Why don't we live underground?

Humanity has adapted to life on the surface. We like sunlight and fresh air -- but do we need it to survive? Check out this HowStuffWorks podcast to learn more about living underground.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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(00:20):
and resolves online fraud safe Secure Visa. Hi, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me is Charles
Chuck Bryant. As always, where the Stuff you should know? Guy?
So hey, how's it going to Chuck? Hey? Hey, it's good.
So um with all the the the Olympic stuff going on,
and it's all on Beijing and all that. This is

(00:41):
like the second podcast of recent times that I've mentioned
Beijing because the Olympics are just so huge. My question
is this, Chuck, did you know that there's an underground
city beneath Beijing? I did, Josh, because I read your
really cool article. Oh thank you very much, Chuck, I
appreciate that. Did you read the is there a city
beneath Beijing? Oh? No, I thought the one you referenced

(01:03):
in your article. Why don't we live underground. Yeah, yeah,
I know. There's another article on the site too, uh
called is there an underground city below Beijing? Didn't read
that one. It's awesome, let me tell you about it.
So Chairman Mao gets into a little border dispute with
Soviets in sixty nine, and the Soviets basically show them
we're not messing around pal like we will come in

(01:24):
or we will nuke you or whatever. This is at
a time when the Russians were, you know, getting their
chops with Cold War, so at that time, China wasn't
much of a threat to them. Um. So Chairman Mau
was like, okay, hey, maybe we should do something about
this just in case. Puts um the residents of Beijing,

(01:45):
the capital city of China, to work for the next
ten years constructing an underground city that can house like
three thousand people. And it's kind of an emergency. It's
very cool. It's still around. Actually what is it now? Uh,
there's parts of it, um that are accessible still. It's
actually been turned into something of an underground mall of course, right,

(02:06):
and there's tour tours and that kind of thing. Apparently
it's pretty easy to kind of drift off from the
tour and go down some forbidden corridors. So there's still
like old bunk beds with rotting mattresses, and there's pictures
of Chairman Mao everywhere. It's pretty cool. They also had like,
um these little patches for going like mushrooms and digging
wells and people. You could have lived in there comfortably

(02:27):
for four months. That's pretty cool. It's no Olympic village though,
that's not down there. No, no, not at this time.
Is this the the Subtranean mutants used it for their
two thousands six Olympics Olympics. Yeah, they don't like to
be talked about very much, but the thing was never used,
thankfully for for the residents of Beijing. Um. And actually

(02:49):
it's just one example of an underground structure. There's there's
tons of them all over the place. And then Nora
add this one. Nora AD is a great example. What's NORAHD.
It's a defense system basically that detects if you know,
people are gonna send nuclear warheads our way, and not
as useful anymore. Well maybe I shouldn't say that, but no,
actually they're looking into decommissioning it in two thousand six.

(03:12):
I don't I didn't find any follow up information. I
don't think they made the decision yet. Well, they smartly
put norad uh In inside a mountain basically mountain. Yeah,
seven hundred thousand tons of rock they dug out of
this thing, and I think the door is like three
and a half feet thick. And basically they determine that
we're safe no matter what happens. Yeah, when they built

(03:35):
the place in the sixties, they were a hundred percent
confident that it could withstand a direct nuclear strike. That's nuts.
It is nuts. Nowadays they're like, yeah, maybe in the sixties,
not with today's inner intercontinental ballistic missiles, right, the mountain
would shatter exactly, which actually I think you know that
we have ballistic missiles that we can just level entire

(03:57):
mountains with, right, So um, but yeah, Nora, And it's
it's it's kind of this, uh, this homage to the
security of underground living, and the US government is the
isn't the only group to have, you know, come across this.
It's not just Chairman MoU and Uncle Sam who figured
out that hey, underground, you know is pretty secure. Um,
you know, insurance companies and and uh, information bureaus like

(04:22):
credit reporting companies uh Sun micro Systems. The people who
run the Internet and are the keepers of all of
our information, they've discovered the same thing I mentioned son.
They just least I believe in old mine in Japan
and are now they now store their network servers below ground. Um,

(04:45):
it's very secure. You can't get in or out very
easily and chuckers. In our beloved city of Atlanta, we
even have a couple of underground buildings here there. You
know which one I'm talking about, Atlanta, the famous or
once famous underground Atlanta. I've got one even better than that,
the old Equifax building now occupied by the Savannah College
of artenam Design. Is that underground. Most of it is

(05:07):
very much underground to protect you know. Obviously it couldn't
handle an intercontinental ballistic missile shy in mountain camp, but
it can handle something you know, and burglars can't just
you know, prance in and out so well, I know.
One of the other benefits to being underground is uh
natural disaster whether. Um, you have more constant temperatures, so
it's more energy efficient if you're underground. Yeah, and you

(05:30):
you don't really think of houses as being you know,
too terribly energy inefficient. You know, obviously there's there's some
fat we could trim here there. But I was reading
a study that found that, you know, transportation is always
cited is like the big or one of the big
sectors that contributes to climate change. It turns out that, um,

(05:52):
all of the buildings in the United States consume six
times more energy, uh and a it six times more
greenhouse gases than all the cars and trucks in the
country combined. Really. Yeah, So apparently there's a whole sub genre, subculture,
sub something of architects who have decided that you know,

(06:14):
it's it's kind of imburdened on them to kind of
take up the mantel and start designing underground. Go underground.
That's one of the that's one of the theories. That's
one of the ideas that's being batted around right now. Well,
why do you think more people don't live underground if
it's such a if it's so great down there. Well,
Number one, if you thought, you know, talking Americans out

(06:35):
of driving SUVs is difficult, imagine telling them that they
have to now give up their nice you know, some
story colonial or something like that, and they have to
move into an earth sheltered home. I think that's that's
number one, number two, And I think the point that
you were leading to is that it's a huge old
slap in the face of evolution. Agreed. Yeah, Chuck Darwin

(06:56):
is is rolling in his grave as we speak. He
would be just just just thinking of this. You know,
either either that or we'd be salivating it. You know,
a perfect natural experiment, like, yes, stupid humans move underground
and so I can take notes, you know that kind
of thing, right, Um. And the reason it's a slap
in the face of evolution is that we're diurnal, right right,

(07:17):
we uh are sleep patterns or wakefulness. Um, all of
that is based on the sun circa rhythm. Yeah, so
basically when we decide to go to sleep or wake up,
it's it's generally, you know, based on the sun. Think
about it. We're not farmers any longer, but it's kind
of tough to sleep past sun up these days, right,
even though we don't have to be out there to

(07:38):
milk the cows or you know, plant the corn or
harvest the corn, depending on what time of year it is.
But we've evolved that way. So there's snug getting rid
of it now, right. Uh. And we we also are
kind of linked to the sun. Well, I don't even
want to say kind of we are sun slaves. Basically
the Egyptians had it right when they called sun raw
and worshiped it, because that's pretty much how linked we are.

(08:00):
Needed that vitamin D. Yeah, think about it, chuck. We
get all of our other vitamins from like milk, from
um vegetables, that's a great example. Yes, from chewing on rocks,
the whole thing. We get every single one of our
vitamins from an external source except one vitamin D. That's

(08:20):
we actually create that through a process of photosynthesis within
our own bodies right from the Sun's radiation. It serves,
it serves as a catalyst for vitamin D production in
the body. In vitamin D is important. How do you ask,
how partext against rickets? Ever seen a rickets patient? It

(08:42):
is a it's a it's a lack of bone development.
And actually, when I was researching this, uh, there's of
the children in Europe and America in like some terrible
couple of decades of the nineteenth century suffered from rickets.
If they lived in an urban area, they rickets to
some degree or other. Um. There's a picture of a

(09:05):
girl who is a ricket suffer. She's nineteen, her names
shall Wing. It's in the article on how stuff works
dot com. And she's two ft tall and she's cute
as a button. But she's she's nineteen and she struggled
with rickets her whole life versus congenital But you know,
there's all sorts of problems associated with a lack of
vitamin D. And don't forget the serotonin. Yeah, serotonin is big.

(09:29):
Serotonin is a hormone um, responsible for basically good moods. Yeah.
And you can get enough yeah yeah, but positive outlook. Um.
And conversely, if you don't have enough serotonin, which is
produced from exposure to the sun, or actually lack of
exposure to the sun, you go out in the sun. Uh,

(09:49):
melatonin is produced, right, okay. Uh. And once the melatonin
production stops, meaning you're out of the sun, serotonin production
kicks in. So one leads to the other. Uh. So
you have to have sunlight, which accounts for seasonal effective disorder. Right.
And it's not just the sun that we need. We
need air, and we need air in certain supply. Um.

(10:12):
And we also are pretty acclimated to the um atmospheric
pressure around sea level. That's what we've evolved to adapt to,
which is why scuba divers and even miners it's the
same thing as being underwater and need to depressurize or
decompresses that come up. Exactly That's exactly right. So living
underground poses a lot of problems to us. UM. You know,

(10:36):
should we listen to to the ghost of Darwin, to
Darwin beyond the Grape? Should we trapes into this natural experiment?
Or is it too late? Have we already started? That's
a good question, and the answer is yes, we have
already started. You know, we were talking about Nora m
We're talking about Mr Chairman Mao's underground city in Beijing.
There's a lot of actual, like everyday architecture out there

(11:00):
that's below ground, right. I know that the Marin County
Jail is partially underground. It's kind of cool looking building, yeah,
which provides for a lot of security. Like you're saying,
it's more energy efficient, keeps the prissoners nice and cool. Yeah,
they're they're just kind of cooling out the Marine County. UM,
and there's there's a really cool example of an underground museum. Uh.

(11:23):
In Williamsburg, Virginia, there was this old colonial settlement from
the seventeenth century, and rather than build this visitor center
and museum above ground to detract from the natural scene,
they actually built it into the side of a hill.
Even cooler. This museum shut down in two thousand two.
As far as I know, it's still there, which makes

(11:43):
it a prime spot for urban explorers to explore. So
it's like a one to punch for the housetop works
articles right there. I don't know that we'd endorsed that.
We would never never endorse libably trespassing, but yes, I
bet it would be neat. So you got any other
examples as well? I know Alice City in Japan. The
Japanese are kind of leading the way because Japan is

(12:05):
uh not the largest land mass, and there's a lot
of people there. They're land start, Yeah, so they're kind
of leading away and instead of going up, up, up,
which they've already done in spades, they're going down. And
Alice City is one example. It's not built yet, but
it's a it's a proposed um. I wouldn't call it
a complete city, but uh, shopping mall. And it has

(12:26):
also has you know, restaurants. I think there's office space
and living right, I think it's a bit of a
stretch to call it a city. Yeah, it's really cool
looking now. Look I checked out the pictures online today.
It's really neat. It is. It's like these two um
parallel shafts going like fifty feet into their into the ground,
covered with a big bubble to let light end. Right,
and that's what. Yeah, all the light comes in through
those through these two domes, and the two domes are

(12:48):
all you can see above ground to even know anything's there. Uh.
And then it's all connected by like the series of
walkways and tunnels and everything underground. Um. There's another proposal
in Japan hand uh that I don't think ever came
to fruition. It's called the urban geo grid. This one
you actually could call it underground city. It covered or

(13:09):
it would cover five square miles. Yeah, that's that qualifies
in my but I would say, there's yeah, that's that's
a decent size city. That's what like Kansas City, Kansas, Yeah,
something like that. Um. And it could it could hold
or house or you know, um, it could accommodate up
to half a million people at a time. Wow, this

(13:30):
see this makes me wonder if you know what that
means for the people on top. I mean, I'm sure
that they're taking all the right moves and shoring up
everything underneath there, But when you weaken the ground underneath
what's already a large city, it makes me worry personally. Yeah,
and there's all sorts of questions. Um, Like I read
a question from a guy who was saying, what is

(13:52):
this due to the temperature of the water table, which
you we probably really shouldn't be messing with, and there's
a lot of water undergroun. Yeah. Although I mean we've
made a pretty big mess of things above ground, I
can pretty much predict that we'd make an equally big
mess below ground too. But yeah, inside out of mind? Wow, yeah,
can you imagine how bad it would be then if

(14:14):
we couldn't even see it right? It would be like
the Great Pacific garbage Dump? Right you read that one?
That that's another one. Wow, we we've just been hitting
them all over the right chuck. Yeah, it is a
plug best chuck. And our listeners can read all the
articles we plugged today all on how stuff works dot
Com and hang around to find out which article makes

(14:36):
Chuck really crabby? Right after this, Chuck, what what makes
you crabby? Well, a lot of things make me crabby, dude,
but two examples traffic and heat. Yeah, you like that,
But this was actually a little bit of a cheat,
a little bit of a pun. It's actually uh the
article inside Deadly's Catch, which is an article that dives in.

(15:00):
Here we go again to uh the world of a
crab fishing from the awesome Discovery Channel show Deadliest Sketch Fantastic. Well,
I beg our readers to forgive Chuck for his puns
and misleading words, and I also beg you to please
go read Inside Deadliest Catch on how stuff works dot
com for more on this and thousands of other topics.

(15:21):
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