#FridayFlash: Land, Ho!

"Why Madrid and Wellington? Not that I have anything against Spaniards or Kiwis, but a connection like that isn't nearly as useful as, say, New York-to-Tokyo or London-to-Beijing. Why not run the line between bigger cities like that?"

"Because those site-pairs aren't antipodal through the center of the earth. The chronospatial displacement beam won't work if it isn't perpendicular to the gravity field."

"Why not?"

"You need the graviton density of the Earth's core to stabilize the beam with respect to the timeslip. Otherwise, instead of the material being displaced backward in time by thirty seconds, it might be as little as one second. That's not enough time for the Earth to move out of the way along its orbit. We can dump matter backwards if it's going into the vacuum of space, but a one second displacement dumps it on top of another part of the Earth. And since two atoms can't occupy the same space -"

"A billion tons of rock and iron will turn into energy, blowing up the planet in a displacement explosion."

"Exactly. So, we need to have land on both sides of the planet, and that really limits the placement of our transfer sites. It can't be land-to-water; it has to be a land-to-land. And if they aren't near a major population, we'd have to build up too much infrastructure to make the project economically feasible. After energy walls of the Madrid-to-Wellington tunnel are stable, we can do Shanghai-to-Buenos Aires, Quito-to-Kuala Lampur, Santiago-to-Xi'an. We could also do a Honolulu-to-Botswana and Mongolia-to-Cape of Good Hope, but there's not much point, economically speaking."

"I'm surprised the Americans aren't insisting on doing the Honolulu-to-Botswana tunnel first."

"Oh, their noses are out of joint because there's nothing on the other side of the continental U.S. except the Indian Ocean. There's no infrastructure in Botswana and getting materials in and out of Honolulu doesn't really do much for you, industrially speaking. You're still in the middle of the Pacific Ocean."

"Hey, wait a minute."

"What?"

"You said we had to wait until the energy walls of the tunnel are stable, right?"

"Sure. Why?"

"Without the repulsor fields, the tunnel collapses, doesn't it?"

"Yeah, they're the only thing holding back the superhot material at the core. It's like 9000 degrees down there. Without the repulsors anything sent through the tunnel would be burnt to a crisp. So?"

"What happens if we de-collimate the repulsor fields? Not enough to make the tunnel collapse, but just enough to make the walls a little unstable. What would happen?"

"Don't be an idiot. The pressure at the core would force the molten nickel-iron into the tunnel. It would be unusable."

"Right, but then what would happen?"

"Huh? You'd have a geyser from both ends, shooting a million tons of... molten... metal... oh my god."

"Exactly! Wherever it emerges under the ocean, you'd have a brand new island made of solid iron. You'd have a mess to clean up on the other side, but it's all high-grade metal. Once the new island cools sufficiently, you level it off, build a seaport on top of it and shoot a tunnel back through the other side."

"You, my friend, aren't nearly as dumb as you look."

"I've been telling you that for years. Get the Americans on the phone."

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n.b. I used this website in writing this week's story: "Tunnel To The Other Side Of The Earth"

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