>>16639117
No. If you want funny rocks you have to dig to where they are. Also all the best funny rock piles near the surface are already mined and you have to go deeper to maintain production.
>what if dig really deep open hole
Then it collapses unless you make it really wide too. Want to dig 2 km deep? Great you need basically a cone shape just to get there without it collapsing on you. v = pi*r^2*h/3 = 5 cubic kilometers = 12,420,000,000 tonnes of shit you have to dig up before getting one tonne of ore.
For visualization, this is the weight of 250,000 Titanics, or one and a quarter times OP's mom
>t. mining engineering student

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Can surface mining replace underground? A lot less scary.