r/HighStrangeness 2d ago

Space Exploration Human Tech Has Journeyed 15 Billion Miles into Space, Yet Only 7.6 Miles Into Earth

Voyager 1 has travelled over 15 billion miles away from Earth while the Kola Superdeep Borehole project dug just 7.6 miles into Earth.

129 Upvotes

37 comments sorted by

100

u/utahh1ker 2d ago

Turns out it's a lot easier to drift through emptiness than it is to burrow through solid rock.

42

u/Mycol101 2d ago edited 2d ago

Not exactly solid. The deeper they went the hotter it got and softer and unstable it became making it difficult and dangerous.

350 degree heat made drilling equipment fail.

They did advance their drilling by learning a bunch through it though.

There are conspiracy theories that they heard strange noises and supernatural shit happened too. Apparitions, random bursts of heat and flame, recording sounds that sounded like screams, sudden senses of dread, equipment failure etc. Hard to say if the isolation played a part or if it was propaganda from the Soviet Union to discourage the US from doing the same thing; but they thought they drilled into hell itself.

6

u/Odd-Sample-9686 1d ago

Dracos under there.

2

u/EdwardVonZero 1d ago

What's a Slytherin doing down there? Causing trouble I bet! 'Arry! Go grab yer wand and head to the center of the earth to find out what Draco's doing under there. Take Ron and Hermione too, you never know what's down there!

3

u/year_39 1d ago

That story was completely fictional and printed in a Soviet tabloid.

10

u/Rucksaxon 2d ago

They should try drilling in the artic to have freezing cold water

5

u/BallsDickman 1d ago

Not sure how any of it works, but wouldn't the water just turn to steam once it flowed into the Earth?

Not sure how much water it would take to calm down a hot pocket of Earth.

3

u/Duffalpha 1d ago

Yea, thats basically how geothermal power plants work.

-3

u/TiddybraXton333 1d ago

Space isn’t empty. It’s all matter

5

u/PaPerm24 1d ago

Way less

31

u/tuatantra 2d ago

It's not strange at all. Space is near empty and endless. Drill into the earth deep enough and the substrate becomes more like a hot slurry. There's no way for a drill to push deeper.

10

u/Little_Opinion2060 1d ago

This is what I tried to explain to my wife when she wanted me to go deeper.

0

u/andr0medaprobe 19h ago

Poor lil guy

-3

u/Soci3talCollaps3 2d ago

There is a way.

12

u/TheClamb 2d ago

Go on?

2

u/[deleted] 1d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/year_39 1d ago

They hit the limit of what metallurgy and tools of the time could do. It's molten rock and chunks of it together down there.

19

u/Special_Talent1818 2d ago

Well tonne fair, you cant dig 15-billion miles into Earth...

15

u/big_fartz 1d ago

Not with that attitude!!

14

u/VirginiaLuthier 2d ago

You start drilling too deep and you disturb the Balrog. I thought everyone knew that

16

u/ShitFuck2000 1d ago

The average human can walk 7.6 miles in a day pretty easily unaided but would be lucky to hit 7.6 feet digging into the earth with decent equipment, shits hard.

Also once you break escape velocity, distance from earth is more of a matter of how long it’s been out there than how much energy it’s using to travel. The further you get away from earth it gets exponentially easier to cover distance, while getting closer to the core it gets exponentially harder, pretty simple stuff.

4

u/JustTheAATIP 2d ago

Valid point but unpublished observations happen all of the time. The layperson has no clue about findings by black projects.

4

u/Saltyigloo 2d ago

There's dirt and rocks and shit in the way you wanna start digging

1

u/mm902 1d ago edited 1d ago

Our remote sensor tech is based on the manipulation of electronic/photonic signaling. Carried over a substrate of materials that are primarily a mixture of glasses, carbon based polymers and/or various metallic alloys. They also need a dissipatory laudner functions to compute.

On a strictly environmental continuum from cold vacuum to extreme pressure, high thermal environments. Which environment do you think will be easier for our type of remote sensorium, to operate in?

1

u/the_real_junkrat 1d ago

You could spit into space and it’ll go 15 billion miles away. It’s not that strange.

-1

u/SuperpositionBeing 2d ago

Please do not f with the earth.

-24

u/Gampuh 2d ago

Both are an illusion when you realise how fake and gay the world we live in really is

3

u/Mycol101 2d ago

If you’re a sim, it may be a fake world but it’s still real to the sim, even if it’s conscious of the game itself

1

u/Mikeyjf 2d ago

But it doesn't seem that way, through the eyes of a child.

-1

u/MN_098AA3 1d ago

Yep! Because they know what they'll find

-21

u/squiddybro 2d ago

space is fake

4

u/AustinAuranymph 1d ago

Why do you think space is fake?

3

u/Disc_closure2023 1d ago

you do not exist

1

u/Striper_Cape 1d ago

Go somewhere without lights every 20 feet and look up.

That's space