Elevator through the earth? Yay or Nay
Grab the popcorn ladies and gents, I'm gonna talk about a movie real quick.
In the movie Total Recall (2012), the main character and his friend step into a huge earth elevator/public transportation system that zooms them through the Earth's interior. We can assume that the elevator went straight through the core and out the other side. During the ride, they seemed perfectly comfortable and really relaxed, which shows that the environment they were in was controlled (and there wasn't much turbulence/"shaky-shaky").
Now the question:
What are the consequences of doing this? I know that the removal of the core is a pretty gigantic task by itself, but also combatting the temperatures itself would be enough to make most engineers walk away.
1) Can we emulate/imitate the presence of a core (to preserve magnetic fields, etc...)
2) What systems could we use the combat the temperatures?
3) How advanced of a society would we have to be to be able to make this?
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/30416. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
As Gary Walker said, there are not that many places that have land on a straight line tunnel that goes straight through the core.
The good news is that you could go around the core by taking a hypocycloid path between two non-antipode points.
You still have to go deep into the mantle, which is still way beyond our technology level for the foreseeable future, but it's slightly less crazy.
All hypocycloid routes would take exactly the same travel time.
A tunnel from France to England would have to be 55km deep, which is into the mantle.
Alternative
That being said, a much more feasible way to accomplish the same thing would be a space plane. The Space Liner concept had flight times of 90 minutes from Australia to Europe, and 60 minutes from North America to Europe. This is slower than a gravity train, but it's also possible to achieve in our lifetimes with present/near future technology.
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