They wouldn’t be able to breathe!
Where would the oxygen come from?
Not to mention water.
Well, to add a serious reply, just in case this was a serious question:
Here’s a link that purports to describe one Hollow Earth theory.
The answer is No. As very best we can tell, the earth is not hollow. Not Peary, not Amundsen, not anyone has reported a hole at the north or the south pole. First of all, there’s an ocean at the north one, which would spill into the hollow (or something) unless a great dyke were there to stop it. Further, people have stood at the north pole. There have been explorers as far as almost a century ago, and military expeditions, and even private ventures (My parents have a copy of National Geographic Magazine which contains an article about a man who skied from Siberia to the pole, and then to Canada.) Here’s a page that lists people that have been to the north pole. And here’s some guy’s biography page where there’s a picture of him standing next to a submarine at the north pole.
The south pole has a big, frozen continent. But people have been there, as a Google search on, say “south pole explorers” will show you. In fact, there is are scientists and researchers there right now.
And we haven’t found any holes anywhere else, unless you think there are some tunnels somewhere or other with humble surface entrances, as depicted in Jules Verne’s work (of fiction) “Voyage au centre de la terre” (Voyage to the Centre of the Earth). Such things, if they’ve ever been found, have never been reported.
But maybe it’s just hollow, and there’s no opening to the surface? How would we ever know?
We’d know because when we send sound waves (seismic testing) down into the rock, it would reflect of the inner surface and we’d recognize the patterns of reflection. Instead what we see when we do this lends us to believe the earth is very much full of material, with some parts of it of different densities. As some posters have mentioned, parts of the rock below the earth’s suface are liquid, and other parts are solid. It seems very likely that there’s a lot of nickel, iron, and silicon down there, and that the very centre may be solid because of the trmendous pressure caused by the weight of all the rock above it.
Further, we have a theory of gravity which very nicely predicts all sorts of things, including how much gravitational pull the earth should have on things such as people and rockets and buildings. This gravitational pull is proportional to the mass of the earth, which is to say “how heavy the whole earth is”. If the earth were hollow, it would weigh a lot less (remember, we know what the density of rocks, in general, is), and the earth would exert less pull on us. You’d weigh less on a hollow earth, and you’d be able to jump higher. And the space shuttle would take less fuel to get to orbit.
Further still, our understanding of how the earth was formed (coalescing from a cloud of space dust billions of years ago) makes sense if the earth is a solid ball of matter. But how do you explain all that dust coming together to form a hollow ball? Ever try to pack a hollow snowball – wait, your location says Honolulu – um, ever try to pack a buch of sand into a hollow ball? It doesn’t work very well.
So, no, hollow earth theories don’t have much going for them at all. Except Science Fiction and fantasy.
Really? What geometry is that?
From what I can gather, this model suggests we live on the inner surface of a sphere, with rock below us to infinity. Here are what I see to be problems with this model:
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Seismic waves reporting reflections from a core of limited size (I think, but don’t know, that they can estimate the diameter of the solid core by sending sound waves and reading the reflections).
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Where the heck is the moon? Mars? The International Space Station? The Stars? Comets? How the heck do you explain this photograph from the Apollo 17 mission?
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The Humber Estuary bridge is a long suspension bridge in England. It’s so long and its towers so tall that the tops of the towers are farther apart from each other than the bases, and the engineers had to take account of this when designing the cables. Why are the tops farther apart? That’s what happens when you stand things up on the outside of a sphere. The opposite happens if you stand them up on a concave surface.
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Have you ever gone flying? If you go up high enough, you begin to see the curvature of the earth. And it doesn’t curve up at you. I can personally vouch for this, and so can many an aeronaut.
So, no, at first glance, it does not appear that this theory would give the same results as the standard model.
(As for the credibility, that Ernst Zundel hollow-earther on the linked site appears to be the same holocaust-denier that they’re trying to deport from Canada right now.)
It’s called inversion geometry:
http://www.csc.twu.ca/byl/modelstest.doc
As light takes a curved path in non-Euclidian geometry, once you accept this ridcolus model you needn’t worry about how the Earth appears from above.
[ul]
[li]Scientists have tried to drill to the earth’s core, but not to determine if it is hollow or not, but whether it is crunchy or chewy.[/li]
[li]Do you think every one of several million high school earth science books are wrong?[/li]
[li]Won’t somebody think of the mole-children?![/li][/ul]
The real question is how many licks does it take to get to its tootsie roll center!
Yeah, but Amundsen didn’t say anything about the great city of the old ones down there either, so obviously we know how trustworthy he is.
What really is interesting that certain hollow earthers are in love with the statement that Admirl Byrd made in 1947, that “I’d like to see that land beyond the pole. That area beyond the pole is the center of center of the great unknown”. Most people would take this to mean that he wants to see the unexplored reason once he flew over the pole, but some Hollow-earthers seem to believe it obviously must be a whole new world accessible by the hole in the pole.
But from what I understand, Hollow Earthers are pretty much in the same catagory as people who think the moon landing is a hoax. Any scientific evidence you bring them to prove it’s not just brings charges of a massive coverup to hide the real “truth”. All accounts saying there are no holes are part of this, and all satillite photos are doctored.
From the abstract of the “inversion geometry” paper linked above: ". However, one must be careful not to confuse models of reality with reality itself. "
Topological inversions fall into two categories: either they are accounting tricks [mapping games] that are by definition equivalent to the standard accepted geometry, or they are in some way different, in which case they would destroy many, and probably all, fundamental symmetries that underly the current understanding of physical laws. (to name a few: Inverse square laws would lose position independence; 3K radiation would be inexplicable; and the mass, energy output, longevity and mechanism of every star would need a new, undreamt-of explanation. )
With the acceptance and demonstration of a unified space-time (or long before) geometry ceased to be independent of physical laws. It is now intrinsic to the operation of those laws (e.g. distortion fo space by gravity) and genuinely different geometries would result in observable differences. Thus far, our paradigm changes have been more detailed geometries which reduce to previously accepted geometries except in extreme cases.
To present any inversion geometry as a more valid representation of reality than the standard geometry one must not only write and test the equations that show that all the phenomena observed to date would produce identical results BUT ALSO, having proved that great equivalence, strongly demonstrate a phenomenon that is inconsistent with the old geometry, but consistent with the new.
That last part is what separates a real theory of the universe from a topological game, and is also where every theory espousing any sort of inversion geometry as ‘real’ (whatever that means) has completely fallen down. In short words: “Prove it”.
Don’t be too hard on Amundsen; he was just trying to protect the public from things they (and he himself, for that matter) wouldn’t be able to comprehend.
OK—2nd question–
How do we know for sure the Earth’s core is molten? Just a good guess or is there any scientific evidence?
Granted there are volcanoes so there must be some liguid rock down there. But the whole core molten? Pretend I’m from Oklahoma and “show me”.
Or maybe it’s Missouri the “show me” state. Or some damned state or other. What does this Florida boy know about such things anyway?
For only $18,000-20,000 you can find out for yourself:
VoyageHollowEarth
Steve Currey’s Expedition Company has chartered the Russian Nuclear IceBreaker YAMAL, to take 100 adventurers to the North Pole for an expedition to conduct scientific observations that could resolve once and for all whether the Hollow Earth theories have any validity!
I’d be happy to go along and report back to the SDMB, if said members would be so kind as to subsidize me.
The itinerary looks wonderful. I’m especially looking forward to the monorail trip to the City of Eden
Just to keep the party goin’…
One of the reasons we know that the earth is not hollow in the center is because of the earth’s magnetic field. The planet earth is just one big electromagnet, and the only way you can have an electromagnet is to have electrons moving fluidly around a solid hunk of metal.
So… we can therefore deduce that the center of the earth is a solid chunk of metal with molten metal flowing around it. The deep center of the earth is solid because even though it’s much hotter than the melting temperature of iron down there, the pressure gets so high that it’s not possible for the metal to be fluid.
Also, the hollow earth theory wouldn’t really make any sense. Denser materials would have sunk to the bottom while the planet was still one big molten ball in its infancy.
I took a geology class last year. It was boring but interesting at some points.
No. I must admit, I hadn’t considered that. I do, though, have some grasp of Riemann geometry and such things.
Still, it’s not exactly ‘Hollow Earth’ in the classical sense. It also strikes me as needlessly complicated an non-intuitive. and the model in the *.doc you linked is a little different than the Cyrus Teed version. But I guess that’s what you meant by “modify it and use a certain geometry”.
I suppose you could assume the world was like that, but since it’s by definition identical in appearance to the classical model, it’s no more useful than the classicla model. It is, however, more complex (from some views).
No One KNOWS!
The deeper you go into the mantle the hotter it gets. e.g. the Kimberly diamond mines in SA.
Molten lava flows from the sea bottom in various locations through vents. It Is Hot!
<http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/gen99/gen99305.htm>
Sun’s temp. 5500 deg. Celsius.
Earths core 3000 to 5000 ceg. C. estimated.
A project was proposed, facetiously several years ago, gained serious support till they couldn’t figure out how to drill a hole in the mantle on the sea floor and insert a probe into the core that would not be destroyed on entry.
“Beware of the Cog”
*Dr. Raymond Bernard made a very convincing case in his classic “The Hollow Earth.” It also provides strong evidence for the existence of UFOs using the hollow innards as a base of operations.
*That was the name he wrote under. His real name was revealed in Martin Gardner’s “Notes of a Fringe Watcher,” but I don’t recall it.
… obviously you’re using a new meaning of the phrase “very convincing” that I hadn’t come across before.
If the earth were hollow there would not be enough mass for the earth to exist in the first place.
how might a hollow sphere form anyway? During the period after the big bang inwhich matter began to lump together I cannot think of any mechanism that would allow for a hollow planet to come into existance(given that the effect of gravity is uniform).
if the earth were hollow then it would stand to reason that the same principles that cause the earth’s hollowness also cause the sun to be hollow, but the sun cannot be hollow because a hollow sun cannot possibly have the pressure and heat necessary to create hydrogen fusion(so it would not even be a sun at all).
the only way you could possibly entertain notions of a hollow earth is if you are also willing to disregard hundreds of years worth of scientific research on the subjects of gravitation, cosmology and astronomy.
Walter Siegmeister.
The New Age: Notes of a Fringe Watcher, Prometheus, 1991, p216.
Part of the text linked to:
What is it with people named Koresh and believing they’re the Messiah?