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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

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neilv·

What's at 12,000 meters deep? What are they afraid of?

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There's a documentary about that, in the form of the game 'Motherload'

https://www.crazygames.com/game/motherload

I played that game way back when - I highly recommend it.

Edit: thanks, that's an(other) hour of my life I'll never get back :-)

I used to play that at work, I thought it went away when all the other flash games went away.

Nothing of great interest. That's a tiny scratch in the surface of the planet, less than 1% of the radius.

On the other hand although we lack the technology you'd need to destroy the damp rock where we live, we only live on some dry-ish outside surface parts of the rock, and we could trash that part and drive ourselves extinct. "Oops"

They were asking why the two deepest holes, despite being nowhere near each other, dug decades apart, are 99.3% of 12km and 99.5% of 12km respectively. Was BP symbolically honoring the russian scientists? Does the earth have an extremely uniform material property that happens to be at a very round number of km? Just a complete coincidence all around?

(I asked AI, and it says coincidence, since BP stopped drilling once they hit oil, and the russians stopped drilling once they hit some melty rock.)

Also in both cases economic reasons. BP drilled to reach oil which makes economic sense, but AIUI the Russians wanted to keep drilling but eventually central government wouldn't give them any more money.

But yes, largely a coincidence. I think humans would see the same "pattern" if it were slightly more than 12km. We like patterns, we're the superstitious pigeon experiment but at a ludicrous scale. I would like to think the patterns I've seen point at some underlying more important truth - but the pigeon thought so too.

conveniently there is a xkcd for that too https://xkcd.com/1330/

Hell: https://xkcd.com/1330/

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