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 to 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 oncluding vertical ones.

With a lot of human activity going 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.

Underground spaces may harbor many truly giant artificial caverns. (Not arbitrarily big of course, even gemstione 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 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 multi layer and can be well separated from living spaces.

Sunlight

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

Some large cavern walls may be covered entirely by displays. So 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'll be many caverns without screens an everyone will know very well what is going on. That is so far an ensitification adpocalypse dystopy can be averted. A callenge in governence.

Large scale display technology may too greatly increase capabilities in terms of brightness to sun and direct sun reflection (glistering waves) level.

Displays on walls in smaller rooms pose more of a challenges as they need to be able to display tings in 3D for giving a feeling of being outside. 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 windows, but undergound windows can go out to a big caverns that have real stuff nearby and afeoremetioned far off 2D screen walls. So 3D holographic displays are a overkill and off-topic here.

Wind and fresh air

What humans perceive as fresh air is not 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 this be one of the more challenging problems that even advanced gem-gum-tec may struggle with. That is, if it where not allowed to manage living organisms. But it is allowed and capable to do so. One totally can plant forests and all sorts of plants undergrund and keep the plants happy and healthy.

One could attemt tosynthesize many chenical compounds to add to the air but that is a bit like in the case of using gem-gum-tech for the syntehsis of food where t is often better to automate cultivation rather than fake it all the way from bottom up.

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

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.

Today's city live discomfort in comparison

Today we (too) often have concrete deserts. 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. Streets are mostly ground level but buildings go vertical, which is predictably leading to severe congestion. Also to lethal accidents, also tho chronic health problems from noise, fine dust, and (so long we still combust gasoline) fumes. Going underground all that would be gone and for the future people like is what a medieval past for us now.

Relation to space colonization

When linking 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).

Garvity & ceiling

Granted one obviously can't visit Earths surface on a whim as one will usually be able to in Earth's underground living spaces. Bets 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.

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