If Wild. E Coyote can do it

Ever seen that Roadrunner episode where Wild E. Coyote somehow (?) manages to dig his way through the Earth (and its metallic core) and ends up China? Well, if anyone can work out how to do that for real, we can totally make it worth your while.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/science/heart-of-gold-well-never-see/2006/06/27/1151174201694.html

Two million billion tonnes of gold. Sitting in the core. Thats 2x10^6 x 10^9 (where ^ means to the power of). That's 2000000000000000 tonnes. This would send goldmark broke. It would also send the price of gold plummeting if it were extractable, its one of those catch-22's.

I guess this makes Prof. Bernie Wood & co. golden boys? (Sorry. Had to be done).

Makes you wonder if there is any chance of getting down there. I know of at least one guy who has given this some serious thought:

http://www.gps.caltech.edu/faculty/stevenson/coremission/index.html

Dave Stevenson, who is originally a kiwi, now at Caltech in California, has suggested a way to do it. It involves hijacking all the world's iron refineries for a year, melting all the iron, and letting it plummet to the bottom of the mantle. Odd thing is, it seems to work. That much iron would crack the rock it sits in (the density difference generates excess pressure - and the rest, well, you ever put a sealed tin can in a campfire? Yeah. Bake beans everywhere).
So if can figure out a way to ride a wave of molten iron to the core, then you can get to the gold. Then you'd have to get it back out....

Well, that seems in the too-hard basket right now. But it some places, there are "cores" just sitting around for the taking. The whole asteroid belt was originally "planetesimals" - embryos of planets that never quite made it. They did start forming cores, though - all the iron meteorites we find on Earth are remnants of the cores of these planetary fetuses. (/Embryos. Whatever). So there is a good chance that there are 'gold-rich' embryo's floating around out there, waiting for us to snatch up. Like this one:



Now we just need a loan of a space shuttle.. preferably one with no foam.
Find out more about why an asteroid is shaped like a dumbell here:

http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/May00/Arecibo.Kleopatra.deb.html