3004: Wells

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Wells

Title text: You do have to be careful, though--sometimes, instead of water, you hit this free fuel that you can sell for a lot of money instead.

Explanation

This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by a MAGICALLY WATERLOGGED OIL DRILL - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon. If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks.

Water is essential to life, and humans have long sought out places to get it. Freshwater surface sources like rivers and lakes most obviously dictate where people live, but are subject to changes of quantity and quality (e.g. the seasons/weather and what other people are doing with(/in) the water, upstream). Water can also be present beneath the surface in aquifers, gradually having soaked through into various soil and/or rock layers, and may emerge (far more reliably and usably) from handy seeps and springs where the local ground topology is favorable. But geology and geography don't coincide so usefully everywhere that someone requires water.

Many modern countries (and a number of historic ones) will have at least some ability to pipe water from areas of high availability (e.g. from areas with reservoirs, natural or constructed) to other places of higher consumption (towns and cities), but not everyone will have piped water and may find it better to rely upon a well, a hole dug into the ground, deep enough to reach the local water to lift or pump out as needed. A borehole is similar, but may even puncture impermeable bedrock to access water held (under significant pressure) in rock layers below.

This comic pokes fun of the seemingly improbable characteristics of wells and boreholes; talking about how water "randomly" forms below the surface of the ground and how they "magically" refill themselves. In reality the complex systems of the water cycle dictate the formation of the underground 'pools' that the wells take from and the seeps of underground water that supply them, meaning that it's not really so surprising (nor necessarily quite as simple as it sounds) to get your water from beneath the ground, and is a process not restricted to humans. This theme of things that seem like they shouldn't work, but do, has also been used in 2540: TTSLTSWBD, 2115: Plutonium, and 2775: Siphon, among others.

The title text points out that in some cases, people intending to drill water wells instead found oil beds. Oil is a very valuable energy source, so they became very wealthy as a result. This is the source of the idiom "struck oil" to mean receiving a windfall as a result of a lucky occurrence. But you have to be careful — if you blindly "drink whatever you find at the bottom", as Megan says, you'll get very sick if it's oil rather than water. Oil tends to be buried much deeper than water, but each has its own (different) prerequisites that don't make it equally likely to get either (or both) at any given spot. A prior comic made some related points about ground-hydrology.

This comic bears similarity to a Calvin and Hobbes comic from 1993, Randall may have been aware of, in that it points out properties of a common natural drink that can appear disgusting when the underpinnings are left out.

Transcript

This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks.

[Megan is on the left hand side and is facing Cueball who is on the right side and facing her. Megan has her left hand raised.]

Megan: I need water, so I think I'll dig a deep hole and drink whatever liquid I find at the bottom.

Cueball: What will you do after you drink it all? Dig another hole?

Megan: I dunno. Hopefully it magically refills itself or something.

[Caption below the panel:]

It's ridiculous that wells work.

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Discussion

We definitely need some funny explanation for wells and boreholes. Come on, people, you know the drill! 172.70.85.139 14:50, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

insert laugh track here P?sych??otic?pot??at???o (talk) 14:59, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

Who're you calling a borehole? Barmar (talk) 15:15, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

plot convenience 💔 Caliban (talk) 17:56, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

Fortunately there aren't many Hg wells. 162.158.134.243 18:05, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

The only ones that existed are gone now, although they did survive an alien attack. P?sych??otic?pot??at???o (talk) 01:46, 29 October 2024 (UTC)

FYI: the "Random" button currently seems to be broken. 162.158.154.244 18:08, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

Aaaaaaaaaand it's back again. huh. 162.158.159.5 18:15, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

The similarity with C&H is a bit superficial. Baby humans instinctively drink from their mother's breast, baby calves go to cow udders, and the similarity between the two fluids is pretty obvious. So it's not as random as drinking whatever clear liquid you find underground. Barmar (talk) 19:15, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

While your logic does make sense on the surface, once you actally aply it.... the similarity between animals mating and humans is pretty obvious.... We stop drinking milk from our mothers as a child and drinking it again is considered very strange, so it would be even more strange to start drinking a different "mothers" milk. -- Apollo11 (talk) 22:39, 28 October 2024 (UTC)) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

It's the same with the joke about eggs, if predators eat them, it's not far-fetched to think we might be able to as well 141.101.98.104

Seriously though, how did people discover wells? Some internet says from animals that dig for water, but it's still impressive 141.101.98.104

I imagine it started with an effort to "improve" on a natural spring, perhaps in desperation after the surface flow of one stopped. But that's conjecture. The Wikipedia article provides much information on what happened next. But not all clear liquids that come out of a well are potable (brines, for example). And it's fun, sort of, to conjecture what would have happened if 19th-century US rigs, drilling for oil, had hit methane instead.108.162.245.66 23:17, 29 October 2024 (UTC)

Reminds me of the first discovery of a "helium well". Traditionally, to mark the discovery of a gas-well you would chuck a burning bale of straw into the (closable) outlet to get a demonstrative flame. Then they found one where the bale was extinguished, instead of the gas lit. Eventually they realised that there was helium in it (though incidental amounts, compared to the majority nitrogen that actually rendered the actual methane a slightly-below-combustable proportion), and it attained a new usefulness after the disappointment of not being the usually lucrative gas-strike they originally thought it was. 172.71.26.55 00:13, 30 October 2024 (UTC)

Maybe we need a category for "stuff that seems like it should not work"? I can recall 2540: TTSLTSWBD, 2775: Siphon, 2115: Plutonium. Anything else? 172.70.86.22 10:21, 29 October 2024 (UTC)

I agree, theres been a few comics with simaliar punchlines, "the siphon glitch" for example Apollo11 (talk) 15:57, 29 October 2024 (UTC)

The current explanation seems to have an awful lot of preamble on things that aren't about the comic before you get to the stuff that is about it (in the third paragraph. Feels like that could be significantly cut down, if not simply removed/moved to trivia.172.70.162.2 16:50, 29 October 2024 (UTC)

Could be, but the original was basically "to get water, you dig a well (unless there's a river)". When the truth is that it's more complicated than that, and wells sort of fill in a gap in supply when natural water is unavailable or inappropriate (see also qanats, etc, which I would have mentioned myself).

I wouldn't know what to cut out from what's there without ignoring a significant bit of relevant explanation. It'd be a lot of little bits of streamlining, but some people much prefer just deleting chunks of paragraph and not reading what's left to make sure it still makes narrative sense. Yes, a completer history could by given in Trivia, but then I think it'd get even longer. 172.71.26.55 17:16, 29 October 2024 (UTC)

Anyone noticed how the comic's frame appears thinner than usual on the top and the sides? 172.69.22.243 17:12, 29 October 2024 (UTC)

Saying that something shouldn't be "surprising" because of the "complex systems" underlying it seems downright contradictory. It's surprising exactly because it is complex. 172.70.46.108 08:45, 30 October 2024 (UTC)

I mean, if the underlying mechaninism were simple, it would still be surprising. I think it should be made more clear that the phenomena itself is surprising, not the systems behind the phenomena.172.71.166.19 15:18, 30 October 2024 (UTC)