(no subject)

[webofevil]

I was very excited to receive the following information from internetsdairy:

Did you know that in France, you legally own the Earth's crust, mantle etc. beneath your house, right the way down to the centre of the planet?

[I read this] in a book about the Large Hadron Collider. They had to get permission from homeowners on the French side to tunnel through ‘their’ rock; some refused until the government arranged some kind of settlement. No such problems on the Swiss side of the border, so long as the tunnel was below the level where you might want a wine cellar or artesian well.

Presumably, your subterranean zone of ownership forms (for a regular-shaped house) a sort of inverted pyramid that tapers toward the Earth's centre, or there would be magma disputes.

Yes, alongside its mission to confirm the existence of theoretical particles, it turns out that the collider was also designed to try to establish the full extent of France. So thanks to the work of CERN, we can now confidently assert that as well as extending infinitely upwards into space, France territory also extends all the way to the Earth's molten core. The question that logically follows, and therefore the next scientific frontier, is: does France then continue through the planet and emerge just south-east of New Zealand? We can only hope that science is ready for its greatest challenge yet.

Comments

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Metropolitan France - L'Hexagone - is north of the tropics (23.5 degrees for a reason!) so you're out of luck there.

But that's neglecting the spread of France across the surface of the globe. Off the top of my head, there's at least three Departements d'Outre Mers well within the tropics: Guadeloupe, French Guyana, and Martinique. Legally, they're part of France.

So not only is Jupiter occasionally French, the Sun is French too. Doubtless many other stars too, but it'll be a little while before the light cone reaches another galaxy, even if you take a very generous view of when the Merovingian Franks established the country.