ANSWERS: 3
  • We can. We just don't have a drill large enough, the mantle extends quite a few miles. And by quite a few i mean a lot. Oh, the mantle temperatures would also melt the drill, you might cause a volcano to erupt where you drilled, just a lot of bad scenarios.
  • When I was a geology student, I heard of an attempt that the Soviets made to drill to the mantle. They we not sure if they succeeded. The problem was that it gets darn hot down there. So, the drill bits keep burning up. Also pressures down that deep would be pretty darn high. This plus the high temperatures would have cause to holes to seal up again if the drill were pulled out to replace the bit. Thus, they would have had to redrill a significant portion of the hole. Because of this, they were never really sure if they actually reached the mantle before they were forced to give up.
  • We cannot drill through the mantle for no other reason than we decide to give the money to fat welfare mothers to stay at home and have kids. For the amount of money we have spent on such entitlement programs we could have drilled through the mantle long ago... but this is not where our priorities lie. For the amount we spend on illegal aliens we could have a colony on the moon and for what we are about to spend on socialized medicine we could have a colony on Mars or possibly fusion power*. . . . *It is hard to predict the final cost of developing fusion power in advance.

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