, you might get either a slow, steady flow like a Hawaiian volcano Or you can use Mars's lower gravity and practical lack of an atmosphere to one-up Krakatoa, possibly knock some unlucky spaceships out of the solar system altogether. And the only way to expand is through the tunnel, so that molten iron and nickel is going to come up like lava going up a volcano. If it is not able to, you will just get a hotter solid. In plain terms: you dig a hole to the core and make it liquid, it will expand. And for metals such as iron and nickel, which make the bulk of Mars's core, the molten phase is less dense than the solid one - on top of being able to flow. ![]() ![]() Mostly every substance has different densities at different phases of matter. What I love about them is that most would lead to planetary obliteration and this one is no exception :) So instead of telling you how to tunnel to the core, I will do a frame challenge by assuming it is easily possible to do so. There are many good ideas such as this in World Building.SE. (.) tunnelling to Mars’ core and liquefying it, after which the planet’s rotation would generate a magnetic field like earth does.
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