Could Tapping Geothermal Energy Cool the Earth’s Core?

So, the original article that was posted Tuesday, September 9, 2008, posited the question as to whether the tapping of the Earth geothermal energy for power generation might have any impact on the planet’s core. Well, you can conspiracy theory away, but the basic response is: no. But, if we glance laterally at the question and asked, “What if humanity found a way to extract something apparently inexhaustible, only to discover that it was supporting something far more important?”, then we have potential for some roleplaying.

Dead Letter Office — Return to Sender

Task at Hand: The Office receives a parcel addressed to a geothermal engineer who died in 1976. Inside is a scorched fragment of drill core and a handwritten instruction: RETURN BEFORE EXTRACTION. The Characters must deliver it.

What’s Going On: Following the route drops them into several different moments at the same experimental drilling site: its optimistic opening, an unexplained shutdown, decades of abandonment and a future where the surrounding landscape lies beneath a permanent aurora. Each period contains another piece of correspondence that should never have existed, and it should become apparent that the some of this communication targets the Characters as much as the engineer.

Twist: The parcel did not come from the future. It originated millions of years ago. Something inside the Earth has learned to exploit the peculiar routes of the postal system and is sending warnings forward through geological time. The drilling is simultaneously allowing and forcing the planet to communicate, and the final letter simply reads: STOP HURTING ME. The target project is the beginning of the end of everything, so finding, saving and then convincing the engineer to not only stop but to cook up a reason to kill the project dead, and all possible variations of it, will mean saving the planet itself.

Lost in the Fold — Heat Sink

Task at Hand: Temperatures Here have fallen by three degrees. Middle Management issues a simple instruction: locate the failing heat exchange and restore normal service..

What’s Going On: Deep beyond the Threshold, a newly accessible section contains enormous machines extracting heat from surrounding rock and feeding it into the Chain. They are working perfectly. The problem is that another habitat has restarted, rebooted or otherwise revived and is drawing from the same system. Here is losing the competition, which pretty much is the boiled down premise of half the missions you’re running.

Twist: There is enough energy for only one habitat. Restoring full service Here requires shutting down the other community. Once the Characters get a glimmer of an idea what’s happening, they receive an Authority instruction confirming exactly that—shut the other habitat down. Then someone on the other side gets a communications channel working and politely asks them not to.

If the system can glitch a habitat out of existence to save on dwindling resources, it can clearly roll back the change where evidence suggests a miscalculation. It’s possible that the complex algorithm running Fold protocols could bug out on one parameter, but not account for the impact a rollback has on others. Actually, there might be enough heat, but we’re not considering that yeast, spanner, nitrogen, and sock supplies are running desperately close to the line.