| 词条 | Draft:Harvesting Gold on Mars |
| 释义 | In the 2006 novel Nobel’s Gold, a Washington, D.C. think-tank is working on a top secret project called Operation GERDA, an acronym that stands for “Gold Extraction and Recovery for Defense of America.” Urgency is prompted by the fact that the United States is heading for an economic crisis and catastrophic recession unless in the opinion of experts America returns to a gold standard. The leading economic advisor, Dr. Cinza Brown, at the think-tank known as the Studebaker Institute determines that the best solution for finding the vast quantities of gold required is to discuss the topic in oblique terms with the experts at the U.S. Geological Survey. Here is the conversation which determines the best approach for harvesting gold on Mars between Dr. Brown and various expert scientists and engineers of the USGS including Dr. Morris Vine, Dr. Dr. Ben “Pig” Lemkau, Dr. David Prendergast, and Doctors Crampton, Berigard, and Owens: “Ben, as you rightly point out, we have absolutely no scientific evidence that there’s gold on Mars, not even in the tiniest quantity, based on tests done to date from soil and rock samples collected over the years by NASA. Without this evidence, how do you justify a goldrush to Mars and expenditure of billions of dollars on this wild goose chase?” asks Prendergast. “Not to mention how you intend to get that deep into Mars’ crust and mine this long-lost yellow metal you’re talking about. You said there would be three simultaneous launches lifting off from Earth initially, but their cargoes will be mainly needed for life support and exploration purposes for extended periods. Just do the math, there’s no room on these three ships for the thousands of tons of mining equipment you’re talking about, and for sure, getting gold out from deep inside Mars, even if it existed, will far exceed the timeline Dr. Vine indicated for his requirements. How, then, do you reconcile these technical contradictions and your seriously flawed logic?” “Actually David, I can’t. If my suggested approach was conventional, it would take years to achieve the kind of success needed, so that’s why we need to think outside the box and discard old paradigms. As a substitution for heavyweight mining equipment being shipped to Mars, I propose the use of high-yield thermonuclear weapons to blast our way inside the Martian crust.” The room grew deathly quiet following Pigs words, but then the crescendo built, first with nervous physical movements by those present, culminating with Dr. Vine’s hysterical outburst. “Are you bloody fucking insane!” he hammered at Pig, and this from a man who almost never cursed.” “Certifiable, Morris, but ain’t it bloody cool!” was the large man’s loud rejoinder. “We all know the Martian southern hemisphere is a wasteland pockmarked with craters, thousands of them, like someone fired a 12-guage load of buckshot into a big ball of cheese, repeatedly, but only at the bottom half of the sphere. The meteorites that made these craters deposited their gold way down deep, so to get at the ore, I say we blast in using 100-megaton nukes mounted on missiles fired from orbiting space platforms. We trilaterate our targeted craters from the platforms so we hit them with GPS pinpoint accuracy, using bunker busters developed by the military for the Middle Eastern wars.” “The Pentagon has these huge B61-11 bombs that don’t detonate until they’re a hundred feet inside the ground, and by specially shaping our explosive charge for mining purposes, we can get blasts which are exponential in force to the initial mega-tonnage yield. Additionally, the blow-back from such a blast will release trillions of tons of soil and rock high into the sky, via its gigantic mushroom cloud, thanks to Mars’ weak atmosphere, and from there we can harvest ore already mined, crushed, and pulverized, thanks to the courtesy of Albert Einstein.” “If we need to go deeper, all we do is increase the mega-tonnage – hell, we can go to 1,000 megatons if that’s what it takes. The beauty of using nukes is that we don’t even have to worry about radiation fallout because Mars is bombarded by radiation all the time from the Sun anyway, and our crews will already be protected by specially designed suits and gear. Plus the fact our home base will be thousands of miles away to the north, near the Martian equator, and not anywhere near the blast sites.” The other doctors all chimed in at the same time. “Madness!” Berigarg screamed. “Potential Armageddon for life on Earth!” was Prendergast’s contribution. “Mars could explode!” exclaimed Owens. Dr. Crampton, rail thin, actually began sobbing and trembling uncontrollably from the stressful commotion which had become too emotionally painful for him to bear any longer. Eerily calm and now ashen-faced, as if keeping his composure showed Pig he couldn’t get his goat, Dr. Vine said finally, “Gentlemen, let’s give Dr. Lemkau his say. Please continue. I’d like to hear how you, our modern day Midas, intend to convert all this radioactive dust blown forty miles into space into gold.” At first somewhat threatened by Pig’s seemingly intellectual command of the subject, Vine felt that his argument had now completely lost veracity and Dr. Brown could not report any of this conversation to his superiors or run the risk of himself being accused of lunacy. Once this endless and tortuous meeting was concluded, this fat, pink-skinned, scientifically blasphemous bastard would be relegated once again to his dark little cubbyhole; and Vine would see to it that his last few years as a public servant at USGS would be a living hell. “But Dr. Lemkau, this is preposterous!” Prendergast exclaimed and continued to pile on, “Burrowing deep into the Martian crust and setting off these devastatingly powerful weapons may actually cause the planet to crack open, releasing toxic and potentially deadly fumes from gaseous pockets inside the rock. We know very little about Mars’ interior, much less than we do about Earth’s and we know very little about Earth’s internal physical structure.” “Mars may have empty cavities inside its crust thousands of miles wide and many miles deep from former water and ice deposits – should a nuke be detonated in such a vacuum, the accompanying pressure from the cavity’s depth would multiply the explosive force by a factor of many thousands of times, theoretically sufficient to destroy the planet.” “A disintegrated Mars would change the cosmic balance in our solar system, throw it a kilter, and that could mean the end of life on planet Earth. All this and not to mention that coming at Earth would be millions of radioactively charged meteors, some large enough to completely snuff out life on this planet. Even unknown deadly Martian bacteria could be unleashed and hurled towards Earth as meteoric passengers. I don’t see the point in this discussion, why continue with this farce?” “Well,” said Pig still amused by the ruckus he had caused, “thanks for that vote of confidence David. Since I’m just spitballing here anyway, please let me finish for Dr. Brown’s sake and then all you geniuses can tear me a new asshole, okay?” “What we do is find a dried up riverbed up by our northern base camp, far away from the mine blasting activities in the south, and dam it up on both sides. It’s a geologic fact that these beds have soil packed very tight, tighter than frog pun-tang and that’s water tight – an apropos analogy because we’re going to flood these dry reservoirs with millions of gallons of subterranean water to make huge cyanidation tanks out of them. I’m talking really big here – twenty, thirty, forty miles long and wide.” “They don’t have to be that deep, though; what we want is a large surface area so the Sun’s cosmic rays can cook the potassium-cyanide soup and leach out the gold from the Martian dirt and rock, which can be done many times faster than on Earth where our atmosphere and heavier gravity slow down the chemical process.” Pig was on a roll now and didn’t stop to be bothered with questions. “To get the airborne debris from the nuclear detonations into the holding tanks, we’ll use a sponge-like ‘fishnet’ hundreds of miles in diameter called aerogel, developed for NASA’s Space Probe in 1999 to capture comet dust millions of miles in space. This aerogel is some strange shit – it’s an extremely light, porous material with ultra-low density made from silica. You know, sand. Explosive debris, even though traveling very fast and very hot, tunnel right into aerogel but can’t get through it and so are captured intact. These aerogel sticky fishnets can be rounded up by low altitude vertical take-off harvesters and deposited inside the cyanidation tanks, where the acid will dissolve the aerogel and leave the gold-laden ore inside the tanks.” “Think about this phase as being like the old twenty-mule-team Borax guys mining and hauling that shit from Death Valley to make laundry detergent back in the day. You remember that television show don’t you Dr. Brown, from the early sixties, the one with the Old Ranger and later Dutch Reagan?” Pig asked. Cinza nodded in the affirmative but had absolutely no idea what the hell Dr. Lemkau was talking about since this was way before his time. The rest of the guys in the room did, though, since they were all baby boomers and had watched the show on black and white television sets as kids. “Yeah, I know what you guys are going to ask,” Pig continued, “where do all these nasty chemicals come from, right? Well, the answer is right under the astronauts’ feet. The soft alkalis found in Martian soil have about the same proportion of potassium as that found in Earth’s soil, and the same goes for sand and hydrocyanic salts found on Mars for making aerogel and hydrocyanic acid, also called cyanide. Once the ore is dissolved in the leaching tanks, mercury will be added as a precipitator for gold separation to be followed by the penultimate step of filtration.” “Just imagine the scale of gold production if we created hundreds and hundreds of these massive leaching tanks – why Dr. Brown, there’ll be thousands of tons of gold ready to be transported back to Earth in no time,” Pig squealed. “And once we suck all the gold out of the Martian crust, we go upward and outward, traveling first through the Asteroid Belt, then to distant planets, and even to the edge of the Oort Cloud 84 billion miles away to harvest gold. By then, Mars is just one gigantic cyanidation tank anyway and like Abraham did with Isaac, we offer the planet up as a godly sacrifice if that’s what it takes to make our mission successful.” |
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