Journey To the Mantle of the Earth By 2020 262
An anonymous reader writes "A half-century after the first attempt to drill through the ocean crust into the Earth's mantle, a new campaign armed with improved technology is underway that could reach the mantle by the end of the decade, researchers say."
Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake (Score:5, Funny)
But how could we have known that's where those alien microbes were? God help us, HOW COULD WE HAVE KNOWN!?
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Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake (Score:5, Informative)
In all seriousness, that would be a pretty significant discovery if we found life living close to the mantle.
Actually, few biologists would be surprised. One of the more interesting things about previous deep-drilling projects is that they've turned up micro-organisms all the way down. Projecting the microbe count from these holes has produced the estimate that there is more biomass inside the planet than on its surface and in the oceans. Of course, this is based on a very small sample, so nobody takes it too seriously.
But still, the fact that we've found living things everywhere we've drilled means that the default assumption should be that we'll keep finding them. Presumably it'll get too hot for life at some depth, but so far we have no clue at all what this depth might be. The really significant thing would be if we found no decrease in the density of microbes at any depth.
And I don't think the critters down there qualify as "alien". From the few samples that've been studied, they are very similar to the things living inside rocks near the surface. We might have to go to other planets to find something truly alien. And maybe the things living inside the other planets will turn out to be relatives of the things living here.
For further information, ask google about "deep-rock microorganisms" (without the quotes). There's quite a bit of information on the subject online.
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Also.. is this a reference to POD [wikipedia.org] by any chance? :D
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What about one of the greatest Dr. Who serials ever: Inferno [wikipedia.org].
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But how could we have known that's where those alien microbes were? God help us, HOW COULD WE HAVE KNOWN!?
I guess we could have just listened to the Scientologists.
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If there are microbes living in the mantle, they're probably not alien.
Still might eat your face, though.
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Just drill a little deeper, Lews Therin, and you will reach the true source. It is your only salvation.
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Well...being that we've given up on the space program we might as well go to hell....
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obligatory. [dresdencodak.com]
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Not to worry. As long as we have Christian Bale to lead us, we'll survive.
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Gerard Butler will have to remain behind to die though. Again.
Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake (Score:5, Interesting)
There is too much genetic diversity and geographic separation of human populations for a virus to wipe them all out. Even in the middle of some of the worst of plagues some people were immune. The energy involved in achieving any kind of planetary effects is for all intents and purposes currently impossible to produce, and if H bombs didn't ignite the atmosphere, what, if anything, could?
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We seem to think its OK to try and keep animal species going with only a few hundred pairs (and less in some cases).
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I actually saw a pretty cool article about this some time ago; what is the minimum needed number of people to keep the species going without causing inter-marriage and inter-breeding to cause defects. I wish I could find it.
You just need two. It says so in the bible.
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There is too much genetic diversity and geographic separation of human populations for a virus to wipe them all out. Even in the middle of some of the worst of plagues some people were immune.
True, Madagascar will close its borders at the first sign of trouble. /pandemic joke
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Grey goo isn't really a credible threat either. Somehow you start talking nanotechnology and people imagine magical machines capable of operating and replicating without regard to basic principles of conservation of energy and so on. Self-replicating machines will quickly bump into the same limits that naturally occuring self-replicating life forms do, and unlike machines we design, things like bacteria have no interest in limiting themselves -- they'd happily become the grey goo that takes over the plane
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Further, and this is almost more important, bacteria and other microorganisms as well as plants and animals live in a de facto equilibrium. Yes, it's not the result of self imposed limits,
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Before you give humans too much credit for their ingenuity, the main reason machines perform so well is because they are not organisms. In a sense, a battle tank is like a single organ; very effective at a task but incapable of existing without a greater body. The tank has mines to produce steel, titanium and depleted uranium, refineries to produce jet fuel, factories to build it, ships to transport it, people to operate it, and heavy equipment to get it out of any mud and ditches it happens across. Tanks
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Grey goo isn't much of a threat anyway, if it were fire would have done the job a long time ago. There isn't enough energy that is easily obtained (especially by a machine in the nano size range) to go around tearing apart the component molecules on any random object and reassembling them into more copies. And even if there were enough energy, similar machines that tear apart the component molecules but don't reassemble them are always going to be an order of magnitude more efficient, meaning all you need
Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake (Score:4, Funny)
Same thing happened with Project Mohole (Score:3)
The Moho is short for Mohorovicic -- a Hrv (Croatian) scientist who discovered some seismic-wave boundary between crust and upper mantle. The Mohole was the effort do drill "partway to China" as it were, doing this in the ocean where the crust is to be thinner. You had to do seaborne drilling, which is hard, but you had to drill through less crust.
It seems that Texas drilling
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ObYouTubeLink (IN TECHNICOLOR®) [youtube.com]
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That's why we NEED to get the fuck off this rock! Start sending people to mars and start laying the groundwork for colonization/terraforming. Start building large rotating space stations where people can live permenantly. And launch ourselves even further out from there.
The only way the human race is going to survive is if we aren't all in one place. If we don't do it to ourselves, then it will be some natural disaster like an asteroid.
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Well...
"The Day the Earth Caught Fire" (1961) was simultaneous nuclear test detonations.
"Crack in the World" (1965) was searching for geothermal energy sources.
I love 60's disaster movies.
Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake (Score:5, Insightful)
So you are actually probably pretty safe from most things like this that we might do. Even a global thermonuclear war (which is no longer terribly likely, at least at this time, politically) is very unlikely to kill off all of humanity. Nature, however, could easily produce a pandemic killer bug without our help. Or a nearby sun (including our own) could almost casually snuff out the human race in a matter of minutes. Or a really big rock could fall and manage it. There are a few "plausible" extinction/doomsday scenarios, if by plausible you mean things that could cause it are known to happen somewhere in the Universe and could do the job, but none of them are terribly likely on a timescale of a few million years at this point in the natural evolution of our solar system and our biosphere. They are, if anything, less likely as time goes by -- a pandemic that might have been (nearly) universally fatal three hundred years ago would probably not be today, between our knowledge of the causes of disease and our ability to produce remedies and or quarantines that would very likely contain it.
In a nutshell, we probably won't "destroy ourselves", but if we really want the human species to survive in the long run, we do need to move off of planet Earth and out into the Universe at large -- events likely to wipe out all life on Earth are rather likely to be confined to Earth or local Galactic environments until we hit deadlines like the Big Crunch or the Big Freeze. By which time, singularity or not, we'll both likely be dead...
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Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake (Score:5, Insightful)
What would tend to happen is that as they drill the hole, lava starts climbing up the shaft and cooling again into solid rock. Even once they are all the way through, the lava will still quickly cool into rock as it comes onto the surface.
Ultimately, it would amount to becoming a man-made volcano... one that would probably take several centuries before it was of any significant size, and that's assuming that it remains active for that amount of time.
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There are certain geological ingredients required to create a volcano. Simply drilling a little hole won't do it.
Damn. There goes that idea. Back to the thermite.
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where lava can spew out
Where lava will spew out. I don't know what they plan to accomplish short of destroying their drill/probe. Well I guess that first fraction of a second before the sensors melt will let them know what "virgin" mantle 'tastes' like...
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where lava can spew out
Where lava will spew out. I don't know what they plan to accomplish short of destroying their drill/probe. Well I guess that first fraction of a second before the sensors melt will let them know what "virgin" mantle 'tastes' like...
Not really.
1) The temperature of the upper mantle, near the boundary with the crust, is in the neighborhood of 750C/1400F. I think we can design sensors to handle these temperatures.
2) The mantle is mostly solid, not liquid. And even where it's not "solid", for most practical purposes you'd have a hard time telling it from solid..
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Would it be wider large areas would be consumed but the pressure would be negligent, would it be narrower the lava would have cooled down and solidified well before reaching surface.
A bore hole is extremely narrow, at these depths a typical diameter of a few inches only and the lava's viscosity would increase the moment it would start to rise, solidifying and plugging the hole before getting anywhere n
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Yeah, it's hot, but it's not going to go shooting up the borehole. It will plastically deform into the borehole and eventually form an intrusion and probably become granite. The only time you could get a volcanic event is if you hit a mantle plume (as mentioned above by AC). In which case, the lava will freeze when it hits the drilling mud plugging itself back up.
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I humbly accept your correction. :-) Would mantle become basalt if quickly cooled?
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Knowing rig owners they'll have a BOP in place when drilling at suspect depths.
Besides, it's not operated by BP :)
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Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake (Score:4, Funny)
Journey to the Center of the Earth! (Score:5, Insightful)
Jules Verne Likes This.
I predict... (Score:5, Funny)
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And ballpoint pens. (However I have already determined that pens gravitate here [wikimedia.org], the top of Grouse Mountain [wikipedia.org].
Boon, or boom? (Score:3)
I can see two ways this could go. One, plentiful geothermal power wherever you can dig a big enough hole.
Two, artificial volcanos.
Either one is pretty cool.
Artificial volcanoes.... (Score:2)
... as weapons of mass destruction? Why invade Iraq if you can just make a few volcanoes pop up where ya needs 'em?
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I was assuming a bit more refinement of the technique, ya know, let ya trigger it from afar. Maybe drill at a slant or something? Although putting Halliburton people on the front lines for once might be a good thing for everybody (else)....
Inferno (Score:2)
I saw how this turned out in a Dr. Who episode. Murderous mutated humans, parallel universes with the British military in Nazi-esque uniforms. Finishing up with the destruction of the planet. It's not good.
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parallel universes with the British military in Nazi-esque uniforms
Not all that different than our universe, then. The only thing missing really is the uniform. The police state mechanism is already in place.
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Nuclear waste disposal (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Nuclear waste disposal (Score:5, Interesting)
You want to put spent nuclear fuel rods into a burning hot ocean of magma in a spot where enormous upward pressure is being exerted? Realistically, a hole in the earth's crust that reaches the mantle already has a name. It's called a volcano. You wouldn't try to shit in an overflowing toilet, would you?
Though you may have something if you meant that we somehow insert spent fuel into a Subduction Zone [wikipedia.org], where a portion of the crust is sinking into the mantle anyway.
Personally, I'm all for storing the old fuel until technology becomes sufficiently advanced to use it again, there is still a ton of energy present in it. I'd say the best way to be safe from the stuff it is to bleed it dry.
Re:Nuclear waste disposal (Score:5, Informative)
They're called breeder reactors and already exist. They just happen to be illegal in the united states.
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LFTR reactors are good at getting rid of the stuff, too, I heard.
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They're called breeder reactors and already exist. They just happen to be illegal in the united states.
Are they actually illegal, or is that just the way a certain non-nuclear proliferation treaty has been interpreted to date in order to protect the high price of nuclear fuel?
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They're called breeder reactors and already exist. They just happen to be illegal in the united states.
Like that stops anybody. We just need to set up the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Breeder Reactors and we've got it made.
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You wouldn't try to shit in an overflowing toilet, would you?
Depends on how bad I had to go...
Re:Nuclear waste disposal (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is that this mantle is under intense pressure because it has the weight of the Earth's crust bearing down on it. This pressure doesn't matter too much to us because of the weight of the rock being forced down by gravity is exactly balanced by the reaction force of the mantle pushing back up. Except where you get cracks and weaknesses in the rock - and some mantle seeps through, causing a volcano. This pressure is enough to drive the molten rock all the way to the surface.
Now consider drilling a hole - a hole filled with a tube and presumably some material that is not rock - like air or water (probably water since the distance to the mantle is less from the bottom of the ocean). While water has weight, it doesn't weigh as much as rock - we can prove that because undersea volcanoes exist, too. So basically what you will end up doing is creating your own instant-volcano, the minute you get close enough to the mantle that the remaining rock is weakened, all of that stuff is going to come up - following the path of least resistance.
I am not saying it's the end of the world - it's not. There are other forces at work too, the mantle will cool on its way up and might only reach the surface slowly, if at all. However you must understand that there will be a tremendous amount of upwards pressure in the shaft. It will be absolutely impossible to "drop something" down there. At best what you would get is a deep hole with your radioactive waste, sitting at the bottom of the sea. At worst you would get the mother of all dirty-bombs, driven by a volcano and spreading this waste all over the ocean floor. It was virtually impossible to drop concrete into the Deepwater Horizon shaft. Imagine the pressures of going much much deeper and what's coming out isn't oil but lava.
Re:Nuclear waste disposal (Score:4, Interesting)
The crust itself is surprisingly resilient in places where there are no special pressures. The Kola borehole proved that. Over seven and a half miles down and there was no explosion of pressure. If seven and a half miles of rock can be removed to no ill effect, then substituting it with water should not be as big a problem as you think it is, difference in weight not withstanding.
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However you must understand that there will be a tremendous amount of upwards pressure in the shaft.
Giggity.
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The problem is that this mantle is under intense pressure because it has the weight of the Earth's crust bearing down on it. This pressure doesn't matter too much to us because of the weight of the rock being forced down by gravity is exactly balanced by the reaction force of the mantle pushing back up. Except where you get cracks and weaknesses in the rock - and some mantle seeps through, causing a volcano. This pressure is enough to drive the molten rock all the way to the surface.
Now consider drilling a hole - a hole filled with a tube and presumably some material that is not rock - like air or water (probably water since the distance to the mantle is less from the bottom of the ocean). While water has weight, it doesn't weigh as much as rock - we can prove that because undersea volcanoes exist, too. So basically what you will end up doing is creating your own instant-volcano, the minute you get close enough to the mantle that the remaining rock is weakened, all of that stuff is going to come up - following the path of least resistance.
I am not saying it's the end of the world - it's not. There are other forces at work too, the mantle will cool on its way up and might only reach the surface slowly, if at all. However you must understand that there will be a tremendous amount of upwards pressure in the shaft. It will be absolutely impossible to "drop something" down there. At best what you would get is a deep hole with your radioactive waste, sitting at the bottom of the sea. At worst you would get the mother of all dirty-bombs, driven by a volcano and spreading this waste all over the ocean floor. It was virtually impossible to drop concrete into the Deepwater Horizon shaft. Imagine the pressures of going much much deeper and what's coming out isn't oil but lava.
First, to keep magma out of the drill pipe you would just need to keep pressure on your drilling fluid. We already do this; it would just require a higher pressure system than what is needed for, say, oil drilling. Of course, this could be a problem if your drilling fluid is flash-boiling as it encounters the magma, as it would be very difficult to control that much pressure and could lead to a blow out. However, unlike with oil, you could fairly easily stop any leaking lava by circulating cold water, or wo
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"Extreme Heat"? (Score:2)
In addition, new tools must be developed to withstand extreme pressure and heat – which can reach upwards of 300 degrees Celsius.
Oh no, THREE HUNDRED degrees celsius!!! Whatever will they do?
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Oh no, THREE HUNDRED degrees celsius!!! Whatever will they do?
Perhaps they shall bake a cake.
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300 Celsius? That's almost as hot as a pizza oven. I can't imagine how they're going to find tools that can function at that temperature.
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I realise both you and OP are being sarcastic, however the biggest problem isn't finding tools to function at that temperature. The biggest problem is finding drilling equipment that can dissipate heat at that temperature while generating additional heat through friction. Try using a normal steel drill-bit in concrete for more than 15 minutes continuous in standard air temperature (lets say 21C) will render the drill bit useless just from friction generated heat (anecdotal, certainly - you are welcome to
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If you have your pizza oven at 300c you must like a burnt ass pizza. Thats over 570F, most pizzas are cooked between 350F and 450F.
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The Italians apparently don't agree with you...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza#Pizza_types [wikipedia.org]
According to the rules proposed by the Associazione Vera Pizza Napoletana, the genuine Neapolitan pizza [...] must be baked for 60–90 seconds in a 485 C (905 F) stone oven with an oak-wood fire. When cooked, it should be crispy, tender and fragrant.
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That is a pansy-ass cooking temperature. At home, any thinner-crust pizza should be cooked in an oven of at least 500 F; more if you can manage it. A real brick pizza oven is substantially hotter, and commercial pizzerias regularly use them.
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300 Celsius? That's almost as hot as a pizza oven. I can't imagine how they're going to find tools that can function at that temperature.
Obviously, you make them out of pizza. Problem solved!
Heat issues (Score:5, Interesting)
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There has been billions of dollars of research into drill bits over the twenty years since the Kola project stopped, drilling deep holes in rock under awkward conditions being more than somewhat useful for the oil industry - the mud-motors that Kola is described as pioneering are now reasonably routine. But whilst 400F is something that people deal with now, 600F is still quite a problem.
The drilling fluids probably will be fairly horrible, and simply getting electronics to work at those temperatures is ha
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Drill bits made from lava?
Re:Heat issues (Score:5, Funny)
They'll go at night! Wait, sorry, wrong joke.
Isn't it obvious? (Score:2)
They found some Unobtainium!
Sure! (Score:2)
Go poking holes in it and making volcanoes all over the place! See if WE care!
Old News (Score:5, Funny)
Shredder and Krang already did this in like 1989.
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Comparison with contemporary oil and gas drilling (Score:2)
6km is a deep hole, but not an enormously deep hole by the standards of the off-shore drilling industry; there are deeper holes drilled for oil production in the Gulf of Mexico and for gas production in Sakhalin and the Persian Gulf. The post-salt oil prospects in Brazil require 5km depth to get past the salt layer.
(annoyingly, oil-drillers appear to use 'depth' to describe the length of holes even when they are not pointing vertically downwards, and some of the things described as 'deepest' appear to be d
WoT (Score:2)
At last, the Great Lord shall be free...
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At last, the Great Lord shall be free...
Don't be silly, I'm sure Mierin has a foolproof plan for dealing with any unexpected consequences.
On a similar note, I heard Lloyd's is looking into offering a new Balrog insurance product.
shadow and flame (Score:2)
The Dwarves dug too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of Khazad-dum shadow and flame.
— Saruman, The Lord of the Rings
Now You've Gone And Done It (Score:2)
It will probably deflate the earth like a giant beach ball
I want one (Score:2)
geologists have found mantle rocks on land (Score:2)
In other places high pressure gasses from the upper mantle shoot rocks to the surfaces. These areas are called kimberlites and are sources of diamonds.
Actual mantle drilling will confirm these rocks. But it hasnt been the highest priority in earth science due to these above-mentioned occurrences.
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Actual mantle drilling will confirm these rocks. But it hasnt been the highest priority in earth science due to these above-mentioned occurrences.
There is still interest in direct sampling because a) those rocks you mentioned are ancient and may not reflect current conditions in the mantle, and b) there are still debates on just how plastic mantle material is which affects all sorts of modelling.
Best/Worst case scenario (Score:2)
Best case scenario: Hollow Earth theory is correct and we find Hitler riding dinosaurs in the middle of the earth.
Worst case scenario: Earth, quite literally, shoots its load and we're screwed.
And, in their greed for knowledge (Score:2)
They'll unleash a balrog that decimates civilization. No thanks, Mr. Smarty Pants scientists...
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Funny timing, I've been playing lord of the rings online for the last hour (free to play if you like) and just finally discovered Durin's Bane... the Balrog.
It's dead on the side of the misty mountains. Not sure how it got there after Gandalf killed it, guess they just threw it out like trash.
Silurians (Score:2)
almost there (Score:2)
A few more Moho Mines, a couple of fusion plants, and I'll be able to start work on my Krogoth...
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Standard freedom-loving procedure is to liberate an existing island for US military use, giving gratis one-way travel to the natives.
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I think that would have been during the Pertwee era or maybe Tom Baker. (Both of whom made better Drs than the current one.)