pretty much at the boundary between the mesophere and the thermosphere you are officially in "outer space" (at 100 km/62 miles is the "karman line")

the earth's diameter is almost 8,000 miles, so to drill to the center of the earth, you'd need to go down 4,000 miles from the surface.

4,000 miles to the center of the earth, 62 miles to outer space. we fly in airplanes between 3.75 and 7.5 miles above the surface (20,000-40,000 ft)

4,000 miles to the center of the earth is only 1/60th of the distance from the earth to the moon (238,857 miles away) and 1/23,250 of the distance to the sun (93,000,000 miles away)

blame it on my lack of natural science classes, but this is all news to me, and with all the new digital imaging technologies, I'm only beginning to visually comprehend how much we really are only on the surface of this planet

hm. very interesting.

the average man is about 6 ft tall, so airplanes are between 3,333 and 6,666 times higher into space than a human is.

a photo of a lego man next to the First United Methodist Church of Chicago's steeple would be about the scale of drawing the distance between a human and the plane above him or her.




i liked envisioning a little fleet of planes flying just a few thousand feet above the surface over to iran to drop a few retalitory bombs after they bombed Israel...

just a couple of places on this earth destroyed, nothing too serious...

the mushroom plume from nagasaki went up into the air 11 miles... about 50 miles short of outerspace