Stuff You Should Know - Why don't we live underground?

Episode Date: September 11, 2008

Humanity has adapted to life on the surface. We like sunlight and fresh air -- but do we need it to survive? Check out this HowStuffWorks podcast to learn more about living underground. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Flooring contractors agree. When looking for the best to care for hardwood floors, use Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner. The residue-free, fast drying solution is specially designed for hardwood floors, delivering the safe and effective clean you trust. Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner is available at most retailers where floor cleaning products are sold and on Amazon. Also available for your other hard surface floors like Stone, Tile, Laminate, Vinyl, and LVT. For cleaning tips and exclusive offers, visit Bona.com slash Bona Clean. In 1968, five Black girls were picked up by police after running away from a reform school in Mt. Megs, Alabama. I'm writer and reporter Josie Deffie Rice. And in a new podcast, I investigate the abuse that thousands of Black children suffered

at the Alabama Industrial School for Negro children and how those five girls changed everything. Listen to unreformed on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Stuff You Should Know is brought to you by Visa. We all have things we like to think about. Online fraud shouldn't be one of them because with every purchase, visa prevents, detects, and resolves online fraud. Safe, secure, visa. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me is Charles Chuck Bryant,

as always, we're the Stuff You Should Know guys. So, hey, how's it going, Chuck? Hey. Hey. It's going good. So, with all 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. Right. 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, no, there's another article on the site too 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 the Soviets in 69. Right. 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 the US and the Cold War. So, at that time, China wasn't much of a threat to them. So, Chairman Mao's like,

okay, hey, maybe we should do something about this, just in case. Puts the residents of Beijing, the capital city of China, to work for the next 10 years constructing an underground city that can house like 300,000 people in the event of an emergency. It's very cool. It's still around, actually. What is it now? There's parts of it that are accessible still. Right. It's actually been turned into something of an underground mall. Of course. Right. And there's 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. Right. It's pretty cool. They also had like these little

patches for going like mushrooms and digging wells, and you could have lived in there comfortably for four months. That's pretty cool. All right. It's no Olympic village, though. That's not down there. No. No. Not at this time. It's been a good idea. Is this the subterranean mutants used at for their 2006 Olympics? The subterranean mutant Olympics? Yeah. They don't like to be talked about very much. But the thing was never used, thankfully, for the residents of Beijing. And actually, it's just one example of an underground structure. There's tons of them all over the place. Right. And then NORAD is one. NORAD is a great example. What's NORAD? It's a defense system, basically, that detects if people are going to send nuclear warheads our

way. Sure. And not as useful anymore. Well, maybe I shouldn't say that. No. Actually, they were looking into decommissioning it in 2006. I didn't find any follow-up information. I don't think they made the decision yet. Well, they smartly put NORAD inside a mountain, basically. A Cheyenne mountain. Yeah. 700,000 tons of rock they dug out of this thing. Yeah. And I think the door is like three and a half feet thick. And basically, they determined that we're safe no matter what happens. Yeah. When they built the place in the 60s, they were 100% confident that it could withstand a direct nuclear strike. That's nuts. It is nuts. Nowadays, they're like, yeah, maybe in the 60s, not with today's intercontinental ballistic missiles. Right.

The mountain would shatter. Exactly. Maybe it's days ago. Which is equally nuts, actually, I think, you know, that we have ballistic missiles that we can just level entire mountains with. Right. But yeah, NORAD, it's kind of this homage to the security of underground living. Right. And the US government isn't the only group to have come across this. It's not just Chairman Mao and Uncle Sam who figured out that, hey, underground is pretty secure. Insurance companies and information bureaus like credit reporting companies, Sun microsystems, the people who run the internet and are the keepers of all of our information, they've discovered the same thing. I mentioned Sun. They just leased, I believe, an old mine

in Japan and are now, they now store their network servers below ground. It's very secure. You can't get in or out very easily. Right. And Chuckers in our beloved city of Atlanta, we even have a couple of underground buildings here there. Right. I think you know which one I'm talking about. Underground 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 Art and Design. Is that underground? Most of it is, very much underground to protect, you know, obviously it couldn't handle an intercontinental ballistic missile, Cheyenne Mountain Camp, but it can handle something, you know, and burglars can't just,

you know, prance in and out. Well, I know one of the other benefits to it being underground is natural disaster, weather. You have more constant temperatures, so it's more energy efficient if you're underground. Yeah. And you don't really think of houses as being, you know, too terribly energy inefficient. You know, obviously there's some fat, we could trim here there. Right. But I was reading a study that found that, you know, transportation is always cited as like the big or one of the big sectors that contributes to climate change. It turns out that all of the buildings in the United States consume six times more energy and emit 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, sub-culture, sub-something of architects who have decided that, you know, it's kind of in burdened on them to kind of take up the mantle and start designing. Go underground? Go underground? 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 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, two-story colonial or something like that, and they have to move into an earth sheltered home.

Right. I think 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. Right. Agreed? Yeah, Chuck Darwin is rolling in his grave as we speak. He would be just thinking of this, you know, either that or he'd be salivating at, you know, a perfect natural experiment. Right. Like, yes, stupid humans, move underground, and so I can take notes, you know, that kind of thing. Right. And the reason it's a slap in the face of evolution is that word diurnal, right? Right. We, our sleep patterns are wakefulness. All of that is based on the sun. Right. Circadian rhythm. Yeah. So basically, when we decide to go to sleep or wake up, 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 sunup 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 no getting rid of it now. Right. And we also are kind of linked to the sun. I don't even want to say kind of. We are sun slaves, basically. The Egyptians had it right when they called the sun raw and worshipped it because that's pretty much how linked we are. We need it. We need that vitamin D. Yeah. Think about it, Chuck. We get all of our other vitamins from like milk from vegetables. That's a great example. Yes. From chewing on rocks. Right. The whole thing. We get every single one of our

vitamins from an external source, except one. Vitamin D. Yeah. We actually create that through a process of photosynthesis. Right. Within our own bodies. Right. From the sun's radiation, it serves as a catalyst for vitamin D production in the body. Right. And vitamin D is important. How do you ask? How, Josh? It protects against rickets. Right. You ever seen a rickets patient? Yeah. It's a bone disease. It is. It's a lack of bone development. And actually, when I was researching this, there's 90% of the children in Europe and America in like some terrible couple of decades of the 19th century suffered from rickets. If they lived in an urban area, they had rickets to some degree or other. There's a picture of a girl who is a ricket

sufferer. She's 19. Her name's Xiaoling. It's in the article on howstuffworks.com. And she's two feet tall. And she's cute as a button. But she's 19. And she struggled with rickets her whole life. Hers is congenital. But, you know, there's all sorts of problems associated with a lack of vitamin D. Right. And don't forget the serotonin. Yeah. Serotonin's big. Serotonin is a hormone responsible for basically good moods. Yeah. And you can get a nutshell. Yeah. Yeah. Positive outlook. Sure. 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. Melatonin is produced. Right. Okay. And once

the melatonin production stops, meaning you're out of the sun, serotonin production kicks in. So one leads to the other. Right. 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. Right. And we also are pretty acclimated to the 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 things being underwater, need to depressurize or decompress as they come up. Exactly. That's exactly right. So living underground poses a lot of problems to us. You know, should we listen to the ghost of Darwin, to Darwin Beyond the Grape? Should we

traipse 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 NORM. We were talking about Mr. Chairman Mao's Underground City in Beijing. Right. 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 a cool looking building. Yeah. Which provides for a lot of security. Like you're saying, it's more energy efficient. Sure. Keeps the prisoners nice and cool. Yeah. They're just kind of cooling out there in Marin County. And there's a really cool example of an underground

museum in Williamsburg, Virginia. There was this old colonial settlement from the 17th century. And rather than build this visitor center 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 2002. And 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, two punch for the House of Works articles right there. I don't know that we'd endorse that. We would never ever endorse that. Probably trespassing, but yes, I bet it would be neat. So you got any other examples? Well, I know Alice City in Japan, the Japanese are kind of leading the way because Japan is not the largest land mass. And there's a lot of people

there. They're landstarks. Yeah. So they're kind of leading the way and then 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 proposed, I wouldn't call it a complete city, but shopping mall. It also has restaurants. I think there's office space and living. I think it's a bit of a stretch to call it a city. Yeah. It's really cool looking though. I checked out the pictures online today. It's really neat. It is. It's like these two parallel shafts going like 550 feet into there, into the ground. Right. Covered with a big bubble to let light in. Right. And that's, 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. Right. And then it's all connected by like these series of walkways and tunnels and everything underground. There's another proposal in Japan that I don't think ever came to fruition. It's called the Urban Geo grid. This one you actually could call an underground city. It covered, or it would cover 485 square miles. Wow. Yeah. That's, that qualifies in my book. I would say there's, yeah, that's, that's a decent sized city. That's what like Kansas City, Kansas. Yeah. Something like that. And it could, it could hold or house or, you know, 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. Like I read a question from a guy who was saying, what does this do to the temperature of the water table? Right. Which we probably really shouldn't be messing with. Right. There's a lot of water underground. 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. Right. But yeah. Out of sight, out of mind. Wow. Yeah. Can you imagine how bad it'd be then if we couldn't even see it? Right. It'd be like the

Great Pacific garbage dump. Right. You read that one? Yeah. That's another one. Wow. We, we've just been hitting them all over the place in this podcast, Chuck. Yeah. It is a plug-fest, Chuck. And our listeners can read all the articles we plug today, all on howstuffworks.com, and hang around to find out which article makes Chuck really crabby right after this. Chuck, what? The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2,200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah, and they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs, of course, yes,

they can do that. And I'm the prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Step out of piss y'all. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. Cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid work. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. There is no need for the outside world because we are removed from it and apart from it and in our own universe. On the new podcast, The Turning, Room of Mirrors,

we look beneath the delicate veneer of American ballet and the culture formed by its most influential figure, George Balanchine. There are not very many of us that actually grew up with Balanchine. It was like I grew up with Mozart. He could do no wrong. Like he was a god. But what was the cost for the dancers who brought these ballets to life? Were the lines between the professional and the personal were hazy and often crossed? He used to say, what are you looking at, dear? You can't see you. Only I can see you. Most people in the ballet world are more interested in their experience of watching it than in the dancers' experience of executing it. Listen to The Turning, Room of Mirrors on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcast. It makes you crabby. Well, a lot of things make me crabby, dude. Give me two examples. Traffic and heat. Bravo. Yeah, you like that? But this was actually a little bit of a cheat, a little bit of a pun. It's actually the article Inside Deadliest Catch, which is an article that dives in, there we go again, to the world of crab fishing from the awesome Discovery Channel show Deadliest Catch. It's 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 HowStuffWorks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast at HowStuffWorks.com.

Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? In 1980, cocaine was captivating and corrupting Miami. The cartels, they just peeled everybody that was home. Setting an aspiring private investigator on a collision course with corruption and multiple murders. The detective agency would turn out to be a front for a drug pilot. Would claim he did it all for this CIA. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco. Join me for murder in Miami. Talk about walking into the devil's den. Listen to Murder in Miami on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 1968, five black girls were picked up by police after running away from a reform school in Mt. Megs, Alabama. I'm writer and reporter Josie

Duffy Rice. And in a new podcast, I investigate the abuse that thousands of black children suffered at the Alabama Industrial School for Negro children and how those five girls changed everything. Listen to Unreformed on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.