I want to remove Mount Everest, cart away completely and leave a fairly neat, level plain in its place.
I have unlimited funds to do this, but I want to start right away - so I can’t wait for new technologies to be developed - I want it done as quickly as possible using current mining, quarrying etc techniques and equipment.
I am happy to employ multiple teams and buy as much duplicate equipment as is necessary, however, we must consider access (only so many teams can practically work on this without getting in each others’ way).
All legal permissions are already in place to do whatever we see fit - we can construct as many roads, trains or other transport systems to transport the material away.
We will observe modern western health and safety standards (so for example if we are blasting an area, we’re not doing anything else nearby).
Oh, and no nuclear explosives.
So how soon can we make Mount Everest go away, please?
You might be wondering why I want to do this - the answer is simple:
It’s possible that no amount of money can achieve this goal while observing western health and safety standards.
Like, you could cart away the base of the mountain, but in order to get the stuff off the peak, you either have to (1) cause the mountain to collapse or (2) have someone haul stuff down from the top.
For option 1, I am skeptical that anyone has the engineering skill to properly figure out exactly when the mountain is going to collapse enough to somehow manage to do so safely and get people far enough away. And you’d have to do this many many times.
For option 2, I think the best technology for doing so is having people climb up there and carry it down. And I expect that OSHA is not going to be happy with a 10% death rate of your workers. Even if they were, you can only reasonably get people up there for like a week a year. My first search says that Everest has a mass of about 200 trillion kg. If I model it as a simple cone and we’re only worried about getting down below the death zone, then we only care about the top 1000m or so of the total 4500m height, which is only about 5% of the total mass, or about 10 trillion kg.
Looks like there were 800 summits last year, so let’s assume 1000 is an achievable goal. Convince each of them to carry 10kg down with them, and you should be there in about a billion years. Sure, you still have to deal with the other 95% of the mountain, but that’s the easy 95%.
Bringing the mountain down is a trivial exercise: just bore holes and load them with nukes. Start suitably near the top and work your way down. Obviously you want the explosions to be entirely contained within the mountain. Clearing the radio-active rubble safely is the non-trivial part of the exercise. But you have unlimited funds so you build a conveyor belt to a facility where the rubble is melted and vitrified to safely contain the radioactivity.
Is 2019 drone technology robust enough to send a steady supply of explosives to the summit? Basically, taking the summit down in many thousands (if not millions) of small bites. The idea being that the detritus makes it’s way downhill by and by. After some time, perhaps we get to the point that Everest’s summit is whittled down below the erstwhile “death zone”.
I note that mangetout mentioned not only unlimited funds, but also no specific time constraints Sending up hundreds and hundreds of drone sorties to drop explosives every single day and night, 365 days a year, for however long, should surely put a dent in that thing eventually.
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If sufficiently advanced drone technology is available, maybe we can even start talking about optimal placement of explosive charges and stuff like that.
While mangetout stipulated no nukes … my understanding is that the very most powerful of conventional explosives are a lot more damaging than most people think. Maybe your plan can work with conventional explosives.
Full size helicopters can’t reach the summit of Everest, so I’m guessing rotor-based drones wouldn’t be able to either.
Unless you meant using Predator or Reaper drones to launch a billion Hellfire missiles at it.
Me personally, I would start at the base and hollow it out from the inside.
A stripped down helicopter made it to the summit about 10 years ago. Granted it was specially designed and had a very skilled pilot but with modern drone technology I’m sure it would be possible. I don’t know what it’s affected payload would be but you probably wouldn’t eat too much to start the process. And funds are Unlimited.
Mass of Everest : 160 trillion kg (1.6 x 10^14 kg)
Assuming you will use a jaw crusher or gyratory crusher for breaking down big rocks to transportable chunks. From my early engineering days, iirc, for rocks the crushers needed around 10kJ/kg
So you need around 1.6 or 2x10^15 J of energy or about 2000 TJ.
It’s certainly not that much when you compare to the nuclear yields here - Nuclear weapon yield - Wikipedia
It would take for-evah to blast it with surface impacts. It’s granite. It ain’t going down easy. You need to drill in and plant explosives inside.
So the FIRST thing you need to do is to build a road that runs to the top. Gonna take a lot of truck loads of explosives, and lots of truck loads of rock going down. Maybe a conveyor belt setup that does both. Fund it with the fees that you can charge to take people up to the top, before it’s gone.
Yes, charge $500K each to take one person up when it is still at 29,002, and drop the price as the height decreases. By the time you’re below 8000m the cost could be as low as 100K.
Hm. From Wikipedia, the Ivy King 500-kiloton nuclear test had a yield of 2,100 TJ. According to the NUKEMAP nuclear weapons effects calculator a 500-kiloton surface burst would make a crater that’s “only” 70 meters deep and 300 meters in diameter. Granted, I suppose nuking them may not actually be the most efficient way to move mountains, but I’m a bit surprised that the disparity is that great. Naively, I would have thought you’d want a nuclear explosion with a yield sufficient to leave a crater that was a least kinda sorta roughly the size of the mountain you’re trying to get rid of.
But thinking about it some more–the goal is to remove the mountain, not vaporize it into a super-hot plasma, or even pulverize it to microscopic radioactive dust particles floating around in the stratosphere. So, nuking it would waste a lot of energy, as opposed to just breaking it up into manageable* chunks and carting it away.
*Given the OP, I suppose we should really say “bite-sized chunks”.
I agree with this, which would also require modified trucks, which have oxygen supplies and engines that could run in that low air pressure. But once those trucks are made it’s just a bunch of rock hauling trips.
But you have unlimited funds so you build a conveyor belt to a facility where the rubble is melted and vitrified to safely contain the radioactivity.
Sending up hundreds and hundreds of drone sorties to drop explosives every single day and night, 365 days a year, for however long, should surely put a dent in that thing eventually.