I strongly agree with the first half of this post—bunkers and refuges are pretty bad as a defence against global catastrophes.
Your solution makes a lot less sense to me. It seems like it has many of the same problems you’re trying to avoid—it won’t be pressure tested until the world collapses. In particular, if it’s an active part of a local community, that implies people will be leaving and reentering regularly, which means any virus with a long incubation period could be in there before people know it’s a problem.
Also, I feel like your whole list of questions still applies, and I have no sense of how you imagine it’s going to answer them. In particular, I don’t see how digging underground is going it make it better at water treatment, electricity generation etc than the equivalent aboveground services.
Fwiw my take is that offworld bases have much better longterm prospects—they’re pressure tested every moment of every day; they perforce have meaningful isolation; the inhabitants are very strongly incentivised to develop the base to make it more sustainable as fast as possible; and once you have the technology for one, you have the technology for many, and are a long way towards developing the sort of technology that’s necessary for a future in which we (per Nick Bostrom’s Astronomical Waste essay) colonise the Virgo supercluster.
> it won’t be pressure tested until the world collapses.
- so I’m saying it should not only be pressure tested but be in continuous operation in order to flush out failure modes before a catastrophic scenario plays out, it needs to be providing value way before an extinction level event plays out.
- I agree about your point with the bio/virus with a long incubation time, I think the only way round this would be to have shifts like on an oil platform or mine, where different groups spend a period of time (say 1-3 months) working in isolation from the general population.
> I don’t see how digging underground is going it make it better at water treatment, electricity generation etc than the equivalent aboveground services.
- it may not make it better but would make it more resilient, an open water treatment plant for example is going to become immediately polluted with nuclear dust if is built in standard outdoor settings, where as an isolated underground facility would be protected from that risk. A geothermal power plant may not be more efficient than a wind turbine or solar panels, but again is more resilient to hurricanes or nuclear winter.
> Fwiw my take is that offworld bases have much better longterm prospects—they’re pressure tested every moment of every day;
- I agree they are better as they are pressure tested by necessity, to do this on-world we have to simulate the necessity, in my mind it’s good to have 3 options, 1) Don’t destroy earth’s ecosystem 2) Have off-world bases 3) Have Citadelles or something similar - They each address different needs, 1) Addresses Reliability, 2) Redundancy 3) Disaster recovery.
- so I’m saying it should not only be pressure tested but be in continuous operation in order to flush out failure modes before a catastrophic scenario plays out, it needs to be providing value way before an extinction level event plays out.
This seems to rely on an assumption that the failure modes that would exist in “normal mode” are related or correlated, to a fairly high degree, to the failure modes that could show up in “catastrophic mode.” That’s not obvious to me.
I’m not sure, if you look back at Biosphere 2 for example a large number of the failure modes were identified fairly early on. In my experience there are two things that cause unexpected failure modes, scale and duration. i.e. running something at a larger scale than was previously tested can often reveal unintuitive failure modes and running something for longer that previous can reveal failure modes.
I get what your saying that running a service in a different environment to what it was tested in can cause unforseen issues, but I think with simulation and testing like they did for bejing airport or the kind of testing they do at SpaceX—we should be aiming to test these things to failure points.
I strongly agree with the first half of this post—bunkers and refuges are pretty bad as a defence against global catastrophes.
Your solution makes a lot less sense to me. It seems like it has many of the same problems you’re trying to avoid—it won’t be pressure tested until the world collapses. In particular, if it’s an active part of a local community, that implies people will be leaving and reentering regularly, which means any virus with a long incubation period could be in there before people know it’s a problem.
Also, I feel like your whole list of questions still applies, and I have no sense of how you imagine it’s going to answer them. In particular, I don’t see how digging underground is going it make it better at water treatment, electricity generation etc than the equivalent aboveground services.
Fwiw my take is that offworld bases have much better longterm prospects—they’re pressure tested every moment of every day; they perforce have meaningful isolation; the inhabitants are very strongly incentivised to develop the base to make it more sustainable as fast as possible; and once you have the technology for one, you have the technology for many, and are a long way towards developing the sort of technology that’s necessary for a future in which we (per Nick Bostrom’s Astronomical Waste essay) colonise the Virgo supercluster.
> it won’t be pressure tested until the world collapses.
- so I’m saying it should not only be pressure tested but be in continuous operation in order to flush out failure modes before a catastrophic scenario plays out, it needs to be providing value way before an extinction level event plays out.
- I agree about your point with the bio/virus with a long incubation time, I think the only way round this would be to have shifts like on an oil platform or mine, where different groups spend a period of time (say 1-3 months) working in isolation from the general population.
> I don’t see how digging underground is going it make it better at water treatment, electricity generation etc than the equivalent aboveground services.
- it may not make it better but would make it more resilient, an open water treatment plant for example is going to become immediately polluted with nuclear dust if is built in standard outdoor settings, where as an isolated underground facility would be protected from that risk. A geothermal power plant may not be more efficient than a wind turbine or solar panels, but again is more resilient to hurricanes or nuclear winter.
> Fwiw my take is that offworld bases have much better longterm prospects—they’re pressure tested every moment of every day;
- I agree they are better as they are pressure tested by necessity, to do this on-world we have to simulate the necessity, in my mind it’s good to have 3 options, 1) Don’t destroy earth’s ecosystem 2) Have off-world bases 3) Have Citadelles or something similar - They each address different needs, 1) Addresses Reliability, 2) Redundancy 3) Disaster recovery.
This seems to rely on an assumption that the failure modes that would exist in “normal mode” are related or correlated, to a fairly high degree, to the failure modes that could show up in “catastrophic mode.” That’s not obvious to me.
I’m not sure, if you look back at Biosphere 2 for example a large number of the failure modes were identified fairly early on. In my experience there are two things that cause unexpected failure modes, scale and duration. i.e. running something at a larger scale than was previously tested can often reveal unintuitive failure modes and running something for longer that previous can reveal failure modes.
I get what your saying that running a service in a different environment to what it was tested in can cause unforseen issues, but I think with simulation and testing like they did for bejing airport or the kind of testing they do at SpaceX—we should be aiming to test these things to failure points.