A scientifically accurate version of The Core (or The Journey to the Center of the Earth, for that matter) wouldn’t have been very exciting to watch. The Kola Superdeep Borehole, the deepest hole ever drilled into the real Earth, only penetrated a third of the way through the continental crust somewhere just shy of the Finnish border. That’s a little under eight miles; the Earth’s core, for reference, is 4,000 miles deep. Although it surfaced plenty of surprises from deep below the permafrost—boiling hydrogen-rich mud, a shock of liquid water, and even microscopic Plankton fossils as far as three miles below the surface—it was hardly the stuff of adventure tales.

Even before the Russians welded it shut in the ‘90s, the Kola Superdeep Borehole was only 9 inches wide, and in photos, its opening peters immediately away into darkness, a blank slate that has been enthusiastically filled in by eldritch creepypasta authors, clickbait farms, and evangelical memelords suggesting that the Soviet Union opened the gates to hell. Images taken by urban explorers of the abandoned site could not look more like outtakes from Stalker, adding to its postlapsarian Soviet spook factor.

...Although both make us feel very small, the challenges of inner-space exploration are, in every way, inverse to those presented by outer-space travel: tremendous pressure and heat make it impossible to dig beyond a certain point. The mantle is yet to be breached; pending some miraculous advance in materials science, it’s unlikely that it ever will.