A Heartthrobbingly Modest Propsal:

Why not open a thousand-foot seam in the Earth's crust, fill it with molten iron and send down a robotic probe into the core? Since radio waves can't penetrate rock, communication with the basketball-sized probe would be by sound. A Times story on this project concludes:
"What I'm imagining is the solid throbs like a heart, pumping in and out and creating vibrations in the surrounding media, which then propagate to the earth's surface," [David J Stevenson] said. The 2.5-mile-long instruments that physicists have built to detect the cosmological rumblings known as gravitational waves could be adapted to hear the probe's faint sound signals, he said.

Scientists would also have to get regulators to sign off on a whopper of an environmental impact statement. To open the initial crack — about a thousand feet long, a thousand feet deep and at least four inches wide — would require energy equal to a few million tons of TNT, a magnitude-7 earthquake or a nuclear bomb. "Yes, of course, you'd have to be careful," Dr. Stevenson said.

But he said the effort would cost less than NASA has lavished on space exploration. "I think if it costs less than $10 billion, we should do it," Dr. Stevenson said.
It's that "of course, you'd have to be careful" part that gets me -- I guess what it means depends entirely on how he said it.



- bruno 5-20-2003 7:39 pm




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