# Trivial trivia.



## Spacerunner (Mar 18, 2006)

What would happen if I drilled a tunnel through the center of the Earth and jumped into it?


Is it possible to drill straight through the Earth?
Although it would be impossible to do this on earth, you actually could do this on the moon. The moon has a cold core and it also doesn't have any oceans or groundwater to mess things up. In addition, the moon has no atmosphere, so the tunnel would have a nice vacuum in it that eliminates aerodynamic drag.

So, imagine that the tunnel through the moon is 20 feet (7 meters) in diameter. Down one side is a ladder. If you were to climb down the ladder, what you would find is that your weight decreases. Gravity is caused by objects attracting one another with their mass . As you descend into the tunnel, more and more of the moon's mass is above you, so it attracts you upward. Once you climbed down to the center of the moon you would be weightless. The mass of the moon is all around you and attracting you equally, so it all cancels out and you would feel weightless.


If you were to actually leap into the tunnel and allow yourself to fall, you would accelerate toward the center to a very high speed. Then you would zoom through the center and start decelerating. You would eventually stop when you reached the tunnel's lip on the other side of the moon, and then you would start falling back down the tunnel in the other direction. You would oscillate back and forth like this forever.

If you could do this on earth, one amazing effect would be the ease of travel. The diameter of the earth is about 12,700 kilometers (7,800 miles). If you drilled the tunnel straight through the center and could create a vacuum inside, anything you dropped into the tunnel would reach the other side of the planet in just 42 minutes!


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## GEMMY (Jun 19, 2006)

Nurse, come quick with medicine. :lol: 

tony


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## bigbazza (Mar 6, 2008)

Why don't you try it and see


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## pippin (Nov 15, 2007)

What - the medicine?

I rather fancy some of what he has already taken!!

Nurse! This straightjacket is too tight!


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## Spacerunner (Mar 18, 2006)

No time for medicine, too busy oscillating between Pompey seafront and Bondi beach! 8O


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## CatherineandSteve (Dec 20, 2005)

What's the matter John :? you bored :wink: ...... :lol: :lol: best get that van off the drive and go on another grand tour


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## KeithChesterfield (Mar 12, 2010)

Spacerunner - another question to ask. 

I found this on the web at 'Quezi.com'

If I dug a hole through the center of the earth, where would I come out?

China here we come! 
Many parents have convinced their youngster that the earth is not flat, but rather a sphere, only to be asked “So what’s on the other side of the earth?” American parents are likely to answer “China”. Maybe British parents reply “Australia” or “New Zealand”, and parents “down under” reply “England” or “Europe”. Then the youngster pops the question about digging.

My friends and I at that age were convinced we could—theoretically—dig a hole from the United States through to China, and I can’t remember our parents advising us otherwise. But where would we have come out?

Get your globe—or easier still use an online antipodes finder.

New Orleans is a convenient place to start, not so much because digging there is easy, but because it happens to be conveniently near 30°N 90°W, making it easy to recognize that a hole through the center of the earth would come out at 30°S 90°E. Where’s that?

It is not in China or anywhere near China. It is west of Australia, and a hole through from further north on 90°W, somewhere in Wisconsin or the eastern tip of Minnesota, would come out further south. One from San Francisco would come out even further west of Australia.

Discovering that their hole from anywhere in the States will end up in the Indian Ocean may damper kids’ enthusiasm for the project.

So, would children in England have better luck? No, all their holes would come out southeast of New Zealand. A hole from anywhere else in Europe would end in the South Pacific. And the Aussies’ holes? They would all end in the North Atlantic, although the New Zealanders would mostly end up in Spain.

And the kids in China? Most of them would come out in the South Pacific, west of Chile. The ones in eastern China would come out in Argentina or Chile—and the other way around too, of course. Holes from Africa would end for the most part in the western Pacific, although from Botswana you could reach Hawaii.

This is all rather disappointing and somewhat uncanny. One thing it demonstrates is that the Pacific Ocean is very large, something overseen on most world maps, since they split it and we ignore the expanses of blue at the left and right edges of the map. We also tend to forget that most of the Southern Hemisphere is covered by oceans.

Let’s change the rules. Daddy said China was on the other side of the earth. We’ll let his kid in New Orleans just dig through the earth at the level of the 30°N parallel (latitude).

At 30°N 90°E, the kid comes out in the middle of Tibet, about 130 km NW of Lhasa.


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