Another Silly Idea!

Are you volunteering to drive the machine?

"Another Silly idea"? Yep. That's about right.

If you drill a 50 km deep hole in the earth, all the air will come out and the earth will be flat.

The heat would be so great that the boring machine would become inactive and break down........materials science has a long long way to go for this to work. Don't you know how a horizontal boring machine works? If you did you wouldn't be posing this question. For instance, the cutting heads require a lot of maintenance and are constantly being changed. They do wear out; duration varies depending on the type of rock encountered. Google some of the Swiss tunneling websites!

The working conditions would be intolerable. All you have to do is research the working conditions of the diamond mines in South Africa and see why this isn't currently feasible. I believe they are the deepest mines in the world.

I for one wouldn't want to work in such a deep bore for a lot of reasons!

I like the idea for enegy purposes. It's "only" 50 km down.

The deepest earth bore I know of is about 12 km at Sakhalin Island. All we have to do is go 4 or 5 times that.

So, to entertain your silly idea with another one,

Why not just build a disposable powerplant on an active volcano? You could achieve the same results without drilling to record breaking depths.

I like your idea about a disposable power plant !

Fusion generation requires dealing with temperature of a few million degrees ! Deep earth tunneling only a few hundred degrees. Ordinary steel can easily withstand several hundred degree C, this is enough to generate a lot of useful steam. Both fusion and geothermal give unlimited energy . I reckon that deep earth tunneling research will be far cheaper and nearer than fusion research. The choice seems obvious.

Neither fusion nor geothermal energy is unlimited, although each resource is large.

OH MY GOODNESS!!! Don't do it. Don't you remember "Crack in the world" where the world cracked apart and we ended up with a new moon much closer. They used an atomic bomb to get to the final depths and the crack traveled around the world. Many people died (in the movie) or wasted there money sitting in the theater. Either one would be bad!!!

why not cap an active volcano and term this "geo-thermal-upper-mantle"?

I believe they explored that in the documentary film 'The Core'

The Core

Easily accessible geothermal power does have its advantages but is quite expensive to setup and is only available in certain areas (we have quite a bit down here).

Deep drilling helps solve the location problem but is more expensive and fraught with technical difficulties.

In the end it is being currently looked at as a viable renewable power source among other ideas

Magma power

Safety glasses people!!!!

Bravo88..

You have discovered our deepest engineering secret !!! OMG OMG OMG !!!

As engineers, we have taken an oath to never reveal this secret source of energy and to continue to use coal, oil and nuclear power to make electricity. We want to polute the places where we live and we never, never have clean energy....

OMG, OMG, OMG How did you guess the secret !!??

Oh,......and that part about tunneling hundreds of km and using materials that have not been invented yet......and, um, .....that driver's job on the tunnelling machine........can you help us out with that..???

Or, like most MBAs, Certified Project Professionals and other executive b*ttwipes, do you just leave those tasks to "others to figure out"....????