The Earth's core consumes a human?
In my world, a 16 year old boy has gained ghost-like properties, invisible to the naked eye and able to flit through objects as if they were not there. Like a man trapped in a room with an endless expanse of stark white tile, with projections showing him what's happening in the world around him. He passes right through the holograms, but in this story, the boy is technically still there.
When his feet reach grass, he starts free falling to the Earth's core and swings back and forth until he is resting in the exact center of the core.
My question is this: If the boy was suddenly able to interact with the environment once more, what would happen? He is technically taking up the space that the core is, so he would most likely displace it, and I was thinking that maybe, like a gopher's tunnel, there would be an impression in the earth directly above him that looks like his body, because he doesn't instantly get incinerated by the sun. Would this be plausible?
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1 answer
I have two main points.
- Compressibility. Your idea of his body forming an indentation rests on the assumption that the Earth's core is incompressible. This is not true. While it is thought to be solid, this does not mean that it can't be compressed. I find it highly unlikely that any sizable indentation would be formed, especially given the size difference: The inner core is about 1,220,000 meters in radius. Your average boy probably doesn't top two meters in height.
- Temperature and pressure. Again, working from Wikipedia's numbers, I find that the temperature at the edge of the inner core is about 5,700 K, about as hot as the surface of the Sun. The boy will be burned to a crisp . . . unless he is crushed by 3,300,000- to 3,600,000-atm pressure all around him.
Also, keep in mind that the boy's initial gravitational potential energy at the surface has now been converted into kinetic energy, meaning that he's moving at a speed of . . . oh, I'm not going to do the calculations, but it's really, really, really fast. The result of suddenly finding himself rushing through a solid object at this speed could be compared to building a brick wall across the track during the Indy 500, but that doesn't quite do it justice.
You do say that he's stopped his oscillations, which didn't occur to me when I wrote the above paragraph. However, Hypnosifl's concerns are also my own. There's no mechanism to dissipate his energy if he isn't interacting with anything.
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