2003

December 2003. A Mission to the Earth's Core, by John G. Cramer. http://mist.npl.washington.edu:80/av/altvw120.html. Alternate View Column, published in Analog Science Fiction & Fact Magazine. Adventure stories involving the exploration of the interior of Planet Earth have a long and distinguished history in science fiction. Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) was perhaps the first such tale. ...Following Verne's lead and doing considerably more violence to geology, paleontology, and physics, Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote seven novels beginning with At the Earth's Core (1922) that were set in Pellucidar, a "land" occupying the inner surface of a vast spherical hole in the Earth's hollow interior.... David Stevenson, a Professor of Planetary Science at CalTech, has proposed mounting an ambitious NASA-style mission to the Earth's core. He describes his "modest proposal" (in the Swiftian sense) in a paper recently published in the journal Nature. ... He proposes to use a multi-megaton nuclear weapon and one hour's worth of the net iron production of the Earth's iron smelter facilities (~10^8 kg). The annotated paper, A Modest Proposal: Mission to Earth's Core, is at http://www.gps.caltech.edu/faculty/stevenson/coremission/

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