If/when the human populance reaches a plateau on the number of people the earth can sustain, could people break ground and develop healthy underground environments in order to keep their loved ones as a part of this lovely (crowded) home of ours?
Would oxygen need to be pumped down below for us to breathe?
Would we be able to grow plants in the deeper soil (or is it a completely different soil type as we dig deeper)?
Would developed countries begin claiming how deep their territory goes?
Do you think that the people would create mock environments down below to feel as if they were on the surface (windows displaying active city views or children playing, environment rooms that emulate outside environments such as a beach)? surely our technology would be this advanced by the time this could/if possible happen.
thanks for playing dudes & ettes…
(this would be a killer movie)
The issue with overpopulation is not really one of running out of living space like cities. Only about 1-3 percent of the Earth’s land surface is currently covered by cities & suburbs.
The real problem is all the land needed to supply these people with food & raw materials. For example, think of the amount of land required to provide a city of 1 million people with wood for paper, construction materials, furniture, fuel, and so on. That’s much more than the area actually taken up by homes.
So we wouldn’t likely end up living underground, but what about underground farming? I can’t begin to imagine the technical complications of such an endeavor, but I suppose it’s not impossible that eventually our demand for food could outstrip what can be supplied by farming only the surface of the planet. Damn Malthus…
The big problems is that you need light to do farming. Lots and lots of light. That’s why people prefer using the sun to provide light for their crops. It’s a lot cheaper than artificial light. I doubt that it would be profitable to grow plants underground under artificial light, especially given the rising cost of energy.
I read an article recently that there are companies growing crops underground in abandoned mines. Especially genetically engineered crops- like corn with vaccines for pigs “built in”. Don’t have to worry about tornadoes blowing stuff around; fewer bugs so less pesticides; controlled light and watering. They were recording very high yields compared to above ground crops. I’ll see if I can find the cite.
People already spend their working days in the Underground City in Toronto, and then take the subway home to their apartment buildings, never going outside for weeks on end during the winter.
It isn’t that big of a jump, as far as living standards go. Now providing the resources for the underground dwellers is where it gets interesting. But even now, air, water, food, and light are piped in for them.
If we hadn’t been stupid enough to surround Toronto by a thousand square kilometres of single-family-housing sprawl, we’d have a lot more room to grow food for the even larger Underground City of the future…
I’ve visited a (small) underground “greenhouse” in Sudbury. They were growing pine seedlings at the 60-foot level. INCO grows theirs much lower. The advantages of underground agriculture include:
[ul][li]Constant temperature and humidity conditions (at a given depth in the rock), all year round, allowing multiple crops.[/li][li]With electric lighting, the conditions can simulate constant light conditions, or the insolation of any place on earth. Crops that wouldn’t grow aboveground due to latitude and climate can be grown.[]Isolation. There’s little risk of contamination from adjacent crops, if you’re trying to keep strains separate.[]Few if any pests - insects, fungi, mammals, etc. all kept out of the crops.[]No bad weather, no frost, no tornados.[]If the rock is below the water table, there’s a reliable source of water.[]Can be located anywhere the ground is suitable for tunneling or underground construction.[]Since the air going into the underground complex can be filtered, teh crops can be protected from pollution.[/ul][/li]
All of this means you can grow multiple crops per year, different crops than you might above ground, and get high yields due to the lack of stressors. The drawback is in the lighting and other energy costs. Water and air have to be pumped in. The air has to come from the surface, but the water might be extracted from the bedrock. Even if it is, it needs to be circulated to the plants.
This is all well and good for plants, of course, but farming animals underground would be a lot more difficult. They produce wastes, and might not adapt to the unusual conditions of insolation well. I’m not sure how different it is than modrn factory farming, though, come to think of it.
Another thing is that most agriculture nowadays isn’t intensive agriculture.
Compare farming in the Netherlands to farming in Oklahoma. In the Netherlands you have intensive agriculture, with lots of capital and labor invested per square meter. In Kansas you have lots and lots of land, so very little capital and labor is invested per square meter, and lots of land isn’t even farmed at all, it is used for ranching.
If you worked the land in Oklahoma as intensively as land is worked in the Netherlands you could produce many times the amount of food per acre. The only trouble is that it would cost a lot more also. It isn’t cost effective to farm that way nowadays. However, if the world population was several times higher it would become neccesary. There would be plenty of food, but it would be much more expensive because it would require a lot more capital and labor to produce.
So you could feed dense cities with today’s acreage, but farming methods would have to change. But open air farms worked as closely as a backyard produce garden would still be a lot cheaper than underground farms lit by nuclear power.
