I asked this on Engineering forums:
With Boring Companies that make massive tunnels, it is not difficult to make large underground tunnels with concrete walls. As we start to lose more and more real estate and farm land to housing, it becomes a real issue as our world populates of where to put people. The world has enough food production to feed everyone many times over. As the world scales up, we can feed people easier and easier especially with newer techs, economy of scale, automation and even drone farming is becoming a thing… Farming technology will always outscale our population, hunger is never a problem unless it is engineered like they do in some totalitarian dictator ships to con-scribe the uneducated into their military. Before this goes off tangent, we have enough food production to always feed the Earth’s population, but where do you put people?
In China you have Judge Dredd style dystopia skyscrapers housing thousands of people. And one way to deal with more people is to build up and concentrate them into one place. In Japan, people often struggle to understand how they’d be okay with sleeping in basically a coffin in a box for night with no real cozy place to stay. One one hand, it is great to grow the world’s population since there’s more people to build civilization into the stars, but on the other hand, if we don’t architect proper living spaces, it can become dystopic.
I was wondering about the challenges of making vast networks of underground homes. This doesn’t have to just be engineering problems, but also culturally. I know I love sleeping in the basement because it is more thermally regulated, but others think sleeping underground is creepy. Maybe have to give it a fun cozy name like Hobbit Holing or something. Another cultural issue is that the police do not like it when they have to apprehend a criminal and there’s a vast sprawling underground (literally) network of tunnels they can escape through. It makes isolating someone in their house for capture much more difficult. No natural sunlight would mess up people’s Vitamin D levels, so the people who abode underground would be encouraged to go surface level often or have a tanning bed or something.
I cam here though mostly focused on the engineering challenges: I know of underground housing has problems with concrete rot due to relentless moisture, Could we insulate the concrete with plastics?
Ventilation is an issue. They make CO2->oxygen converters with electricity use, but probably just fans could circulate it from the top down. A nice side effect of CO2->oxygen converters and self sufficiency is that you’d have built in fall out shelters which could improve your country’s security in case of nuclear attack. So many people think when nuclear war happens, it ain’t worth being alive… But lets say after the nukes land, surviving would let you get to another place that is not affected by Fall out. I mean nukes were used in World War 2, and Earth is still kinda nice. WW3 nuking will be way worse, but it might still be worth living after wards, so a fall out shelter isn’t a terrible design bonus… Especially with today’s current events, whoa, lets not go there either.
Lets say we were able to architect abodes that scaled across the nation, but only 50 feet deep. What challenges do you get as you try and get more and more layers of housing underneath the immediate underground. I read that temperatures go up 1 degree Fahrenheit per 30 feet after the first 100 feet… Obviously deep enough it becomes uncomfortable…
I’m no architect though.
What engineering challenges are there to build underground houses?
How do we solve those challenges and the ones I presented such as moisture rotting external concrete?
What cultural and other than engineering challenges are there that I did not present and how do we overcome those?
It seems like a huge idea to build underground personal housing. The more greenspace we have on the surface, the more fossil fuel pollution is abated, bees, butterflies, and fireflies are happy, and such. I tell people these days to let your grass grow longer since Earth is not supposed to be a golf course. Cutting the grass kills flowers so the bees/butterflies/fireflies have nothing to eat. Spraying kills em too. Also less grass cutting leads to less gasoline emissions, saves you money, less empowering of oil companies world wide, and the longer grass as said before will capture fossil fuels pollution in the air, and also make the air more oxygenated which is all health for us.
Can architects discuss how we might start moving cozy houses underground? I’m not sure how I feel about big underground cities… Since one of the fun parts of being underground is your neighbor not judging your actions and living self conscious. Having privacy in secluded areas be it underground, or in the woods in a not so well traveled to glade, gives one peace for you can enjoy the beauty around you without caring what people think about you… Anyway before this waxes any more poetic, I’ll leave ya and wonder what architects got on the idea of starting to build underground homes… I’m interested in hearing from ya guys.
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From the dev side, I am making an NPC pool in the Memento System today talked about in my last post. I need this NPC data pool for space stations. I need space stations for the game to be fun. Doubt we have something playable this Saturday. I want it tho, so I’m gonna hermit from friends and get things done these next few days. No crunch, just casual coding, but no distractions.
