Why don't we live underground?

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 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 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

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, 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, 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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,

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

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 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, 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, 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 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

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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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, 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. 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, 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 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. 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 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 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

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

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 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 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 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

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 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. 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. Is it how stuff works dot com? Let us know what you did? Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com, brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you