Accessing Earth's Core 

I love how in this channel, "black hole" just gets casually mentioned as tool to solve an engineering problem.

Humans dug too deep, they were too greedy, sudden Balrog appears

The amount of knowledge and effort that clearly goes into this channel's productions is staggering and immensely impressive.

When you can't find out what the mostly likely fermi paradox filter is so you decide to start drilling into the earth's core instead.

"But if we do it, we'll gain access to resources beyond our imagining." That sounds like a bit of hyperbole given this channel's already covered starlifting. I mean, I can imagine a *lot* after that episode, Isaac.

One issue to keep in mind is that significantly cooling the Earth's core would eventually shut down the convection that maintains the Earth's protective magnetic field. If that happens, the surface could loose most of its atmosphere and oceans, as we think happened to Mars.

this episode keeps making me think: "what could possibly go wrong."

I like these more down to earth episodes

Have we learned nothing from the fate of Krypton??? Mining out the inside of a planet.... umm... makes it explode, apparently?... because comic book physics.

the "We can do anything" attitude is so refreshing.

Now there's an amazing SF story concept: a species whose parent star was dying, so they dug into their planet's core and flew their entire planet to a new star.

You never know what it is you will truly learn watching one of these, you think it will be about relatively (lol) simple geology, and Isaac comes at you with antipode connecting tunnels, Matrioshka worlds that are hollowed and then powered by controlled artificial 'mini' Black Holes, ways a civilization could survive ejection from their home system, active pressure and its titanic strength, as well as giving props to, or showing problems of sci-fi/ fantasy franchises. You are a true polymath Isaac, and a gift.

On this episode of Downward Bound.

Gets ejected from the solar system "I'm gonna do what's called a pro gamer move"

We may not have access to Earth's heart yet, but this channel certainly has access to mine

Isaac: Let's mine earth's core Me, a biologist: *_PANIC NOISES_*

I don't think it would be very wise to start messing with, or even trying to access, the core of the Earth. It's that spinning metallic core that fuels our magnetosphere, which in turn prevents the solar wind from ripping our atmosphere away. We tinker with it at our peril.

Stuff like this; the exchange of serious knowledge, was what the internet was envisioned for.

Well done, Isaac! I love how you mention using the Earth’s core as a power source to buy time while we figure out fusion. I’ve always believed that if the Sun ever failed us, we would simply design a replacement :)

"Sometimes you have to go backwards to go forward, or downwards to go upward." Sir Isaac A ♠ 👍

Jor El : "No you fools!!! I sent my son there to avoid this."

Amazing video. It blows my mind that there is a *quadrillion tons of diamond* at around a hundred miles deep!

Wouldn't we lose our protective magneto sphere if we cool the Earth?

Nobody: Isaac Arthur: Let's wreck our planet and blast our core into a small black hole with nukes!

Me: Space is easy. It's empty. We're talking about millions of pounds of pressure per square inch. Even if we somehow came up with a brilliant plan to _reach_ the core, we just can't get there. IA: Yes... but what if we could?

I always imagined the earths core had a chewy nougat center.

4:20 that's a two way trip the trip there takes a bit under 40 minutes - it would take about 43 minutes if the earths density was completely homogenous (if the dnesity at every point is equal to it's average density) - but it's not - the core is denser than the crust - that's why you keep accelerating more than you would in a homogenous model

Me: oh cool a geology episode! Me, 10 minutes later: oh god no what are you doing

Cool the inside of the earth, bye bye magnetic field..

I would like to petition that the nuclear sledgehammer be named the Balrog.

"I reached the stars by building a massive seed ship!" "I reached the stars by sending out nanite probes to create new life." "My planet was ejected from the solar system so I burrowed into it like a Tonton until it settled around a new sun."

Wouldnt continental drift end up blocking our tunnels after a while?

"A planet is just a pile of cosmic garbage"

I love that the description of the Orion Pusher Plate Design is literally what you get if you ask the Looney Tunes to invent a Rube Goldberg rocket engine for space travel.

It was my understanding that our magnetic field (that protects us from much of the solar wind) is generated by convection currents in the core that would presumably go away if we were to remove the heat and cool it off. Am I misunderstanding that? It didn't really seem like this problem was addressed by the video.

I always wondered why the interior of the Earth doesn't factor in the Kardadshev scale. We are not a type 0.7 civilization, but more like type 0.00001 civilization.

New SFIA video! Best part of the week!

Nuclear jackhammers are my new favorite idea from this show. It hits the prefect balance of ridiculous yet practical.

The submerged ball idea is interesting - never heard of that one before. But... how could you reasonably deal with the bouyancy forces?

"That MoHo Straw is a bad mother-" 'Shut your mouth!' "Just talking about the Magma Extractor Shaft!"

mundane nitpick："Beijing" at 4:15 was actually Shanghai keep up the good work, big fan here!

"These data" Nooooooo!!!! You were the chosen one!!!!

By horse, by rail, by land, by sea, our journey starts Two men incensed by one man's journey from the past In Iceland, where the mountain stood with pride They set off with their guide To reach the mountain side Roped as one for safety through the long descent Into the crater of volcanic rock they went Look up from our telescopic lair, One star for us to share, We continue on our prayer. Crystals of opaque quartz, studded limpid tears, Forming magic chandeliers, lighting blistered galleries.

Would love to see more of your ideas on futurism of plate tectonics! Love your work, thanks much!

Down to the Heart of the Orth !!

Suspension of disbelief gets slightly more difficult with each episode.

Politicians: "We're running out of oil! It will be a catastrophe!" Mining Companies: "Then how about a permit for the Earth's core, Senator? Nothing can go wrong, we promise. At least not during your time in office" ;)

Geology Question. As a lithophile element wouldn't most of the Uranium be convecting in the mantle instead of being collected in the core? Plenty of other fun stuff including all of the Siderophile platinum metals.

Start selling impact drills as SFIA merch. Call it the "Nuclear Jackhammer." Maybe that would work better as a raffle.

This is actually very pragmatic. I imagine advanced civs moving into planets rather than onto them, makes them nice and cozy, protected and gives privacy.

Isaac makes some really crazy outlandish stuff sound feasible because it is "theoretically possible" :D

I never comment or anything. But for your whole ''oeuvre'' I say thank you Isaac Arthur. This is some brilliant content that has provided me with hundreds of hours of entertainment.

Unless you build an outer shell first to provide shielding and light delivery, too much risk to biosphere. And we'd best live in that shell in case our earthquake mitigation is insufficient.

If the earth core is the one feeding our magnetosphere, what would happen if we dig enough metals from it? This sound like a good idea that could bring an apocalyptic event. Without a strong enough magnetosphere, we are exposed to deathly space radiations and much more things.

Earth's core . . . where all the delicious nougat is kept out of our reach.

Jesus this channel is my favorite. “ we could solve this with modern tech by simply COOLING off the earth.” The sky really is the limit with you and I love it

I have never heard of the Kola Superdeep Borehole before, but now that I had, thanks to Isaac, and read a bit about it on Wikipedia, I find it fascinating.

Rising diapirs in the Asthenosphere have to be considered, much as sagging diapers here on the surface.

What I _think_ the video is about: Digging big hole. What the video is _actually_ about: Create artificial black hole in the planet core and build entire multi-layer planet around it.

Covering Earth Surface in Gold would make Aliens dismiss us as Nouveaux Riche Showoffs

don't we need the heat in the core? for something? ... like: Keeping the magnetosphere?

lol - Ethics be damned, engineering feats aside. You talk about a lot of cool stuff here

Been a while since I watched any of your videos. I enjoyed them in the beginning but your videos just feels like a case of "if we had some ham we could have some ham and eggs, if we had some eggs"

I had no idea an episode on mining the Earth's core would then conclude with the Chinese "The Wandering Earth" movie. Mind Blown. Again!

The core is also rotating and you'd be putting a static tube through ti if you wanted to travel through the core.

Have we learned NOTHING from Krypton?!

Thank God! Arthursday has arrived and I can be somewhere else in my mind for a while. Thank you Isaac!

Isaac, I love what you do and have been a sci-fi fan since I was a kid in the 80’s. Starting on my dads collection of Asimov, Clark, Adams and Poulsen. Every now and then I actually get a new idea from your channel. For example, downloading ones personality is copy and paste was one of those “Exactly” moments for me.. These days, I am excited about the Expanse series both the books and the show. But... So many sci fi books turn humans into troglodytes of one sort or another. Sometimes it’s caves of steel such as space ships or stations, sometimes it’s literal warrens underground burrowed into our Moon, Mars or an asteroid. Already for decades now a significant percentage of us humans have moved into high rises etc, and spend most of our lives indoors. What I am pondering is do we perhaps loose something of our humanity as we distance ourselves from Nature? Our thinking has changed already. It’s becoming less and less used in language to compare ourselves to the animal kingdom and more prevalent to use machine similes. It’s in our Zeitgeist to think of our brains as computers. It’s becoming rare to call someone mousy or wolffish or bear like or foxy. We often think a brain in a box kept alive would hold our essential being. Earlier it was the heart. In many folk tales the evil giant keeps his heart in a box and the hero wins by discovering and destroying said box. ( interestingly in language the heart is still the most important. We say the heart of the problem, or my hearts desire. It doesn’t make sense to say the brain of the problem or my minds desire;) My question in brief is can we be correct in imagining going to the stars or other planets without taking nature with us? Sci-fi almost always imagines machines that support our lives as we create our footholds in new worlds. We take nature for granted and forget her. I worry, if we leave her behind there is a good chance we could loose ourselves and become monsters. What are your thoughts?

I love Isaac's extreme engineering projects.

Well, time to reinstall Alpha Centauri and play around with drilling a billion boreholes. Wonderful episode, would love to see something on the practicality of messing with plate tectonics.

Go for it. I was tired of living on Orth anyway.

If Earth gets ejected, I immediately thought of the book and movie "When Worlds Collide" when a culture survives underground.

There has never been a channel on youtube or anywhere that has blown my mind more or more often than Isaac's. It makes me wish I had trained as an engineer or a physicist. I suppose if life extension becomes a thing, I still could.

I love to listen to your videos at night as Im trying to relax and go to bed, I usually end up listening to two videos before falling asleep and if I miss anything, I go back to it the next day and watch it all over again, keep up the good work, Your one of my favorite channels on you tube

Says "Beijing", shows downtown Shanghai.

I've always wanted to decorate my megastructure with the extracted solid core of a planet, thanks for the tutorial on step 1 😉

the scarcity of iron on the surface always felt indignant given how abundant it is and how easy it is to form naturally, the lowest energy state of matter

7:04 Well put, I'll take that to heart.

I`m going to share this in every flat Earth group I can find :D I love this video!

Maybe I'm working with outdated information, or ideas sanitised for easy assimilation; but isn't the liquidity of the core rather an important factor in _not_ turning the planet into a radiation-soaked wasteland, with less atmosphere than one of Rimmer's birthday parties? The fact that our core is fluid, mobile (and importantly composed of a forest of aligned gargantuan needles of nickle-iron, which makes it magnetic) is what makes it the "dynamo" of the planet and generates the planetary magnetic field. If that were to be "switched-off" (by significant cooling), the solar wind currently deflected by it would cause considerable issues, both on the surface and in the atmosphere. I am also given to understand that (at least a significant proportion of) Earth's heat is generated deep down - at least partially by the decay of radioisotopes. Which, in itself, would make the shedding of that heat quite the Sisyphean task - and potentially counter-productive.

I believe krypton taught us something about digging up to the core...

Very fitting music for the closing credits! Great job!

18:20 looks a lot like how the setting of Blame! got started...

I'm afraid we'd cool the core too much and mess up magnetic fields, like global cooling.

I was immediately hooked on the intro music just so you know

This is sorely missing a reference to the real-life soviet 1960s "battle-mole" (Subterrene). A nuclear driven, cartoonish looking, but actually working, under-land-vehicle, whose last known accident happened at a 6 km depth. (watch the 'Dark docs' - "The Soviet Nuclear Battle Mole: An Underground Cold War Battleship?")

R.I.P hollow earth theory😂😂

My parents back in the 60s told us kids not to hang around people who wanted to nuke the earths core into a black hole and today at 68,I’m glad I followed their advice

This episode reminded me of beginning of “Man of Steel”

I'm no natural purist prude, and this may be an unpopular opinion on this channel even as much of a fan I am. But I can't say I'm not worried about poking holes in this ship, considering it the only one we've got so far. In fact I find this video the most disturbing one yet on the channel. Well done.

The only episode where each theory made me feel like “Well...guess that’s where the world will end.” And elevator through the core of the earth? Living like blood clots in the mantle? I’m not a scientist but I got pretty great instincts and I’m sure that’s gonna fuck something up lol. But as always, I love the series and the amount of knowledge.

Love how movies and shows talk about how earth used all its resources but the earth had millions of years worth of resources.

Once again man, I have to say. This is intense. Though, another potential use for that for those gigantic straw structures could be manipulation of earth's ocean currents. Assuming you could build them with flood gates you could actually keep the ocean out with at the base, and assuming you built the structure to narrow and curve above the surface of the sea and have a rotation point in a before it reaches its curve, It could by sheer weight of the ocean crushing down shoot water up through the structure and out the top tip, which could recirculate the ocean, and redirect current,s though it would be dangerous. You could also technically use this to tunnel into the earth, using the ocean's worth of water pressure funneled through a very small space with very thick walls over a relatively short distance, and cut through the crust with little or no issue. Though, it would be very destructive.

If we can get to the core of Earth we could easily recreate the magnetic fields or even keep the biosphere stable more or less. I'd actually think this would be something we'll do in the end to put an end to erfquakes and other existential risks (super volcanoes). Even if it takes more energy than we could get out of it it'll still be worth it if we can control our environment better.

You really did get to the core of this topic, Isaac!

23:16 "but sometimes you have to go backwards to go forwards, or go downward to go upward." Damn never thought about it that way. Yet another great video Isaac and team, I look forward to the bonus one this weekend and the rest.

Somehow I just watch the movie "The Core" 2 days ago and the prospect of core mining has me suddenly worried :D But, seriously, unless we are no longer living on the planet I would stay away from trying to mine the Inner or even Outer core. And other planets have cores as well ... why not start there? Like Mars for example. Its core is smaller, but already cooled down to a solid. Looks easier to me to mine than, say, the only place we currently can live in a decent quantity.

Are you Nuts? The Earth's core is 11,000 degrees F... An 8 thousand mile tunnel? Even Tungsten would liquefy! I'll take my time on a 747!

I'm with you Isaac . We can do this . Whatever this is .

Earths core spins, good luck putting a hole through that.