Subterrenes: Like Submarines but Underground

The notion of a subterrene, or underground drilling vehicle, is well established within the realm of science fiction, but what are the real-world possibilities for vehicles that drill or melt their way through the subterranean world. Robert and Joe explore in this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind…

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I recall, as it were, but yesterday, the night of
that momentous occasion upon which we were to test the
practicality of that wondrous invention. It was near midnight when
we repaired to the lofty tower in which Perry had
constructed his iron mole, as he was wont to call
the thing, the great nose rested upon the bare earth

(00:21):
of the floor. We passed through the doors into the
outer jacket, secured them, and then passing on into the cabin,
which contained the controlling mechanism within the inner tube, switched
on the electric lights. Perry looked to his generator, to
the great tanks that held the life giving chemicals with
which he was to manufacture fresh air to replace that

(00:43):
which we consumed in breathing, to his instruments for recording temperature, speed, distance,
and for examining the materials through which we were to pass.
He tested his steering device and overlooked the mighty cogs
which transmitted its marvelous velocity to the giant drill at
the nose of his strange craft. Our seats into which

(01:05):
we strapped ourselves were so arranged upon transverse bars that
we would be upright whether the craft were plowing her
way downward into the bowels of the earth, or running
horizontally along some great seam of coal, or rising vertically
towards the surface again at length, all was ready. Perry
bowed his head in prayer. For a moment we were silent,

(01:27):
and then the old man's hand grasped the starting lever.
There was a frightful roaring beneath us. The giant frame
trembled and vibrated. There was a rush of sound as
the loose earth passed up through the hollow space between
the inner and outer jackets to be deposited in our wake,
and we were off. Welcome to stuff to blow your mind,

(01:51):
the production of My Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to
stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb
and I'm Joe McCormick. And that was that little coal
reading there was from at the Earth's Core by Edgar
Rice Burrows, published in nineteen fourteen. Is that the one

(02:14):
where Tarzan goes to the center of the Earth. No,
and I know you're joking, but Tarzan does go to
the center of the Earth in a follow up novel.
Because this particular novel, because this was this this kick
started a series that dealt with essentially like an inner world,
a hollow earth environment. This was the the Pellucidar series.

(02:35):
Uh yeah, so Tarzan I think goes to Pellucidar and
a follow up and we'll we'll talk more about Pellucidar
here in a in a few minutes. But the reason
that we're were we kicked off with this reading is
that this is this is pivotal, This is uh this
what is being described here. The iron mole is a subterine, right,
So that was not a mistake. You weren't trying to

(02:56):
say submarine that is a subterrean as in beneath the earth,
as in the same way that a submarine is beneath
the ocean. So what we're talking about today is a
submarine for the ground. Yes, like submarines, but underground. Some
sort of vehicle uh that has some sort of drilling
or melting apparatus um on its front end or perhaps

(03:18):
on the rear end as well, then enables it to
travel through the earth to so to burrow through even
solid rock, as if it were some sort of giant
worm making its way through the ground. Now, you might
not have heard of a subdarine before but I bet
you have seen one in science fiction. Uh So, before
we dive into the science and the actual and in

(03:42):
some cases alleged technological history of the submarine, I thought
we might run through some fun examples from film and TV,
and then we'll also come back around to Edgar Rice
Burrows again before we venture into the real world. Now, Robert,
right when I jumped in the video chat today, you
and Seth were tall king about the like seventy thousand
episodes of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated TV series,

(04:05):
and immediately it came to mind, like, oh, yes, didn't Shredder?
Was it Shredder or was it Krang One of the
villains rides around in a giant underground drill in that show? Oh? Yeah, yeah,
I was. I was chatting with Seth about this because
I'm not sure if it was the first time I
saw a sci fi vision of a subterarine, but I
have a very clear memory of those um but believe

(04:27):
it was the especially the arcade Beat Him Up teena
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game. I think it was a
good week Konami, right, Maybe it was Konami. Anyway, I
remember the arcade version was a lot better than the
port to the nes Oh yeah, yeah, the arcade version
was really kind of beautiful, and I've seen some more
recent ports of it, uh that that you know, really

(04:48):
really felt all right, you know. I mean it was
a total quarter guzzler. It was just how many how
many quarters can you put into this machine at your
local pizza hut in order to beat it? But it
was it was so much fun. And and one of
the things was that frequently the boss at the end
of the level would arrive via a transport module this
thing that looked like a rocket, except the cone of

(05:09):
the rocket is a big drill and it comes burrowing
up through the earth and then it opens up and
here's the bad guy for your fight. Here's Bebop the
punk bore yeah or yeah, or it's Shredder, or it's
Crane himself, and they're coming up. The idea is that,
of course Krane's layer is the subterranean techno dome, this
big uh you know, domed vehicle base that is often

(05:32):
like in the molten core of the Earth, and they
have to send up their their myrmidons, their their foot
soldiers up to the surface in these specialized subterranes and
the techno dome or the techno drome. I always thought
it was like the like video drome. Oh, we have
just received an update from Seth. It is in fact
techno drome um, which can be a little confused. I

(05:56):
think I trans figured it into my head because it
is a a like a spherical looking structure it had.
It looks kind of like a dome. It is a
technodrome whatever that is actually supposed to be. You would
imagine that the interior has a domed ceiling, perhaps painted
by michel Angelo or something. Is yes, but it's a
picture of of crying and shredder about to have this

(06:19):
divine type yeah, crying reaching out. Yeah. So there's the series,
which which certainly Seth can attest to and I have
memories of. It was a lot of fun and had
these vehicles in there as well. There was even a
toy version of it. I included a picture of this
for you, Joe. I don't know if you remember this

(06:40):
or not from your the toys of your childhood, but
it is a more ornate version of the subcarine from
the cartoon. I remember it, but I didn't have it
that this was an object of coveting for me. Yeah,
I I remember for me personally teenage Mutan, Ninja, Turtles,
the cartoon, and just the overall like sensation of the
toys and all. It came around this weird time where

(07:01):
I still very much I certainly watched all these shows
and I wanted to have the figures. I wanted to
have these action figures, especially Shredder and Crane. But there
was this kind of feeling at that point that you
weren't supposed to have toys anymore, Like you weren't supposed
to enjoy this stuff, which is total b s. And
I'm thankfully snapped out of that and have spent the

(07:23):
rest of my you know, adult life, um, you know,
realizing that action figures are awesome and and I should
buy them for myself or my child. Uh. It's it's
that horrible middle period. I mean, it's just like with
movies too. It's like how Roger Ebert talks about how
you know, when you're a little kid, GAMMERA is great
because it's a rocket powered turtle. And then you get
older and more mature, and you think this is stupid

(07:44):
because it's not realistic. And then you get even more
mature than that, and then you realize Gamera is great again. Yes,
and Gamera is great. Um and and and I and
I will say that you look back at Teenage Ninas,
I had so many crazy just on zo elements in it. Uh,
it was fabulous. I mean you had this armored Ninja

(08:04):
and he's with there with an alien brain that's in
this giant android body, and they're sending Ninja's up to
the surface in these crazy drill submarines to fight. Uh.
You know, obviously teenage Mutant Ninja turtles, which is in
itself such a strange concept. So that was one subterarine
that I think a lot of people probably remember. Older
viewers or certainly viewers who caught this show like on

(08:27):
Sci Fi Channel in reruns, might remember the Thunderbirds, you know,
like Thunderbirds or go well the this was the nineteen
sixties puppet show with these very signature looking characters. Um
that I understand. I was reading that they were partially
inspiration for the animation style on the long running Star
Wars clone World War series that I'm watching now with

(08:47):
my son, Um. But in this show, the characters had
these crazy vehicles and one of them was the Thunderbird too,
and it featured all these different pods, and one of
them was called the Mole, and it was a drill
headed vehicle then enabled the team to venture into the Earth. Now,
this establishes a theme that's going to continue throughout the episode,

(09:08):
which is that there is a lack of imagination among
the people who create under underground drilling machines for science
fiction because it's always a mole. It's always a darn mole. Like,
why can't you think of some kind of other burrowing creature.
Why isn't it a sicilian or or something like that,
you know, I mean, come on, how many moles can

(09:29):
there be? Or even a naked mole rat that's close enough. Yeah,
there's there's so many other ways to go, but everyone
comes back to the mole. And and that also includes
Pixar because I know a number of Certainly, if you're
you're too young to remember a teenage Mutiny Turtles or
certainly Thunderbirds, then perhaps you remember the Incredibles. At the
very end of this film, we're introduced to a new

(09:49):
supervillain called the Underminer, who arrives in an epic uh
and an epic subterine with a drill, this time on
either end. Uh. It's a a fun scene, just kind
of like a way to close out the film. He's
a bigger character in the sequel. Have I have seen
the sequel? Uh, Yeah, he plays a larger role in that.

(10:09):
But he's also mole themed. Clearly, Yes, yes, clearly mole themed. Um,
let's see. Oh and and this is so weird. We
were we kind of decided to do this episode and
I had it in my mind, and then I happened
to check out. Uh, this new series on Hulu titled
Solar Opposites. It's a it's a new show from Rick
and Morty co creator Justin Royland along with Mike McMahon,

(10:33):
who also worked on that show. Uh. They dropped the
entire first season on Hulu, and it's it's it's a
lot of fun. It's it's definitely for grown ups. But
it's the you know, a similar vibe to Rick and Morty,
but perhaps a little less meta and um, with characters
that are a little more likable. Um. But I've started
watching it in BAM. Right there in the opening of

(10:53):
the first episode, there's this vehicle called the Earth Drill
that's used by the character Corvo to obtain nickel alloy
from the Earth's core in order to try and fix
his spaceship. And there's this great sequence where core of
a you know, fires it up and starts drilling into
the earth to go get the nickel, and it started
immediately causes earthquakes in like China and London, and there's

(11:14):
a big tidal wave somewhere else in the world due
to the seismic disruption of the thing. I like that
the design is a little bit trown shaped, is a
little bit light cycle kind of in profile at least. Yeah,
it's a really cool design like that. They didn't just
you know, slap together something that looked like the like
the the transport module all over again. It has has

(11:35):
some really cool wheels. But anyway, these are just a
few examples. You'll find submarines all over the place in
science fiction if you really start looking for them, like
it'll just turn up eventually, I think, in any kind
of science fiction scenario. For instance, there's one in Fallout
seventy six, the current Fallout game. I looked around, I
was like, there's gotta be one in Star Wars somewhere,

(11:55):
and it looks like there is a combat drill in
the Darth Vader comic books, like Darth Vader rides one
into battle at some point, like an a T dril ty. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
that would be a T drilt. I like that, Um yeah, yeah,
because I figured Star Wars University's room for there's certainly
room for a subdarane. There's some rocky planet somewhere where
there's a battle between uh, you know, the the Empire

(12:17):
and um, you know, some hapless species of subterranean creature.
But I feel like we got to bring it back
to the Edgar Ice Burrows because I will admit so
I have never read this book. At Earth's Core his
novel about the drill that goes down, and uh, I
don't know, actually, I guess timing wise, this would be
coming after Jules Verne's journey to the Center of the Earth,

(12:39):
So I don't know how derivative of it it is. Um.
But I did manage to watch about the first twenty
minutes of the nineteen seventy six film adaptation of this
book Last Night, starring our old friend Doug McClure. You
know the man. Hi, I'm Doug McClure. You might remember
me from such films as that one with the Fish People,

(12:59):
and it also had Peter Cushing in probably definitely, not
even no doubt at all, the goober reest role I've
ever seen Peter Cushing in, where he is just like
a bumbling doo fast with a high pitched, uh cartoon
professor voice. Yeah, this was This was the ninety six adaptation,
directed by Kevin Conner, and um, yeah, you might expect,

(13:23):
like Doug, with Doug McClure and Peter Cushing, you might think, Okay,
Doug's gonna play kind of the meaty doofist, which he
did so wellbe Doug McClure is awesome. He's a he's
a treat. When you see his name pop up in
one of these older films, you know you're you've got
a nice film ahead of you. But Peter Cushing, you
think especially all right, we're thinking seventy six, we're thinking
Star Wars is just after this practically, and you know,

(13:46):
you think the dignified, stoic Peter Cushing, He's gonna play
this dignified scientist who invince this thing. But no, he
plays this goofy doofist character as well. Uh, and it's great.
I mean, Cushing is is wonderful. He has he has ranged,
so I guess in a way, it's nice to see
him flexes his acting muscles in another direction. I mean
it's an unfamiliar setup. Normally, I think you'd have more like,

(14:07):
you know, the Dufus in The straight Man, but it's
like a dual Dufus lead. Yeah. Yeah. And then you
have Carolyn Monroe in there as well, a screen legend
in her own ride. Yeah. She played still a star
in Star Crash. Yeah, she was in I think she
was in a James Bond film yeah yeah, yeah, and
and numerous so she was very much an icon of

(14:29):
of the day. Hi, I'm Doug McClure. And I didn't
get a haircut before filming this. Oh yeah, he's pretty
shaggy in this. Yeah. It looks and it doesn't even
look like it's intentional. It looks like he just, you know,
it was meaning to get it trimmed and he didn't. Yeah. Uh. Now,
a lot of people where I think we're reintroduced to
the summer, introduced to it to the for the first time.
The most recent season of Mystery Science Theater three thousand

(14:52):
that aired on Netflix, because this is one of the
films that they riff and it's I remembered as being
one of the best episode odes of the the MST
three K Revival. But the film in and of itself,
it's just is tons of fun. It's colorful, It's it's
weird and wacky, you know, it's it's I feel like,
even though I haven't read this particular Edgar Rice Burrows novel,

(15:13):
it does feel true to the spirit of them because
they're they're There are a number of cool things going
on in this. First of all, we do have the
Iron Mole. We have a drill headed subterine vehicle that
takes our characters deep into the earth and it takes
us to this hollow earth realm called Pellucidar and Uh
and here we have a number of crazy elements taking

(15:33):
place as well, because we have a species of telepathic
terra saurs called the Mahars that rule over stone age
humans that are also there. There's also like a giant
bipedal bird Tyrannosaurus rex thing. It's kind of like Sam
the Eagle and it runs around chasing Doug and Peter
Cushing in this giant underground corn field. I don't know

(15:55):
if that's in the book. Yeah, I don't know. I'd
love to hear from someone who who's who's red this one,
because I've read a couple of Burrows books um back
in the day, and I remember them as being pretty fun.
You know. He gets into a little bit of scientific
speculation while also getting into lots of you know, swashbuckling
style action, but then occasionally like some really atmospheric you

(16:16):
almost kind of like pulp horror moments as well. Uh So, Yeah,
and of course he wrote a ton of books. This
was this one just kicked off a mini series that
he did dealing with this inner world he created. Uh
and and he was he was a highly influential fiction
writer at the time. So it seems to me it's
possible that he might be the originator of our like

(16:39):
popular culture and to a certain extent, scientific obsession with
subterranes in especially in the twentieth century. So I was
looking around to see if there were any hard bio
biographical details on where Burrows got the idea for the
iron mole um, because it seems like he might have
been the first I don't know for sure. It's you know,
it's very possible that there's some other short stories from

(17:01):
the time period, or some book I'm missing in which
a character introduces the idea of a of the subterine,
but I wasn't able to come across it myself. Let
me know if you if you have an answer to
that now. Certainly, Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of
the Earth came out earlier in eighteen sixty four, but
this book does not feature a fantastic drilling vehicle. No,

(17:22):
they just they just find a hole in the earth
and just kind of walk all the way down. It's
more of a spelunking adventure. They traveled down via lava tubes,
I think. So I ended up consulting I think three
different Burrows biographies in search of any answers on you know,
where he got his ideas. I'm just a little nugget
of like, hey, he was reading in Popular Mechanics or something,
you know, but nothing turned up. So it seems entirely

(17:45):
possible that Burrows might have invented the sci fi subterine
as we know it, and in doing so, as is
often the nature with sci fi influenced scientific minds all
of that century to investigate the idea further. Um. However,
even if he invented the sci Fi subterine in his

(18:05):
own right, he was definitely inspired by technological achievements in
tunneling and burrowing that had taken they were taking place
at the time, and had taken place towards the end
of the previous century. Well, maybe we should take a
quick break and then when we come back we can
talk about some of the real science and technology of
burrowing vehicles. Thank alright, we're back. So like I was

(18:30):
I was saying here earlier, burrows I think would have
definitely been inspired by the real life advances and tunnel
boring machines during the nineteenth century. UH tunneling shield technology
came first successfully used for the first time to excavate
UH the Thim's tunnel beginning in eight But this is

(18:50):
just as the name implies a protective structure that allows
human excavators to work underground. It's not even a machine, right,
So describe briefly the the tunneling shield. This is basically
kind of like a movable roof shield that you can
take with you as you continually remove new material from
as the tunnel is made. Yeah, I would say combine
that with the concept of say a drilling template, and

(19:13):
that's pretty much what you have. But then this leads
into some of the first tunnel boring machines UH. And
what is often brought up as the first tunnel boring machine,
though it's a real stretch to call it a vehicle,
came in eighteen forty five with the Mountain Slicer. Is
that really what it was called. Yeah, it was called
the mountain slicer. It was not named it wasn't called

(19:33):
a mole at all. Again again, it wasn't a vehicle really.
But it was commissioned by the King of Sardinia in
eighteen forty five to dig the French rail tunnel between
France and Italy through the Alps. And it was the
work of Belgian engineer Henry Joseph Mouse And this was
the first UH. This is often considered the first tunnel

(19:53):
boring machine or TBM. It consisted of more than one
d percussion drills mounted at the runt of a locomotive
sized machine which was mechanically power driven at the entrance
to the tunnel. So think about what kind of of
an engineering project it is to do something like this,
especially to have a single machine, because tunneling is you know,

(20:15):
it's not just like moving through water, which kind of
like is is easily displaced around you as you dive
through it. Of course, when you're tunneling through hard material,
one of the big problems you're gonna have is continually
removing everything that you're drilling out of place in front
of you as you go. Right. And then if we're
thinking of saying, we keep talking about the mole as

(20:36):
the bio biological uh analog for all of this. Well,
when you're talking about the ocean, right, you're talking about
ships and submarines basically doing the things that other organisms,
even large organisms, are capable of doing. But when you're
talking about you know, you're not just talking about burrowing
through loose soil here, we're talking about burrowing through solid rock,

(20:57):
which is is not something that is general they considered
within the realm of certainly you know, a vertebrates capabilities
or or even or any kind of you know, or
organisms capabilities. This is this is something new well certainly
not at any speed that would be useful from like
a civil engineering point of view. Right, um, so uh

(21:17):
I want to talk just a little bit more about
the idea of the tunnel boring machine or t b M.
There there's tons of information out there written about t
pms because this is a this is a huge area
of engineering, right figuring out how to improve these machines
for the production of tunnels. UH. One particular definition I
came across in laboratory testing of materials for tunnel boring

(21:40):
machine drag bits by Catuition at All UH defines a
t b M as a quote machine used to excavate
tunnels with a circular cross section through a variety of
soil and rock strata. So that's something to keep in
mind too, is when you're dealing with tunnels, you're dealing
with boring through not just one type of rock or soil,
but multiple. Yeah, and I think it's important that it

(22:02):
mentions the circularity of the tunnel because this is a
feature that This will actually come up again later in
the episode when we talk about different methods for producing
a whole tunnels in rock. The drill based method, which
is based on grinding and removing material, tends to be
by nature circular, right, just because of the limitations of

(22:23):
the kind of machine you have to use to drill
and bore out. Yeah. Absolutely. Um another source on the
mountain slicer I was looking at in hard Rock Tunnel
Boring Machines by um Metal, Schmidt and Rits. The authors
described the mountain slicer as having quote worked with hammer drills,
chiseling deep annular grooves in the stone, dividing the face

(22:46):
into four two by point five meter high stone blocks. Now,
the interesting thing here is that supposedly the mountain slicer
successfully demonstrated it was you know, there was a successful
demonstration of this technology in a test tunnel for something
like two years EARS, but it was ultimately not used
for the Alpine project in question due to doubts about
the drive equipment and its power requirements and its ability

(23:09):
to sustain the wear of its usage. So they ended
up just using traditional tunneling tunnel boring techniques instead. But
I think this this drives home like just the real
the true engineering challenge here. You know, it's quite a
feat to even create a what seems to be you know,
working prototype like the mountain slicer, but then it's quite
another to actually use it and use it and use

(23:30):
it for the extended period of time required to actually
complete the project. Yeah, exactly. And we should emphasize again
that when we're talking about these types of boring machines
like the Mountain Slicer, this would again not be a
vehicle designed to just like autonomously run around under the ground.
This would be a stationary like institute machine that's for

(23:52):
a particular project, right, Yeah, and and certainly is not
working in isolation. Um. So this is all, like I said,
you could you could see the mountain Slicer as a
potential first for TBMs. But a lot of people give
credit to American designer Charles Wilson, who designed a t
b M in eighteen fifty one, patented in eighteen fifty six.
It was called Wilson's patented stone cutting Machine, which doesn't

(24:15):
I don't know, it doesn't have as much it It
doesn't sound as a uh you know, is wagnery as
that to previous one. I should have called it, what, uh,
Wilson's rock stapper. Yeah. So anyway, Wilson's patented stone cutting machine,
and and it was successful. They used it to bore
the Hoosic Tunnel in northwest Massachusetts, and it had rotate

(24:39):
a rotating mount for the disc cutters at the front
of it. Now, there's obviously a lot more to the
science and subsequent development of tb ms, but I thought
we might cut to the chase here. I think we
can already see how Yeah, Mountain, We're gonna Mountain. Cut
to the chase. Even, I think we can already see
how how even their early forms help inspire the idea
of subterarine. But even considering the more modern forms of

(25:04):
the TBM, you know, you have to ask how close
does the idea of a subterarine really get to a TBM.
So we have to consider the facts. So first of all,
as as we mentioned already, generally speaking, a t b M,
and there are different varieties of TBM for different types
of rock. It is a tool, not a vehicle. It is,
you know, a piece of equipment. It's used to make

(25:26):
a tunnel, not to simply tunnel from one place to another.
I suppose you can say it does both, but the
tunnel making is the key focus. Plus it's part of
a system and an overall project that entails workers, specialized
trucks to haul away the rock, etcetera. You're not gonna
hijack one of these things and bore a rogue tunnel
with it. Also, TBMs are in general neither independent nor

(25:47):
truly mobile, and here this is important too. They are
certainly not fast. Yeah. Now, I think another thing is
that a lot of these are going to be in
some kind of way, and not exactly like a train,
but sort of on rails like in a way. They
will have infrastructure that is supporting the forward movement of

(26:08):
the vehicle. And it's not just like rolling ahead on
its own right. It is a thing you move up
or you have at the front of your tunnel boring project. Now,
one of the more exciting players in the realm of
of of TBMs these days is none other than Elon Musk.
Okay doak. Yeah. I don't know if you're familiar with

(26:30):
this joke, but he founded the Boring Company in I
was trying to read about it, but I just fell asleep.
You just, uh joke I've ever made on the show.
Let's cut it. No, let's leave it. Let me deal
with the shame. Now you can laugh at Elon Musk jokes. Um,
it's it's it's clever. They really commit to it. Um.

(26:53):
If you can look at the website and you can
see that there's a lot of tongue in cheek there,
but but it is a real project, and then it
looks like they're making a lot of exciting progress here.
So part of the whole idea of the Boring Company
is that they want to they want to see tunnel
usage being a huge part of our sustainable future, Like
in terms of of creating more sustainable infrastructure, it's better

(27:17):
to get as much of it underground as possible. And
then this has been a trend in futurism UM for
a while. This isn't in and in and of itself
anything new, but these are some of the reasons that
they cite UH for investing UM in the improvement of
TBM technology. First of all, there's no practical limit to
how many layers of tunnels can be built, so any

(27:37):
level of traffic can then be addressed through these tunnels.
Tunnels or weather proof tunnel construction and operation is ultimately
silent and invisible to anyone on the surface. And this
is not something that I saw them touch on, but
certainly as a part of the larger sort of futurism
design focus of underground systems. Is, of course, if you

(27:57):
put your highways under round, then you can have more
like trees on top. You know, you can have some
sort of a return to nature. You can take the
you can give back the land that the that are so,
you know, our highways and streets have stolen. But to
do all this you've got to make tunnels. And the
thing is, tunnels are expensive to bore. The price that

(28:20):
they quote in their materials is one billion dollars per mile,
and and then it's a slow process on top of that.
In fact, musk Uh joked that a snail travels fourteen
times faster than a traditional TBM, and as such, they
did this whole bit where they said they had this
pet snail named Gary, and their goal was to beat

(28:41):
Gary and a foot race with their TBM. So in
order to do that, the company stresses the importance of
increasing TBM power output, making tb ms capable of continuous
tunneling without breaks for support structure building as is currently
the norm, also the importance of making tb ms autonomous,
and also creating a system by which the excavated rock

(29:04):
is then made into bricks on site or perhaps even
within the t b M itself for use in the
support structure. Oh and that's another thing I should probably
describe what these t b ms, and sort of all
modern t b ms look like. They look like, um
that they do not have a conical drill at the front. Uh.

(29:24):
It tends to, at least at first glance, look a
lot like flattery. It looks like a cross between an
east cigarette and a tape worm. Oh, two great things
not to put in your mouth. Yeah. Um. The Boring
Company also promotes the idea of smaller tunnels, So instead
of relying just on like enormous tunnels through which you
put like a you know, a four lane highway, instead

(29:47):
make a smaller tunnel with a one way, uh, one
lane highway for one way traffic as well. This also
factors into the various loop and hyperloop projects that Musk
has involved in. So you, I have to say a
lot of that, especially when you're talking about, you know,
looking into the future, A lot of that certainly sounds
more like the subterarine we know and love. Though at

(30:09):
the same time, I think it all further underlines the
realities of boring that tend to limit these fictional visions. Um.
And and I should also know the boring company is
actually building tunnel, so it's we're not just talking about
a pure futurism project. Um. They have I believe, three
different TBMs, all of them with with wonderful names. There's

(30:29):
the Good, there's the line Storm, which I believe I
read is named for um, Robert Frost poem or a
line in Robert Frost poem. And then there's the proof Rock.
Oh j Alfred proof Rock. Yeah. Um, the proof Rock,
which is is two words in the name here is
one that's still in development, but we will be used soon.

(30:51):
Why is it named the proof Rock? Is it is
it lying like an patient eutherized upon a table or
is it let's um, I think maybe it's just like
the proof if it's in the r I don't know
how deeply it is invoking the poem. It has measured
its progressing coffee spoons, well, whatever you know, we want
to call them. Um. These are some of the stats.
The line Storm is said to be two to three

(31:12):
times faster than conventional TBMs. Proof Rock is supposed to
be as much as ten times faster than conventional machines.
And I I was reading about this in the publication
Tunnel Insider, which I've never read before. I was not
I'm not a subscriber to Tunnel Insider. But as they
put it in quote, if they and by they we

(31:33):
mean the Boring Company, if they are able to pull
this one off, it will mark a quantum leap in
the history of tunnel boring technology and catapult the Boring
Company to the pinnacle of subterranean engineering. These these particular
TBMs are also electric and are claimed to be three
times more powerful than conventional TBMs. Uh. The Boring Company
is still going strong, it seems. In fact, I was

(31:55):
reading that they recently finished a pair of Las Vegas
tunnels ahead of a plane opening. Well, more power to them,
I mean, I I gotta say, just from a puristetic sense,
in addition to all the practical reasons for it, I
I like the idea of relegating transportation infrastructure underground. Yeah. Absolutely,
it all makes sense to me. Uh, And it seems

(32:17):
like they're making progress. Um. You know, of course they're
always questions and all of this, Like, you know, you
have to you're wanting to push the technology, but also
it needs to be the affordable choice as well. Um.
But you know, the future. The future remains to be seen,
but but I'm hopeful. It seems seems like this might
be the way. Okay, Robert, are you ready to talk

(32:37):
about atomic battle moles? Yes, or as well atomic battle
I think it is time because we've we've spoken about
the pure sci fi, We've spoken about the the the
the the actual technological history and and our current place
concerning TBMs. Let's start dealing with some of the murcury

(32:58):
Er territory here. Okay, so he are, We're going to
dive into a bit of alleged Cold War crypto history,
and we will have to warn you up front. The
sourcing that's available in English on this subject, I think
is very murky, and there's a lot of uncertainty. Possibly
even in fact, I would say more than possibly, I
think quite probably. We're getting into some Edison Louis La

(33:21):
Prince murder confession territory. If you listen to our Invention
episode on that, where a possible hoax document or work
of fiction is being misinterpreted by later writers as a
factual report and then built upon by embellishment, but with
some major caveats. Are are you ready to dig in? Yes?

(33:41):
I do want to just throw in one quick nugget here.
We're gonna be talking about about Russian UH advances, advancements
or also or alleged advancements, and it's worth it's worth
noting that, first of all, UH Edgar Rice Burrows was
very influential just around the world, but there was also
a key Russia sci fi author bad the name of
Gregory Adamov, who wrote about subterines in Conquerors of the

(34:06):
Underground in ninety seven. Oh yeah, I was reading about
this and one of the articles that I'm going to
reference in a minute here points out a hilariously machine
translated version of that title Conquerors of the Underground, which
is Winners of the Bowels. Well that's good, okay, okay,
but yeah, well, what's what's the prompting for all this? Well,

(34:27):
a couple of years ago you you might have seen
a number of double take headlines running around the internet
about the Soviets developing a nuclear powered subterine weapon during
the Cold War. We can I know there was an
article on like I f L Science about it. There
there's one we can check in with hero in, our

(34:47):
old arch nemesis, The Daily Mail, The headline is quote
revealed the nuclear powered mole the Soviets built to burrow
beneath America and deliver atomic bombs under ground undergrounds in
all caps. Oh yeah, this is a great headline, right.
So I was looking to trace back to the source

(35:08):
some of the claims in this article. So this is
not the main source of the of it, but I
think it gets to the core of some of what
we're going to be looking at here. So there's an
English article from June in an online publication called Russia Beyond.
The headlines. Now, it's just known as Russia Beyond, which
is a multi lingual arm of the major Russian state

(35:30):
newspaper rosie Skaya Gazetta. And I'm not generally very familiar
with rosy Skya Gazetta Russia Beyond, I don't have a
very good sense of how generally reliable it is. But
this article is derived from reporting from a government funded
newspaper of the Russian Federation, and it doesn't actually name
most of its sources. So I think we have to

(35:53):
treat the claims in this article with an extremely heavy
dose of skepticism. Uh that's not to say everything in
it is necessarily untrue. But I would not hang my
hat on anything here, but just so we can lay
it on the table, let's at least look at what
this article claims. So it talks about how during the
middle of the Cold War, the Soviet Premier Nikita Krutzchev

(36:14):
ordered the construction of mechanized units that would be able
to burrow underground to destroy military targets. And these might
be underground bunkers or command centers or strategic missile launch sites,
or to destroy underground communications infrastructure. And this hypothetical tunneling
weapon that Krutzchev supposedly ordered the construction of would be

(36:37):
known as a battle mole. So we're back to the
moles again. Now. One of the supposed advantages of the
battle mole would be its ability to tunnel the targets
deep behind enemy lines undetected and detonate charges, or even
to surface and deposit Soviet troops, sort of like an
underground APC. So was there any historical press for this well.

(37:01):
The article claims that the first self powered underground military
vehicle was designed by someone named Pyotr Raskazov in Moscow
and nineteen oh four, but that this was just a design.
It was never realized. He made some drawings, but the
designs were lost around the outbreak of the First World
War ten years later, and then there were attempts to

(37:24):
bring the project back in the nineteen thirties under the
Soviet Union. Again, according to this article, the person in
charge of this effort to to revive the underground battle
mule idea was somebody identified in this article simply as
engineer treble Leev, which sounds like it's it sounds like
Kirk selecting a red shirt for the landing party and

(37:45):
Star Trek, you know. Um, but engineer Trebellev wanted to
quote design a machine which would look like a real mole. No,
no further explanation though. I actually I did find an
article from from the nineteen fifties that explains what this
is referring to. I'll leave that as a surprise for
a little bit later. I mean, I would hope that

(38:06):
the translations a little off, and the ideas that it
functions like a mole and not that it just looks
like one. Though that's exciting in its own right. I mean,
this is an English language article, this wasn't machine translated. Okay, well,
maybe maybe it's just supposed to look like a Molden
wanted to design a machine which would look like a
real mole. But eventually, you know, whatever happened here, the
project fizzled. And so then Nikita Krutzchev comes to power

(38:30):
as the first Secretary of the Communist Party in nineteen
fifty three after the death of Joseph Stalin, and according
to this reporting, Krutzschev was big into the idea of
the battle mole and he strongly supported its redevelopment. So
you know, go out there, create the people's mole. And uh.
Supposedly there was a secret underground facility in Ukraine for

(38:51):
developing and producing these moles, and the first nuclear powered
prototype for the battle mole was completed in nineteen sixty four. Now,
according to the article, this would have been a tunneling
vehicle powered by an internal nuclear reactor like a nuclear submarine,
which again, this would be an ideal power source for

(39:12):
like any kind of long term stealth vehicle for the
same reasons it's useful for like strategic ballistic missile subs. Right. Uh,
you know, the the nuclear power allows you to run
silently for a long period of time without having to
return and get fuel. Somewhere and it doesn't you know,
it doesn't produce any emissions other than heat, so you know,

(39:32):
it's an ideal fuel choice. Just as a note of
historical comparison, uh, the first nuclear powered submarines I looked
this up. They were produced by the United States and
the Soviet Union, and like the mid to late fifties.
I think the US put out their first nuclear sub
in then in nineteen fifty five and the USSR by night. Yeah.
And and of course it was just the overall atomic

(39:53):
trend of of looking at ways to power various types
of vehicles. I mean, there was there's the whole realm
of the atomic power aircraft they're looking at. Yeah, and
I think that that's clear that we could do a
whole podcast on that in the future, or certainly the
ideas of atomic powered automobiles and so forth. Um, So
there was a lot of this line of thinking back

(40:14):
and in the day there's a lot of enthusiasm enthusiasm
for this, uh, this sort of power. But to defend
the idea here, like I think the idea of nuclear
power does make a whole lot of sense for for
a vehicle like a strategic missile sub because the whole
point is that it needs to go out there and
be hidden, and uh, you know, the strategic purpose of

(40:34):
it is that you don't know where it is, and
it's somewhere on the Earth, and it can be out
there for a long time without coming back to refuel. Right. Yeah,
I mean this is if we I think we've discussed
this on the show before. I mean, this is one
of the key parts of of for instance, the United Kingdoms,
uh nuclear deterrent. Yeah. But so back to this article
from Russia. Beyond so other claims that it makes about

(40:57):
this alleged battle mole, it says, quote it had a
stretched titanium cylindrical body with a pointed end and a
powerful drill. It says the size would have been between
twenty five and thirty five meters in length and then
between three to four meters in diameter, and its speed
underground as it's tunneling, would be between seven and fifteen

(41:19):
kilometers per hour. Now, I am no expert on tunneling vehicles,
I admit, so my judgment may be way off, but
this is huge red flag for me. This sounds really
really fast. That sounds much faster than a snail to
go back to uh Elon Musk's u um snail race. Right,

(41:40):
this thing can tunnel through the ground faster than some
people can run. I don't know. Yeah, okay, but the
article also claims that quote the nuclear physicist Andrei Sakarov
was involved with the creation of this machine, possibly with
the development of the original soil crushing and propulsion system
to tchnology, the cavitation flow created around the battle mole's

(42:04):
body reduced friction and enabled it to bore through granite
and basalt. Again, I very much doubt if there's any
truth to this association, but for those who aren't familiar,
Andrei Sakarov is absolutely a very real and very important
figure in twentieth century history. Uh Sakarov was a Russian

(42:24):
nuclear physicist who worked on the Soviet Union's nuclear weapons
program in the late forties and the fifties. He's considered
in some ways the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb,
but he later became an activist, protesting for civil liberties
and human rights within the Soviet Union, and he received
a Nobel Peace Prize in nineteen I know he was

(42:44):
not popular with the with the Soviet government for his activism.
At some point I know he was sent into internal exile. Um.
But anyway, So back to the article. So the article
claims that the battle Mole took a crew of five
people to operate, and it could carry up to fifteen
paratroopers on top of that, So again, it is actually
being alleged that this thing would bore in under the earth,

(43:06):
drill up to the surface, and then let out a
bunch of dudes. Yeah, it's I mean, it's it's straight
It sounds straight up Ninja turtles. It sounds like I mean,
it makes me think of stormtroopers jumping out of one
of these things, right right, Or of course if it
wasn't you know, fifteen paratroopers could deliver a payload of

(43:27):
weapons or equipment or especially an explosive charge, and this
payload could be of up to a ton. Now here's
here's the part where it gets really interesting. The article
alleges there was a secret plan for an underground strike
on America which would be triggered It said if the
United States quote deteriorated beyond the point. No further explanation there,

(43:50):
but I guess the idea is like, if if the
US is starting to look weak, then like this, these
things could drill in, So how would they tunnel underneath
the United States? Well, allegedly the play and was to
bring them to the United States coast inside nuclear submarines,
specifically to the California coast, and the California coast is
singled out for its seismic instability, and then the moles

(44:11):
would be released from underwater to tunnel into California and
plant nuclear explosive charges under strategic facilities and fault lines
without being noticed right at all. And also this would
this turn, this attack, it alleges, would be a kind
of false flag for nature where the nuclear charges they'd
be detonated, but it would just look like naturally occurring

(44:33):
earthquakes and tsunamis all over the place, and it'd be like,
I guess Mother Nature is just mad at us. Oh man,
I mean this is there's so many sci fi possibilities
just in this, like the idea of say, ultimately slow
moving nuclear drill machines have been slowly making their way
from the California coast to the heartland, and when they
finally open up, you have all these like hideously atomic

(44:55):
mutated paratroopers that emerge. All the talk sick of injured.
Now speaking Russian, so much fun to you can have
with this concept. But anyway, so I've I've just got
to read the conclusion here verbatim quote. According to some reports,
test runs of the Soviet nuclear subterine were carried out
in different geological conditions in suburban Moscow's soils, in the

(45:18):
Rostov region and in the Urals. Witnesses who observed the
tests were most struck by the capabilities the subterine demonstrated
in the Ural mountains, the battle mole easily bit into
hard rock and destroyed the underground target. However, a tragedy
occurred during the repeated trials. For reasons unknown, the machine
exploded deep within the bowels of the Urals, killing the

(45:42):
entire crew. Shortly thereafter, the project was shelved. Oh man,
there's a whole like cool Indie historic horror film concept
right there, This doomed subterine. It gets I don't know,
eaten by Judd's or something, right. I think this would
make a great movie. But I have serries us doubts
about this report, like even if this were published by

(46:03):
a source that I thought to be trustworthy. Again, I
don't know much about the source and it is related
to like a government funded paper. Some of like my
basic plausibility alarms are flashing red. But anyway, so back
to like a lot of the ten circulation of the
story that was going around and you know, daily mail.
In all these places, it seems to trace back to

(46:24):
an article in Gelopnik by senior editor Jason Torchinsky, who,
to his credit, does show skepticism about some of these claims,
maybe more so than some of the derivative articles do.
Um which but it tries to follow up on these
claims by consulting some contemporary articles in Russian language sources,
a lot of it machine translated, though um So. It

(46:46):
was Torchinsky, by the way, who pointed out that idea
of the machine translation of conquerors of the underground being
winners of the bowels. So he is the winner of
the winner of the bowels. But um he develops on
the assertion that this this guy, remember engineer trabellev that
he wanted it to look like a mole. Uh. Twarcensky
points out that this is supposedly because he studied X

(47:09):
rays of a mole skeleton in order to design the machine.
That makes a little bit more sense uh and will
be further developed even more by another source I found.
As for the reports of this nineteen thirties model, there's
all this vagueness in the sources. It's hard to tell
from what's available, how large Trabelle's model was supposed to be,

(47:29):
whether it was crude, etcetera. Um Regarding the prototype built
in nineteen sixty four, Twarcensky turns up some more claims
about how the project came to an end from the
Russian reporting and rosy Skaya Gazetta, which is apparently what
that Russia Beyond article was sort of derivative of. But
here here's additional detail machine translated, of course. Quote. However,

(47:52):
during next tests in nineteen sixty four, a car that
penetrated the Ural mountains near Nisney tag Gil for a
stance of ten kilometers for unknown reasons, exploded. Since the
explosion was nuclear, the apparatus with the people in it
simply evaporated and the broken tunnel collapsed. In the press
was the name of the deceased commander of the Battle Mole,

(48:15):
Colonel Semyon Budnikov, but official confirmation of this never sounded.
The project was closed. All documentary evidence of it was
liquidated as if nothing had ever happened, very conveniently here, right,
So all physical evidence of this experiment is completely erased
from the earth. And then it gets even fishier and
starts to get into territory where I'm wondering who's fooling who.

(48:38):
So this is again from the Rosy skya Gazetta report
explaining why the explosion happened. Quote or maybe another civilization
exists literally under our feet, and the guards did not
want the Soviet mole to penetrate the forbidden limits. After all,
the technical characteristics allowed the battle mole to reach the
center of the Earth. Therefore, unique underground machine was destroyed,

(49:02):
and the mystery of the longstanding Soviet project is likely
to never be fully revealed. Oh okay, so the underground
civilization might have sabotaged it. Yeah, that doesn't sound pas right,
So there's definitely something wrong with this story. It doesn't
necessarily mean that all of the reports of historical Soviet

(49:26):
battle mole development are untrue, though here I'm getting the
feeling that a lot of these reports may be embellished,
and this report about the nineteen sixty four vehicle specifically
might be a complete or near complete fiction. So the
next thing I was looking to was seeing if we
can figure out about mid century subterrane projects from like
contemporaneous sources, like was anything published about it at the

(49:48):
time that I can access in English and understand? And
so I did come across something this was this was
linked through another source I found there was a nineteen
fifty six, actually December thirteen, nineteen fifty article in New
Scientists called Russia's Battle Moles. Okay, now we're dealing with
a publication we can get behind, I mean to an extent,

(50:10):
Like now, I don't necessarily trust all of the claims
in this article either, but at least it might give
us a better idea of not necessarily what really happened,
but what ideas were actually being discussed in the nineteen fifties. Uh.
You know, this isn't like a you know, decades later source.
Now we can find out whether or not the idea
of these machines was actually in the air, regardless of

(50:32):
whether or not they were actually built. And I will
know this is a very early article for New Scientists.
It was founded a New Scientist I think was founded
just a month or two before this article was published.
In nineteen fifty six. But it starts off talking about
how slow and labor intensive the process of tunneling is
and how great it would be to have a machine
that's like a mechanical mole or an underground boat that

(50:55):
can speed up the process of digging tunnels. And then
they go on to report an unnamed contemporary Russian technical
journal that is describing the attempts of Soviet scientists to
build a machine like this um, something that would be
able to independently drive around underground boring tunnels. And they

(51:15):
corroborate the idea that this research is based on bio mimicry,
the biomimicry of the mammalian mole quote. The investigation of
moles technique was carried out in the Ural mountains. Local
hunters taught the Russian scientists how to catch moles. Then
the lengths of the captured moles from tip to tail
were measured. Next, the animals were allowed to burrow and

(51:36):
the duration of their task was timed with a stop watch,
from the moment they started digging to the moment that
the end of their tails disappeared into the earth. In
this way, the speed of digging under various conditions was calculated.
In clay, the mole borrowed at a rate of two
hundred and thirty four ft per hour and in black
earth three d and sixty one ft per hour. In

(51:58):
some cases even higher speed were attained. The second part
of the investigation was carried out in the laboratory. A
box measuring sixteen inches square by eight feet long was used.
The box was packed with clay soil and arranged in
front of an X ray machine. A mole was placed
at the front end of the box and it started
to burrow its way through the soil in the box.

(52:19):
By X ray photography, a record of the moles progress
was obtained, showing the movement of its muscles and skeleton. Okay,
so this is starting to become actually clear to me now, yeah,
I mean this is this is where we're again. We're
talking about biomimicry. Here we said, we're talking about uh,
scientists considering a problem, an engineering problem, and then looking

(52:40):
for an answer in um evolved biology. Right. So they
discovered that the mole digs by working its head and
its paws back and forth along and access in the
front to to loosen the soil ahead of it, and
then it moves the displaced earth out of the way
and presses it up into the side of the tunnel,

(53:00):
sort of packing it against the edges of the tunnel
with its what they call its withers. I guess that's
like the back of its neck and upper back area,
and with its shoulders, and then it continually applies forward
pressure by digging in and pushing with its hind legs.
And the article claims that this pressing out of the
displaced earth by the strong withers and the shoulder muscles

(53:24):
of the mole is actually the most important discovery here,
because again, one of the biggest problems with with drilling, tunneling, boring,
whatever you want to call it, is how to deal
with the displaced material as you go right. The New
Scientist article goes on quote from the lessons learned with
the mole, the Russians built a mechanical model, followed by
a larger scale machine consisting of a cutter corresponding to

(53:47):
the mole's head, a worm for ramming loosened earth into
the walls of the tunnel corresponding to the withers, and
propellers corresponding to the hind legs. In the front part
of the body of the machine is a powerful cutter
made of hard alloy. Behind the four propellers, which push
against the walls of the tunnel and move the machine
forward at a speed of thirty ft per hour. The

(54:09):
cutter rotates at a speed of three revolutions per minute
for use in hard soils. The cutter can also be
given hammer blows as it rotates. Uh and it says yes,
this would have needed a human pilot to steer it. So.
The article claims that the machine was built and tested
in the Ural Mountains in nineteen six, and Soviet engineers

(54:29):
have it says, made improvements in its speed and size
since then. The article does not really even though it's
called battle mole, The article does not really mention military applications. Instead,
it emphasizes how useful this kind of device would be
for the kind of tunneling we were talking about earlier,
like for mining or for urban engineering. One thought that
comes to mind thinking about this is if well, I mean,

(54:53):
first of all, if you wanted to solve this engineering
problem like looking to the mole, is is is certainly
one way to to try and answer those questions. Even
if things might not scale up all the way, but
in terms of a warfare scenario, it seems like this
is the sort of thing that, if you could pull
it off, would be very advantageous in older modes of warfare.

(55:14):
You know, like if you're dealing with with siege warfare,
having a battle mole could really turn the tide. Perhaps
even in trench warfare, you know where you have you know,
these hard fronts, uh, in these Noman lands. You know
that I could see that being a factor. But it
is certainly I don't know. People may disagree with me,

(55:34):
but it seems like once you get into the World
War two era and the post War War two era,
the usefulness of this kind of a device, even if
you could pull it off, becomes um uh, you know,
less obvious. Yeah, it's I mean, it seems much more
useful in the world that doesn't already depend on air power.
You've already conquered the skies at this point. Now you

(55:56):
could say that well maybe the maybe an underground mole,
at least hypothetically could be more stealthy than air power.
I don't know. I mean, we have stealth bombers and
stuff now, but um well, you know it reminds me
of uh, the super secret weapon um of the Byzantines,
the Greek Fire. We did an episode on that and

(56:17):
one of the things that came out about it was
that it was it was useful if you used it
every once in a while under very specific circumstances, but
if people were expecting it, uh, then it lost its usefulness. Yeah,
it's like more useful as a kind of shock weapon
than as like a regular mainstay of how you win battles.
But anyway, so I want to kind of put a

(56:39):
bow on this issue of the Soviet atomic battle mole.
There appears to be a very good, skeptical and well
sided dive into the issue of the atomic subterine from
way back in twelve at the Atomic Sky's blog, and
it's called the atomic subterine. Uh. The author of this blog,
I think, offers a very reasonable assessment of this weird

(57:00):
in murky subject, in addition to a very good right
up in general of atomic subterarine ideas as they were
explored in the United States, which Robert I know you're
going to get into in a minute here. But the
author here he just goes by Mark, but he acknowledges
the claims we've talked about so far regarding the alleged
Soviet atomic battle mole, and he concludes that there probably

(57:21):
was a real Russian program in the nineteen fifties to
develop a conventional chemical powered tunneling machine known as an
underground boat, but that the part about the atomic battle
mole and krutz Chev's attack plan, uh you know, attack
the US from below, that this is not just untrue,
but possibly a prank gone wrong. Uh So, I'm gonna

(57:44):
read from his in note here quote I strongly suspect
that the supposed nuclear powered prototype was an April fools
hoax by the Russian language Popular Mechanics magazine. The first
mention of it I can find online and comes from
the April issue of that magazine, and the diagram they
include incorporates what appeared to be mechanical tentacles. In any case, however,

(58:10):
neither of these were a subterraine, but rather tunnel boring machines,
And based on everything I've read, I think he's very
possibly correct. In fact, I might even say probably, And
if so, this would be interesting because we'd be again
in territory I mentioned this earlier, like the territory of
the Edison murder confession that we talked about in the

(58:30):
Louis La Prince episode of Invention, where something originally intended
as what I think was a non malicious, explicit, explicitly
fictional document is later misinterpreted by a bunch of other
writers as a legitimate news report. And this is why
April Fool's articles should be exiled to Siberia forever like

(58:50):
no more of them ever. I agree. And on that note,
let's take a quick break. But when we come back,
we'll discuss uh some of the US based research into
the idea of a subterarine. Thank alright, we're back, alright.
So we think that these reports about the Soviet atomic

(59:11):
subterine and the the attack America from below planned that
this is probably not true. It's you know, it may
be based on some actual research that took place, but
the the overall story is not real and this thing
was never actually built or tested in the Earl Mountains,
at least as best we can tell. Um. But that
doesn't mean that the idea of an atomic subtarine was

(59:32):
never seriously investigated at all. That's right, Uh, so, I
I too was looking at that atomic Skuy's blog post
and I was also looking at a piece by Steve
wentz H in the National Interest that that also cites
that particular blog post um and Yeah. The United States
also looked into this technology, into this idea of a

(59:55):
subterarine UH specifically um during the n lost Alamos National
Laboratory explore the use of nuclear of a nuclear powered subterarine.
Engineer Bob Porter was allegedly inspired by at Earth's Core
by the by the Boroughs novel after noting the three
thousand degrees integrade temperatures of a prototype reactor in the fifties,

(01:00:18):
and then in experiment by Potter showed that this sort
of drilling could be possible. The resulting project was intended
to produce a vehicle quote capable of penetrating the Earth
to depths of ten kilometers to extend geological and geophysical
exploration into the Earth's mantle. Now, the important idea here
is that this subterine envisioned by Potter here would not

(01:00:40):
drill just through traditional boring like a you know, a
drill bit or a bunch of drill bits, that it
would primarily work through melting right using the superheating from
either a nuclear or an electrical source to to superheat
something like some tongue sten or something that would melt
the rock away and allow you to just kind of

(01:01:01):
like go through it like a hot knife through butter. Yeah,
in a way, it would be swimming through the earth.
It would be creating its own lava tube and sliding
through it. Uh yeah, So I mean it's it's an
ingenious solution, you know, um or potential solution. So apparently
the first of all, I do want to like you,
like you mentioned earlier, I would I would encourage everyone

(01:01:23):
to check out that Atomic Sky's blog post because he
also goes into a little more detail about this supposed
a scenario where they were talking about it at at
out luncheon or at a diner or something. Yeah, bar
and um, and it just kind of the idea of
it was got picked up by um, was it a
it was a politician this politician. Yeah, the the scientists

(01:01:45):
from the lab on Friday, we're hanging out just like
having drinks and talking about ideas that occurred to them
in a some politician, I don't know if it was
a US rap or a New Mexico reps. Some politician
legislator walks in and overhears them talking about this subterine
idea and gets really excited about it. Yeah, he's like,
that sounds great, let's fund it. And so they did

(01:02:06):
and got funded. Um. So, apparently, in addition to mining,
tunneling and exploration, the project also entailed this idea that
the tech could be used to create storage cavities in
the earth, in the deep Earth, not only for toxic
and nuclear waste. And we've discussed on the show before
about out the the the the deep geologic isolation of

(01:02:26):
nuclear waste is actually a you know, a really supported idea.
But they also got into this idea of how putting
pressurized gases in these storage cavities that could then be
unleashed to drive turbines for energy. It's an interesting idea. Yeah,
I would not have thought of that, but yeah, that's
pretty cool. So um. According to again that National Interest

(01:02:49):
article and the Atomic Skuy's blog post, uh, the everything
kind of came together like this. So in the National
Science Foundation funded a full scale study of the nuclear
subtu rain and then a small scale electrically powered prototype
drills were built and one was used by the National
Park Service to drill drainage holes at Bandalier National Monument

(01:03:11):
near Los Alamos. The rock penetrator's lack of vibration. This
was apparently essential to preserving an archaeological site close by
while the holes were being drilled. And this, uh, this
emphasizes again like some of the advantages that you would
have if you're just moving through rock primarily by melting
rather than standard grinding drilling stuff. Also, it's like you

(01:03:33):
don't produce a lot of dust and pollutants from the process.
There are many ways that melting down into the earth
is a quite elegant solution for tunneling. Yeah, I saw
this referenced in some of the other like tunneling and
boring articles. I was coming across the idea of of
creating a tunnel in your wake that is like lined
in glass. You know, again, it's like a lava tube.

(01:03:56):
And therefore, you know, you wouldn't necessarily have this issue
of Okay, we have all this leftover stone, what are
we gonna do? How's the how's our subtermarine gonna then
turn that into blocks to reinforce the wreckage it leaves
in its wake. So the sources here they point out
that the according to the designs two cutting head designs
were looked at, one for common rock and one for

(01:04:17):
hard rock. So you had a traditional rotary cutting head
with the cylindrical rock melters, and then you also had
one with dozens of nuclear powered needle probs. Um, which
is a pretty crazy idea, Like these are in a way,
these are like little tentacles. Are almost like the tentacle, uh,
you know the head of the star faced mole right
where they kind of dig in and then but then
they melt right. And this again, it wouldn't have necessarily

(01:04:41):
like a conical tip. It might be more like a
flat disc type shape with the melting elements and then
the drilling elements. Yeah. Really more in line with traditional
TBMs in that in that respect, um. And then they
also mentioned that the probes would would would unevenly heat
the rock face, causing it to crack and crumble, so
that would be an an aspect of it as well. Um.

(01:05:02):
And then yeah, I mentioned the glass walls. But so
ultimately the project transfers to the Department of Energy in
ninety five and from there it apparently mostly vanished. It
would pop up again in the nineteen eighties as a
possible way to tunnel for bases on the Moon. And
this was apparently this has been six and this was
a proposal by one doctor John Rowley. Yeah, well, and

(01:05:23):
and two other co authors. Yeah, and they published a
paper about, uh, excavating tunnels on the surface of the
Moon to shield colonists from the radiation that you would
be exposed to if you were trying to create a
nuclear base or not a nuclear base, sorry, a moon base. Uh.
This is a very common problem when people talk about
making moon bases. Right, You've basically just got again underground somehow.

(01:05:44):
And they called this idea not a subterine, but a
sub selline because it's the nice Yeah. Well, I think
that that in and of itself is a it's a
pretty um elegant idea. Um. You know, you can certainly
imagine your lander delivers uh, the the subterine or subsiline
vehicle and then like that is necessary to burrow to safety. Um. Yeah.

(01:06:07):
So in that Atomic Sky's post, Mark also touches on
a weaponized concept that was discussed to use the technology.
This would have been the radio isotope powered thermal penetrator
or the the rip TP, in which the machine quote
would form a bubble of magna and hot high pressure
gases behind itself. When it nears the underground base that is,

(01:06:30):
you know, presumably the target here, the pressure of the
gas and magma would burst the base walls explosively, destroying
the facilities near the breach through blast and fire. On
that blog post, he include some black and white too
illustrations of what these concepts would have looked like. You
get to see those, uh those needles at the front.

(01:06:51):
There's also this image of a tunnel that has been
board of what this would look like, this kind of
glass line tunnel, and it has kind of look kind
of like a colon oscary um, you know it, it
has kind of a colonic appearance. Uh Now. Another one
of the advantages that that they talk about with respect
to the rock melting versus just the traditional drill type

(01:07:15):
excavator is that a rock melting model for a subtrain
would allow you to to potentially create a tunnel of
any shape you wanted. It wouldn't have to be a
circular tube. It could be square, it could be triangular.
You know, you can do anything interesting. Yeah, Like especially
if you're if you're trying to create a space for
your moon base upon arriving, you know, for that you

(01:07:37):
might want say a large cube cubicle space, uh, underneath
the lunar surface, as opposed to just a whole bunch
of tunnels to live in. Right, So I don't know. Yeah,
the rock melting subsaline, I'm not sure that idea is
forever done with. Maybe they'll come back someday. Yeah, I
don't know, because we've also we've discussed on the show
before how there are concepts of building such bases and

(01:07:58):
craters so you know, a naturally occurring um places to
hide in the linear surface. So so I don't know, Um, yeah,
I guess it. Basically, we kind of leave this episode
with still a number of questions, you know, like what
what what is the future of boring and tunneling here
on the Earth or even on other you know, on
moons and planets that we might go to, and and

(01:08:21):
what is that going to look like? Are we going
to actually see subterines in the future, you know, I
it's it's it's hard to say, but it seems like
some of the tunnel boring advances that are taking place
today are encouraging of that. Um, I don't know if
they're gonna let um Elon musk Uh strap a nuclear
reactor to one of these things anytime soon. But well,

(01:08:42):
that's another interesting thing to point out, which is that,
um so, obviously there are lots of safety concerns whenever
you have a nuclear powered vehicle. I mean, this is
the case with all of the nuclear powered submarines and everything.
But fortunately, I would say nuclear power safety concerns are
going to be les, sir, with a device that's being
used to tunnel deep underground, then they would be with

(01:09:05):
a lot of other kinds of vehicles, right, true. I
mean it's like if it's if it fails, it's down there, right,
you know, not to say that that that an accidental
nuclear detonation even underground is ideal, But I don't you know,
there are it's better than other places I'm saying, like
relative to an airplane or something. Yes, yeah, absolutely. Now

(01:09:27):
I guess another thing we should quickly acknowledges that the
internet is also full of claims that there are subtraines
all over the place. They're making tunnels under the whole
world as we speak. That are you know, that are
full of like the the Illuminati warriors and everything like that.
It's I would say subtraines and underground tunnels are a

(01:09:48):
very common trope of conspiracy theories, and I wonder why
that is. Why is it that specifically underground enclosures are
like such a common image in conspiracy theory thinking is
like underground bunkers, hidden underground bases, tunnels, there's always tunnels.

(01:10:09):
What why is that? Well? I mean, I think part
of it is that, I mean, these are really cool ideas,
and I think a lot of conspiracy thinking does get
into areas of taking things that are really cool and
taking them too far, you know, taking them too far
into an area where you you want to believe them
so badly, and then you deal with the ramifications of

(01:10:31):
believing that you know, because it's interesting, it's therefore true. Yeah, Like, yeah,
the idea of the hollow Earth, that's it's a very
fun concept. I I love reading about how Edgar Rice
Burrows constructed this this world. But if you start buying
into that concept, there's a whole lot of baggage that
comes with it. And and likewise, if yeah, if you

(01:10:52):
if you want to believe submarines are real and you
know they're out there in the world, burrowing tunnels and
what are they doing for whom are they burrowing these tunnels?
And what are the results? Suh, well I know the answer.
It's for Lord kin Boat. Sorry that maybe in Next
Files right? Oh I just remember you're not the Next
Files person. Yeah, yeah, sorry I was. I'm struggling with
that reference. Who's Lord Kinboat. Oh he's you know, he's

(01:11:13):
the Lord of the Underground Realm from Jose Chunks from
Outer Space. It's one of the best episodes of all times.
Oh yeah, you've You've reckoned. I need to watch that
one someday. He ends up. Lord Kinboat reveals himself to
a character who is named after Rocky Ericsson and who
who gets a visit from Jesse Ventura as one of
the Men in Black. It's just it's it's NonStop hits,

(01:11:35):
all right, I need to check that out. Well, um, well,
this has been a fun one. I feel like there
have to be some really cool examples of subterines and
fiction that we haven't covered. And you know, if anyone
out there is is more versed in even the conspiracy
theory realm of subterarines, uh, I mean, I'd love to
hear about it, you know, like like I say, the

(01:11:56):
idea of secret underground bases and on link vehicles connecting
them all like that's that's uh, it's it's pretty pretty
fun soundings as long as it doesn't end up obscuring
your understanding of reality. If you can't get them out
of your mind, write a screenplay, don't post on the
on the forums. But but that being said, like the

(01:12:17):
real the reality of like TBM technology and and the
kind of work that's going on with the boring company
like bad and of It's the in and of itself
is really exciting. So um yeah, there's there's plenty of
of great stuff to go around just within the realm
of truth here totally all right. In the meantime, if
you would like to listen to other episodes of Stuff
to Blow your mind, you know where to find us.

(01:12:37):
That is, wherever you happen to get your podcast and
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Just to say hi. You can email us at contact

(01:12:58):
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