Why can't we live underground, or carve our homes on the sides of mountains?
What's stopping us? Not all of us have to, obviously, but at least some of us can live that way.
If our antiquated predecessors could sometimes manage it, I'm sure we can too. Maybe even better.
around 40 million people live in yaodongs in China
The Pueblo also made very good use of features like mesas and canyons.
similar to shaanbei yaodong are the cave houses in the sierra nevada in andalucia. especially the sacromonte caves in granada, traditionally inhabited by roma who were not allowed to live inside city limits
Digging out a ton of rock and earth is a lot more complicated IRL than it is in games like Dwarf Fortress or Minecraft. Real life geology is pretty complicated, you gotta deal with shit like ground water, unstable types of earth, blasting. It's all pretty expensive and dangerous. Meanwhile humans have gotten pretty good at erecting shit above ground, we can throw up sheds and huts like nobodies business.
Edit: Also plumbing, electrical, HVAC, means of egress and sewage become problems with subterranean development. Digging a room underground, doable, but then you're gonna have to dig out additional shit to get all the water pipes and air ducts in there. Also, people like having windows, and windows are good for fire safety, but it's kind of hard to put enough windows in if only one side of a dwelling is facing the open land.
I wanna be an irl dwarf fortress dwarf ngl
it's a dangerous world to live in. just the other day i built a well over an underground lake in a cavern layer. every now and then a giant bat would fly up the well and into the room, flap around a bit, and then leave back down the well. but then one time one of the children was in the room and in a panic running away from the giant bat ended up falling down the well and drowning.
Look into Derinkuyu. It's so fucking cool. They were able to do it because it was soft stone.
Keeping the water out winds up being a huge problem. Either its percolating down from outside water sources and working down through the cracks in the rocks until its inside your house or its condensation buildup from the living things inside the cave house.
Personally, I'd love to live in an underground bunker because I'm a weirdo, but i would be pretty cool with some small single story house with a reinforced shed style roof with a few feet of soil and let the crass grow.
earth-covered homes have a great climate control advantage, I'm for it in environments where it's feasible
let's do it
I'll start digging while you gather up some rugs and pillows
It's generally much more economical to build upward into empty air than to clear large amounts of earth before you can even get started building
real
hours who upSubnautica style underwater living facility, but we live in a shallow area.
It can be done, damnit, I know it can
Feel like shit, just wanna live in a hobbit hole.
some of us can live that way
looks at billionaires' bunkers
Obligatory Coober Pedy posting
This is tangentially relevant, but in my conworld I'm mainly writing about one specific country, and this country was colonized by a foreign empire. A major part of the colonial resource extraction was in the form of mining, particularly open-pit mining. When economic crises led to a lot of mining companies pulling out of the colony and simply abandoning their old mines — with these crises also leading to widespread homelessness within the colony — a lot of homeless residents actually ended up carving homes into the sides of the benches of the abandoned mining pits. A lot of these homes are still around today, albeit less hazardous and with running water — and the people who live in these homes are called "troglodytes" or "trogs" or "troggies".
poop
We climb out of hole
We poop in designated area
We compost poop
poop juice infiltrates thru the walls because we didn't put our poop processing hole far enough away
Wet
Some people in Spain used to live in Caves until the 1970's
Remembered this guy that had the manly urge to dig and now there's a group of people that are expanding the tunnels.
Hamas convinced me how good it must be there
idk, but iirc some really deadly earthquakes have been due to mass cave homes
They do in outback South Australia- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coober_Pedy
Radon, for starters
We can put ventilation in our ground homes. Just put some of those big industrial fans next to some big holes.
ROCK AND STONE!
I would like to live in a subterranean quonset hut or earthship. I also would love to just build a home inside of a mountain, though this is probably due to my inspiration from Minecraft, lol. My heart yearns to be a commie dwarf.
It's cool as hell and but I'd miss windows and houseplants
You obviously need a hydroponic grow room in your underground cave dwelling.
I think about this a lot.
You can carve dwellings into the sides of mountains or hills. If it's stone you're digging through, it takes more effort, and if it's soil, you have to worry about groundwater and internal supports. As long as all the water and condensation will drain around it and also out of it, it can work. Also, you do want sunlight, so there's a bit of a limit to how deep you want to go. You could put storage in the interior, but without the light and air exchange, it wouldn't be very suitable for regular living space.
Groundwater is a terrible thing to deal with for underground dwellings. It's a hard problem to solve. Possible, but hard.