March 12, 2019 • 49 mins
How deep into the Earth have humans traveled? How far have we drilled? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick explore some interesting lows from the history of mining, geologic exploration and good old fashioned subterranean living.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
in this episode, we're going to dig down, deep into
the bones of the Earth. Okay, we're gonna We're gonna
(00:25):
call to mind a quote from J. R. Tolkien's The
Fellowship of the Ring Maria Maria, Wonder of the Northern World.
Too deep we delved there and woke the nameless fear. Okay,
So is this an episode about the ball Rog? No,
I mean not directly. I mean we might ponder, as
(00:46):
we uh we read here what the metaphorical ball rog
might be in all of this. But but it is
gonna be an episode about about digging in the earth,
about about about mining down, digging down, and just how
deep we've gotten. And then what do we do in
the earth? What's what is what? What? What is Homo
sapiens business beneath the surface of the earth? After all?
(01:09):
You know what? I just recently went to the Atlanta
Zoo and I hadn't been there since I was a kid.
And first of all, it's fantastic. Atlanta Zoo is wonderful.
But one of the things that struck me the most
was when I went into the little area where they
have the places where you can view the naked mole
rep Yon, where there is this The smell is overwhelming. Uh,
(01:32):
there's this odd odor. But just looking at them, they
are one of the strangest looking creatures on Earth. There
these naked, wrinkly, uh, kind of rosy pink things with
long teeth, lying in puddles, appearing to have some kind
of high mind and and frequently, at least when I
was looking at them, chewing on each other, just gnawing
(01:54):
on one another beneath the ground. And these are true
like subterranean creatures. You're not that we're designed to live
on the surface, but we do a lot more underground
venturing than most other permanent surface dwellers do. Absolutely. And
on the subject of of underground true underground evolution and
the evolution of burrowing species, I would like to come
(02:16):
back to that because we actually have um an author
in the Atlanta area wrote a book about the evolution
of burrowing creatures and uh, and I keep meaning to
to reach out and see about having him on the
show to chat with us about it. He's the one.
He actually mentions tremors the movie in the book, so
you know, you know that he's our people. But speaking
(02:37):
of of our people and speaking of of underground creatures,
one thing I was thinking about two is how if
you look to the fictional world of subterranean humanoids, we
see there's always there's pretty strict dichotomy. Right on one hand,
you have the debased underworld dwellers. You have the moment
(02:57):
the crawlers from the descent, the more locks for the
time machine you have or one of my other favorites
in terms of just cave dwelling creatures. Two gargoyles. I
don't know. Oh, it's terrible, some wonderful gargoyle costumes come
creatures coming out of the deserts and the desert caves
and kidnapping people that sort of thing. Well, I usually
(03:18):
think of gargoyles as as flying. Yeah, but they live
in caves in this particular movie, somewhere where they gonna
live in the middle of the desert on a skyscraper.
I guess bats live in caves and they fly. Yeah,
they're basically It's more it would have made more sense
if they were bat people. Instead of gargoyles. But um hey,
I invite everyone to to see this film for them
(03:40):
for theirselves. The the ideal way to see this film
I think was probably at three pm on a Sunday
on TBS back in the day. But you can watch
it through modern means as well. Oh, I just looked
it up. These are some striking images. The gargoyle is
almost cramp us looking it is now. Of course. The
(04:01):
more Locks though, are really more of the iconic underground
dweller though from HD Wells The time Machine. Yeah. Though,
the interesting thing about them, so you're saying that there
are some uh, some fantasy and sci fi works where
underground human oid type creatures are presented as like, in
some way like a horrible deviant version of us, where
(04:23):
the more Locks are the sort of the villains of
the time Machine, but they're also it's funny. In the novel,
the more Locks are like the intelligent creatures that use technology,
and it's the the gentle surface dwelling eloi who are
like kind of ye, they're flacid and in curious and
sort of bovine. But then we also have works where
(04:45):
the creatures who live underground are the more refined humanoids.
So um, we could of course looked in the Middle
Earth and the Dwarf Lords in their Halls of Stone.
You know, they're not elevated to the same level as
the elves, but but still they're an advanced civilization that
that seemed to to to love a good underground uh empire.
(05:08):
Then you have things that you have, and you have
other groups like the drought in Dungeons and Dragons, the
non men and our Scott Baker's Second Apocalypse socca. The
mutants in beneath the Planet of the Eights. Oh yeah,
they worship a giant bomb. Yeah, they're great and they
have psychic powers, and yet we have not seen them
in any of these recent Planet of the Apes movies.
Also in the Fallout games, you have the Vault Dwellers.
(05:29):
They're not permanent to underground dwellers, but they have dwelt
underground for a long period of time and they have
internal and you know, emerging into the surface world to
retake it. Well, yeah, I think clearly in a lot
of these like science fiction works, the underground humanoids it's
supposed to be something symbolic. It shows like a sort
(05:50):
of like retreat into some kind of other nature. It
is a physical sign that something has changed. And I
think another out of the appeal is that the living
below ground or in caves or vault is something that
seems like it should be rather removed from the sort
of homes that most of us keep. And yet one
(06:10):
of the curious things is that underground dwellings are also
a part of our past. Uh. They're they're part of
our present, and depending on where we go in this
solar system, uh, they may be a part an important
part of our future. Yeah. So let's take a minute
just to to talk about humanity's history in the depths
of the earth. Okay, So limestone caves provided shelter for
(06:33):
the Neanderthals of the Ice Age, and early humans too
made use of caves for shelter but also for burial
and for sacred rights. Yeah, I was looking at examples
of this. One example of I think the religious significance
of deep cave dwellings, especially by Neanderthals, is to be
found in the Brunkel Cave of southwestern France. Uh So,
(06:54):
to decide a journal article, We've got one in Nature
here from twenty sixteen called early Neandertal constructions deep in
in Brunickel Cave in southwestern France by joe Bert at
All And in this study, archaeologists reported the discovery of
ring shaped patterns of broken still agmites made from about
four hundred pieces of still agmite that are that were
(07:17):
found deep in the cave. And we don't know what
these ring shaped structures were for, but it's clear they're
artificial in origin. They were made by by humans and
they were the site of ancient fires, where like there
are some sections that are burned and charred, and there
are also pieces of burned bone mixed in with them.
And a uranium dating series combined with some other methods
(07:39):
gives the structure an approximate age of a hundred and
seventy six point five thousand years old, one of the
oldest known human structures. And this was pretty deep down
to oh extremely yeah. This was found three hundred and
thirty six meters down from the entrance of the cave.
That's over eleven hundred feet down, showing that the Neanderthals
who made these rings had master deep underground environments. Like
(08:02):
to go this far down is not something an animal
would do lightly. You'd need to have an artificial light
source to take with you. You You probably need a plan
in a way of organizing and understanding your spatial environment
so you don't get stuck down there. And the big
question is what were the rings for? We had these
rings over a thousand feet down underground. A common explanation
(08:23):
would be, well, it's maybe religious in nature. Somebody's burning
fires with rings of stone down in the dark over
a thousand feet underground, right, must be for some kind
of ritual. We don't really know, but it's fascinating question,
and I think the most common answer is probably that
it had something to do with with an with a
loss to history, unknown neandertal religion. So there yet, so
(08:44):
there was a sacred reason to go down into the
depths presumably, or maybe there's just some other reason that
we don't understand. It doesn't it's not clear. Is it's
not easy to determine that these this like circle would
serve a practical purpose. I'm not sure what you'd use
it for as a tool or anything like that, or
why I would need to be so far down if
(09:05):
you did it. Almost it really asks for a kind
of symbolic interpretation. Yeah, Now in terms of more readily
accessed portions of a cave. Stuff close to the surface.
It's easier. It's easy for us to to think, well,
you know, these are the kind of early primitive shelters
one might use, and then you would quickly evolve beyond that.
(09:25):
You would reach the point where it just makes more
sense to depend on tents and buildings for your shelter
um and then you would would maybe only stick to
the depths for you know, things that are religious in nature,
like catacombs or or perhaps bomb shelters in some cases,
or basements. I mean, it's, uh, it's easy to think
(09:46):
that there would just come a time where nobody lives
underground anymore unless you absolutely have to. Well, yeah, and
there'd be several reasons for this. I mean, one would
be the advent of settled civilization, because it's not that
there are no sub old civilizations that involve caves. Some
of them do involve caves, but generally there's a limited
number of caves out there, so you can't just like
(10:07):
keep filling up caves. You need to like build your
own structures to support and expanding population, and caves are
not necessarily near where you can do your agriculture, right.
And then if you're expanding on caves or or setting
out to build your own caves in the form of
artificial tunnels, it takes a fair amount of of effort.
You have to have considerable resources, technological know how, and
(10:29):
you have to depend on the rock that you're working
with being the right temperament for what you're trying to build. However,
we do see all of these things line up, uh
in really to a fascinating degree with some of these
caves cities in modern day Turkey. Um and I was
(10:49):
was not really all that familiar with these prior to
researching for this episode, but they are, They're amazing. Uh.
One in particular is the city of Daring, who you
h This is a complex of hand dug tunnels that
dive down sixty meters or two hundred feet um beneath
that's as roughly eighteen stories beneath the surface and would
(11:12):
have housed and estimated twenty thousand people during its heyday.
It contained homes, schools, even a winery, and it's likely
that these tunnels were begun around seven b C. And
while it eventually seems to be a functional, fully functional city,
it continued to serve as a place of refuge well
into modern times, the place that surface dwellers knew they
(11:35):
could they could flee to and hide in. You have
surface tensions, we were too problematic. Yeah, it seems to
be worth noting that this is what the majority of
these Turkish underground UH dwellings were primarily used for. It
kind of calls to mind to go back to the
Lord of the rings, like Helm's Deep, right, it's a
place where if your civilization is attacked, you can retreat
(11:57):
down below the surface and we're in seal up the
walls with stone until the war passes on or the
danger is gone, and then you re emerge. Which makes
me wonder about the Neanderthal a mystery from earlier, like,
to what extent was that a way to survive uh,
the new people, you know, the inheritors, to to to
(12:17):
flee down into depths that that other uh certainly surface predators,
but maybe even uh these newer hommaid species would not
bother with. Now that'd be a good plot for a novel,
but I think it is the case that Homo sapiens
are not believed to have been in the area at
this point. Oh no, no, for purely Hollywood reasons, it
could be like a reverse descent instead of it being uh,
(12:41):
poor hapless humanoids dealing with underground monsters are underground monsters
of the heroes. There you go do for the descent three,
That would be actually a pretty good uh way to
frame it. So again, this is just one of of
several underground cities that you find in this region. There's
also the Kaimak the Underground City, the Oscanic Underground City,
(13:03):
there's the Mazy Underground City. And there are some interesting
illustrations of these online that really just drive home what
we're talking about. We're not talking about like just a
few chambers. We're talking about like multiple stories of underground habitat.
It's a luxury mine. We should also point out that
(13:23):
cave dwellings continue to this day in parts of the world,
such as with Waddox, a southern Spanish region containing around
two thousand caves that have been used as homes for generations.
And you look at pictures of these and there's really
quite uh. The design is very interesting to look at
because in many cases, like the walls are painted, they
look like rooms in in home. You know that they
(13:46):
don't don't look like cave dwellers. They look like relatively
modern people living in a shelter that just happens to
be part of a naturally occurring cave. Well. They're also
still underground homes in Tunisia. In fact, some of these
underground homes make an appearance in the first Star Wars movie.
So Luke's house in the first Star Wars is you
(14:09):
know Uncle Owan and Aunt Brew where they live. That's
sort of modeled after a type of Tunisian dwelling where
there is a central crater type structure. It's like a
big pit in the ground, and then around the ring
of the crater there are dugout rooms that you can
go into. Very interesting. I didn't realize that. I always
thought it was just an elaborate set, I guess, or
(14:29):
an actual space house. I didn't think about the idea
that this would be an actual home or based upon
an actual home design from that region. There's a cool
photo gallery on on the Atlantic website that that documents
some of what these houses look like in more recent decades. Cool,
and there, of course other plenty of other examples we
can point to of sporadic underground dwellings they're parts of
(14:53):
Australia where you still see a fair number of underground dwellings.
And then I feel like, at least when I was
growing up, there were at least a couple of underground
houses in the county where I lived, because there were
there's a lot of tornatic activity in the region, and
there was at least one house where It's like somebody
was like, screw it, I'm not putting up with this
(15:14):
fear of tornadoes anymore. I'm living under the ground. And
then they did it. Wow. Yeah. In fact, I think
I knew somebody who lived in an underground house in
southern Middle Tennessee. It's all basement. It's all basement. Yeah. Well,
I guess that has certain advantages. It probably a certain
disadvantages too, I would I would think, for example, the
lack of exposure to sunlight would eventually psychologically get to you.
(15:36):
Oh yes, And that's a that's of course, that's a
whole other side of the equation when you start imagining
permanent dwelling underground and what that does to our circadian rhythms.
But generally speaking, we're thinking about creatures that are going
to come back out again with with with regularity to
obtain the resources they need. You would kind of have
(15:56):
to write because I mean you mentioned that, for example,
the city uh in an ancient Turkey, this underground city.
It had like a winery, but it couldn't have a
vineyard under the ground, right, and then they weren't making
mushroom wine, um likely. So you know, we mentioned the Descent.
Even the monsters in the Descent were leaving their caves
to pray, because there's the whole scene where their bones
(16:17):
piled up. They have this uh this is these midden
heaps of the things that they've been eating, and it's
it's it's shown that they've been eating deer like they're
going to the surfaced hunt, presumably at night. So yeah,
we have plenty of underground to have it as today.
And also certainly if you go to a major modern city,
you go to New York City, you're gonna find plenty
of people living in basements. You know that there there
(16:40):
there's there's still an underground too many um surface dwellings
that rise into the sky. And then we have plenty
of underground complexes that can sometimes be repurposed as a shelter.
For instance, we did uh an episode talking about mosquitoes
in the London underground and their evolution, and we in
that we discussed how during the Second World War the
(17:00):
London underground, the subway system there was used as a
bomb shelter. And then we have cases of homeless individuals
living and abandoned subways, railroads, flood sewage tunnels, heating shafts
in various metropolitan areas around the world. Uh. If you've
ever seen the two thousand your two thousand documentary Dark Days, Uh,
(17:21):
that documentary looks at people living in Freedom Tunnel in
New York City during the mid nineteen nineties. So thus
far we've looked at religious reasons, survival reasons, um, infrastructure reasons,
even a little bit to dig tunnels under the earth.
But another major reason to go digging around and crawling
around under the earth like you're some mener of worm,
(17:43):
is of course, to mine precious resources, find that pot
of gold exactly. In fact, we just talked recently in
an episode of Invention the role that copper mining might
have played in the origins of wheel technology. That's right,
So humans figured out that these were press as resources
that we could do things with them that give us
a very important advantages over our fellow humans, and in
(18:07):
doing so, we quickly ate up all the the easily
acquired deposits of these materials. So instead we just started
digging a tunnel. There's more down there, right, and then
you need you need things like like wheels to remove
them from those tunnels. So we do find plenty of
examples of pretty old minds in human history. The oldest
(18:28):
mine in the world is thought to be the the
Church Silica mine at Naslette Sabaja in in Egypt, and
it's estimated to have been in use around a hundred
thousand years ago. That's crazy old. That's long before like
settled civilization, long before agriculture. And it's in mining that
we find some of the most incredible feats of tunneling, uh,
(18:51):
even before the twentieth century. So in Kimberly South Africa
and South Africa is a region where we see some
some pretty incredible, slash terrifying feats in mining. Um between
eighteen seventy and nineteen forty, fifty thousand laborers moved twenty
two million tons of earth and reached the depth of
(19:12):
seven hundred nine ft or two hundred forty in search
of diamonds. And this is uh, this is a dig
that's currently not known today as the Big Hole, and
it is considered the largest hand dug pit in the
world hand dug yes, well that yeah, so not using
you know, a bunch of mechanical aid. Less impressive certainly
(19:34):
from the air, but still pretty impressive in its depth.
Is uh is woodingden Well in the UK. It's an
impressive hand dug well that reaches h one thousand, two
hundred and eighty five ft or three hundred ninety into
the earth. And uh BBC's the deepest holes dug by
hand points out that it's as deep as the Empire
(19:54):
State Building is tall. And that's just well, that's the
hand dug well. Well, I think they did well. Uh,
let's say on that note, Yes, let's definitely take a break, folks.
You should know I just said that and then I
said we could cut it, and then I said it again,
So it's got to be time for a break. Thank
Thank Alright, we're back. So let's talk about some of
(20:14):
the modern day marvels of digging in the dirt. Uh.
Modern minds are even more impressive because, of course, we
have enhanced tunneling machinery that allows us to be dig deeper,
dig harder, if you will. And also, of course we
have just better ability to blow up the rock and
do so in a way that actually achieves our goals
of digging deeper. And uh and we mentioned South Africa earlier,
(20:39):
and our most impressive mining operations are to be found
in South Africa, specifically the Tawtona and Opponent mines, which
have broken through around uh four kilometers or two point
four five two point five miles of rock. So we're
talking mines that are so deep that it takes an
(21:00):
hour to elevator down to the bottom. And you have
to have a powerful, just an extremely powerful air conditioning
system essentially like shoveling um ice down to the depths,
because you have to balance out the hundred and thirty
eight degree fahrenheit fifty nine degrees celsius temperatures in the
surrounding rocks. Wow. So that's weird because I normally think
(21:20):
of going down into a cave is uh something that
that makes you nice and cool? I mean, I guess
unless it's like cold outside. I mean, one great thing
about an underground environment is that it tends to have
a pretty regulated temperature if you're at a certain depth. Right,
this is the wine seller um uh situation. It's a
place where you can keep a standard temperature for whatever
(21:40):
you're storingly, but basement a wine seller is probably not
going to go two and a half miles down into
the earth. Uh. By the way, with these minds, when
we're talking about trying to balance out the temperatures, the
air conditioning systems usually get temperatures uh back down to
a more reasonable eighty two degrees fahrenheit twenty eight degrees celsius.
(22:02):
So it's still hot. Yes, it's hot. Uh. These your
dangerous places. The taw tone of mine today has some
I read four miles or eight hundred kilometers of tunnels,
and it employs some fifty six thousand miners. And there
are some whole books have been written about just the
scale of these mining operations and the like. The type
(22:26):
of the technological details alone are pretty incredible, but then
also the cultural asides about ghost miners, people who like
sneak into the mines and what percentage of say gold,
for for instance, is is pilfered, But then also how
relatively little gold they have to actually mine out of
the Earth to get a profit, because even though most
(22:48):
of the gold on Earth we mostly don't do much
with it. It's it's it's extremely useful in in various electronics,
but we're only using a fraction of that gold for
those electronics. Per This is the rest we're wearing and
looking at and and thing, oh isn't that sparkly and
putting in a vault. Well, I'm interested in the idea
of so that gold is down there where it's really hot,
(23:11):
and you've got to pump in ice or air conditioning
or something to keep you keep yourself from overheating while
you're trying to mind whatever the stuff is. And the
question is why why does it get so hot when
you go deep underground? I mean, we all know that
it does get hot as you go towards the center
of the earth, But why does that happen? Yeah, and
I should point out to that we've known about this
for a while. It was known even in medieval times.
(23:31):
Uh as mining efforts made it obvious that that, you know,
they weren't going quite that deep, but they were still
going deep enough to tell that things were getting warmer.
And so, first of all, there's an incorrect answer to
this question, and that is because you're getting closer and
closer to Hell, and Hell is really hot, right, Well
not if you're Dante. Right. Well, well that's true because
(23:55):
well I guess there were hot parts and cold parts, yes,
but the very center was cold. When you get down
to the lake local Itis, it is frozen solid for sure.
So uh so yeah, I always fall back on Dante's
model there, But the general idea is is Hell is
hot and and so one could mistakenly think, Wow, he's
gonna get hotter when you dig down to the Earth
because you're getting closer to all of that. Uh that
(24:17):
what heavy sweaty uh fiery brimstone. In fact, they're one
of my favorite art Bell clips out there. Art Bell
but there was a Coast to Coast the old radio
show where they often talked about ideas, Yeah, like late
night paranormal conspiracy radio stuff. Yeah. One of the my
(24:37):
favorite clips was about the Sounds of Hell, where they
had this recording that was allegedly made via microphone which
was lowered into Hell via a hole in Siberia. Yeah,
he got a note from a listener that, uh, he
had already reported on the fact that geologists had drilled
a hole to hell, and a listener got in touch
(24:57):
with them and was like, hey, this story is true.
My uncle collected videos and audio tapes to the paranormal
and he had an audio tape of this and I
copied it and it originally I think he said it
came from the BBC or something, but that they had
the evidence for hell and they were sitting on it.
And this is a great hoax story. This is part
of the whole Well to Hell hoax that was reported
(25:20):
over and over by tabloids and religious publications in the
nineteen eighties and the nineties. Um, I've got a good
quote here that is quoted in the Snopes article on this,
on this hoax, But this quote came from a book
in n Are You Ready, Robert, Let's do it? Okay.
Geologists working somewhere in remote Siberia had drilled a hole
(25:41):
some fourteen point four kilometers deep about nine miles when
the drill bits suddenly began to rotate wildly. A Mr. Asakov,
identified as the project's manager, was quoted as saying they
decided that the center of the Earth was hollow. Supposedly,
the geologists measured temperatures of over two thousand degrees in
(26:01):
the whole. They lowered supersensitive microphones to the bottom of
the well, and to their astonishment, they heard the sounds
of thousands, perhaps millions, of suffering souls screaming. Uh so,
according to Snopes, long before this ever appeared on The
Art Bell Show, it was reported on the Christian station
(26:22):
the known as Trinity Broadcasting Network. I think that still
exists t N. I remember it. I don't know if
it still exists. I think it does. What it was
in nineteen eighty nine, they featured this story on tb N.
It was also in the Weekly World News in nineteen two.
Is Weekly World News the one with bat Boy? I
think it may have been, yes, but the Weekly World
News version changed the location to Alaska and had the
(26:45):
report ending with the claim that Satan himself came up
out of the hole and the thirteen workers were killed
in the incident, which, of course is basically the minds
of Maria all over again. They're basically saying the dwarves
got to then they do to. Yeah, but one of
the workers yelled, you shall not pass. I love it
(27:08):
this story too, though, it's it's so ridiculous because it's
like like, here is an example of science proving our
religious ideas, proving our supernatural model as accurate. But did
those people before this story literally think that hell was
physically underground? It's just like a place you could go
(27:30):
to if you dig that deep. I don't this would
be something worth exploring because I don't know. I don't
get that that that sense a lot from older religious
writing that that Hell is is literally in the ground. Um.
I mean, I think there are some like if you
go like to you know, the original like mythical texts
(27:50):
and stuff, there's stuff like that, you know that heaven
is literally physically in the sky, that the underworld is
literally physically under the ground. I don't. I didn't get
the sense that many people believed that in the modern world,
Like we're people aligned with TB and did they get
this story and they're like, finally, you know, I knew
there was something about this whole hell thing that didn't
sit right with me. And it was like, well, I
(28:12):
don't you know, if it's down there, we would have
proof of it. Somebody would have drilled down there and
recorded the sounds of the anguish. Well, people don't often
drill that deep as we'll discuss in a moment. So
about the sounds of Hell. I don't know should we
feature should we feature this recording at all on the podcast?
Let's do it. Here's a taste, just a warning. It
does sound really scary. It's like a it is made
(28:34):
to sound scary. So it's a scary sound of people screaming.
Fair warning. So that sound clip, the sounds used in
the Well to Hell hoax tape appear to be a
Then people figured this out, a looped and reprocessed version
of a clip from a movie called Barren Blood from
(28:57):
nineteen seventy two. I looked it up and hey, it
stars Joseph Cotton. Everything comes back to Joseph Cotton on
this podcast. Is there a single topic that hasn't at
some point led us back to Joseph Cotton. He was
in so many films from The Third Man in Citizen Kane,
you know, classics of of of cinema from that era
to uh stuff like Soilent Green uh and also various
(29:20):
installments of euro horror, including one of my favorites, Screamers,
The Island of the Fishmen. Uh. And yeah, just a
lot of trashy like Gallo movies and and seventies junk. So, uh,
Barren Blood. I haven't seen it. I was I wish
I'd had time to watch it last night because it
looks like some some righteous trash um. But it was
(29:42):
directed by Mario Bava. It has that grimy Mario Bava
movie kind of look. And the Snopes right up traces
the origin of this whole Well to Hell hoax to
a hugely embellished take on reports in Scientific American published
in nineteen four about a real drilling project called the
(30:02):
Cola Super Deep Borehole, which we'll be back to in
a minute. So someone was literally like, well, they're digging
that deep, they're gonna touch, they're gonna reach Hell, and
then we're gonna hear about it. And then someone said, well,
I'll just go ahead and make that. I just saw
this movie called Baron Blood, which, by the way, you
you shared the trailer clip with me, and I'm not
a mistaken. The trailer itself has that, or at least
(30:23):
a taste of that, the sound of Hell in it, screaming, screaming,
going on. Yeah. I should also add they did not
in this story about the sounds from Hell. They didn't
dig near deep enough to reach Hell. If Hell's at
the center of the Earth, like they they didn't even
maybe they reach like the outer the outskirts of a
gigantic Hell. I mean, Earth would have to be so
(30:44):
hollow for that, for like everything below like fourteen something
point something kilometers down to be hollow. Yeah, and Earth
would then be mostly Hell, which is ridiculous. It maybe
more befitting of like of a of a theology that
really embrace and cherishes the idea of Hell is a
vital aspect of its of its structure, like because that's
(31:07):
the ugly reality. Great, you have a creation that's mostly people,
sort tormented throughout all eternity, the thin layer of people
sort of getting along on the surface. Uh. Great creation. Yeah,
I mean I guess if you believe pretty much everybody
goes to Hell, Hell's got to be huge. But then
how would how would Earth have a magnetosphere with a
Hell this big? What's whereould the core dynamo effect come from?
(31:30):
I have to look kind of answers in Genesis for
that one show. Um, but but wait, we were asking
a question. We got sidetracks talking about the well to Hell.
No that we're asking a question about so we know
that Earth actually does get hotter as you go deeper
down into the ground. Why does that happen. It's not
because you're getting close to hell, but somehow it's getting hotter. Okay,
so yeah, the the actual answer goes along these lines.
(31:52):
So geologists calculate that for every mile you dig down,
the temperature rises fifteen degrees fahrenheit and the pressure increases
at a rate of seven thousand, three hundred pounds per
square inch. Roughly go down deep enough and the temperature
and pressure is enough to form diamonds. Now, this is
something that that learned minds noted, and uh one one
(32:15):
in particular was Lord Kelvin, who lived through nineteen o seven,
and he theorized that this was due to the cooling
of the Earth and that that that he could use
temperature readings to actually calculate the age of the Earth.
We talked about this in our two episodes on the
Edge of the Earth. We talked about Kelvin's attempts to
to gauge the age of the Earth this way. His
(32:35):
he was sort of on the right track, but his
calculations were off right. And so this is just a
short version of this if you want the longer version,
we advise you to listen to that episode to the
age of the Earth thing is the two part. It
wasn't it? It was so, But basically he thought, yeah,
twenty million years seems about right. He was wrong because
one of the reasons that he didn't know about radioactivity
(32:56):
in the Earth contributing to the heating to know about
convection cycles and the inner layers of the Earth. So
there are actually multiple reasons that Earth gets hotter the
deeper you go down, right, and none of them are
hell uh. So, there are three main sources for heat
in the deep Earth. There's heat from when the planet
was formed and created. There's frictional heating caused by a
denser core materials sinking to the center. And then there's
(33:18):
heat from the decay of radioactive elements. And these causes
are according to an Explainer article by Quentin Williams, who's
a professor of Earth sciences, that you see Santa Cruz.
So partially it's just always been hot since it was
ever formed, and it's been cooling off ever since. Partially
there's like some rubbing going on down there that's causing
(33:39):
some heat, and partially you've got like uranium and stuff
that is decaying and given and that fission causes heat.
But ultimately the Earth has this has this inner heat
cycle that's going on, that's that's removed from the heat
that comes from the sun. But you see that, I
mean like the heat that comes from the sun as well.
I guess these are these are finite sources of heat, right,
(34:00):
because if you've got some heat that's just left over
from the formation of the Earth has been slowly cooling down,
it will just keep cooling down until it gets colder
and colder. Uh, the heat from the decay of radioactive elements.
Eventually those things will pass their half life. They will
just decay more and more until they reach stabile isotopes,
though for some of them this will take a really
long time. Right. And we should also point out that
(34:21):
the mysteries remain about the interior of the Earth that
we don't know, that we don't fully understand. One of
the ways that we we hope to increase our understanding
is by drilling down into it. Now certainly not like
sending people down to the mantle, but certainly, but by
reaching the mantle, that alone would be an important step
(34:42):
towards better understanding the interior of the planet. Wait, are
you telling me that that movie where they drill to
the core is it called the Core? Is not scientifically
accurate and not sending people down there pretty much. I
love science fiction that has some sort of a fabulous
drilling submarine that that takes people down into the depths,
usually to some sort of interior hollow earth scenario. I
(35:04):
love those films, but it's just not ultimately not realistic. Uh.
I like that movie. I haven't seen it. I feel
like I should see it at some point because the
dare you judge it without saying it? Well, the premise
is so funny to me because it's like normally when
you've got some kind of journey to the center of
the earth that the Jewels Verne novel, that makes sense
(35:25):
because it has incorrect ideas about what's down there under
the surface. You know, there's another land and it can
have creatures and all that, so there's like stuff to
do down there with the Core. I assume it just
has a basically accurate idea that, like the Earth is
made of rock and you know, solid material, so what's
(35:47):
down there? They're going on an adventure just drilling into
solid material. But where are the monsters? What's what's there
to do? Yeah? Where are the bout the ball rocks? Right?
I mean, I'd be happy to be surprised, but it's
so anyway that the goal has been to drill down
through roughly twenty five miles of crust to reach the mantle,
which makes up about the planet. One of the projects
(36:09):
that had the same was the United States Project Mohole,
which took a shot at in the late fifties and
early sixties, but they lost their funding funding. They made
it about five hundred and fifty seven feet down, and
this was a sea floor drilling. But the more impressive one,
the one that we referenced already, was the Cola Super
Deep but bore hole in Russia. So this one they
(36:29):
managed to get down forty thousand, two hundred thirty ft
or twelve thousand, two hundred sixty two meters uh, it's
about seven point five miles. They did this over twenty
years of drilling, and ultimately we're about halfway to the
mantle at this point. The effort was abandoned in the
early nineties when they encountered higher temperatures than expected, though
they were prepared for about two hundred and twelve degree
(36:51):
farenheight temperature has been encountered three hundred and fifty six
and uh, this is apparently still the record for how
far we've successfully successfully drilled down into our planet. And
again that's the one that like at least some of
the debunkers seemed to think that the idea of the
well to Hell came from like there were stories about this.
So this was in nine four, I think or in
(37:13):
the eighties, and then there were like articles about it
in Scientific American and and I assume other publications, and
that this probably got warped into the idea of the
drilling and breaking through, right like if if Cola had
actually hit Hell, that would mean Hell is in the
crust of the Earth, is not even in the mantle. It'
certainly not in the core. But you know, I'm gonna
(37:36):
I'll leave that alone for now. Other depoles of note,
there's a BPS Deepwater Horizon which when it was operational
made it down what thirty thousand feet or about five miles.
Japanese drill ship Cheek you reached ten thousand feet or
two miles into the sea floor, and they're actually aiming
to go much deeper with that particular drill project, because
(38:00):
they want to go even deeper and they they plan
to break the record by around is when they look
to start drilling. So in the future we may see, uh,
we may see an even higher figure on our descent.
So maybe that's when we actually reach the lava men.
Maybe so. But but then again, it would just be
it wouldn't be us. It would be you know, the
(38:22):
pro the sensor or something of that nature. I mean,
it wouldn't be us at all, not not just because humans.
There's no reason for humans to go down right, as
far as I can tell, the deepest humans have been
in the Earth is probably two point five miles or
four kilometers at the Opponent gold mine in South Africa.
But that's deep. That's that's deep. I mean, it's still
(38:43):
very impressive, but it's just it's such a small fraction
when you start looking at the at the overall depths
of the Earth. Alright, Well, on that note, we're gonna
take one more break and when we come back, we're
gonna look to the future a little bit. Uh what
else could humans do underneath the surface of this planet
or another planet? Thank alright, we're back. Alright, So we're
(39:05):
talking about underground dwelling humans making a habitat underneath the surface.
And one thing I think we've sort of touched on
a little bit on the podcast before is space colonization
becoming a route for us to become the lava men
of other planets, to to to go down under the
surface of another planet with Lord kin boat and set
(39:26):
up residents there. Now, why would we do that? So
other planets do not have all of the protections that
Earth has from dangerous radiation. That's the main reason. Earth
has a thick atmosphere to absorb incoming radiation. It also
has a magnetic field known as the magnetosphere, is created
by the dynamo of its iron nickel core, and this
(39:47):
magnetic field also repels incoming radiation. Other planets and objects
in space do not have the same protective advantages. For example,
the Moon and Mars. Mars does not have a core
dynamo to produce a strong magnetic field to repel and
coming radiation. Also, Mars has a much much thinner atmosphere
than Earth, less than one percent as thick as the
(40:09):
Earth's atmosphere. So this just means when you're on the
surface of Mars, there's a lot more radiation flux. The
radiation is um is more variable, and you can get
surges of it in different places and times, and it's
just generally also much higher. So without these radiation shields,
long term life on the surface of Mars for a
colonist would be inconsistent. But in the net it would
(40:33):
be a high level radiation bath. Like levels seem to
be such that you could probably survive there for a
short period. It's not like you would just immediately die
of radiation poisoning, but it would not be a good
place to live long term for say, a permanent colony.
For example, to quote from a article by the space
journalist Mike wall Quote, a mission consisting of a one
(40:55):
eight day cruise to Mars, a five hundred day stay
on the red planet, a one day return flight to
Earth would expose astronauts to a cumulative radiation dose of
about one point o one siverts measured by curiosities, radiation
assessment detector or rad instrument indicate. To put that in perspective,
(41:16):
the European Space Agency generally limits its astronauts to a
total career radiation dose of one cevert, which is associated
with a five percent increase in lifetime fatal cancer risk.
So that's just for a five hundred days stay on
the surface. Now, of course, a lot of that radiation
in that calculation there's coming from the trip to and
from Mars. Where you're in space, you're gonna be getting
(41:37):
the most. Then once you get to Mars, there's some
reduction because you've got the planet behind you. That helps,
you know, but you're still getting a lot bombarded from space,
way more than you would get protected on the surface
of the Earth. So one solution here once you get
to Mars is to go underground, where the soil and
rock above will help protect the colonists from radiation if
(41:58):
they're gonna be staying a long time. But you can
think about this in a few Number one is like, Okay,
let's say you want to dig a deep hole. That
would be kind of difficult because it's you know, you're
on Mars. That's a lot of work to do. You
have to bring literally everything with you. You have to
bring your habitat, you have to bring your food, your air. Uh.
And then on top of that you're talking about having
to bring the equipment to dig tunnels in the Martian
(42:22):
surface and create a space for all this stuff to
go and for you to live. Yeah, like an excavator
or something like that. I mean that that's that's rough.
So one proposed work around here is to establish colonist
habitats in lava tubes. This has been proposed for Mars
and for the Moon. Uh So, I put in a
(42:42):
selection of images taken from satellite photos of things that
look like openings to lava tubes on the surface of Mars.
But I've got a really cool one. That's a photo
from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment or high Rise camera,
which is on board the Mars Reconnaissance orbiter. I love
this photo. It's very haunting. I believe this is taken
from Pavonis Mons. But it's a crater, and then in
(43:05):
the middle of the crater there's clearly just a hole
where you can see the shadow and the light falling
across an inner cavity down below, and you can even
see what we're like, the sand from the crater is
falling down into the hole. So these lava tubes would
have been created because, of course Mars and the Moon
had periods of vulcanism in their past. The biggest volcano
(43:27):
in the Solar System actually is not on Earth. It's
not even on the yellow volcano hell World of Io,
the moon of Jupiter. It's on Mars. Olympus Mons is
the biggest volcano in the Solar System. It's a volcano
more than twice as tall as Mount Everest. And so
you can find these lava tubes on on Mars and
the Moon, and they could be not only somewhat suitable
(43:49):
to house uh colonies, they can they can in some
cases be huge. One example I found is that studies
have shown the possible size of lava tubes on the
surface of the Moon to be just enormous, like lunar
lava tubes tend to be bigger than lava tubes on Earth.
Based on leads and data from the Selene spacecraft and
the Grail mission, researchers at Perdue University were able to
(44:13):
predict that at least one lava tube near a group
of volcanic domes on the Moon called the Marius Hills
was at least large enough to to hold the entire
city of Philadelphia inside it. So space Philadelphia, We're space
Rocky jogs this and maybe this is where the their
(44:34):
their sports mascot is from. Was their sports mask. I
don't think have any sports mascot. The frightening red one
with no face. Oh yeah, the googly eyed pervert thing.
Yeah yeah, I think that's their their icon. Oh that's
a moon man. Yeah, but no, this is this isn't
incredible The idea that these these are essentially just large
caverns uh in in the planet or in this case,
(44:57):
that the lunar surface. Yeah, and I think this is
it's because they are is because of the gravity of
the Moon being different. I think that they can tend
to be larger on the Moon than they usually are
on Earth. This is comforting to anybody out there who
is running Dungeons and Dragons campaign in the under dark,
where you continually having adventures encounter large caverns with cities
(45:19):
in them. You can just look to the lunar examples.
They will see here's here's how it might work. But
so anyway, I like to think that our our future
astronaut descendants who go out to colonize other objects in
the Solar System, the ones who live on the Moon
or live on live on Mars, might end up somehow
being maybe culturally having some of the same environmental influences
(45:43):
as the Neanderthals who made the rings of stalagmites deep
down in the dark in southwestern France. Oh wow, that
is fascinating to think about. Like, what are the so
you know, some of the underground religions are often referred
to as like the idea of cathonic cults, you know,
the cults of the underworld. Are are there certain ways
(46:03):
that being in subterranean environments, are going into caves or
into catacombs or whatever, tends to cause people to come
up with certain cultural beliefs and religions. What are the
religions of the lava tube dwellers look like? Who I love?
I love that idea? Um, you know, it would be
remissing all of this if we didn't mention total recall though,
(46:23):
because of course total recall, the original total recall, the
Arnold total Recall in total, Yes, the the the Michael
Ironside Total Recall. See you at the party rector exactly
this one. This film features underground habitats, and it's revealed
that the early stages of those underground habitats for early
(46:45):
colonists to Mars. They were essentially just caves that the
people lived in um and and and that's and one
of the curious things is that lines up with human
history and also some of these models regarding what colonizing
an off world habitat would consist of, and also teaches
us not to put trust in caring for the resources
(47:07):
of one of these off world colonies in the hands
of a greedy, evil corporation. Overlord, give the people to air. Indeed,
give the people the air. Uh. Well, well, hopefully this
is a good, you know, first installment. I want to
think of this as a first installment on some perhaps
deeper Earth and deeper life studies. Like I said, I'd
(47:28):
like to come back and talk about the evolution of
burrowing creatures, even if part of that is just a
reason to talk about trimmers a little more. Uh, we
could definitely have some more fun with the idea of
of deep Earth religions and the idea and religious ideas
of the deep Earth. Yeah, there's a lot to explore here. Meanwhile,
(47:49):
if you would like to dig deeper into stuff to
blow your mind, head on't over to stuff to blow
your mind dot com. That is that is the home world.
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(48:12):
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(48:32):
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works dot com or more on this and thousands of
(49:01):
other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com. The
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
in this episode, we're going to dig down, deep into
the bones of the Earth. Okay, we're gonna We're gonna
(00:25):
call to mind a quote from J. R. Tolkien's The
Fellowship of the Ring Maria Maria, Wonder of the Northern World.
Too deep we delved there and woke the nameless fear. Okay,
So is this an episode about the ball Rog? No,
I mean not directly. I mean we might ponder, as
(00:46):
we uh we read here what the metaphorical ball rog
might be in all of this. But but it is
gonna be an episode about about digging in the earth,
about about about mining down, digging down, and just how
deep we've gotten. And then what do we do in
the earth? What's what is what? What? What is Homo
sapiens business beneath the surface of the earth? After all?
(01:09):
You know what? I just recently went to the Atlanta
Zoo and I hadn't been there since I was a kid.
And first of all, it's fantastic. Atlanta Zoo is wonderful.
But one of the things that struck me the most
was when I went into the little area where they
have the places where you can view the naked mole
rep Yon, where there is this The smell is overwhelming. Uh,
(01:32):
there's this odd odor. But just looking at them, they
are one of the strangest looking creatures on Earth. There
these naked, wrinkly, uh, kind of rosy pink things with
long teeth, lying in puddles, appearing to have some kind
of high mind and and frequently, at least when I
was looking at them, chewing on each other, just gnawing
(01:54):
on one another beneath the ground. And these are true
like subterranean creatures. You're not that we're designed to live
on the surface, but we do a lot more underground
venturing than most other permanent surface dwellers do. Absolutely. And
on the subject of of underground true underground evolution and
the evolution of burrowing species, I would like to come
(02:16):
back to that because we actually have um an author
in the Atlanta area wrote a book about the evolution
of burrowing creatures and uh, and I keep meaning to
to reach out and see about having him on the
show to chat with us about it. He's the one.
He actually mentions tremors the movie in the book, so
you know, you know that he's our people. But speaking
(02:37):
of of our people and speaking of of underground creatures,
one thing I was thinking about two is how if
you look to the fictional world of subterranean humanoids, we
see there's always there's pretty strict dichotomy. Right on one hand,
you have the debased underworld dwellers. You have the moment
(02:57):
the crawlers from the descent, the more locks for the
time machine you have or one of my other favorites
in terms of just cave dwelling creatures. Two gargoyles. I
don't know. Oh, it's terrible, some wonderful gargoyle costumes come
creatures coming out of the deserts and the desert caves
and kidnapping people that sort of thing. Well, I usually
(03:18):
think of gargoyles as as flying. Yeah, but they live
in caves in this particular movie, somewhere where they gonna
live in the middle of the desert on a skyscraper.
I guess bats live in caves and they fly. Yeah,
they're basically It's more it would have made more sense
if they were bat people. Instead of gargoyles. But um hey,
I invite everyone to to see this film for them
(03:40):
for theirselves. The the ideal way to see this film
I think was probably at three pm on a Sunday
on TBS back in the day. But you can watch
it through modern means as well. Oh, I just looked
it up. These are some striking images. The gargoyle is
almost cramp us looking it is now. Of course. The
(04:01):
more Locks though, are really more of the iconic underground
dweller though from HD Wells The time Machine. Yeah. Though,
the interesting thing about them, so you're saying that there
are some uh, some fantasy and sci fi works where
underground human oid type creatures are presented as like, in
some way like a horrible deviant version of us, where
(04:23):
the more Locks are the sort of the villains of
the time Machine, but they're also it's funny. In the novel,
the more Locks are like the intelligent creatures that use technology,
and it's the the gentle surface dwelling eloi who are
like kind of ye, they're flacid and in curious and
sort of bovine. But then we also have works where
(04:45):
the creatures who live underground are the more refined humanoids.
So um, we could of course looked in the Middle
Earth and the Dwarf Lords in their Halls of Stone.
You know, they're not elevated to the same level as
the elves, but but still they're an advanced civilization that
that seemed to to to love a good underground uh empire.
(05:08):
Then you have things that you have, and you have
other groups like the drought in Dungeons and Dragons, the
non men and our Scott Baker's Second Apocalypse socca. The
mutants in beneath the Planet of the Eights. Oh yeah,
they worship a giant bomb. Yeah, they're great and they
have psychic powers, and yet we have not seen them
in any of these recent Planet of the Apes movies.
Also in the Fallout games, you have the Vault Dwellers.
(05:29):
They're not permanent to underground dwellers, but they have dwelt
underground for a long period of time and they have
internal and you know, emerging into the surface world to
retake it. Well, yeah, I think clearly in a lot
of these like science fiction works, the underground humanoids it's
supposed to be something symbolic. It shows like a sort
(05:50):
of like retreat into some kind of other nature. It
is a physical sign that something has changed. And I
think another out of the appeal is that the living
below ground or in caves or vault is something that
seems like it should be rather removed from the sort
of homes that most of us keep. And yet one
(06:10):
of the curious things is that underground dwellings are also
a part of our past. Uh. They're they're part of
our present, and depending on where we go in this
solar system, uh, they may be a part an important
part of our future. Yeah. So let's take a minute
just to to talk about humanity's history in the depths
of the earth. Okay, So limestone caves provided shelter for
(06:33):
the Neanderthals of the Ice Age, and early humans too
made use of caves for shelter but also for burial
and for sacred rights. Yeah, I was looking at examples
of this. One example of I think the religious significance
of deep cave dwellings, especially by Neanderthals, is to be
found in the Brunkel Cave of southwestern France. Uh So,
(06:54):
to decide a journal article, We've got one in Nature
here from twenty sixteen called early Neandertal constructions deep in
in Brunickel Cave in southwestern France by joe Bert at
All And in this study, archaeologists reported the discovery of
ring shaped patterns of broken still agmites made from about
four hundred pieces of still agmite that are that were
(07:17):
found deep in the cave. And we don't know what
these ring shaped structures were for, but it's clear they're
artificial in origin. They were made by by humans and
they were the site of ancient fires, where like there
are some sections that are burned and charred, and there
are also pieces of burned bone mixed in with them.
And a uranium dating series combined with some other methods
(07:39):
gives the structure an approximate age of a hundred and
seventy six point five thousand years old, one of the
oldest known human structures. And this was pretty deep down
to oh extremely yeah. This was found three hundred and
thirty six meters down from the entrance of the cave.
That's over eleven hundred feet down, showing that the Neanderthals
who made these rings had master deep underground environments. Like
(08:02):
to go this far down is not something an animal
would do lightly. You'd need to have an artificial light
source to take with you. You You probably need a plan
in a way of organizing and understanding your spatial environment
so you don't get stuck down there. And the big
question is what were the rings for? We had these
rings over a thousand feet down underground. A common explanation
(08:23):
would be, well, it's maybe religious in nature. Somebody's burning
fires with rings of stone down in the dark over
a thousand feet underground, right, must be for some kind
of ritual. We don't really know, but it's fascinating question,
and I think the most common answer is probably that
it had something to do with with an with a
loss to history, unknown neandertal religion. So there yet, so
(08:44):
there was a sacred reason to go down into the
depths presumably, or maybe there's just some other reason that
we don't understand. It doesn't it's not clear. Is it's
not easy to determine that these this like circle would
serve a practical purpose. I'm not sure what you'd use
it for as a tool or anything like that, or
why I would need to be so far down if
(09:05):
you did it. Almost it really asks for a kind
of symbolic interpretation. Yeah, Now in terms of more readily
accessed portions of a cave. Stuff close to the surface.
It's easier. It's easy for us to to think, well,
you know, these are the kind of early primitive shelters
one might use, and then you would quickly evolve beyond that.
(09:25):
You would reach the point where it just makes more
sense to depend on tents and buildings for your shelter
um and then you would would maybe only stick to
the depths for you know, things that are religious in nature,
like catacombs or or perhaps bomb shelters in some cases,
or basements. I mean, it's, uh, it's easy to think
(09:46):
that there would just come a time where nobody lives
underground anymore unless you absolutely have to. Well, yeah, and
there'd be several reasons for this. I mean, one would
be the advent of settled civilization, because it's not that
there are no sub old civilizations that involve caves. Some
of them do involve caves, but generally there's a limited
number of caves out there, so you can't just like
(10:07):
keep filling up caves. You need to like build your
own structures to support and expanding population, and caves are
not necessarily near where you can do your agriculture, right.
And then if you're expanding on caves or or setting
out to build your own caves in the form of
artificial tunnels, it takes a fair amount of of effort.
You have to have considerable resources, technological know how, and
(10:29):
you have to depend on the rock that you're working
with being the right temperament for what you're trying to build. However,
we do see all of these things line up, uh
in really to a fascinating degree with some of these
caves cities in modern day Turkey. Um and I was
(10:49):
was not really all that familiar with these prior to
researching for this episode, but they are, They're amazing. Uh.
One in particular is the city of Daring, who you
h This is a complex of hand dug tunnels that
dive down sixty meters or two hundred feet um beneath
that's as roughly eighteen stories beneath the surface and would
(11:12):
have housed and estimated twenty thousand people during its heyday.
It contained homes, schools, even a winery, and it's likely
that these tunnels were begun around seven b C. And
while it eventually seems to be a functional, fully functional city,
it continued to serve as a place of refuge well
into modern times, the place that surface dwellers knew they
(11:35):
could they could flee to and hide in. You have
surface tensions, we were too problematic. Yeah, it seems to
be worth noting that this is what the majority of
these Turkish underground UH dwellings were primarily used for. It
kind of calls to mind to go back to the
Lord of the rings, like Helm's Deep, right, it's a
place where if your civilization is attacked, you can retreat
(11:57):
down below the surface and we're in seal up the
walls with stone until the war passes on or the
danger is gone, and then you re emerge. Which makes
me wonder about the Neanderthal a mystery from earlier, like,
to what extent was that a way to survive uh,
the new people, you know, the inheritors, to to to
(12:17):
flee down into depths that that other uh certainly surface predators,
but maybe even uh these newer hommaid species would not
bother with. Now that'd be a good plot for a novel,
but I think it is the case that Homo sapiens
are not believed to have been in the area at
this point. Oh no, no, for purely Hollywood reasons, it
could be like a reverse descent instead of it being uh,
(12:41):
poor hapless humanoids dealing with underground monsters are underground monsters
of the heroes. There you go do for the descent three,
That would be actually a pretty good uh way to
frame it. So again, this is just one of of
several underground cities that you find in this region. There's
also the Kaimak the Underground City, the Oscanic Underground City,
(13:03):
there's the Mazy Underground City. And there are some interesting
illustrations of these online that really just drive home what
we're talking about. We're not talking about like just a
few chambers. We're talking about like multiple stories of underground habitat.
It's a luxury mine. We should also point out that
(13:23):
cave dwellings continue to this day in parts of the world,
such as with Waddox, a southern Spanish region containing around
two thousand caves that have been used as homes for generations.
And you look at pictures of these and there's really
quite uh. The design is very interesting to look at
because in many cases, like the walls are painted, they
look like rooms in in home. You know that they
(13:46):
don't don't look like cave dwellers. They look like relatively
modern people living in a shelter that just happens to
be part of a naturally occurring cave. Well. They're also
still underground homes in Tunisia. In fact, some of these
underground homes make an appearance in the first Star Wars movie.
So Luke's house in the first Star Wars is you
(14:09):
know Uncle Owan and Aunt Brew where they live. That's
sort of modeled after a type of Tunisian dwelling where
there is a central crater type structure. It's like a
big pit in the ground, and then around the ring
of the crater there are dugout rooms that you can
go into. Very interesting. I didn't realize that. I always
thought it was just an elaborate set, I guess, or
(14:29):
an actual space house. I didn't think about the idea
that this would be an actual home or based upon
an actual home design from that region. There's a cool
photo gallery on on the Atlantic website that that documents
some of what these houses look like in more recent decades. Cool,
and there, of course other plenty of other examples we
can point to of sporadic underground dwellings they're parts of
(14:53):
Australia where you still see a fair number of underground dwellings.
And then I feel like, at least when I was
growing up, there were at least a couple of underground
houses in the county where I lived, because there were
there's a lot of tornatic activity in the region, and
there was at least one house where It's like somebody
was like, screw it, I'm not putting up with this
(15:14):
fear of tornadoes anymore. I'm living under the ground. And
then they did it. Wow. Yeah. In fact, I think
I knew somebody who lived in an underground house in
southern Middle Tennessee. It's all basement. It's all basement. Yeah. Well,
I guess that has certain advantages. It probably a certain
disadvantages too, I would I would think, for example, the
lack of exposure to sunlight would eventually psychologically get to you.
(15:36):
Oh yes, And that's a that's of course, that's a
whole other side of the equation when you start imagining
permanent dwelling underground and what that does to our circadian rhythms.
But generally speaking, we're thinking about creatures that are going
to come back out again with with with regularity to
obtain the resources they need. You would kind of have
(15:56):
to write because I mean you mentioned that, for example,
the city uh in an ancient Turkey, this underground city.
It had like a winery, but it couldn't have a
vineyard under the ground, right, and then they weren't making
mushroom wine, um likely. So you know, we mentioned the Descent.
Even the monsters in the Descent were leaving their caves
to pray, because there's the whole scene where their bones
(16:17):
piled up. They have this uh this is these midden
heaps of the things that they've been eating, and it's
it's it's shown that they've been eating deer like they're
going to the surfaced hunt, presumably at night. So yeah,
we have plenty of underground to have it as today.
And also certainly if you go to a major modern city,
you go to New York City, you're gonna find plenty
of people living in basements. You know that there there
(16:40):
there's there's still an underground too many um surface dwellings
that rise into the sky. And then we have plenty
of underground complexes that can sometimes be repurposed as a shelter.
For instance, we did uh an episode talking about mosquitoes
in the London underground and their evolution, and we in
that we discussed how during the Second World War the
(17:00):
London underground, the subway system there was used as a
bomb shelter. And then we have cases of homeless individuals
living and abandoned subways, railroads, flood sewage tunnels, heating shafts
in various metropolitan areas around the world. Uh. If you've
ever seen the two thousand your two thousand documentary Dark Days, Uh,
(17:21):
that documentary looks at people living in Freedom Tunnel in
New York City during the mid nineteen nineties. So thus
far we've looked at religious reasons, survival reasons, um, infrastructure reasons,
even a little bit to dig tunnels under the earth.
But another major reason to go digging around and crawling
around under the earth like you're some mener of worm,
(17:43):
is of course, to mine precious resources, find that pot
of gold exactly. In fact, we just talked recently in
an episode of Invention the role that copper mining might
have played in the origins of wheel technology. That's right,
So humans figured out that these were press as resources
that we could do things with them that give us
a very important advantages over our fellow humans, and in
(18:07):
doing so, we quickly ate up all the the easily
acquired deposits of these materials. So instead we just started
digging a tunnel. There's more down there, right, and then
you need you need things like like wheels to remove
them from those tunnels. So we do find plenty of
examples of pretty old minds in human history. The oldest
(18:28):
mine in the world is thought to be the the
Church Silica mine at Naslette Sabaja in in Egypt, and
it's estimated to have been in use around a hundred
thousand years ago. That's crazy old. That's long before like
settled civilization, long before agriculture. And it's in mining that
we find some of the most incredible feats of tunneling, uh,
(18:51):
even before the twentieth century. So in Kimberly South Africa
and South Africa is a region where we see some
some pretty incredible, slash terrifying feats in mining. Um between
eighteen seventy and nineteen forty, fifty thousand laborers moved twenty
two million tons of earth and reached the depth of
(19:12):
seven hundred nine ft or two hundred forty in search
of diamonds. And this is uh, this is a dig
that's currently not known today as the Big Hole, and
it is considered the largest hand dug pit in the
world hand dug yes, well that yeah, so not using
you know, a bunch of mechanical aid. Less impressive certainly
(19:34):
from the air, but still pretty impressive in its depth.
Is uh is woodingden Well in the UK. It's an
impressive hand dug well that reaches h one thousand, two
hundred and eighty five ft or three hundred ninety into
the earth. And uh BBC's the deepest holes dug by
hand points out that it's as deep as the Empire
(19:54):
State Building is tall. And that's just well, that's the
hand dug well. Well, I think they did well. Uh,
let's say on that note, Yes, let's definitely take a break, folks.
You should know I just said that and then I
said we could cut it, and then I said it again,
So it's got to be time for a break. Thank
Thank Alright, we're back. So let's talk about some of
(20:14):
the modern day marvels of digging in the dirt. Uh.
Modern minds are even more impressive because, of course, we
have enhanced tunneling machinery that allows us to be dig deeper,
dig harder, if you will. And also, of course we
have just better ability to blow up the rock and
do so in a way that actually achieves our goals
of digging deeper. And uh and we mentioned South Africa earlier,
(20:39):
and our most impressive mining operations are to be found
in South Africa, specifically the Tawtona and Opponent mines, which
have broken through around uh four kilometers or two point
four five two point five miles of rock. So we're
talking mines that are so deep that it takes an
(21:00):
hour to elevator down to the bottom. And you have
to have a powerful, just an extremely powerful air conditioning
system essentially like shoveling um ice down to the depths,
because you have to balance out the hundred and thirty
eight degree fahrenheit fifty nine degrees celsius temperatures in the
surrounding rocks. Wow. So that's weird because I normally think
(21:20):
of going down into a cave is uh something that
that makes you nice and cool? I mean, I guess
unless it's like cold outside. I mean, one great thing
about an underground environment is that it tends to have
a pretty regulated temperature if you're at a certain depth. Right,
this is the wine seller um uh situation. It's a
place where you can keep a standard temperature for whatever
(21:40):
you're storingly, but basement a wine seller is probably not
going to go two and a half miles down into
the earth. Uh. By the way, with these minds, when
we're talking about trying to balance out the temperatures, the
air conditioning systems usually get temperatures uh back down to
a more reasonable eighty two degrees fahrenheit twenty eight degrees celsius.
(22:02):
So it's still hot. Yes, it's hot. Uh. These your
dangerous places. The taw tone of mine today has some
I read four miles or eight hundred kilometers of tunnels,
and it employs some fifty six thousand miners. And there
are some whole books have been written about just the
scale of these mining operations and the like. The type
(22:26):
of the technological details alone are pretty incredible, but then
also the cultural asides about ghost miners, people who like
sneak into the mines and what percentage of say gold,
for for instance, is is pilfered, But then also how
relatively little gold they have to actually mine out of
the Earth to get a profit, because even though most
(22:48):
of the gold on Earth we mostly don't do much
with it. It's it's it's extremely useful in in various electronics,
but we're only using a fraction of that gold for
those electronics. Per This is the rest we're wearing and
looking at and and thing, oh isn't that sparkly and
putting in a vault. Well, I'm interested in the idea
of so that gold is down there where it's really hot,
(23:11):
and you've got to pump in ice or air conditioning
or something to keep you keep yourself from overheating while
you're trying to mind whatever the stuff is. And the
question is why why does it get so hot when
you go deep underground? I mean, we all know that
it does get hot as you go towards the center
of the earth, But why does that happen? Yeah, and
I should point out to that we've known about this
for a while. It was known even in medieval times.
(23:31):
Uh as mining efforts made it obvious that that, you know,
they weren't going quite that deep, but they were still
going deep enough to tell that things were getting warmer.
And so, first of all, there's an incorrect answer to
this question, and that is because you're getting closer and
closer to Hell, and Hell is really hot, right, Well
not if you're Dante. Right. Well, well that's true because
(23:55):
well I guess there were hot parts and cold parts, yes,
but the very center was cold. When you get down
to the lake local Itis, it is frozen solid for sure.
So uh so yeah, I always fall back on Dante's
model there, But the general idea is is Hell is
hot and and so one could mistakenly think, Wow, he's
gonna get hotter when you dig down to the Earth
because you're getting closer to all of that. Uh that
(24:17):
what heavy sweaty uh fiery brimstone. In fact, they're one
of my favorite art Bell clips out there. Art Bell
but there was a Coast to Coast the old radio
show where they often talked about ideas, Yeah, like late
night paranormal conspiracy radio stuff. Yeah. One of the my
(24:37):
favorite clips was about the Sounds of Hell, where they
had this recording that was allegedly made via microphone which
was lowered into Hell via a hole in Siberia. Yeah,
he got a note from a listener that, uh, he
had already reported on the fact that geologists had drilled
a hole to hell, and a listener got in touch
(24:57):
with them and was like, hey, this story is true.
My uncle collected videos and audio tapes to the paranormal
and he had an audio tape of this and I
copied it and it originally I think he said it
came from the BBC or something, but that they had
the evidence for hell and they were sitting on it.
And this is a great hoax story. This is part
of the whole Well to Hell hoax that was reported
(25:20):
over and over by tabloids and religious publications in the
nineteen eighties and the nineties. Um, I've got a good
quote here that is quoted in the Snopes article on this,
on this hoax, But this quote came from a book
in n Are You Ready, Robert, Let's do it? Okay.
Geologists working somewhere in remote Siberia had drilled a hole
(25:41):
some fourteen point four kilometers deep about nine miles when
the drill bits suddenly began to rotate wildly. A Mr. Asakov,
identified as the project's manager, was quoted as saying they
decided that the center of the Earth was hollow. Supposedly,
the geologists measured temperatures of over two thousand degrees in
(26:01):
the whole. They lowered supersensitive microphones to the bottom of
the well, and to their astonishment, they heard the sounds
of thousands, perhaps millions, of suffering souls screaming. Uh so,
according to Snopes, long before this ever appeared on The
Art Bell Show, it was reported on the Christian station
(26:22):
the known as Trinity Broadcasting Network. I think that still
exists t N. I remember it. I don't know if
it still exists. I think it does. What it was
in nineteen eighty nine, they featured this story on tb N.
It was also in the Weekly World News in nineteen two.
Is Weekly World News the one with bat Boy? I
think it may have been, yes, but the Weekly World
News version changed the location to Alaska and had the
(26:45):
report ending with the claim that Satan himself came up
out of the hole and the thirteen workers were killed
in the incident, which, of course is basically the minds
of Maria all over again. They're basically saying the dwarves
got to then they do to. Yeah, but one of
the workers yelled, you shall not pass. I love it
(27:08):
this story too, though, it's it's so ridiculous because it's
like like, here is an example of science proving our
religious ideas, proving our supernatural model as accurate. But did
those people before this story literally think that hell was
physically underground? It's just like a place you could go
(27:30):
to if you dig that deep. I don't this would
be something worth exploring because I don't know. I don't
get that that that sense a lot from older religious
writing that that Hell is is literally in the ground. Um.
I mean, I think there are some like if you
go like to you know, the original like mythical texts
(27:50):
and stuff, there's stuff like that, you know that heaven
is literally physically in the sky, that the underworld is
literally physically under the ground. I don't. I didn't get
the sense that many people believed that in the modern world,
Like we're people aligned with TB and did they get
this story and they're like, finally, you know, I knew
there was something about this whole hell thing that didn't
sit right with me. And it was like, well, I
(28:12):
don't you know, if it's down there, we would have
proof of it. Somebody would have drilled down there and
recorded the sounds of the anguish. Well, people don't often
drill that deep as we'll discuss in a moment. So
about the sounds of Hell. I don't know should we
feature should we feature this recording at all on the podcast?
Let's do it. Here's a taste, just a warning. It
does sound really scary. It's like a it is made
(28:34):
to sound scary. So it's a scary sound of people screaming.
Fair warning. So that sound clip, the sounds used in
the Well to Hell hoax tape appear to be a
Then people figured this out, a looped and reprocessed version
of a clip from a movie called Barren Blood from
(28:57):
nineteen seventy two. I looked it up and hey, it
stars Joseph Cotton. Everything comes back to Joseph Cotton on
this podcast. Is there a single topic that hasn't at
some point led us back to Joseph Cotton. He was
in so many films from The Third Man in Citizen Kane,
you know, classics of of of cinema from that era
to uh stuff like Soilent Green uh and also various
(29:20):
installments of euro horror, including one of my favorites, Screamers,
The Island of the Fishmen. Uh. And yeah, just a
lot of trashy like Gallo movies and and seventies junk. So, uh,
Barren Blood. I haven't seen it. I was I wish
I'd had time to watch it last night because it
looks like some some righteous trash um. But it was
(29:42):
directed by Mario Bava. It has that grimy Mario Bava
movie kind of look. And the Snopes right up traces
the origin of this whole Well to Hell hoax to
a hugely embellished take on reports in Scientific American published
in nineteen four about a real drilling project called the
(30:02):
Cola Super Deep Borehole, which we'll be back to in
a minute. So someone was literally like, well, they're digging
that deep, they're gonna touch, they're gonna reach Hell, and
then we're gonna hear about it. And then someone said, well,
I'll just go ahead and make that. I just saw
this movie called Baron Blood, which, by the way, you
you shared the trailer clip with me, and I'm not
a mistaken. The trailer itself has that, or at least
(30:23):
a taste of that, the sound of Hell in it, screaming, screaming,
going on. Yeah. I should also add they did not
in this story about the sounds from Hell. They didn't
dig near deep enough to reach Hell. If Hell's at
the center of the Earth, like they they didn't even
maybe they reach like the outer the outskirts of a
gigantic Hell. I mean, Earth would have to be so
(30:44):
hollow for that, for like everything below like fourteen something
point something kilometers down to be hollow. Yeah, and Earth
would then be mostly Hell, which is ridiculous. It maybe
more befitting of like of a of a theology that
really embrace and cherishes the idea of Hell is a
vital aspect of its of its structure, like because that's
(31:07):
the ugly reality. Great, you have a creation that's mostly people,
sort tormented throughout all eternity, the thin layer of people
sort of getting along on the surface. Uh. Great creation. Yeah,
I mean I guess if you believe pretty much everybody
goes to Hell, Hell's got to be huge. But then
how would how would Earth have a magnetosphere with a
Hell this big? What's whereould the core dynamo effect come from?
(31:30):
I have to look kind of answers in Genesis for
that one show. Um, but but wait, we were asking
a question. We got sidetracks talking about the well to Hell.
No that we're asking a question about so we know
that Earth actually does get hotter as you go deeper
down into the ground. Why does that happen. It's not
because you're getting close to hell, but somehow it's getting hotter. Okay,
so yeah, the the actual answer goes along these lines.
(31:52):
So geologists calculate that for every mile you dig down,
the temperature rises fifteen degrees fahrenheit and the pressure increases
at a rate of seven thousand, three hundred pounds per
square inch. Roughly go down deep enough and the temperature
and pressure is enough to form diamonds. Now, this is
something that that learned minds noted, and uh one one
(32:15):
in particular was Lord Kelvin, who lived through nineteen o seven,
and he theorized that this was due to the cooling
of the Earth and that that that he could use
temperature readings to actually calculate the age of the Earth.
We talked about this in our two episodes on the
Edge of the Earth. We talked about Kelvin's attempts to
to gauge the age of the Earth this way. His
(32:35):
he was sort of on the right track, but his
calculations were off right. And so this is just a
short version of this if you want the longer version,
we advise you to listen to that episode to the
age of the Earth thing is the two part. It
wasn't it? It was so, But basically he thought, yeah,
twenty million years seems about right. He was wrong because
one of the reasons that he didn't know about radioactivity
(32:56):
in the Earth contributing to the heating to know about
convection cycles and the inner layers of the Earth. So
there are actually multiple reasons that Earth gets hotter the
deeper you go down, right, and none of them are
hell uh. So, there are three main sources for heat
in the deep Earth. There's heat from when the planet
was formed and created. There's frictional heating caused by a
denser core materials sinking to the center. And then there's
(33:18):
heat from the decay of radioactive elements. And these causes
are according to an Explainer article by Quentin Williams, who's
a professor of Earth sciences, that you see Santa Cruz.
So partially it's just always been hot since it was
ever formed, and it's been cooling off ever since. Partially
there's like some rubbing going on down there that's causing
(33:39):
some heat, and partially you've got like uranium and stuff
that is decaying and given and that fission causes heat.
But ultimately the Earth has this has this inner heat
cycle that's going on, that's that's removed from the heat
that comes from the sun. But you see that, I
mean like the heat that comes from the sun as well.
I guess these are these are finite sources of heat, right,
(34:00):
because if you've got some heat that's just left over
from the formation of the Earth has been slowly cooling down,
it will just keep cooling down until it gets colder
and colder. Uh, the heat from the decay of radioactive elements.
Eventually those things will pass their half life. They will
just decay more and more until they reach stabile isotopes,
though for some of them this will take a really
long time. Right. And we should also point out that
(34:21):
the mysteries remain about the interior of the Earth that
we don't know, that we don't fully understand. One of
the ways that we we hope to increase our understanding
is by drilling down into it. Now certainly not like
sending people down to the mantle, but certainly, but by
reaching the mantle, that alone would be an important step
(34:42):
towards better understanding the interior of the planet. Wait, are
you telling me that that movie where they drill to
the core is it called the Core? Is not scientifically
accurate and not sending people down there pretty much. I
love science fiction that has some sort of a fabulous
drilling submarine that that takes people down into the depths,
usually to some sort of interior hollow earth scenario. I
(35:04):
love those films, but it's just not ultimately not realistic. Uh.
I like that movie. I haven't seen it. I feel
like I should see it at some point because the
dare you judge it without saying it? Well, the premise
is so funny to me because it's like normally when
you've got some kind of journey to the center of
the earth that the Jewels Verne novel, that makes sense
(35:25):
because it has incorrect ideas about what's down there under
the surface. You know, there's another land and it can
have creatures and all that, so there's like stuff to
do down there with the Core. I assume it just
has a basically accurate idea that, like the Earth is
made of rock and you know, solid material, so what's
(35:47):
down there? They're going on an adventure just drilling into
solid material. But where are the monsters? What's what's there
to do? Yeah? Where are the bout the ball rocks? Right?
I mean, I'd be happy to be surprised, but it's
so anyway that the goal has been to drill down
through roughly twenty five miles of crust to reach the mantle,
which makes up about the planet. One of the projects
(36:09):
that had the same was the United States Project Mohole,
which took a shot at in the late fifties and
early sixties, but they lost their funding funding. They made
it about five hundred and fifty seven feet down, and
this was a sea floor drilling. But the more impressive one,
the one that we referenced already, was the Cola Super
Deep but bore hole in Russia. So this one they
(36:29):
managed to get down forty thousand, two hundred thirty ft
or twelve thousand, two hundred sixty two meters uh, it's
about seven point five miles. They did this over twenty
years of drilling, and ultimately we're about halfway to the
mantle at this point. The effort was abandoned in the
early nineties when they encountered higher temperatures than expected, though
they were prepared for about two hundred and twelve degree
(36:51):
farenheight temperature has been encountered three hundred and fifty six
and uh, this is apparently still the record for how
far we've successfully successfully drilled down into our planet. And
again that's the one that like at least some of
the debunkers seemed to think that the idea of the
well to Hell came from like there were stories about this.
So this was in nine four, I think or in
(37:13):
the eighties, and then there were like articles about it
in Scientific American and and I assume other publications, and
that this probably got warped into the idea of the
drilling and breaking through, right like if if Cola had
actually hit Hell, that would mean Hell is in the
crust of the Earth, is not even in the mantle. It'
certainly not in the core. But you know, I'm gonna
(37:36):
I'll leave that alone for now. Other depoles of note,
there's a BPS Deepwater Horizon which when it was operational
made it down what thirty thousand feet or about five miles.
Japanese drill ship Cheek you reached ten thousand feet or
two miles into the sea floor, and they're actually aiming
to go much deeper with that particular drill project, because
(38:00):
they want to go even deeper and they they plan
to break the record by around is when they look
to start drilling. So in the future we may see, uh,
we may see an even higher figure on our descent.
So maybe that's when we actually reach the lava men.
Maybe so. But but then again, it would just be
it wouldn't be us. It would be you know, the
(38:22):
pro the sensor or something of that nature. I mean,
it wouldn't be us at all, not not just because humans.
There's no reason for humans to go down right, as
far as I can tell, the deepest humans have been
in the Earth is probably two point five miles or
four kilometers at the Opponent gold mine in South Africa.
But that's deep. That's that's deep. I mean, it's still
(38:43):
very impressive, but it's just it's such a small fraction
when you start looking at the at the overall depths
of the Earth. Alright, Well, on that note, we're gonna
take one more break and when we come back, we're
gonna look to the future a little bit. Uh what
else could humans do underneath the surface of this planet
or another planet? Thank alright, we're back. Alright, So we're
(39:05):
talking about underground dwelling humans making a habitat underneath the surface.
And one thing I think we've sort of touched on
a little bit on the podcast before is space colonization
becoming a route for us to become the lava men
of other planets, to to to go down under the
surface of another planet with Lord kin boat and set
(39:26):
up residents there. Now, why would we do that? So
other planets do not have all of the protections that
Earth has from dangerous radiation. That's the main reason. Earth
has a thick atmosphere to absorb incoming radiation. It also
has a magnetic field known as the magnetosphere, is created
by the dynamo of its iron nickel core, and this
(39:47):
magnetic field also repels incoming radiation. Other planets and objects
in space do not have the same protective advantages. For example,
the Moon and Mars. Mars does not have a core
dynamo to produce a strong magnetic field to repel and
coming radiation. Also, Mars has a much much thinner atmosphere
than Earth, less than one percent as thick as the
(40:09):
Earth's atmosphere. So this just means when you're on the
surface of Mars, there's a lot more radiation flux. The
radiation is um is more variable, and you can get
surges of it in different places and times, and it's
just generally also much higher. So without these radiation shields,
long term life on the surface of Mars for a
colonist would be inconsistent. But in the net it would
(40:33):
be a high level radiation bath. Like levels seem to
be such that you could probably survive there for a
short period. It's not like you would just immediately die
of radiation poisoning, but it would not be a good
place to live long term for say, a permanent colony.
For example, to quote from a article by the space
journalist Mike wall Quote, a mission consisting of a one
(40:55):
eight day cruise to Mars, a five hundred day stay
on the red planet, a one day return flight to
Earth would expose astronauts to a cumulative radiation dose of
about one point o one siverts measured by curiosities, radiation
assessment detector or rad instrument indicate. To put that in perspective,
(41:16):
the European Space Agency generally limits its astronauts to a
total career radiation dose of one cevert, which is associated
with a five percent increase in lifetime fatal cancer risk.
So that's just for a five hundred days stay on
the surface. Now, of course, a lot of that radiation
in that calculation there's coming from the trip to and
from Mars. Where you're in space, you're gonna be getting
(41:37):
the most. Then once you get to Mars, there's some
reduction because you've got the planet behind you. That helps,
you know, but you're still getting a lot bombarded from space,
way more than you would get protected on the surface
of the Earth. So one solution here once you get
to Mars is to go underground, where the soil and
rock above will help protect the colonists from radiation if
(41:58):
they're gonna be staying a long time. But you can
think about this in a few Number one is like, Okay,
let's say you want to dig a deep hole. That
would be kind of difficult because it's you know, you're
on Mars. That's a lot of work to do. You
have to bring literally everything with you. You have to
bring your habitat, you have to bring your food, your air. Uh.
And then on top of that you're talking about having
to bring the equipment to dig tunnels in the Martian
(42:22):
surface and create a space for all this stuff to
go and for you to live. Yeah, like an excavator
or something like that. I mean that that's that's rough.
So one proposed work around here is to establish colonist
habitats in lava tubes. This has been proposed for Mars
and for the Moon. Uh So, I put in a
(42:42):
selection of images taken from satellite photos of things that
look like openings to lava tubes on the surface of Mars.
But I've got a really cool one. That's a photo
from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment or high Rise camera,
which is on board the Mars Reconnaissance orbiter. I love
this photo. It's very haunting. I believe this is taken
from Pavonis Mons. But it's a crater, and then in
(43:05):
the middle of the crater there's clearly just a hole
where you can see the shadow and the light falling
across an inner cavity down below, and you can even
see what we're like, the sand from the crater is
falling down into the hole. So these lava tubes would
have been created because, of course Mars and the Moon
had periods of vulcanism in their past. The biggest volcano
(43:27):
in the Solar System actually is not on Earth. It's
not even on the yellow volcano hell World of Io,
the moon of Jupiter. It's on Mars. Olympus Mons is
the biggest volcano in the Solar System. It's a volcano
more than twice as tall as Mount Everest. And so
you can find these lava tubes on on Mars and
the Moon, and they could be not only somewhat suitable
(43:49):
to house uh colonies, they can they can in some
cases be huge. One example I found is that studies
have shown the possible size of lava tubes on the
surface of the Moon to be just enormous, like lunar
lava tubes tend to be bigger than lava tubes on Earth.
Based on leads and data from the Selene spacecraft and
the Grail mission, researchers at Perdue University were able to
(44:13):
predict that at least one lava tube near a group
of volcanic domes on the Moon called the Marius Hills
was at least large enough to to hold the entire
city of Philadelphia inside it. So space Philadelphia, We're space
Rocky jogs this and maybe this is where the their
(44:34):
their sports mascot is from. Was their sports mask. I
don't think have any sports mascot. The frightening red one
with no face. Oh yeah, the googly eyed pervert thing.
Yeah yeah, I think that's their their icon. Oh that's
a moon man. Yeah, but no, this is this isn't
incredible The idea that these these are essentially just large
caverns uh in in the planet or in this case,
(44:57):
that the lunar surface. Yeah, and I think this is
it's because they are is because of the gravity of
the Moon being different. I think that they can tend
to be larger on the Moon than they usually are
on Earth. This is comforting to anybody out there who
is running Dungeons and Dragons campaign in the under dark,
where you continually having adventures encounter large caverns with cities
(45:19):
in them. You can just look to the lunar examples.
They will see here's here's how it might work. But
so anyway, I like to think that our our future
astronaut descendants who go out to colonize other objects in
the Solar System, the ones who live on the Moon
or live on live on Mars, might end up somehow
being maybe culturally having some of the same environmental influences
(45:43):
as the Neanderthals who made the rings of stalagmites deep
down in the dark in southwestern France. Oh wow, that
is fascinating to think about. Like, what are the so
you know, some of the underground religions are often referred
to as like the idea of cathonic cults, you know,
the cults of the underworld. Are are there certain ways
(46:03):
that being in subterranean environments, are going into caves or
into catacombs or whatever, tends to cause people to come
up with certain cultural beliefs and religions. What are the
religions of the lava tube dwellers look like? Who I love?
I love that idea? Um, you know, it would be
remissing all of this if we didn't mention total recall though,
(46:23):
because of course total recall, the original total recall, the
Arnold total Recall in total, Yes, the the the Michael
Ironside Total Recall. See you at the party rector exactly
this one. This film features underground habitats, and it's revealed
that the early stages of those underground habitats for early
(46:45):
colonists to Mars. They were essentially just caves that the
people lived in um and and and that's and one
of the curious things is that lines up with human
history and also some of these models regarding what colonizing
an off world habitat would consist of, and also teaches
us not to put trust in caring for the resources
(47:07):
of one of these off world colonies in the hands
of a greedy, evil corporation. Overlord, give the people to air. Indeed,
give the people the air. Uh. Well, well, hopefully this
is a good, you know, first installment. I want to
think of this as a first installment on some perhaps
deeper Earth and deeper life studies. Like I said, I'd
(47:28):
like to come back and talk about the evolution of
burrowing creatures, even if part of that is just a
reason to talk about trimmers a little more. Uh, we
could definitely have some more fun with the idea of
of deep Earth religions and the idea and religious ideas
of the deep Earth. Yeah, there's a lot to explore here. Meanwhile,
(47:49):
if you would like to dig deeper into stuff to
blow your mind, head on't over to stuff to blow
your mind dot com. That is that is the home world.
That's where you will find all of the podcasts we recorded,
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