The other night I was thinking about the book and movie "Journey to the Center of the Earth". Then I started to wonder how far down humans have actually travelled.

Like have we explored the great depths of earth's caverans? How far down have humans gone before the laws of physics and whatnot kicked in, not allowing us to go any farther?

If if we haven't gone down a whole way, we should set up some sort of huge expedition to travel deeper down the caves?

Your thoughts/answers?

I think the record for drilling is in excess of 5 kilometers. Caves are usually not very *deep*. When we talk about a "deep" cave it is usually really a *long* cave, that is the depth is in the horizontal plane. Once you go sufficiently below the surface of Earth, caves tend to be water-filled.

Hans

What about the major caves like Carlsbad, etc? Don't they go extremely deep?

And even if they're water filled, can't we send a robotic submerine down to examine what atmosphere whatnot?

Water-filled or not, the deepest caves we know of only go down about 1700m

http://www.pipeline.com/~caverbob/wdeep.htm

Not quite Jules Verne territory....

for perspective, I believe that the Earth is estimated at 3963 miles in radius. We've only gotten .2% of the way to the center (given the 40,000ft thing above), so to travel to the center of the earth, we've got 99.8% left to go.

Exactly, so we don't have to worry about scarce resources cause there is still plenty of crust to process for ores and stuff, maybe more expensive, but it is there if we really need it....

This is a bit old, but couldn't find any more recent:

http://helios.physics.uoguelph.ca/summer/scor/articles/scor49.htm