If you dig a hole to the other side of earth (and other myths)

[ZohsixGT5]

If anyone wants to try this we can start in my back yard. I'll stop by lowes on the way home tonight.

 

[wfooshee]

But during your fall you can't bump the wall even a tiny little bit, or you won't make it out the other end. Has to be frictionless!

As for gravity equilibrium, there is definitely equlibrium at the center, with a perception of microgravity due to the pull being outward in all directions. But is that the point of maximum pressure, i.e. the most weight being pressed down from the column of air? I'm not sure it can be, if gravity is actually pulling away from you at that point. So are you weightless but still under intense pressure, or is there a higher pressure (but not weightless) point somewhere out from the center? Does pressure maximize somewhere and then actually decrease as you continue downward?

And has anyone determined where we're going to put 8000 miles' worth of material from our coring project? It's gonna take about 65 to 70 million dump truck loads to haul it off.

 

[Beeblebrox237]

Why is the earth so hot in the middle?

I thought it was just soil, which contains worms, which are awesome..

The earth started off very hot (4.5 billion years ago). The inside is still warm, because it is insulated by the outside and the atmosphere. The outside is only insulated by the atmosphere, so it cooled much faster. The crust(rock) is very thin, and it floats atop the upper mantle, or aesthenosphere. As you go down further the temperature increases, but so does pressure, so the mantle (rock) is solid. The outer core, made primarily of iron, is liquid, and the inner core, made up of nickel and other metals, is solid due to pressure. It gets as hot as the surface of the sun at the center of the Earth.
Radioactivity is not as relevant now as it was in Earth's early stages, as it is not very common now. There was a lot of uranium present on the early Earth, but most of it has decayed into lead.

 

[gt5 fan]

Gravity pulls you to the center of the earth so you will get stuck !

 

[Beeblebrox237]

Gravity pulls you to the center of the earth so you will get stuck !

Just like a pendulum will always end up at the bottom of its arc and stay there unless an outside force acts upon it.

 

[DG_Silva]

The answer to the original question is: 42 minutes 12 seconds.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_train

 

[AlexGTV]

If you guys would like a kick I urge you to join in the Flat earth society website. They reject the explanations given for a round earth (complete with a ridiculous conspiracy, lol!) and give even crazier ones.

A scene in their forums:

-Sceptical guy: "Do you have any evidence the earth is flat?"
-FE believer: "Sure, look at this picture" *posts a picture of a beach*

 

[masterrawad]

The answer to the original question is: 42 minutes 12 seconds.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_train

i had a feeling something like that would happen.

 

[niky]

But during your fall you can't bump the wall even a tiny little bit, or you won't make it out the other end. Has to be frictionless!

As for gravity equilibrium, there is definitely equlibrium at the center, with a perception of microgravity due to the pull being outward in all directions. But is that the point of maximum pressure, i.e. the most weight being pressed down from the column of air? I'm not sure it can be, if gravity is actually pulling away from you at that point. So are you weightless but still under intense pressure, or is there a higher pressure (but not weightless) point somewhere out from the center? Does pressure maximize somewhere and then actually decrease as you continue downward?

And has anyone determined where we're going to put 8000 miles' worth of material from our coring project? It's gonna take about 65 to 70 million dump truck loads to haul it off.

Use that material to make the walls of the tube. Since we're doing something impossible, anyway, transmute them into neutronium and carbon-nanotube walls, and use them to build the magnets on the walls of the train track. But we'd also have to find a way to cool the tunnel... probably a double vacuum tube, one inside the other, connected at only the top and bottom, cooled by the ice at the poles...

Science fiction writers and futurists have played with this idea... instead of going through the pole, you dig a straight line through the Earth between two points at a tangent... you get the same thing... acceleration by gravity on the first half of the trip, then deceleration by gravity on the second half.

Much simpler, maybe, to have above-ground vacuum trains using permanent magnets for levitation, which would have a track that makes a straight line across, say, 50-100 kilometers of distance. Raise it about a hundred meters above ground at the endpoints and the center should be at ground level or just slightly underground.

Should work. The only energy requirements (given enough permanent magnets!) should be that required to pump out any air that gets in at either end, though it's probably possible to design an airlock dock that doesn't require the train or tunnel to ever be exposed to air.

 

[Villain]