SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
"We are coming to a point in our history in which we need to start looking for more space," Han Admiraal, a civil engineer with over two decades of experience in underground space, told AFP on the sidelines of this year's World Tunnel Congress.
...
"Underground spaces could easily be used for growing crops," he said, as he toured the cavernous Bourbon Tunnel, dug deep under the Italian city of Naples as a potential escape route for King Ferdinand II of Bourbon after the 1848 riots.Scientific developments in areas like aquaponics—where vegetables and fish are farmed together—could help relieve the pressure on the food supply chain, and dramatically cut transport costs if such new farms were situated under cities.
Isn't excavation expensive?
(Score: 2) by ledow on Friday May 10 2019, @07:34AM (4 children)
Down is stupid.
What you do, at worst, is dig down, while using the spoil to build up. The spoil you take out of a huge solid hole would make a GIANT hollow tower you could live in with walls several feet thick. It's stupid and unnecessarily expensive to just keep going down.
But "indoors" is the problem - no sunlight causes all kinds of problems and whether you're in a tower or a cave, that's an issue that requires lots of power to compensate (way more, for instance, than you could get by a bunch of solar panels covering wherever you're living - solar panels would need to be pretty much 100% efficient for that to work and you be able to grow enough crops via artificial light.
Down has all kinds of problems. Light. Power. Water sourcing (especially if you're going to fish!). Water drainage. Air circulation. Heat/Cooling. (We use caves to keep cheese cool because they do it naturally. But also we have severe problems in mines where heat is a major issue. Fixing those takes... even more power).
And as you start to get into the whole "grow all our own crops underground", you're into something ludicrously more expensive than just using the vast swathes of unused land with fertile soil and a natural light source that cover the planet. Sure, it might help in a city, but it makes much more sense to just import food from outside than it does to try to grow it under Naples.
If the tunnels exist, sure that's a lot of work done, but likely they *won't* exist in a shape/format that is good for growing acres of crops with light sources above and ventilation around and holding huge fish farms.
It's a silly idea. And where viable we already use caves for things like this - everything from seed preservation to maturing cheese (especially in Italy... it's very common to use the older methods for traditional cheese manufacture).
But *making* space underground to do things poorly compared to above-ground? That's just nonsense. You'd only want to do that for a) practice, b) space travel, c) extremely serious environmental disaster.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Friday May 10 2019, @09:03AM (3 children)
LED lights safer, more effective in producing Vitamin D3 than sunlight [sciencedaily.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @11:40AM
wow. I had no idea. thanks for the link.
(I still think the GP is right in saying that overground is better for living than underground).
(Score: 2) by ledow on Friday May 10 2019, @03:44PM (1 child)
Yes, and?
"The UV LED device also emits a much narrower band of UVB light and thereby decreasing likelihood of skin damage that can occur when the skin is exposed to higher wavelengths of UV radiation."
Plants don't only need a narrow band of UVB.
And there is zero information there about HOW efficient it is - it's might be more efficient than sunlight, but sunlight is free, thereby almost infinitely efficient. Whether running 12V into a large-wattage LED sufficient to replicate the UV (and other visible light) radiation given out by the sun and necessary for crop growing is actually viable is another matter entirely. You might well lose 50% of the energy before you start, and require an enormous amount of energy after that to transform seedlings into wheat crops sufficient to feed a city (or whatever).
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday May 12 2019, @06:57PM
It was a lazy reply, I didn't realize it was all about plants.
Cheap nuclear fusion electricity could help make growing plants underground or vertically more viable.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]