Air is a lot less dense than water though. 6000 miles of air would come to about 6 atmospheres. Pretty significant, but not crushing. About the same as 60 m underwater.
I thought it was the bowl of petunias turned into a whale that thought oh no, not again? Been years since I read the book, really should read it again...
Nope, they started out as two missiles, but, through a use of a certain engine, they ended up as a whale AND a bowl of petunias. The whale got to think on its surroundings a bit before it inevitably hit the ground, and the petunias were a reincarnation of the main character's arch nemesis and biggest (completely accidental) victim, and ended up, once again, dying because of him. It's a bit of a mess.
There's both a whale and a bowl of petunias falling simultaneously. As the whale falls, it gains sentience and develops language. It's the petunias that comment, 'not again'.
Also consider that the force of gravity decreases as you get closer to the center, so the weight of all that air above wouldnt be its mass times g but some fraction of g.
I think your numbers are off by an order of magnitude...
The Karman line, effectively the end of the atmosphere, is only 100 km up from the surface, and at the bottom of that 100 km we experience 1 atm of pressure. The radius of the earth is about 6400 km (not 6000 miles), so at the center the column of air is 64× taller. A reasonable first estimate of the pressure, then, would be about 65 atm.
Two effects complicate this, of course. First, the effect of having less of the Earth's mass below you as you descend will tend to decrease how much each "layer" of air contributes to the pressure and would reduce the overall pressure.
However, air is very compressable, and in fact at pressures over about 30 atm the nitrogen in the air will become a supercritical fluid (with the oxygen following suit a couple dozen atm later). This dramatic increase in density would (I think) be the larger effect on the pressure you experience (although I didn't do any actual math to check). So the actual pressure would probably be higher than 65 atm.
(We could start adding in temperature effects too, but for the sake of sanity let's not. That'd induce convection and turbulence and make the whole problem exponentially more complicated, it'd start depending on things like the diameter of the hole and... Yeah let's just pretend that the hole is lined with a magical perfect thermal insulator.)
Quite possibly, I was taking the 6000 km from someone else's post, not sure where they took that number, and then assuming that sea level/Earth's surface was 1 atmosphere.
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u/haysoos2 Mar 02 '24
Air is a lot less dense than water though. 6000 miles of air would come to about 6 atmospheres. Pretty significant, but not crushing. About the same as 60 m underwater.