Hitting the Books: The mad science behind digging really huge holes
, from pulling the internet's proverbial plug to bioengineering a dinosaur army — even achieving immortality if the first few plans fail to pan out.HOW TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD: Practical Schemes and Scientific Solutions for the Aspiring Supervillain
The world’s deepest hole, as of this writing, is the now-abandoned Kola Superdeep Borehole, located on the Kola Peninsula in Russia, north of the Arctic Circle. It’s a hole 23 centimeters in diameter, and it was started in May 1970 with a target depth of 15,000m. By 1989, Soviet scientists had reached a depth of 12,262m, but they found they were unable to make further progress due to a few related issues. The first was that temperatures were increasing faster than they’d expected.
So if you build a sufficiently large open-pit mine next to the ocean and use a dam to allow water to flow into the pit to cool the rocks as needed, then you’ll be the proud owner of a mine that allows you to reach greater depths, both literal and metaphorical, than anyone else in history! This scheme has the added benefit that, if we’re clever, we can use the steam that’s generated by cooling all that hot rock and magma to spin turbines, which could then generate more power for drilling.
Even if you could turn almost half the Earth into an open-pit mine cooled by seawater, the steam created by cooling a pit that size would effectively boil the oceans and turn the Earth into a sauna, destroying the climate, collapsing food chains, and threatening all life on the planet — and that’s before you even reach the hostage-taking phase, let alone the part where you plunder forbidden gold! Things get even bleaker once you take into account the responses from the governments...
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