Imagine a giant meteor hits the earth. Not just one that blocks out the sun but one that will turn the entire surface into fire for a time period.
If people knew about it long enough beforehand, could some of them (by some its obviously going to be the rich, powerful and well connected) just move underground and grow crops via artificial lighting? Keeping people alive isn’t hard. All we really need is food, water, oxygen, protection from the elements, protection from pathogens and protection from physical trauma.
Electricity generation would still work. Nuclear, fossil fuels, geothermal, etc are still viable underground. Even if the surface is blasted and solar, wind, hydroelectric are no longer viable for a time period. If need be couldn’t the CO2 from fossil fuels be used to feed the crops, which give off O2 that the people breathe?
I’m assuming the military has some contingency plan for this kind of situation. Could a small group of a few thousand people live underground until the surface became habitable again, then go back to the surface? Would it be days, weeks, months, years, decades?
If this did happen, how long would the surface remain uninhabitable (meaning there was too much heat to live on the surface)? I’m assuming crops could be grown via artificial lighting both underground and on the surface even if the sun is blocked out, but the temperature is down (don’t know if the surface catching fire will alter earths atmosphere so that it affects crop growth or breathing or not though).
If the surface is literally superheated, geothermal might work better. But I suspect there’s a very, very narrow Goldilocks zone between “can’t live on the surface” and “can’t live anywhere we could conceivably dig to in time.”
Watching that video on youtube is partly why I made the post. However even if a meteor that large hit the earth I assume if you’re 50+ feet down the temps will be stable, even if the atmosphere is several hundred degrees you’d be fine.
Here is a graph of temperature underground based on outside temps at 2, 5 and 12 feet. At 12 feet the temperature fluctuations are minor.
I’m assuming governments and the wealthy would have set up underground shelters beforehand at least a hundred feet underground that had nuclear power and/or geothermal power stations as well as artificial lighting to grow crops.
If the US military prepares for any contingency, I’m guessing they have self sustaining underground bunkers in case the surface becomes uninhabitable.
Yeah, but that’s my complaint. I’m having difficulty envisioning something that would make the surface literally uninhabitable for vast spans of time, but a mere hundred feet down all is/can be made rosy over those same timespans.
I think our best chance is to try to work on a way of deflecting or destroying major meteors before they hit us. That seems more realistic than trying to rebuild society underground (especially when you consider there would likely be major riots where the unlucky people who didn’t get dibs on the underground shelter and were left to die on the surface would probably storm the underground shelter). If it were really practical to live underground long-term, then I think we’d see more of that being done already.
Well, that’s pretty terrifying. I feel better about this video now that I have read up on what’s being done to work on ways to deflect asteroids. Suddenly that seems like an extremely urgent priority.
How long are the underground shelters to sustain the inhabitants? Years? Centuries? What happens when the technology starts to break down? Who will repair it, and with what? Life doesn’t just go merrily along, regardless of the environment. There are all kinds of problems with this scenario.
I’m assuming the rich and powerful will also make sure all the people who can keep society functioning are also invited into their bunker.
I’m assuming a bunker capable of sustaining a few hundred or even a few thousand people for years at a time would cost many billions to set up, but in case of an asteroid attack it could mean the difference between humanity disappearing forever vs just being set back by a few centuries.
Eh. Know one knows really. Two things come to mind.
Man made things fail. The thousands or millions of little bits and pieces of every day life fail all the time. Replacing some from a stock of stored widgets will work for a while of course. Or specialized, or not so specialized manufacturing can be done. But what are you gonna do when you need an XB-457799? Improvisation will be the new specialty, and people that can will be highly valuable. Thinking Apollo 13 here.
The social fabric is gonna be a bitch. People are, well, animals. And often act like them.
I think looking at biosphere projects would give some insight to this. While they didn’t have billions of investment, and many have been kinda kooky, they didn’t work out so well.
Not to mention having to survive a Magnitude 100 earthquake. That’s why my plan for a 500km object impact is to get up on the roof with a bottle of whiskey and a rifle and shoot it down. It has a higher probability of success.
A “meteor” is a luminescent atmospheric phenomenon (saw a nice one last night–crossed a little above Jupiter and died out in the Milky Way–wish I could have got it on camera) so a space rock is a meteor for only a few seconds and is not a meteor before or after those few seconds. What is happening here is the exact equivalent of calling an airplace a “contrail.”
I don’t think we have the technology to allow a multi-year stay underground. There’s simply too much equipment required to support an army of people, and there’s no way that you could fix all the possible failures without a fully functioning technological society.
Look at a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier - they still need to come into port at least every 3 months or so, and they have pretty complete facilities to repair anything that breaks.
Read Neil Stephenson’s “Seveneves” for some speculations on the possibilities. He considers three: A space station, submarine life, and life underground. He has all three “working” in some sense, for hundreds of years. How realistic any of this is is not for me to say.
Depends on what you mean by uninhabitable, doesn’t it? It doesn’t have to be the sort of scenario where the Earth’s surface is burnt to a cinder. What about just there’s a lot of fine debris in the upper atmosphere and large land-dwelling animals can’t survive in large numbers due to a lack of food?
See, I don’t think underground is essential when radiation is not a concern. That’s why you need to go deep for thermonuclear war. What you need for a more run of the mill natural disaster is enough food to last you until the sun comes back and you can start growing crops. An energy source might be nice, particularly if you want to get started on growing crops while you’re underground and need the light, but it’s not essential if you’ve got enough food.
The only thing being underground buys you is perhaps concealment from your fellow man, who isn’t quite dead yet and sure would like to eat again. You don’t need to be deep for that, just out of sight. Once all the surface dwellers have died off from starvation, you’re more than welcome to live on the surface if you can stand the cold, just be sure to bring your food supply with you, and be prepared for roving bands of other hole-diggers who maybe didn’t stash as much food as you.
If the surface dwellers never do fully die off, well, then I guess it wasn’t as bad as you thought.
Assuming it’s not a secret, what’s the longest submerged patrol any nuclear submarine’s done? Even there though, they can dump heat to, and make air from, water. 2 months? Longer?
I thought we’d, to .999 or so, found all of the 4km diameter plus rocks that could hit us?
