Mole People

I've been reading Science Fiction by Iain M. Banks lately and they are pretty good stories. (Not to be confused with Iain Banks who writes stuff that isn't science fiction. And how do you pronounce Iain anyway? I always thought E N was spelled Ian, this version has an extra I in it. Is it pronounced differently? Like I-ane?) Anyways, he's writing about a civilization that has achieved everything you could possibly hope to achieve and they spend their time amusing themselves mostly. Naturally, there's trouble in paradise, which is good or we wouldn't have a story. But it got me to thinking. If you can have anything you want, would there be any reason to go anywhere? I mean you can create any kind of environment you want, at least any kind that you would be able to survive in, and anything that you just want to see can be rendered perfectly in a display. No reason to go anywhere, unless you just like traveling.

What if a civilization turned inward though, and instead of looking up at the stars people started looking at what was under their feet. Started digging. Learned how to deal with high pressures and high temperatures. I mean that's basically what's keeping us from going any deeper than we have. We could probably go a few miles deeper than we have now, but not very much farther before the pressure and temperature get too high for us to cope with. What if a civilization did learn to cope with these things and bored into the center of a planet and hollowed it out? You would be nearly weightless as you would be surrounded by approximately equal mass on all sides. The pressure would be enormous. You may need a new state of matter to build an interior structure that would keep the planet from collapsing.

You might ask why anyone would ever want to do this. There is one answer: death by gamma rays. Sometimes stars blow up and when they do they can send out a burst of gamma rays. If the star is close enough, and the explosion is big enough, there could be enough gamma rays to get through our planets magnetic field and do some serious damage. The odds are microscopic, but given billions of years, it could happen and it could be disastrous. Putting a big bunch of rock between you and the source is one way to survive such an event.  Half a planets worth of rock might do the trick. Shoot, maybe even half a moons worth. Shoot, there could be an advanced civilization of mole people living inside the moon right now. We should go visit them.

The Mole People | Trailer | 1956

Update February 2017 replaced missing video clip.