No Stupid Questions

OP, have you ever planted a bush? After a rain?

Digging. Is. Hard.

It’s expensive.

And stuff down there gets wet.

Also, studies have shown that “enclosed” living is psychologically problematic, at least for a majority of people. This is why rooms where people live/work for extended periods have windows, and why above-ground buildings always have copious exterior walls for them, even when a “cube” would be more space efficient.

Also, having grown up in tornado alley myself, tornadoes aren’t as big a deal as you think. Their area of impact is very small; odds are, you’ll never get hit by one. I’ve never even seen one up close.

Hurricanes. Now those are a big deal. I’ve seen 2 Cat 4s, and some smaller ones, real close. Live in the tropics, and it’s not a matter of if, but when they will come raging by, and living underground is the absolute worst possible scenario (as the biggest danger with them is flooding).

And what, just break our treaty with the dwarves and end a peace that has lasted a thousand years?? We get the top 10 feet, they get everything deeper. I won't go to war in the dark over a housing shortage we created ourselves through greed.

I'd go bury a shipping container in the woods somewhere tomorrow if I had the means.

Mold and humidity, look at people who do that and they have to run a heater and dehumidifier to keep the moisture down. Now you could colocate a nuclear reactor and have built in heating and large scale forced air and that would solve it.

Do you want to live underground?

There are several underground spaces where people work, and live. Chicago, Toronto both have underground systems. There is a town in Australia that half the people live underground because it's so hot.

Some issues with underground spaces; it can be expensive to dig the proper tunnels, you have to make sure the geological make up of the area will support the structure, water draining down from above after rain storms can cause issues, and the big one is ventilation, you have to be able to move air through out the entire system.

I can think of a lot of people I'd like to see underground.

Everything you think would be good about underground would be more easily and cheaply accomplished by building aboveground buildings that connect. (Or said another way, by effectively raising ground level to roof level without the expense of digging.)

Underground Atlanta is like this, BTW: they didn't dig below original ground level; they raised the street grid up on viaducts.

It's much more expensive to build underground.

In a number of places, it'd be great in a number of ways.

The big issue, as usual, is cost. Want a house? Fast growth wood frames can be built in a workshop/factory, stood up quickly, capped with more fast growth wood roof frames, skinned with thin boards made from woodchips and sawdust, or just chickenwire and cement, roofed with tar, and slathered in cheap acrylic paint. The engineering is all off-the-shelf at this point because it's so common.

Want a U-house? You're going to be digging. Digging down a foot or two isn't that big of a problem but tends to get more difficult the deeper you go, so expect a lot of excavation costs compared to the stick-built house. Then you have to make all those walls strong enough to hold back the surrounding earth. Get ready to spend a lot more time doing engineering tests to make sure the retaining walls will hold, the water won't turn it all to mush, etc. There is an earth pressure underground just like there's water pressure in the ocean. Then there's the roof. If it's really underground, that's a lot of weight to support. All that support has a material cost. All the engineering work to make sure it's safe has a labor cost. Hiring workers who have the kind of training needed to do more than run a nail gun and a paint sprayer has a labor cost. The finding of those people at all can be a difficult task for the contractor/developer, and can be quite difficult when most house builders haven't been doing that kind of construction.

And at the end of all this you have to get someone to pay for it. Getting people to pay even the same cost as the stick-built house for a house that doesn't fit into their dreams of looking like the vision of success implanted in their brain by the pop culture of their youth is way harder than just cutting corners and being the Walmart of housing. Being a slacker sometimes pays incredibly well. Greatness can never succeed in capitalism because the one-size-fits-most model is always more profitable.

Who's gonna live, in all those cities underground? https://youtu.be/ZdPOsk4Aa8Q (great tune)

Not really, no. This is the same kind of silver-bullet thinking as self-driving cars, it may feel cool but in reality the best way to improve things are boring and have been known for centuries if not millennia.
Some things absolutely benefit from being underground, like railways in dense urban areas, but for most things it's just a ton of effort for not much benefit and introducing a bunch of problems (flooding is only going to become more common in the future).

What we should be doing is returning to everything being designed for the specific local environment, stop building everything identically all over the world.
Look at traditional construction and you'll find tons of small features that together make a HUGE difference, a prime example is how hot places had walled backyard gardens with a fountain in the middle, which basically turns the garden into a swamp cooler.

I certainly enjoy my pandemics trapped in a network of caves full of infected people.

Don’t forget fires as a hazard. When you’re underground, there are fewer windows to jump out of

Or mold/air quality. When you’re underground there are fewer windows to open

Plus more people would be S.A.D. There you’re underground there are fewer windows to let sun in

I yearn to live in the mines.

Human internal clocks get advanced about an hour each day by exposure to light. Living in perpetual darkness (or under light bulbs only) wrecks hell on the system.

Plus you need some way to get rid of excess heat. Human society uses a lot of energy. That all turns into heat eventually.

Digging more than a few meters for a building is not only expensive, it can be very difficult and dangerous for the buildings a few hundred meters away, depending on the nature of the soil.

There is a certain cursed railstation project in germany, where the nee railstation is build underground. Though the soil is a specific type, which sucks up any water it gets in contact with and then expands. If there is a significant leakage, we are talking about half a meter difference at ground level for the complete neighbourhood, probably very inconsistent. Building typically don't like the ground moving that much. So you start investing billions more into the project to make it water tight and still fail to do so.

And after many years you are still not finished and the project seems to be a coup by the car lobby to discredit travel by rail.

It works, when designed well enough. The problem is how do you continue to support the above ground structures, if you aren't as lucky as Chongqing geographically. You have to essentially plan not only all the weight of the structures of each underground level, but also above ground level. That takes lots of highly specialized engineering teams to figure out, which is a huge upfront investment.

Which brings another major problem: Cost. Creating underground structures requires massive mining rigs and blasting and getting rid of the material that comes out and constant review of any potential damage that does when further expanding the city out; all of that costs just so much money compared to normal buildings. If your goal is for-profit development, you'll never break even.

And of course the most obvious problem, most humans are not mole people and do not want to be underground. Sun-deprivation and outdoors-deprivation have serious mental and physical health issues attached, which are not solved by artificial UV-producing lights or indoor plants.

You are not a fan of nature and sunlight, are you?

Underground is not necessarily better for the environment. I think if we compared the ideal underground build to the ideal above ground build, underground would actually be worse for the environment.

Think about it this way: The advantages you might get from underground are related to reclaiming ground and comprehensive city planning. But you can reclaim roof space to make up for the ground, and you can get the same benefits from city planning building above ground.

The idea that you'd just leave pure wilderness on the ground level when you build underground is not realistic. You could grow the crops you need right there above it, instead, for example. A certain amount of land is needed to support each person. But either way, people would be going to the surface every day. If you build underground, you'll also be building above ground.

Meanwhile, underground requires quite a bit more stuff. You have to plan more to manage heat and ventilation. It's difficult to increase density underground because you can build higher more easily than you can dig deeper.

Morlocks

Scarcity of livable land isn’t exactly an issue at this point in time to heavily warrant it.

The tradeoff for resilience in emergencies is that the if the ventilation fails hard enough, everyone who can't get out suffocates. Flooding, as you guessed, is also a serious probelm. Everything that can flood a basement now floods a living space.

Heat and AC are normally going to cost less, but the cost of construction, maintenance, and modification of the structure are way higher and generally kinda dangerous. Not worth it.

Also radon

There are indeed places where large amounts of human activity takes place underground, often being metro systems and their associated retail spaces; Tokyo Station in Japan comes to mind as having an underground mall attached to it.

But the same caveats for underground construction of transportation systems also apply to all other underground structures that humans would like to build. Consider the differences between ground conditions in: the San Francisco Bay Area, Denver, and New York City.

The Bay Area is the outlet for major rivers in northern California, bounded by mountain ranges on virtually all sides. The surface is either a thin covering of soil atop this mountain rock, or is a layer of looser soil or mud, made from the sediments carried in by those rivers. This makes for fantastic agricultural conditions but presents a real risk of liquifaction when there's an earthquake. While an underground structure wouldn't fall over -- because it's within the ground -- it could certainly lose its supports unless it has piles all the way down to the rock. And that's only buildable on the narrow shoreline region where there's sufficient depth before hitting the rock layer.

With Denver, it's basically all rock, so to build within the rock would require blasting it away and building within the hole, or to build normally then bury the structure in fill, so that it's below grade.

With NYC, it's a different story because the ground conditions make it fairly easy to dig tunnels and drive piles, and the bedrock layer beneath Manhattan is strong enough to support the weight of supertall-class skyscrapers. On this point, the New York Fed's Gold Vault is in the basement in Manhattan, precisely because the volume of gold inside would be a serious strain on any foundation and the geology beneath.

All that said, the surface conditions in some extreme climates may warrant building underground, or avoiding the underground outright. Burying a dwelling in New Mexico would make a lot of sense, due to the hot and dry Southwestern climate. But in Alaska, an underground dwelling would cause melting of the permafrost layer below, resulting in a similar situation to liquefaction. I suppose this can be mitigated, but it would be a monumental effort, akin to Camp Century in Greenland. That project was abandoned due to changing ice geology.

Easier to build the house and cover it with soil and vegetation instead of digging down. The front door and windows can face south to take advantage of passive solar heating in the winter.

I think one of the best uses of "underground" is to run piping in a large circuit around the property. I read in a passive solar book that 4 feet underground it's about 4C on average world-wide.

Summer: Warm air goes in from the living space, travels along a couple hundred feet of pipe, cool air comes back into the house. I'm not sure if the air would be 4C but should save a lot of electricity.

Winter: Same system but the air pumped into the house should be much warmer than what's above ground. Usually, the coldest days are sunny so passive solar designs can warm a house to a comfortable level.