-Dr. Keyes, Welecome.
-Thank you.
-Dr. Zimsky imforms us that you made a useful... contribution to his investgations, so... He wanted you to assist him in the briefing.
-That's very generous of you, Dr. Zimsky.
-Science is a selfless business, dear boy.
-Now, why don't you begin, and I'll fill in all the difficult bits.
-All right, I'll put this as simply as I can. Everybody on Earth is dead in a year. Now. Let me explain why. Wrapped around the Earth is an invisible field of energy. It's made up of electricity and magnetism, so it's called, creativity enouth, the Electromagnetid Field. It's where we get out magnetic North Pole and South Pole. It Protects us from cosmic rediation. So this EM Field is out friend.
-But now?
-But now that field is falling apart.
-Why?
-Ah... "Why?" Does somebody have a can of air freshener?
Uh, quick-and-dirty.
The thin skin, that's the Earth's creust. That's what we live on, it's 30 miles thick. That's meat here, call it, the mantle. Forgetting all the funky transitions, it's... uh, 2000 miles thick. The core the peach pit in the center, that's a tricky one. There's two parts... the inner core and the outer core. Are you following me?
The inner core is uh... it's a big solid chunk of iron. We think. And that's surrounded by the outer core, and that is liquid.
-Yes, but most importantly, this liquid is constantly spinning in one direction. So a trillion, trillion tons of hot metal... spinning at a thousand miles an hour, so...
-Right. So physics 101. Hot metal moving fast makes an electromagnetid field. This spinning liquid outer core is the engine... that drives the EM field. And that's where we have our problem.
-This engine has stalled. The core of the Earth has stopped spinneng.
-How could this have happened?
-We don't know.
-What's the timeline here?
-As EM field becomes more and more unstable, we'll start seeing isolated incidents... one plane will fall from the sky, and then two and then... in a few months, anything, everything electronic will be fried.
-Static discharges in the atmosphere will create "super-storms"... with hundreds of lightening strikes per square mile.
-After that, is gets bad.
-The Earth's EM Field shelds us from the solar winds. Which are a lethal blend of radioactive particles... and microwarves. When that shield collapses, microwave radiation will... literally cook our planet.
-Dr. Zimsky. This is the sun. This is the Earth without the EM field.
-3 months, gentlemen, and we're back in the Stone Age. A full year, the Field collapses, and that.
-Fell free to throw up. I know I did.
-So, how do we fix it?
-We can't.
-Not in my vocablary.
-Then you might want to get one of those "word-a-day" calendars, General, because it's imposible. The core is the size of Mars. You're talking about jump-starting a planet. Ths is a superheated hyper-fluid of molten, iron and nickel... at 9,000 degrees Fahrenheit, 2,000 miles down, 1,000 miles thick. And the deepest we've ever been is... 7 miles? With a two-inch drill bit.
-If we can go into space, we certainly...
-Space is easy. It's empty. We're talking about millions of pounds of pressure per square inch. Even if we somehow came up with a vrilliant plan to fix the core, we just can't get there!
-Yes, but... what if we could?