The Problem With Bunkers

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On Twitter, the amazing @mcmansionhell wrote a fabulous piece about bunkering in Architectural Review.  She wisely points out the shortcoming of living underground is that “...we humans require things from above ground to live.”  I want to stress that I completely agree.  In fact, once cut off from surface life, we suddenly have to replace a lot of services with tech solutions. Light, air & water filtration, etc.  And those tech solutions each have their own long tails that all get cutoff when the door slams shut.  Imagine some cascade failure due to running out of a lube oil that’s no longer made in the post apocalypse.

But I’d like to illustrate there is an even earlier failure than loss of surface services.  It’s the profound conceptual error that is easy for modern especially wealthy people to be completely unaware of.  It’s too easy to illustrate with Mrs. Howell’s quote about beets coming in cans, “Oh please don’t be silly.  I’ve seen them in their natural habitat, a Super Market.”  (Ep 71 “Pass the Vegetables, Please.”)

The failure I’m talking about is the inability to realize that survival is a process, not an event.  In fact, it’s a general event-bias fallacy, that many or most things have a boundary.  The fact is that a building isn’t a thing, it’s a process.  A person isn’t a being, it’s a work-in-progress.

Some of that bias comes from “progress” frequently equated with improvement or advancement.  So while from ages 10-30 one might see aging as progress, from 60-80 it’s seen as degeneration.  But thermodynamics tells us it really isn’t.  The 80 year old represents 80 years of entropy-fighting.  Sure, their health isn’t what it was at 30 or even 60, but their lived-experience is an immense collection.  And if their mental acuity isn’t able to recall that dinner on a beach in Italy or even if they had prunes for lunch 20 minutes ago, they nonetheless represent a towering investment in calories and spent lifespan of others supporting them.

With modernity and wealth comes isolation from the actual cost in lifespan of all that person’s wants.  They’re writing a check to a landscaper and green lawns are always present.  To a cook and meals are always ready.  To a financial services person and there’s always money in their account for the aforementioned servants and services.  The 45th president couldn’t have known the price of his bottled water anymore than he knew the preventative maintenance cycle of the airplane he’s on.

When one gets event-biased, one can begin to entertain the possibility of buying one’s survival.  It becomes a purchase event.  With that, the Apartheid Millionaire actually thinks he could start up a libertarian colony on Mars.  And broken down into events (or “milestones”) it becomes readily apparent one can.  It simply becomes an exercise left to the reader to imagine the million-mile and trillion person-hours trail of support, supplies, and knowledge that keeps him alive. It’s even possible some wit with a spreadsheet has cobbled together numbers illustrating that the Mars address is only slightly more expensive than all his others in total.  True, there’s the matter of delivery time, but that’s simply overcome by planning ahead.

Sadly, when one’s fallen down this hole, there’s no pulling them bcc out.  They’re now blind to the mechanics of the lifespan economy.  No idea what multiplicands are hidden in their hand-waving; “We’ll just plan around it” doesn’t account for the immediate staffers who just lost their weekend.  Much less the magnitude-per-layer multiplier as we increase remove from the mighty wealthy-person who’s hand has gone on to other important tasks.

So while our bunkered billionaires are told vitamin D supplements will make up for the lack of sun, they’re not beginning to consider that the props department labored all night to make that bamboo bicycle generator needed for Act 2.  And not merely blindness to “little people” but not seeing the endless contribution of everything around them into making them.  They think dad’s sperm met mom’s egg and the rest is history.

Process-centric planning is a lot harder.  Event-based means “Do we have enough freeze-dried meals on board?”  Process-based starts with a greenhouse but rapidly and continuously descends to some vulnerable mitochondrial chemical reaction because the trichromatic light is missing a frequency previously thought unnecessary.

We’re going to need a fantastic amount of materials science before we can even begin to think of exporting the systems we call “people.”  I’d venture to guess we’re less than 40% of where we need to be.  That means that tolerances currently found at CERN must become common to consumer products.  That we can place molecules instead of micrograms.  That we can audit reagents purity to atoms, not statistically molecular estimates.  That with all of that, we can command nearly mass-energy equivalent energy densities in a reliable and repeatable manner.

I’m not saying “don’t go to Mars” but I’m suggesting that just as every billionaire is a policy failure, perhaps we should recognize this bias as the fallacy it is.  That’s it not smart to buy an old missile silo and a boxcar full of ammo.  Maybe instead of remarking in awe of the apocalypter’s planning, we should recognize this behavior as a sign of mental illness.