[ExI] tunnels, was: RE: Inflation and the 2024 election

[spike at rainier66.com]

From: spike at rainier66.com <spike at rainier66.com> 
Subject: RE: [ExI] Inflation and the 2024 election

 

 

 

From: John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com <mailto:johnkclark at gmail.com> > 
…

>>>…Tunnels John.  Deep, far from harm in a nuclear attack or unruly mobs. Sheesh was it really necessary to spell it out? 

 

 

>>…Yes I think it was. You can't get very "far" in 20 minutes… John

 

>…You don’t need to, if you can get very deep….

 

I realized I understated the case.  You could get very far as well.

 

Consider the task of building tunnels.  The amount of soil to be removed is approximately proportional to the square of the diameter of the tunnel.  The Caldecott Tunnel is one I use occasionally, width 9.8 meters, height 12.5, so we can say it is close enough to about 10 meters diameter for estimation purposes.

 

Consider an escape tunnel, whose only purpose is escape.  Could a vehicle be made with a diameter of two meters, so an escape vehicle is the size of a minivan?  How about one meter?  How “tall” are you from the top of your head to the bottom of your ass when you are in a dentist chair?  Even a tall fat guy could fit in a vehicle one meter in diameter for a few minutes.  If an escape vehicle is built for a tunnel that size, it could be made to go really fast.  There’s nothing in the way down there, so why not 100 km/hr?  Why not 200?

 

The Caldecott Tunnel is about 1 km in length, so the 1 meter diameter tunnel could be made about 100 km in length by removing the same amount of soil, or 50 km if you wish to argue that the Caldecott is roughly semi-circular.  Also note the Caldecott has four bores.

 

A dump truck can haul about 30 cubic meters of soil, so about 40 meters of tunnel for each dump truck if we assume a one meter diameter tunnel.  During the approximately two years where the neighbors were complaining bitterly about the constant noise, a dump truck left the Naval Observatory about every 4 to 6 minutes, around the clock.  That’s about 300 trucks a day or about 10,000 trucks a year, so about twenty thousand trucks removes enough soil for about 400 km of tunnel just from soil removed from just that one site.  Somebody check my math, as I am doing it in my head.

 

If you think it is too technically difficult or expensive, note that the Gazans built a huge tunnel system funded primarily from foreign aid.

 

John I do urge you to use your imagination and recognize that those who design these kinds of systems are as smart as you are, and that there are a lot more of them than there are of you.  Once you do that, imagine what you would do if you were in command the military and you knew your enemy could send you rockets with nuclear warheads, aimed with high accuracy.

 

spike

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

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