Underground transport and habitation

AI generated underground scenery image. Here with a bit of a focus on transport. (wiki-TODO: Add another illustration matching some further ideas in the text.)

Once advanced gemstone based atomically precise manufacturing is large scale established, it may indirectly enable extremely fast and affordable creation of vast, extremely comfortable and luxurious living spaces underground. Both sallow and deep.

Building of the underground structures

Today digging (especially through hard stone) is excruciatingly slow and extremely expensive for larger scales.
For some ideas on how gem-gum-tec could massively improve on that see page: Underground working.

Quality of life

From today's perspective living underground may by many be perceived as …

• claustrophobic, and trapped away from nature and sun
• dark or dim, never very bright
• stagnant air, cold, moist and worst case moldy

… taken together just rather very undesirable if not dystopian.

Gemstone metamaterial technology will make it very very different though.

• very open and with (for humans not cars made) spaces to big to explore by human feet or even by bicycle
  also very quick access to the actual surface usually always being nearby
• very bright due to better light sources than even LEDs are today
• warm dry and most certainly not moldy

Freedom of movement

Fast elevators to the surface even from great depths should become very possible.
Gem-gum-tec will be excellent at transport systems including vertical ones.
See page: Transportation and transmission & Passenger transport

With a lot of human activity migrating towards underground the surface can be …

• re-natured (See page: Nature reserve) or
• converted into large scale parks (See page: Automatedly maintained megapark)

Potentially limiting or even reverting excessive urban sprawl.

Future gem-gum-tec based underground spaces may harbor many truly giant artificial caverns.
Well, not arbitrarily big of course, even gemstone metamaterial based arched architectures have limits
and need support columns with good safety factors.
Each cavern could house a different park and/or ecosystem and different artificial weather.
Other areas (e.g. areas around large cavern support columns) may resemble
conventional housing with ceiling heights as one would expect from indoors.

Unlike with cities on the surface today,
long range personal transport and heavy goods transport
(including the global microcomponent redistribution system)
can and would be multi-layer and thus can be well separated from living spaces made for humans not cars.

Sunlight and visual freedom

Advanced atomically precise technology may eventually allow for
novel light sources that are pretty much indistinguishable from true sunlight
by our human senses (Sun lamps and displays).
Much more so than today's (2025) already advanced LED technology can.

Some large caverns walls may be covered entirely by displays.
This way any and all seemingly far away sceneries can be shown.
If done right what is shown is decided by some democratic process.
It's not to confuse with dystopian Trueman Show like deception.
There will be many caverns without screens an everyone will know very well what is going on.
That is so far an ensitification adpocalypse dystopia can be averted.
A challenge in governance (other topic beyond the scope of this page).

Beside mere lamps large scale display technology may
with the advent of advances atomically precise technology
also greatly increase capabilities in terms of brightness
to reach the level of direct sun and direct mirror like sun reflection.
Latter being essential for the realistic depiction of
blazingly glistering water waves or (much more close up) snow crystals.

Displays on walls in smaller rooms pose more of a challenge
as they need to be able to display things in 3D for giving a feeling of being outside of the rooms walls.
Unless picking up a VR headset today living on the surface
we don't get an outdoor experience when being indoors either.
Well, ok, granted we have something called windows,
but in underground living windows can go out to a big caverns
those windows can have real stuff nearby and a view
all the way to the aforementioned far off 2D screen walls.
So 3D holographic displays are a bit overkill and off-topic here.

Fresh air

What humans perceive as fresh air is not merely from CO₂ scrubbed air filtered to high purity.
Rather it is by nature filtered air with all the smells and aromas of nature depending on season and weather.
Providing what humans perceive as fresh air may thus be one of the more challenging problems
that even advanced gem-gum-tec may struggle with.
That is, if advanced gem-gum-tec where not allowed to manage living organisms.
But it is allowed and very capable to do so.
One totally can plant forests and all sorts of plants underground and keep these plants happy and healthy.

One could attempt to synthesize many chemical compounds to add to the air
to avoid the need for any plants, but that is a bit like in the case of
using gem-gum-tech for the synthesis of food where it is often better
to automate the cultivation of some form of life rather than
fake it all the way from big library bottom up molecule synthesis.

Wind (Cool/warm breeze)

Managing airflow to simulate winds is a more conventional technical problem that well be every solvable.
With from today's perspective conventional or less conventional means. See related page: Air accelerator

I should not need not mention that temperature control won't be a huge problem.
Heat-pumps and thermal insulation.
See pages: Diamondoid heat pump system & Thermal isolation

Problems of too much comfort

Living underground in an era with gem-gum-tec being well established might perhaps be too comfortable even.

• There's never really harsh weather to endure,
  never the harshness of being exposed to the elements of surface weather.
• There's no severe levels of UV radiation that can lead to bad sunburns

Human physical and especially mental health may need/require some exposure to extremes
(hot, cold, dry, wet, windy) to work well.

Discomfort of today's city life in comparison

Today we (too) often have …

• very much plantless "concrete deserts".
  Ugly too look at and an oven in summer. And …
  
• places built for cars rather than humans.
  

We often have big buildings with windowless indoor rooms.
And that despite today's light sources still being far from sun equivalent. Indoor is dim.

Streets are mostly ground level but buildings in city centers go vertical,
which is predictably leading to severe congestion.
But streets blocking the ways for pedestrians also leads to lethal accidents, Open direct line of sight (or rather sound) streets lead to chronic health problems from noise,
There there is fine dust spreadying everywhere,
and (so long we still combust gasoline) exhaust fumes (it's still not just CO2).
Going underground all that would be gone and history.
And for the future people this situation will seem like what
what for us now seem a medieval past.

Relation to space colonization

Implication of underground comfort on Earth

When living underground here on Earth eventually becomes more comfortable and luxurious than living on the surface, and the underground living technology of Earth becomes by some adaptions usable off Earth too, then this implies that living off Earth has become more comfortable than on Earths surface (with no access to underground living spaces).

Granted one obviously can't visit Earths surface on a whim as one will usually be able to in Earth's underground living spaces. Best approximation being seriously harsh weather simulations. Or (for Mars at least) one goes to the arduous generations long task of generating a suit-less survivable atmosphere.

Climate control & life support systems

Climate control for living deeply underground and
life support systems for space habitation might have some notable overlap.

Gravity & ceiling height (and shape)

Lower gravity may make low ceilings problematic. In Moon gravity and lower (Ceres, Titan, Callisto) centrifuges can be used, but on Mars that would make more of a parabolic bowl that may be fun but is likely not very practical. Maybe it depends on the scale. Food for thought.

Smaller asteroids would feature near micro-gravity. That leads to various interesting architectural and landscape planning challenges and solutions. See related page: Microgravity space parks.

Related pages

• Up: The look of our environment
• World building

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• Underground working

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• Automatedly maintained megapark
• Nature reserve

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• Automated decibot swarm mining and tunneling