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Every young kid has the dream at some point in their life of digging a hole to the other side of the world. With today's technology and an unlimited budget, would it be possible to create a tunnel directly through the middle of the earth and core and transport someone through it alive?

Bilbo Baggins
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  • I think the core of the earth would pose larger problems than the earth. Also, I would like my hole to go directly through the center, not just be a really deep tunnel in the magma. – Bilbo Baggins Jun 18 '19 at 02:30
  • Would you not have to dig through the mantle to get to the core? Also may this is a better question to link – katatahito Jun 18 '19 at 02:35
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    One of the biggest problems you'll face, long before you reach the mantle, is that air will fill the tunnel and pressure at the bottom of the hole will become lethal. – Arkenstein XII Jun 18 '19 at 02:43
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    The deepest borehole ever dug is a little more than 12 km (7.6 miles) deep, and it had the while might of the Soviet Union pressing down on the drill. – AlexP Jun 18 '19 at 03:17
  • (a) this isn't a world building question. (b) No. – JBH Jun 18 '19 at 03:33
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    I've gotta +1 @ArkensteinXII's comment. He and I had an argument a while back about pressure at the core. I even wrote a program to prove to myself he was wrong - except he wasn't (dang nabit). It's zero-pressure at the center, but something like a kilometer from the center the pressure is beyond any material we could build the tunnel wall out of that I expect us to discover for the next couple of hundred years. There's just so much stuff... – JBH Jun 18 '19 at 03:46
  • @DonQualm Problem with the suggested duplicate is that is assumed the mantle is liquid, and all answers follow. The mantle of the Earth is in fact solid. – Arkenstein XII Jun 18 '19 at 03:49
  • @ArkensteinXII In that case I must have misunderstood the asthenosphere's description of "viscous". – Escaped dental patient. Jun 18 '19 at 04:34
  • @ArkensteinXII Wouldn't that in part be due to the pressure holding it in place? Once you attempt to drill through it, all that pressure holding it in place would be gone and you would be left with the equivalent of lava or magma? – Shadowzee Jun 18 '19 at 06:44
  • @DonQualm Viscous over geologic timescales, yes. It's a reasonably ductile solid in a million-year timeframe. – Arkenstein XII Jun 18 '19 at 20:12
  • @Shadowzee Given the temperature, yes. Any depressurization of mantle material will result in the formation of liquid. However, at the crust-mantle boundary, that will be the result of partial melt, so solid material will still likely remain. Bigger problem is that the pressure would collapse the tunnel faster than liquid can build up. – Arkenstein XII Jun 18 '19 at 20:13

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No

This article indicates that the Earth's core might be around 4,000 K or around 7,000 Farenheit. And that's when we run into the first problem. Of many. We don't have anything that can hold stability at that tempature. Not osmium, not tungsten, not even carbon. (Carbon has the highest technical melting point of all the elements, except it kind of doesn't because it has a tendency to sublimate, and it usually lights on fire before that happens.) So the tunnel can't hold because we have nothing to build it with. And we have nothing that can adequately insulate a theoretical tunnel from that kind of heat because we'd need to put it somewhere. Also there's gravity problems. In many senses, like the sense that it'd collapse the walls of the tunnel, and the sense that anything actually in the Earth's core would be flatten it. Literally.

Halfthawed
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