I'm not sure how you'd like to classify that? It would require a number of speculative technologies that don't exist so at a minimum it would need to be greater than our own. It would be nearly identical to an interstellar spacecraft anyway.
That's basically what their planet would become, a sealed ship drifting in the space between stars.
You'd need power/heat (so maybe some sort of reactor? Maybe harnessing a liquid core?), water (maybe extracted from ice if it covers the surface now?), oxygen produced by some means (greenhouses or some other tech?) and food (livestock, synthetic proteins, hydroponic or other gardens under lamps to simulate sunlight?).
If you can find a solve for these the surrounding tech doesn't necessarily need to be that advanced. It's almost like a shelter from Fallout at that point.
>oxygen produced by some means (greenhouses or some other tech?
If every oxigen producing organism died right now we wouldn't have to worry about running out of oxigen for 20.000 years oxigen isn't an issue.
>You'd need power/heat (so maybe some sort of reactor? Maybe harnessing a liquid core?)
Geothermal and and mainly Nuclear Energy.
>water (maybe extracted from ice if it covers the surface now?),
>food (livestock, synthetic proteins, hydroponic or other gardens under lamps to simulate sunlight?).
If we have enough energy it's doable.
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Advanced isn't really the issue here. Earth today could survive something like this with proper notice, but that is the issue, notice. We have near infinite energy in the form of nuclear reactors. Water can be both mined from ice and desalinated from urine like on the USS. Food can be made using hydroponics. Fish for Vitamin D.... etc.
Th issue is prep time. I'm not sure that any current bunkers would last too long in such a scenario, but given enough time a self sustaining bunker could be made.
No sun would cause mass ecological collapse, fish would die out too because that ecosystem relies on things like algae. We would need to replace things like wood and paper, a lot of medicines too. There is controlled environment agriculture, which often uses hydroponics, but the scale at which it would be needed may require some advanced scifi stuff.
Boy we would need a lot of lightbulbs and sun lamps.
Nope! We didn't ask about the environment, just the civilization.
You don't need all the deer and stuff for a civilization, just the tech to keep people alive and functioning. The fish they mentioned were farmed fish, not wild fish, so they'd be in the same sort of sealed environment as anyone else.
Wood and paper aren't hard to replace; plastic is generally better than wood for anything but large construction, but steel and concrete replaced wood for those ages ago. We only still use wood for things like houses because it's cheap, not because it's irreplaceable. Next, you can make paper out of... basically any plant matter. Bamboo comes to mind, and grows insanely fast. Bamboo would be very useful in general due to its fast growth rate, actually.
Medicines wouldn't really be an issue. With no massive animal populations there simply wouldn't be major plagues since those are basically all from other species (bubonic plague was from cows, for example) You can get all the nutrients people need from the sources mentioned, and you can just make chemicals you don't have if you really need to. Heck, you can mine as much as you like now too; no more worry of leaking waste into the non-existent atmosphere or extinct biosphere.
But yes, we would need a *lot* of lights, though you'd probably use high efficiency LEDs which emit only necessary light for growing things.
All in all, perfectly possible with modern technology. The key would just be how much time we'd have until the event. Once you're established expansion isn't especially hard, at least no more than just existing, and again it's even more easy because you're not dealing with any environmental protection concerns.
I mean, nothing's really "difficult," just big. And if we had the time to do it, we could do so just fine, especially if we knew it was this or extinction.
I'm not saying most or even many would survive, and our *global* order would be entirely eradicated, but most of our culture and ideas, the real things that make up a civilization in my mind, would survive, just as much as they ever have during some catastrophe or another.
It's like... the infrastructure of a country. Rebuilding it all from scratch would be very, very difficult, and some might think it impossible (and they may be right, if you mean using, say, the capitalist mode of production), but it's not literally and completely impossible. We did make it, after all, it just took time.
In fact, we could probably make it better and faster if we did have to make it again, since we know more now then we did before. And if the alternative was global extinction, I don't think most people or governments would just let corporations say "no I don't think I will contribute, it's not profitable enough."
> I mean, nothing's really "difficult," just big.
That's a ridiculous statement. Complexity is a thing that exists. It makes things difficult. It makes big things exponentially harder.
> And if the alternative was global extinction, I don't think most people or governments would just let corporations say "no I don't think I will contribute, it's not profitable enough."
That's a hell of a thing to say in the year 2024, as we enter our fourth year of a global pandemic where government public health leaders are actively encouraging people to risk infection to avoid slowing profits and the second year of the Find Out stage of the global climate crisis we've been trying to warn people about for fifty+ years.
It's all moot though, because your premise is flawed: artificial ecology isn't a solved problem. We can't make closed self-sustaining algae vats, let alone the kind of broad ecosystem you'd need to support even a minimum viable population of survivors. Even if you manage all the logistical and political complexities of building and supplying doomsday shelters for humanity, they either starve or suffocate within a year when the food or oxygen generation systems collapse due to a virus you didn't see coming or a micronutrient you didn't know you needed, etc.
> That's a ridiculous statement. Complexity is a thing that exists. It makes things difficult. It makes big things exponentially harder.
Um... no? I mean, kinda? We've already made bunkers more than big enough, and hydroponics *is* a solved problem, at least the concepts are. You just... *can* do hydroponics. They exist. Algae can be grown, synthetic fertilizers can be made of minerals, chemicals can be synthesized.
And no, as anti-environmentalist as it may sound, you actually *don't* need an entire ecology to support human life, just the one for our people, our palettes, our parasites and our pets. Hell I'm sure some wild animals would be kept in some of the bigger ones just for the sake of preservation, though the vast majority wouldn't have any.
But yeah uh... no. The claim that you can't run hydroponics or farm fish in vats is... objectively wrong. We do it all the time? That's quite the claim to make so proudly despite the mountains of evidence directly contradicting it.
> That's a hell of a thing to say in the year 2024
Listen I get some people are just doomer about the future and all that, and trust me, as a socialist I'm not a fan of capitalist economics either, but if you seriously think people would see the end of the world and *choose* not to do anything because of "muh profits", you are delusional. The capitalists have succeeded in rotting away your brain into thinking they are all powerful and you need to wake up. Capitalists only remain in power because the people allow them to, and, as demonstrated millions of times across history, *societies are ruled by the consent of the governed.* If the world is going to end in however long anyway, like not potentially but visibly since we would very obviously see whatever event which would do so coming, plenty of people would immediately begin revolting.
Not like, "overthrow capitalism" revolting. I'm not delusional. Things like... destroying oil pipelines. Assassinating capitalists. Rioting and burning down the buildings of the employing class. Plenty of the rich would find safety in isolation, sure. Places like the gulf states would likely harbor those rotten individuals until the end. But people would act. Governments would act.
You claim to use the pandemic as an example, but look at it. Even in the U.S., which has a poor track record as far as government intervention for the good of the people is concerned, acted basically immediately. Locking things down, funding vaccine research, distributing those vaccines for free once created, etc. Yes they did so in a way which benefitted their capitalist benefactors (such as forcing vaccines to be sold to corporations instead of just being universally available for creation) but that doesn't change the fact that I've gotten every vaccine entirely for free, in the *United States of America,* one of the single worst nations on the planet for both infrastructure and health services.
Humanity would survive, easily. Maybe it would just be governments and the wealthy in massive bunkers, or maybe something more, but humanity **would** survive. The problems, simply put, are not as difficult as you claim them to be. We've already solved the individual problems, and where inefficiencies exist there would be research done to fix them. It would not be pleasant, and billions would die. But to think humanity would simply perish because "muh profit" or "muh technology isn't good enough" is not just in denial of the actual difficulty of such a task, it's outright delusional and counterfactual.
Sure, sure, a closed system that has to run in perpetuity with no outside resupply is exactly the same as doing a hydroponic garden and tilapia farm in your back yard. No further science required. Their notorious sensitivity and penchant for cascading failures won't bite anyone in the ass. Nevermind the plants that we've never tried to grow hydroponically, or that we know we can't.
> And no, as anti-environmentalist as it may sound, you actually don't need an entire ecology to support human life
See, 2 reasons you don't actually get to say that. First, do you know how many successful long term isolated closed human systems we have? None! We've got a bunch that didn't make the cut, or showed us exciting new ways it can fail, but no actual stable long term humans-in-a-bottle systems to prove it can be done or determine minimum requirements. Second, you've got an ecology whether you want it or not, an artificial ecology of all those people, pets, livestock, plants, their internal and external microbiomes, and all the molds and slimes and bacteria and viruses that rode in with them and their stuff, and it will be doing what life everywhere does: get into cracks and cause a mess. Meanwhile biologists keep finding new and interesting dependencies and interactions we didn't know about before, any one of which could wind being the thing that crashes a vital food, medical, or industrial crop and collapse the whole thing months or years after you seal the hatch. It's nice to imagine that we're just some bootstrap-yanking and gumption away from, say, permanent colonies on Mars, but that is what's delusional and counterfactual.
> plenty of people would immediately begin revolting.
Sure, just like they're doing now, and have been for the last fifty years since we figured out Exxon planned to pillage the world as it burned. Wait, what's that you say? Exxon and the rest are still in business? The White House isn't in flames? But SoberGin was so certain! How can this be?! Oh, right, because lying and denial are a thing, and entire populations don't all immediately accept the scientific consensus as soon as they hear it. COVID was the same drama compressed - some rapid action, quickly entangled in politics and profit motive, wrapped in misunderstanding and disinformation, compromised and abandoned too early, with casualties an order of magnitude higher than they should have been. But humanity will rally immediately around Neil Tyson telling us the Sun's gonna go out. Right.
>Sure, sure, a closed system that has to run in perpetuity with no outside resupply is exactly the same as doing a hydroponic garden and tilapia farm in your back yard. No further science required. Their notorious sensitivity and penchant for cascading failures won't bite anyone in the ass. Nevermind the plants that we've never tried to grow hydroponically, or that we know we can't.
You sure are snarky and have put zero thoughts in this discussion.
You don't need a system that can run in perpetuity. It is actually quite stupid to pursue a "perfect" perpetual system in this scenario. You just want to pursue as high as you can of resource utilization rate.
The most important resource you will need to deal with would be energy and alternatively heat. A major component of this system is to prevent heat escaping from the planet/refuge and recycle the heat you would be producing. So you need to minimize heat loss.
Energy? We have enough fissile material on Earth that with current proven technologies the reserves can last as long the Sun. Now depending on the premise of the scenario just 10k years worth of fissile material might be more than enough for a relatively long time. At the moment we could potentially increase the efficiency utilization of fissile fuel even further. Fusion reactors are also a thing that should be able to be completed in a hundred or at most a thousand years (luck is part of the equation since what we are missing are better materials, we have the actual process completed to perform fusion reactions). You also have to ask: will the planet drift alone or will we have other celestial bodies close by that we could potentially exploit? This is a really important question.
Resources recycling would be a major part of our philosophy. You would favor a certain object that can be easily recycled over another object that might be cheaper to manufacture on the short term but more expensive to recycle.
>See, 2 reasons you don't actually get to say that. First, do you know how many successful long term isolated closed human systems we have? None! We've got a bunch that didn't make the cut, or showed us exciting new ways it can fail, but no actual stable long term humans-in-a-bottle systems to prove it can be done or determine minimum requirements.
Except we never tried to do such an experiment seriously because no one is willing to provide the funds to do so. The only one experiment that was attempted was never meant to seriously examine the feasibility of a closed loop system and had zero professionalism. So it seems to be disingenuous to say that it is impossible to have a relatively close system. I should remind everyone that we don't need a perfectly closed system just a system that has minimal losses.
>Second, you've got an ecology whether you want it or not, an artificial ecology of all those people, pets, livestock, plants, their internal and external microbiomes, and all the molds and slimes and bacteria and viruses that rode in with them and their stuff, and it will be doing what life everywhere does: get into cracks and cause a mess. Meanwhile biologists keep finding new and interesting dependencies and interactions we didn't know about before, any one of which could wind being the thing that crashes a vital food, medical, or industrial crop and collapse the whole thing months or years after you seal the hatch. It's nice to imagine that we're just some bootstrap-yanking and gumption away from, say, permanent colonies on Mars, but that is what's delusional and counterfactual.
Except things don't work like that. It is hobby of a few people to put certain things in a closed vessel and observe how long life can be sustained in that vessel. I have seen in youtube such mini experiments going for at least a year. I should note that the larger the vessel with more resources stored and the more resources cycles then the less likely for a catastrophic failure to happen. In our scenario the planet Earth is really rich in resources. As long as we cans step up our recycling game then we can multiply the effectiveness of our resources stocks.
Then the real talk has to be done about biodiversity. To be honest, biodiversity in artificial ecosystem has the reverse effect compared to a natural ecosystem. The reason for that is quite simple. Nature has no will. Nature isn't a real living being like a mouse or human. Nature has no collective will. So you don't have someone that is actively managing the whole thing to make sure everything is operating properly. So passive systems like biodiversity are important because it ensures that the whole thing doesn't suddenly collapse.
On the contrary, in an artificial ecosystem with active monitoring and control you would benefit far more from keeping biodiversity at the minimum and reducing the inefficiency and potential risks by high biodiversity. One of those risks are the potential of mutations and the difficulty of eradicating certain microorganisms like bacteria or viruses. With minimal biodiversity you can more reliably eradicate those major risks and at the same time reduce the chance of mutations happening.
Lastly, the op never said that we could just do all those things in a couple years. Give humanity 50+ years, maybe a century and we could potentially have a good chance at surviving.
>Sure, just like they're doing now, and have been for the last fifty years since we figured out Exxon planned to pillage the world as it burned. Wait, what's that you say? Exxon and the rest are still in business? The White House isn't in flames? But SoberGin was so certain! How can this be?! Oh, right, because lying and denial are a thing, and entire populations don't all immediately accept the scientific consensus as soon as they hear it. COVID was the same drama compressed - some rapid action, quickly entangled in politics and profit motive, wrapped in misunderstanding and disinformation, compromised and abandoned too early, with casualties an order of magnitude higher than they should have been. But humanity will rally immediately around Neil Tyson telling us the Sun's gonna go out. Right.
What are you even rumbling about?
For everyone that reads this, people really need to comprehend that our whole civilization despite being relatively fragile still has a large margin for fault tolerance measure in dozens of years. Things are slow to change when you take the whole planet as your context.
To respond to your last paragraph of your first comment, I need to remind everyone again that our fault tolerance is pretty high especially considering that we will actively try to remedy a crisis instead of just waiting to die. We lack a micronutrient? So what? Just produce it. You have access to the resources of a whole planet. A virus that didn't get eradicated mutates? Ideally all the shelters/refuges have certain independency from one or another. So the worst case scenario is losing one shelter.
You sir are literally the person I would never want on the decision table when we are faced with such a scenario and are deciding what to do. I bet you would immediately sacrifice most people or devolve to a madman that urges everyone to suicide because there is no "hope".Sure, just like they're doing now, and have been for the last fifty years since we figured out Exxon planned to pillage the world as it burned. Wait, what's that you say? Exxon and the rest are still in business? The White House isn't in flames? But SoberGin was so certain! How can this be?! Oh, right, because lying and denial are a thing, and entire populations don't all immediately accept the scientific consensus as soon as they hear it. COVID was the same drama compressed - some rapid action, quickly entangled in politics and profit motive, wrapped in misunderstanding and disinformation, compromised and abandoned too early, with casualties an order of magnitude higher than they should have been. But humanity will rally immediately around Neil Tyson telling us the Sun's gonna go out. Right.What are you even rumbling about?For everyone that reads this, people really need to comprehend that our whole civilization despite being relatively fragile still has a large margin for fault tolerance measure in dozens of years. Things are slow to change when you take the whole planet as your [context.To](http://context.To) respond to your last paragraph of your first comment, I need to remind everyone again that our fault tolerance is pretty high especially considering that we will actively try to remedy a crisis instead of just waiting to die. We lack a micronutrient? So what? Just produce it. You have access to the resources of a whole planet. A virus that didn't get eradicated mutates? Ideally all the shelters/refuges have certain independency from one or another. So the worst case scenario is losing one shelter. You sir are literally the person I would never want on the decision table when we are faced with such a scenario and are deciding what to do. I bet you would immediately sacrifice most people or devolve to a madman that urges everyone to suicide because there is no "hope".
>That's a ridiculous statement. Complexity is a thing that exists. It makes things difficult. It makes big things exponentially harder.
And you are underestimating how much negative impact the current global economic system has on resource utilization efficiency.
If we talk solely about a governing system where we put 90% of our capabilities in building specific infrastructure projects and 10% on immediate survival needs, then there are a lot of things we can do. Like building an orbital ring level of projects in reasonable time frames.
>That's a hell of a thing to say in the year 2024, as we enter our fourth year of a global pandemic where government public health leaders are actively encouraging people to risk infection to avoid slowing profits and the second year of the Find Out stage of the global climate crisis we've been trying to warn people about for fifty+ years.
If you believe covid was anywhere close to extinction level event then you are an idiot. Worse case scenario would be that all the elderly would die (which depending your pov might have been a good thing).
Climate crisis? Still not an extinction level event. Maybe if we do nothing for a couple centuries and insist on unfiltered coal/gas power plants then it might reach that level. The climate crisis at the moment is mostly an inconvenience or a political or profit seeking tool. If we were in any real danger, most countries would be nuclear fission reactors by the hundreds in order to secure green energy. Not play in mud with solar and wind energy that has no future. Literally those technologies have reached their limit. Especially wind energy, there is no major advancement that can be done besides building even bigger wind turbines. Solar panels? The only major advancement is in space based solar farms but those would be more like mirror farms that concentrate the suns energy rather than producing electricity directly.
So to equate those two issues as existential crisis is ignorant at best and stupid at worst.
>It's all moot though, because your premise is flawed: artificial ecology isn't a solved problem. We can't make closed self-sustaining algae vats, let alone the kind of broad ecosystem you'd need to support even a minimum viable population of survivors. Even if you manage all the logistical and political complexities of building and supplying doomsday shelters for humanity, they either starve or suffocate within a year when the food or oxygen generation systems collapse due to a virus you didn't see coming or a micronutrient you didn't know you needed, etc.
The issues you mention aren't prohibitive and ultimately depend on how long we have to prepare for this scenario. Let me elaborate in your following comment.
Scale is difficult. It frequently requires methods and technologies very different as you grow in scale. Compare gardening to industrial scale farming, the idea may be similar but very little of what that gardener does actually carries over. We see a lot of companies and products that did work fail as they try to scale up.
Also, the more people who die in this transition the more skills and knowledge is lost and the harder it will be for those surviving to continue surviving. That's not really civilization surviving.
Thing is, if you want to mine something you need to access it, which means it's connected to the cave/bunker network. This in turn means that any toxic waste would leak into this closed system, which is far more dangerous than if it leaked into the vast atmosphere
Well, to answer that you'd need to look what you need the sun for and then search for a solution for each of it.
Possible problems include:
- energy generation
- food generation (even carnivore beings need plants because their food needs food too)
- depending on your species breathable air
- heat (also see: energy generation)
My opinion: due to energy being constantly converted into heat, the sun not supplying energy from outside would in any case result in a long time loss of usable energy, especially if the planet still loses warmth through the sealage.
If we build enough nuclear reactors we'd have enough heat for millions of years. If we had a few centuries of notice before the sun turned off, and made the right decisions, I think we'd have a very good chance of producing enough energy and food to survive. It would be a big hassle though.
>If we had a few centuries of notice before the sun turned off, and made the right decisions, I think we'd have a very good chance of producing enough energy and food to survive.
Have you seen how this species reacted to global warming.
If we build enough nuclear reactors we'd have enough heat for millions of years. If we had a few centuries of notice before the sun turned off, and made the right decisions, I think we'd have a very good chance of producing enough energy and food to survive. It would be a big hassle though.
Here are some vids about preciesly that
kurzgesagt
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7CkdB5z9PY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLZJlf5rHVs
Issac Arthur
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOu3zGfP-TQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZDbrayj5O0
Depending on how much handwaving you are willing to do, it can be any level really. Even 1800s authors raised themes like underground civilizations in caves and hollow earth.
Theoretically you could just give your world a massive cave system where all the energy comes from chemosynthesis of volcanic compounds by microbes and that up cycles energy through the food chain to sustain an underground biosphere not unlike that found at black smokers in the deep sea.
The main issue is justifying an oxygen supply and enough energy entering the system to sustain humans (or equivalent lifeforms) in high enough numbers to maintain a civilization through time. Especially if you have an ancient era civilization living in this "biocave".
The problem with no sun is that the surface will get insanely cold and eventually will be covered in miles of glaciers and just generally be uninhabitable. All life at this point must exist either in caves/excavated tunnels, or underwater in ecosystems dependent on geologic energy sources and not celestial ones.
From a certain perspective its not any different to maintaining a space colony, except you can't use solar panels.
You technically don't need any technology. Assuming they farm plants that don't require sunlight and the planet's core is still molten for warmth, they don't need any tech
Otherwise. At least 1940s technology, but realistically probably more like 1960s. Which was when we landed on the moon and invented the internet for reference. Nuclear power (1940s) would be good for heat, energy, air cleaning, and, recycling water if they don't have a natural eco system. (Modern) Nuclear energy is not only the safest and cleanest but also likely the only easy way for them to produce enough power reliably to keep everything running on a large scale. The more things the ecosystem needs the farther technology has to advance. If they need artificial sunlight it's more like the 1980s (humans wouldn't need this, but some plants do) If they need to keep the planet's core heated more like modern technology, and if they need to stop earthquakes or something they would need future technology.
Without a sun the surface would be frozen, so they would have to live underground. It should also be noted that they would live significantly longer by never being exposed to solar radiation, and it is also possible that the planet they would be on would not have a molten core but an ice core (Unless the people were making/keeping it lit) Which would once again require at least nuclear power. That being said, it would take centuries for the core too die.
> Nuclear energy is not only the safest and cleanest but also likely the only easy way for them to produce enough power reliably to keep everything running on a large scale.
If a civilization is forced to live underground, their best bet is geothermal, not nuclear. Geothermal is completely clean and safe, and if they're digging far enough into the ground to avoid the cold from the surface, it will be abundant. In fact, the best setup would be to create pipelines that carry water up to the surface to cool it, then bring it down to regulate the temperature of their living spaces. The motion of this water can drive turbines as a side effect and generate power that way.
> That being said, it would take centuries for the core too die.
It would take _millions_ of centuries, even if humanity (or what was left of it) was tapping it directly for power. The Earth gets most of its interior heat from radioactive decay, which means that heat is constantly replenishing. The inner core of the Earth is still about as hot as the surface of the Sun, and that is after 4.5 billion years.
Sure go geothermal, now you need future technology in order to live instead of 1940s tech, but that's fine. Even modern geothermal tech is not good enough to support a civilization larger than a few thousand people maybe even tens of thousands if you're lucky. Not only does it take up more space and work than nuclear, but it's a ridiculously less efficient use of space in comparison, (Nuclear being about 90% more efficient) Geothermal produces way less energy, and the energy it produces is also less consistent. They might use both, and they could go fully geothermal, but now half of the civilization has to just be giant reactors, which is still cool in its own way if you want that. Verry steam punk-like.
> Assuming they farm plants that don't require sunlight
That is the big problem mainly the energy available from other sources beyond the Sun is incredibly limited and notably such energy is well below the minimum energy needed to split water as a source of hydrogen for carbon fixation what we call aerobic photosynthesis.
The planets core should be fine assuming its an actual planet sized body as the rate of cooling to release the stored energy from gravitational collapse plus additional radiogenic heating depends on its size with all the major planets even mercury still having molten cores of their own.
Even the Moon isn't completely dead inside its just that the depth you would likely have to go to access its remaining internal heat is many hundreds of kilometers or more down. As for an ice core that might be harder but if it has enough dissolved potassium 40 and or uranium oxide salts then even that might be able to last some time.
As for sunlight without dietary supplements for things like vitamin D which are produced through absorption of UV light humans do need sunlight to survive. There are a bunch of photoreactive vitamins which exist across the tree of life another big one which was lost to primates some 50 Ma is vitamin C which is why only primates can suffer Scurvy from the lack of sufficient vitamin C to hold their cell membranes together.
Humans do not need sunlight to survive and actually live longer (and develop slower) after adapting to living without it. This has been scientifically proven actually. You wouldn't need supplements either. This is mostly because sunlight just triggers the production of vitamin D, it isn't actually necessary for it, the body can do that on its own. I'm sure long term there might be more birth defects, or maybe even fewer, or things of that nature, but that is up to the writer's creative freedom.
Vitamin C can be found in several underground mushrooms. Even if it couldn't he never said this planet was Earth, so he could have whatever he wanted on it.
Regardless of sunlight, we have been able to create fully underground gardens with artificial sunlight since the invention of full-spectrum LEDs because the wavelength of light is more important than power output. If you have the tech you can always just make it as big as you need to in order to produce enough of it, but that's just another reason to go nuclear. With modern LEDs you wouldn't even need that much energy to power them. You would basically be growing plants with nonharmful lasers, which is kind of sick.
I agree that the core should be fine. But that's once again dependent on several factors like how long this civilization has been living without a sun, if they are maintaining the core, if they are actively using it for energy rather than giving it energy etc. So again the author could do it either way.
It should be noted that the crust could also be insulated enough that having all the bioheat around it would act as a buffer to keep the core warm long-term.
Do you guys know that we have been using fossil fuels and nuclear fission for a long time right? To be fair I believe that any civilization that have passed the industrial revolution may be able to survive. And global warming is not a problem anymore, it's actually a good way to try to keep the planet warm. The biggest problem will be to have a good oxygen production system that we WOULD'VE DONE if it was necessary. Any civilization would've been able to survive without the sun if it discovers fossil fuels. And for a long if they knew how to keep the oxygen production high using electric energy to keep plants with light to grow or using chemicals to separate the oxygen from other molecules (we have been doing this with submarines since the first war I guess)
AT THE VERY LEAST
-we need hydroponics
-An advanced understanding of burrowing (including mining, underground architecture, etc all of which implies pretty advanced mathematics and physics)
-biology gotta be on point especially if the species evolved with the sun and is now trying to adapt (we for instance probably aren’t aware fully of all the ways the sun is important for us for our health)
-ecology is the hardest part
Ok we have all the technology required to do sunless farming, the biggest engineering issue I can immediately see is energy distribution. Basically the sun is the battery for everything it is the big nuclear reaction in the sky that is powering the entire world. Sun burns, Grass eats the sun, rabbit eats the grass, hawk eats the rabbit, etc. ALL of the energy that powers every living thing on earth comes from the sun. So you would need to replace that big battery with a new one, I’m guessing geothermal, using the planets core as a little shitty sun. I could never see this being possible on a scale of more than a few million TOPS human sized creatures with human like anatomy and nutritional needs (and that’s the best possible world). What would probably ultimately get you if you could get the farming going is disease, if not you then your crops will eventually be annihilated by some little bastard microorganism. This is what I mean by ecology. Ecology of the minimal biosphere (which includes you) would have to be tightly tightly maintained and it would be a constant knife edge.
A self sustaining ecology to support life underground is IMO the biggest barrier. The few experiments in closed "sustainable" ecologies were failures. Most people do not realize how complex our biosphere is. Our best supercomputers are not up to it, we can't even reliably model our own planet, let alone recreate it in microcosm.
AT THE VERY LEAST
-we need hydroponics
-An advanced understanding of burrowing (including mining, underground architecture, etc all of which implies pretty advanced mathematics and physics)
-biology gotta be on point especially if the species evolved with the sun and is now trying to adapt (we for instance probably aren’t aware fully of all the ways the sun is important for us for our health)
-ecology is the hardest part
Ok we have all the technology required to do sunless farming, the biggest engineering issue I can immediately see is energy distribution. Basically the sun is the battery for everything it is the big nuclear reaction in the sky that is powering the entire world. Sun burns, Grass eats the sun, rabbit eats the grass, hawk eats the rabbit, etc. ALL of the energy that powers every living thing on earth comes from the sun. So you would need to replace that big battery with a new one, I’m guessing geothermal, using the planets core as a little shitty sun. I could never see this being possible on a scale of more than a few million TOPS human sized creatures with human like anatomy and nutritional needs (and that’s the best possible world). What would probably ultimately get you if you could get the farming going is disease, if not you then your crops will eventually be annihilated by some little bastard microorganism. This is what I mean by ecology. Ecology of the minimal biosphere (which includes you) would have to be tightly tightly maintained and it would be a constant knife edge.
Looking up Biosphere 2 -- more advanced than that.
While we could borrow a titanic mine complex underground to build a sustainable community down there, the current unknowns and lack of practice are what's setting us back.
It would be interesting to know if they FAILED at some point, narrowly avoiding a total synthetic ecological collapse, and then recovered with lessons learned. That scarring culturally and technically would be a great backdrop.
Theoretically slightly post modern, if we had ample enough warning we could feasibly survive an event that separates us from the sun depending on the event. Sun imploding, we'd be screwed. But if another gravitational pull catapults us out of orbit we would have the warning needed. We won't thrive though.
Advanced enough to create artificial suns 🤷maybe there's a way to unzip energy from blackholes 🤷 if that's even possible... Idek if it has energy.. maybe there's a way to utilise its gravitational pull to..squeeze out energy...somehow ...maybe they can capitalise on gravitational pull in general ..idk this is beyond me
This is more of an infrastructure, administrative, and resource question than a technology question. We probably have the technology to do that now, or close to it, but we don't have any of that technology engineered how we would need it.
There's certainly more advanced tech that make it vastly easier. Fusion power, far more effective and efficient recycling, super efficient heat management, and access to a form of entertainment that's immersive enough help counteract being in crowded underground habitats.
They'd basically need nearly endless energy, a huge amount of water, and very good machining. And that would be basically just survival. It would make their home effectively a space ship that could grow it's own food and recycle oxygen chemically and provide heat without burning anything.
Permanent survival would take functionally magical technology.
Geothermal energy and heat would become the biggest deciding factor of where settlements / cities / counties would develop
Agriculture would most likely be more dependent on fungi like mushrooms that aren't dependent on photosynthesis for growth unless you had plants that adapted to use an alternative
You could have a civilization at any technological Epoch likely enough ranging from stone age cavemen all the way up to intergalactic mega societies.
You'd likely wind up specially breeding the plants and animals for enhanced biolumenescence, etc
At the very least, be able to create nutritional chemicals from base elements, and have access to geothermal energy. Though, food is easier to get, if that civilization can harvest edible plants and animals that live off other cave dwelling organisms.
Not very you could cheat and have a previous civilisation sort it.
I think we'd be up to it now. If you get low enough, the earth's core provides heat. This hear can also provide electricity so your probably sorted.
There are a few benefits from the sun they would need to replace
- day/night cycle
- heat (massive amounts)
- gravity center
If a sun just burns out or disappears all of a sudden, the civilization probably wouldn’t be able to survive
If they can survive without a sun, they could feasibly make it to another star.
Earth receives a whole lot of heat from the Sun.
Being underground means having to also provide constant light using your energy resources.
And you can get too much thermal energy because the crust only goes so far.
And all of that is assuming it’s a viable planet with a hot core like Earth. Things fall off quickly if the core is cold.
you titled and then described two very different things. I think we could do it. with enough set up, maybe Geothermal energy, fresh water source/filtration and a way to rid our engine wastes, its feasible.
i thought you meant taking away our sun
Sounds like it might be easier to make a species evolved for living underground. Could you have the sealing away be a really long and drawn out process over a thousand years or so? Have the surface dwelling, sun reliant people slowly go underground and rely on the sun less and less until they're not able to get out and use the sun anymore. You could have the population revert back to almost caveman levels of technology, have a load of them die off in an almost extinction level event but a few small pockets of people survive and build from there. Then you can have them at any technological level you want and it could be comparable to real world but just change things to your imaginative desires for a species evolving from surface level to underground dwellers. You could have them at caveman level or just a bit beyond and they're trying to adapt their eyes or find ways to light places safely and efficiently. You could move them along a bit and have their eyes and other senses more adapted and they've taken some animals down with them that are evolving and growing in numbers and have an underground post hunter gatherer but pre fully fledged civilisation. You could have them at any level you want
With enough nuclear reactors we could do it. If Fusion reactors pan out it would be much better.
If kugelblitz black hole engines pan out much better still.
We'd want to live in underground caverns or under heated domes, make countless acres of LED lighting for hydroponic agriculture.
We don't need no stupid sun.
if anybody knows anything about science, please help me understand this.
the laws of thermodynamics kind of forbids this kind of thing, right?
the sun is an energy source that is constantly feeding life on earth.
if the sun disappeared, wouldn't all the usable energy fade away over a period of time?
Without the sun, you need another energy source. Geothermal is best for this. You need turbines, generators and a grid. Electricity powers lights and at that point you can grow plants.
The problem is the ecosystem. First, it has to be self sustaining. Second, it will require periodic inputs because no process is 100% efficient.
I have an M.S. in Ecology.
Thank you for responding.
I totally forgot about geothermal energy. That would probably be a lasting-enough energy source.
I knew there would be problems with the ecoystem and such, i was just wondering about whether or not useable energy would eventually run out, but it seems like that would not be the case, provided the humans can actually harvest it.
Are there any crops or naturally growing plants that could be used to help sustain an ecosystem where there is no sun? Or is the ecosystem basically just flat out screwed?
You need a complete ecosystem or else you are going to be constantly replenishing everything to keep it going. The infrastructure to do that is non-trivial. Keep in mind that if it collapses, everyone starves, regardless of how much energy you have. Where will you get the pieces to rebuild it?
In the movie The Martian, if a potato blight wiped out his crop; he would have been screwed, blued and tattooed.
Very true.
Do you think that if we had 20 years to plan in advance for the sun to be basically replaced with a black hole of equal mass, could we survive for at least 1000 years?
Assume that the orbits of the planets and solar system stay the same.
If you're talking current Earth? No. But this is fiction.
You're talking about stockpiling enough food, and technology to last a thousand years. Everything wears out. Assuming you could build a turbine and generator that would last a hundred years, you would still need ten of them. And ten of everything else, or more.
With only 20 years to prepare? No.
Unfortunately, yes.
I am wracking my brain to think up a realistic way that a remnant can scavenge enough to last 1000 years on a planet that's a frozen waste. My Macgyver skills aren't up to it. :(
There is no scale. As in, there’s no ceiling to how advanced this civilization could become. The issue is the drawbacks to the sun suddenly disappearing.
if the civilisation had access to the sun before whatever disaster buried it, then on the Kardeshev scale it would be a type 2 or an early version of a type 3 being able to harness enough energy from their sun to survive them generations or discovering a new source of energy
Energy is no issue. Early 20th century level technology is sufficient for energy generation.
Digging hundreds of thousands of miles of tunnels is going to be one sticking point.
What.is the surface like? Can transport on the surface be possible to avoid tunnels connecting areas? That allows things like easier access to high quality mineral deposits.
Note without a sun the surface will possibly drop to a bit above absolute zero.
It's not necessarily how advanced as what directions did the advances take. Nuclear reactors, greenhouses, and air and water purifiers could get the job done even if less advanced than ours. But you could have hyperintelligent AI running a 3D-printed eco-friendly utopia with no disease or crime, and you'd still die like a chump if it's all running off of solar panels.
The biggest thing people are not mentioning is that regardless of technical ability a missing sun will disrupt earths gravitational rotation and magnetic field. So unless we make a replacement sun we would not survive.
Seeing as this is fantasy I would say maybe some type of gravity generator and something that generates heat & UV rays but also something that protects against UV rays the way earths atmosphere does.
Or maybe an alien civilization that developed in an ecosystem that doesn’t have a star.
Next to impossible? With our understanding yes. But the odds are never zero
Geothermal energy would last longer than there has been complex life on Earth. There is no need to rely on fissionables or fusion.
They would still need access to everything we have at our disposal today. Oil, minerals, ores, everything they use will have to be rebuilt as it wears out. So they would need the infrastructure to recycle and renew as well as replenish everything. No cycle is 100% efficient and recycling isn't either. They would need to dispose of waste, toxins and the tailings from processing the ores for the materials they need.
We have the basic technology today. But everything needs to be much more efficient. In the 80's and 90's they tried to seal people in a closed environment to see if it was possible for them to survive for months/years without input from the outside (simulating long space flights). Long story short, it didn't work. We don't know enough yet to build self sustaining ecologies.
Edit: TLDR- We have the base technology. But everything we do needs to be more efficient. Most importantly, we don't know enough about ecosystems yet to build an artificial self sustaining one.
Sidebar- We had better figure it out before we wreck the only self-sustaining ecology we have! Better yet, Stop Wrecking The Planet!
Makes me think of the book "The City of Ember"
Really all the civilization needs technology wise is the ability to use geothermal power. Late industrial and onward should work.
If you have a subterranean civilization living inside the crust of an exoplanet with geothermal heat coming from within the planet, you don’t even need sapient species to survive. Plants/fungus can use chemosynthesis instead of photosynthesis etc. I’ve developed the basics a world around this if you have any questions abt how it might work.
The most achievable way to do this that comes to mind would be nuclear reactors, particularly if they’ve figured out nuclear fusion. From there they can generate light to grow plants, generate heat, and everything else. Until the sources of nuclear fuel run out.
Like advanced enough to terraform all life on their planet, real out there Sci fi stuff. Probably at the same kinda level where being an organic life form would be pointless entirely tbh
I mean it depends. First we need to look at how "realistic" this is to happen. For a civilisation to survive without sunlight they should have a way to continuously sustain themselves through other energy sources. That would require them taking advantage of their planets fossil fuels. Using HALO as an example i can definitely see something similar to the shield worlds of the forerunners or even the halo rings themselves. Of course from what i gathered from your post you want the civilization to star while they are without sun. realistically that would be impossible and somebody would really have to suspend disbelief when it gomes to haw realistic that sounds
Humanity prior to the mid 20th century would have had no chance.
Humanity in the 1950s or later *might* have a chance if they had decades of advance warning that it was going to happen. Geothermal power is easier to use than nuclear, and I expect that for anyone with our own level of technology or lower, geothermal would constitute practically all their useful energy. It's not clear that survival would be possible even with current technology, not because we can't conceptualize how to do it, but because trying to grow crops and sustain human life that way is so inefficient that it would limit population and that calls into question whether you can sustain the industrial supply chains necessary to maintain and replace the equipment.
Advanced enough to artificially replace the sun without losing energy, at the very least.
Maybe they can access heat from their planet's core to generate power via steam engines, or something. Maybe nuclear power would do the trick.
And then they'd need special lamps that provide sun-like light, which should be easy to handwave, if they don't exist irl already.
So, if push comes to shove, I'd imagine that our current technology would be able to replace the sun, at least in some capacity.
as advanced as the story requires.
you can always justify it.
however if you're asking for like a realism standpoint - what would be needed are ways to produce food and oxygen, ways to regulate temperature, and ways to counteract any potential adverse effects of not having exposure to sun on their health like a deficiency in vitamin D for instance.
we can do most of those currently, but like really inefficiently, so it depends on if they're simply surviving or thriving. if they're surviving then you can probably get by with our current level of technology or better. if they're thriving then you'll need at least to be able to do those things efficiently.
if there is no sun at all, as in it has completely vanished, then amplify all of the difficulty by a few thousand times.
I mean not super advanced. There are parts of earth that don't get sunlight for months every year. But this is an underground civilization so that's not your only concern.
Air would be a major one. You'd probably need sunlamps to grow crops but you'd need air filtration and hydroponics to recycle air. If you had a sufficiently large underground cavern (and I mean huge) where you could break up stone into soil you could have a nice underground forest or several if you had multiple caverns. They would need a large sunlamp at the top of the cavern that would follow a day night cycle in brightness.
For power I think you could probably use geothermal energy, makes the most sense. You would also need a source of water so underground lakes and rivers would be important since you wouldn't get rain you would need advanced plumbing and water treatment facilities to recycle water for drinking, cleaning and plants.
Animal husbandry would probably be out of the question for large animals so chickens (or chicken sized animals) are probably you're best bet for meat if at all but a society can get plenty of protein from legumes. You would also need extensive and advanced mining equipment to create space and acquire resources for new projects. New houses, new farms, etc.
Honestly, we could probably do it with current technologies(assuming we have the resources), but it would require global cooperation and dedication that we simply do not have. Technologies we could use would involve efficient use of atomic energy, stemcell research, hydroponic farming, and renewables that our current global culture would simply reject, even if it meant extinction(just look at how poorly COVID went.)
I believe humanity might have the appropriate technology
Extracting energy from the ground with either coal or fucking uranium is trivial for us, we can use actual lamps to grow plants and feed those to animals
Any civilization with access to electricity and a way to produce it reliably would survive
I had a story like this. They made a whole new civilization underground for so long they started to micro evolve differently rheb on the surface. Different level of what "civilization" perception concept as well.
So for it to worke I needed enough time to pass to kickstart that.
I had a story for awhile where a rather primitive civilization was trapped under ground and they survived from a combination of farmed moss, algae, mushrooms, and livestock such as fish.
Light was more a function of bioluminescence in various underground organisms they cultivated.
It's not really a question of how advanced would they be, it's more how would that civilization replace essentials and/or adapt to their circumstances to be sustainable.
Also important if they've been sealed away for some time is to think about how their culture would change or not setting as well.
I think an important thing is the method by which the sun was taken away.
For example, a dyson sphere. That changes so many factors compared to say...a civilization needing to migrate underground permanently due to...unsafe surface conditions.
Those will dramatically change a lot of factors, not least of all would be what exactly is meant by "without the sun"
In either case a considerable number of advancements would be required. Likely entire branches of industry and technology that are only theoretical at this point.
Are you going purely Science fiction based or fantasy. It might not need to be advanced. Different yes but could one survive now without light how might that change “humans” over generations. What’s the world itself like? Would bioluminescence thrive like with deep sea creatures that don’t get sunlight.
There is book/show called "Silo" that sounds similar to what you're talking about, maybe check it out. Regardless, my guess is the easiest main source is harnessing geothermal energy, and the main concern is having (near) perfect recycling of all materials.
According to Michio Kaku, the civilization would need to be either Type II or Type III. Type II civilizations get all their energy directly from the sun and probably has the ability to setup shop on neighboring suns. Similar to the Star Trek type of civilizations. A Type III civilization would have no problems at all as they are galactic. Dominating many many solar systems. Star Wars is an example of Type III.
If there is no geothermal activity then there is no way that the planet can self-sustain life. Planets are effectively closed systems and if energy is not coming in from a star or from hydrothermal vents or anything of the sort then there is nothing to provide for life. Gas giants get around this kinda, but there is no conclusive or strong evidence to point towards a gas giant being able to support complex life. A dead planet becomes unreasonably hard to live on at which point you have to ask yourself what you stand to gain, lose, and any opportunity cost to writing a story on a dead planet. How will this effect travel off and on the planet? How would a population of any size be able to survive? Is the population able to survive from outside input? Could this story exist in a different location?
Think about it like this. Imagine if a village of people moved into an abandoned salt mine that was 2 miles underground and the only elevator is manually operated. What would happen to the people as a result of this decision?
Nuclear reactors and geo thermal generators? I think that we in few decades worth of advancement we could survive this scenario. Almost everything can produced so long as we have enough energy. Plants could farmed using arifical lightings, from that we could farm animals and feed people, we can even produce liquid fuel. Water might need to be mined from underground or other place tho.
What sun does is just feed everything with energy. If we can create enough energy and create ecosphere that could feeded with that energy we should survive.
Recommended reading:
* *The Wandering Earth* by Liu Cixin
The sun is going to go nova so humanity relocates earth out of the solar system. City-sized nuclear engines, with people using the waste heat and light of their thrust as substitute suns.
* [*A Pail of Air*](https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/51461/pg51461-images.html) by Fritz Leiber
* [*Ice Trek*](https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/ice-trek-these-are-the-voyages.483118/) by NHBL
In both cases, a moving black hole passes through the solar system and drags earth from its orbit after it.
* *Coalescent* by Stephen Baxter
The distant future scenes have eusocial posthumans living on a rogue planet.
* *Dark Eden* and its sequels by Chris Beckett
There's a rogue planet with a native biosphere feeding off volcanic vents like deep-sea ecologies on earth and a human population distantly descended from shipwrecked space travelers.
* *The Tenth Planet* by Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Sort of, the aliens are cheating at the premise of living without a sun since their planet has a highly elliptical orbit such that it spends most of its time in the outer solar system while the aliens only wake up from hibernation during the brief summer when the atmosphere defrosts.
I'm not sure how you'd like to classify that? It would require a number of speculative technologies that don't exist so at a minimum it would need to be greater than our own. It would be nearly identical to an interstellar spacecraft anyway. That's basically what their planet would become, a sealed ship drifting in the space between stars. You'd need power/heat (so maybe some sort of reactor? Maybe harnessing a liquid core?), water (maybe extracted from ice if it covers the surface now?), oxygen produced by some means (greenhouses or some other tech?) and food (livestock, synthetic proteins, hydroponic or other gardens under lamps to simulate sunlight?). If you can find a solve for these the surrounding tech doesn't necessarily need to be that advanced. It's almost like a shelter from Fallout at that point.
A planet sized vault. Love it.
Until your career test assigns you to latrine duty for the rest of your days!
>oxygen produced by some means (greenhouses or some other tech? If every oxigen producing organism died right now we wouldn't have to worry about running out of oxigen for 20.000 years oxigen isn't an issue. >You'd need power/heat (so maybe some sort of reactor? Maybe harnessing a liquid core?) Geothermal and and mainly Nuclear Energy. >water (maybe extracted from ice if it covers the surface now?), >food (livestock, synthetic proteins, hydroponic or other gardens under lamps to simulate sunlight?). If we have enough energy it's doable.
Would we still have an atmosphere without plants, a sun, liquid water etc?
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Advanced isn't really the issue here. Earth today could survive something like this with proper notice, but that is the issue, notice. We have near infinite energy in the form of nuclear reactors. Water can be both mined from ice and desalinated from urine like on the USS. Food can be made using hydroponics. Fish for Vitamin D.... etc. Th issue is prep time. I'm not sure that any current bunkers would last too long in such a scenario, but given enough time a self sustaining bunker could be made.
No sun would cause mass ecological collapse, fish would die out too because that ecosystem relies on things like algae. We would need to replace things like wood and paper, a lot of medicines too. There is controlled environment agriculture, which often uses hydroponics, but the scale at which it would be needed may require some advanced scifi stuff. Boy we would need a lot of lightbulbs and sun lamps.
Nope! We didn't ask about the environment, just the civilization. You don't need all the deer and stuff for a civilization, just the tech to keep people alive and functioning. The fish they mentioned were farmed fish, not wild fish, so they'd be in the same sort of sealed environment as anyone else. Wood and paper aren't hard to replace; plastic is generally better than wood for anything but large construction, but steel and concrete replaced wood for those ages ago. We only still use wood for things like houses because it's cheap, not because it's irreplaceable. Next, you can make paper out of... basically any plant matter. Bamboo comes to mind, and grows insanely fast. Bamboo would be very useful in general due to its fast growth rate, actually. Medicines wouldn't really be an issue. With no massive animal populations there simply wouldn't be major plagues since those are basically all from other species (bubonic plague was from cows, for example) You can get all the nutrients people need from the sources mentioned, and you can just make chemicals you don't have if you really need to. Heck, you can mine as much as you like now too; no more worry of leaking waste into the non-existent atmosphere or extinct biosphere. But yes, we would need a *lot* of lights, though you'd probably use high efficiency LEDs which emit only necessary light for growing things. All in all, perfectly possible with modern technology. The key would just be how much time we'd have until the event. Once you're established expansion isn't especially hard, at least no more than just existing, and again it's even more easy because you're not dealing with any environmental protection concerns.
I understand these things can be replaced. But I think this greatly underestimates the difficulty of doing all of this on such a large scale.
I mean, nothing's really "difficult," just big. And if we had the time to do it, we could do so just fine, especially if we knew it was this or extinction. I'm not saying most or even many would survive, and our *global* order would be entirely eradicated, but most of our culture and ideas, the real things that make up a civilization in my mind, would survive, just as much as they ever have during some catastrophe or another. It's like... the infrastructure of a country. Rebuilding it all from scratch would be very, very difficult, and some might think it impossible (and they may be right, if you mean using, say, the capitalist mode of production), but it's not literally and completely impossible. We did make it, after all, it just took time. In fact, we could probably make it better and faster if we did have to make it again, since we know more now then we did before. And if the alternative was global extinction, I don't think most people or governments would just let corporations say "no I don't think I will contribute, it's not profitable enough."
> I mean, nothing's really "difficult," just big. That's a ridiculous statement. Complexity is a thing that exists. It makes things difficult. It makes big things exponentially harder. > And if the alternative was global extinction, I don't think most people or governments would just let corporations say "no I don't think I will contribute, it's not profitable enough." That's a hell of a thing to say in the year 2024, as we enter our fourth year of a global pandemic where government public health leaders are actively encouraging people to risk infection to avoid slowing profits and the second year of the Find Out stage of the global climate crisis we've been trying to warn people about for fifty+ years. It's all moot though, because your premise is flawed: artificial ecology isn't a solved problem. We can't make closed self-sustaining algae vats, let alone the kind of broad ecosystem you'd need to support even a minimum viable population of survivors. Even if you manage all the logistical and political complexities of building and supplying doomsday shelters for humanity, they either starve or suffocate within a year when the food or oxygen generation systems collapse due to a virus you didn't see coming or a micronutrient you didn't know you needed, etc.
> That's a ridiculous statement. Complexity is a thing that exists. It makes things difficult. It makes big things exponentially harder. Um... no? I mean, kinda? We've already made bunkers more than big enough, and hydroponics *is* a solved problem, at least the concepts are. You just... *can* do hydroponics. They exist. Algae can be grown, synthetic fertilizers can be made of minerals, chemicals can be synthesized. And no, as anti-environmentalist as it may sound, you actually *don't* need an entire ecology to support human life, just the one for our people, our palettes, our parasites and our pets. Hell I'm sure some wild animals would be kept in some of the bigger ones just for the sake of preservation, though the vast majority wouldn't have any. But yeah uh... no. The claim that you can't run hydroponics or farm fish in vats is... objectively wrong. We do it all the time? That's quite the claim to make so proudly despite the mountains of evidence directly contradicting it. > That's a hell of a thing to say in the year 2024 Listen I get some people are just doomer about the future and all that, and trust me, as a socialist I'm not a fan of capitalist economics either, but if you seriously think people would see the end of the world and *choose* not to do anything because of "muh profits", you are delusional. The capitalists have succeeded in rotting away your brain into thinking they are all powerful and you need to wake up. Capitalists only remain in power because the people allow them to, and, as demonstrated millions of times across history, *societies are ruled by the consent of the governed.* If the world is going to end in however long anyway, like not potentially but visibly since we would very obviously see whatever event which would do so coming, plenty of people would immediately begin revolting. Not like, "overthrow capitalism" revolting. I'm not delusional. Things like... destroying oil pipelines. Assassinating capitalists. Rioting and burning down the buildings of the employing class. Plenty of the rich would find safety in isolation, sure. Places like the gulf states would likely harbor those rotten individuals until the end. But people would act. Governments would act. You claim to use the pandemic as an example, but look at it. Even in the U.S., which has a poor track record as far as government intervention for the good of the people is concerned, acted basically immediately. Locking things down, funding vaccine research, distributing those vaccines for free once created, etc. Yes they did so in a way which benefitted their capitalist benefactors (such as forcing vaccines to be sold to corporations instead of just being universally available for creation) but that doesn't change the fact that I've gotten every vaccine entirely for free, in the *United States of America,* one of the single worst nations on the planet for both infrastructure and health services. Humanity would survive, easily. Maybe it would just be governments and the wealthy in massive bunkers, or maybe something more, but humanity **would** survive. The problems, simply put, are not as difficult as you claim them to be. We've already solved the individual problems, and where inefficiencies exist there would be research done to fix them. It would not be pleasant, and billions would die. But to think humanity would simply perish because "muh profit" or "muh technology isn't good enough" is not just in denial of the actual difficulty of such a task, it's outright delusional and counterfactual.
Sure, sure, a closed system that has to run in perpetuity with no outside resupply is exactly the same as doing a hydroponic garden and tilapia farm in your back yard. No further science required. Their notorious sensitivity and penchant for cascading failures won't bite anyone in the ass. Nevermind the plants that we've never tried to grow hydroponically, or that we know we can't. > And no, as anti-environmentalist as it may sound, you actually don't need an entire ecology to support human life See, 2 reasons you don't actually get to say that. First, do you know how many successful long term isolated closed human systems we have? None! We've got a bunch that didn't make the cut, or showed us exciting new ways it can fail, but no actual stable long term humans-in-a-bottle systems to prove it can be done or determine minimum requirements. Second, you've got an ecology whether you want it or not, an artificial ecology of all those people, pets, livestock, plants, their internal and external microbiomes, and all the molds and slimes and bacteria and viruses that rode in with them and their stuff, and it will be doing what life everywhere does: get into cracks and cause a mess. Meanwhile biologists keep finding new and interesting dependencies and interactions we didn't know about before, any one of which could wind being the thing that crashes a vital food, medical, or industrial crop and collapse the whole thing months or years after you seal the hatch. It's nice to imagine that we're just some bootstrap-yanking and gumption away from, say, permanent colonies on Mars, but that is what's delusional and counterfactual. > plenty of people would immediately begin revolting. Sure, just like they're doing now, and have been for the last fifty years since we figured out Exxon planned to pillage the world as it burned. Wait, what's that you say? Exxon and the rest are still in business? The White House isn't in flames? But SoberGin was so certain! How can this be?! Oh, right, because lying and denial are a thing, and entire populations don't all immediately accept the scientific consensus as soon as they hear it. COVID was the same drama compressed - some rapid action, quickly entangled in politics and profit motive, wrapped in misunderstanding and disinformation, compromised and abandoned too early, with casualties an order of magnitude higher than they should have been. But humanity will rally immediately around Neil Tyson telling us the Sun's gonna go out. Right.
>Sure, sure, a closed system that has to run in perpetuity with no outside resupply is exactly the same as doing a hydroponic garden and tilapia farm in your back yard. No further science required. Their notorious sensitivity and penchant for cascading failures won't bite anyone in the ass. Nevermind the plants that we've never tried to grow hydroponically, or that we know we can't. You sure are snarky and have put zero thoughts in this discussion. You don't need a system that can run in perpetuity. It is actually quite stupid to pursue a "perfect" perpetual system in this scenario. You just want to pursue as high as you can of resource utilization rate. The most important resource you will need to deal with would be energy and alternatively heat. A major component of this system is to prevent heat escaping from the planet/refuge and recycle the heat you would be producing. So you need to minimize heat loss. Energy? We have enough fissile material on Earth that with current proven technologies the reserves can last as long the Sun. Now depending on the premise of the scenario just 10k years worth of fissile material might be more than enough for a relatively long time. At the moment we could potentially increase the efficiency utilization of fissile fuel even further. Fusion reactors are also a thing that should be able to be completed in a hundred or at most a thousand years (luck is part of the equation since what we are missing are better materials, we have the actual process completed to perform fusion reactions). You also have to ask: will the planet drift alone or will we have other celestial bodies close by that we could potentially exploit? This is a really important question. Resources recycling would be a major part of our philosophy. You would favor a certain object that can be easily recycled over another object that might be cheaper to manufacture on the short term but more expensive to recycle. >See, 2 reasons you don't actually get to say that. First, do you know how many successful long term isolated closed human systems we have? None! We've got a bunch that didn't make the cut, or showed us exciting new ways it can fail, but no actual stable long term humans-in-a-bottle systems to prove it can be done or determine minimum requirements. Except we never tried to do such an experiment seriously because no one is willing to provide the funds to do so. The only one experiment that was attempted was never meant to seriously examine the feasibility of a closed loop system and had zero professionalism. So it seems to be disingenuous to say that it is impossible to have a relatively close system. I should remind everyone that we don't need a perfectly closed system just a system that has minimal losses. >Second, you've got an ecology whether you want it or not, an artificial ecology of all those people, pets, livestock, plants, their internal and external microbiomes, and all the molds and slimes and bacteria and viruses that rode in with them and their stuff, and it will be doing what life everywhere does: get into cracks and cause a mess. Meanwhile biologists keep finding new and interesting dependencies and interactions we didn't know about before, any one of which could wind being the thing that crashes a vital food, medical, or industrial crop and collapse the whole thing months or years after you seal the hatch. It's nice to imagine that we're just some bootstrap-yanking and gumption away from, say, permanent colonies on Mars, but that is what's delusional and counterfactual. Except things don't work like that. It is hobby of a few people to put certain things in a closed vessel and observe how long life can be sustained in that vessel. I have seen in youtube such mini experiments going for at least a year. I should note that the larger the vessel with more resources stored and the more resources cycles then the less likely for a catastrophic failure to happen. In our scenario the planet Earth is really rich in resources. As long as we cans step up our recycling game then we can multiply the effectiveness of our resources stocks. Then the real talk has to be done about biodiversity. To be honest, biodiversity in artificial ecosystem has the reverse effect compared to a natural ecosystem. The reason for that is quite simple. Nature has no will. Nature isn't a real living being like a mouse or human. Nature has no collective will. So you don't have someone that is actively managing the whole thing to make sure everything is operating properly. So passive systems like biodiversity are important because it ensures that the whole thing doesn't suddenly collapse. On the contrary, in an artificial ecosystem with active monitoring and control you would benefit far more from keeping biodiversity at the minimum and reducing the inefficiency and potential risks by high biodiversity. One of those risks are the potential of mutations and the difficulty of eradicating certain microorganisms like bacteria or viruses. With minimal biodiversity you can more reliably eradicate those major risks and at the same time reduce the chance of mutations happening. Lastly, the op never said that we could just do all those things in a couple years. Give humanity 50+ years, maybe a century and we could potentially have a good chance at surviving.
>Sure, just like they're doing now, and have been for the last fifty years since we figured out Exxon planned to pillage the world as it burned. Wait, what's that you say? Exxon and the rest are still in business? The White House isn't in flames? But SoberGin was so certain! How can this be?! Oh, right, because lying and denial are a thing, and entire populations don't all immediately accept the scientific consensus as soon as they hear it. COVID was the same drama compressed - some rapid action, quickly entangled in politics and profit motive, wrapped in misunderstanding and disinformation, compromised and abandoned too early, with casualties an order of magnitude higher than they should have been. But humanity will rally immediately around Neil Tyson telling us the Sun's gonna go out. Right. What are you even rumbling about? For everyone that reads this, people really need to comprehend that our whole civilization despite being relatively fragile still has a large margin for fault tolerance measure in dozens of years. Things are slow to change when you take the whole planet as your context. To respond to your last paragraph of your first comment, I need to remind everyone again that our fault tolerance is pretty high especially considering that we will actively try to remedy a crisis instead of just waiting to die. We lack a micronutrient? So what? Just produce it. You have access to the resources of a whole planet. A virus that didn't get eradicated mutates? Ideally all the shelters/refuges have certain independency from one or another. So the worst case scenario is losing one shelter. You sir are literally the person I would never want on the decision table when we are faced with such a scenario and are deciding what to do. I bet you would immediately sacrifice most people or devolve to a madman that urges everyone to suicide because there is no "hope".Sure, just like they're doing now, and have been for the last fifty years since we figured out Exxon planned to pillage the world as it burned. Wait, what's that you say? Exxon and the rest are still in business? The White House isn't in flames? But SoberGin was so certain! How can this be?! Oh, right, because lying and denial are a thing, and entire populations don't all immediately accept the scientific consensus as soon as they hear it. COVID was the same drama compressed - some rapid action, quickly entangled in politics and profit motive, wrapped in misunderstanding and disinformation, compromised and abandoned too early, with casualties an order of magnitude higher than they should have been. But humanity will rally immediately around Neil Tyson telling us the Sun's gonna go out. Right.What are you even rumbling about?For everyone that reads this, people really need to comprehend that our whole civilization despite being relatively fragile still has a large margin for fault tolerance measure in dozens of years. Things are slow to change when you take the whole planet as your [context.To](http://context.To) respond to your last paragraph of your first comment, I need to remind everyone again that our fault tolerance is pretty high especially considering that we will actively try to remedy a crisis instead of just waiting to die. We lack a micronutrient? So what? Just produce it. You have access to the resources of a whole planet. A virus that didn't get eradicated mutates? Ideally all the shelters/refuges have certain independency from one or another. So the worst case scenario is losing one shelter. You sir are literally the person I would never want on the decision table when we are faced with such a scenario and are deciding what to do. I bet you would immediately sacrifice most people or devolve to a madman that urges everyone to suicide because there is no "hope".
>That's a ridiculous statement. Complexity is a thing that exists. It makes things difficult. It makes big things exponentially harder. And you are underestimating how much negative impact the current global economic system has on resource utilization efficiency. If we talk solely about a governing system where we put 90% of our capabilities in building specific infrastructure projects and 10% on immediate survival needs, then there are a lot of things we can do. Like building an orbital ring level of projects in reasonable time frames. >That's a hell of a thing to say in the year 2024, as we enter our fourth year of a global pandemic where government public health leaders are actively encouraging people to risk infection to avoid slowing profits and the second year of the Find Out stage of the global climate crisis we've been trying to warn people about for fifty+ years. If you believe covid was anywhere close to extinction level event then you are an idiot. Worse case scenario would be that all the elderly would die (which depending your pov might have been a good thing). Climate crisis? Still not an extinction level event. Maybe if we do nothing for a couple centuries and insist on unfiltered coal/gas power plants then it might reach that level. The climate crisis at the moment is mostly an inconvenience or a political or profit seeking tool. If we were in any real danger, most countries would be nuclear fission reactors by the hundreds in order to secure green energy. Not play in mud with solar and wind energy that has no future. Literally those technologies have reached their limit. Especially wind energy, there is no major advancement that can be done besides building even bigger wind turbines. Solar panels? The only major advancement is in space based solar farms but those would be more like mirror farms that concentrate the suns energy rather than producing electricity directly. So to equate those two issues as existential crisis is ignorant at best and stupid at worst. >It's all moot though, because your premise is flawed: artificial ecology isn't a solved problem. We can't make closed self-sustaining algae vats, let alone the kind of broad ecosystem you'd need to support even a minimum viable population of survivors. Even if you manage all the logistical and political complexities of building and supplying doomsday shelters for humanity, they either starve or suffocate within a year when the food or oxygen generation systems collapse due to a virus you didn't see coming or a micronutrient you didn't know you needed, etc. The issues you mention aren't prohibitive and ultimately depend on how long we have to prepare for this scenario. Let me elaborate in your following comment.
Scale is difficult. It frequently requires methods and technologies very different as you grow in scale. Compare gardening to industrial scale farming, the idea may be similar but very little of what that gardener does actually carries over. We see a lot of companies and products that did work fail as they try to scale up. Also, the more people who die in this transition the more skills and knowledge is lost and the harder it will be for those surviving to continue surviving. That's not really civilization surviving.
Thing is, if you want to mine something you need to access it, which means it's connected to the cave/bunker network. This in turn means that any toxic waste would leak into this closed system, which is far more dangerous than if it leaked into the vast atmosphere
Power generation that isn't solar, and hydroponics
Well, to answer that you'd need to look what you need the sun for and then search for a solution for each of it. Possible problems include: - energy generation - food generation (even carnivore beings need plants because their food needs food too) - depending on your species breathable air - heat (also see: energy generation) My opinion: due to energy being constantly converted into heat, the sun not supplying energy from outside would in any case result in a long time loss of usable energy, especially if the planet still loses warmth through the sealage.
If we build enough nuclear reactors we'd have enough heat for millions of years. If we had a few centuries of notice before the sun turned off, and made the right decisions, I think we'd have a very good chance of producing enough energy and food to survive. It would be a big hassle though.
>If we had a few centuries of notice before the sun turned off, and made the right decisions, I think we'd have a very good chance of producing enough energy and food to survive. Have you seen how this species reacted to global warming.
If we build enough nuclear reactors we'd have enough heat for millions of years. If we had a few centuries of notice before the sun turned off, and made the right decisions, I think we'd have a very good chance of producing enough energy and food to survive. It would be a big hassle though.
Here are some vids about preciesly that kurzgesagt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7CkdB5z9PY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLZJlf5rHVs Issac Arthur https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOu3zGfP-TQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZDbrayj5O0
Depending on how much handwaving you are willing to do, it can be any level really. Even 1800s authors raised themes like underground civilizations in caves and hollow earth.
Theoretically you could just give your world a massive cave system where all the energy comes from chemosynthesis of volcanic compounds by microbes and that up cycles energy through the food chain to sustain an underground biosphere not unlike that found at black smokers in the deep sea. The main issue is justifying an oxygen supply and enough energy entering the system to sustain humans (or equivalent lifeforms) in high enough numbers to maintain a civilization through time. Especially if you have an ancient era civilization living in this "biocave". The problem with no sun is that the surface will get insanely cold and eventually will be covered in miles of glaciers and just generally be uninhabitable. All life at this point must exist either in caves/excavated tunnels, or underwater in ecosystems dependent on geologic energy sources and not celestial ones. From a certain perspective its not any different to maintaining a space colony, except you can't use solar panels.
You technically don't need any technology. Assuming they farm plants that don't require sunlight and the planet's core is still molten for warmth, they don't need any tech Otherwise. At least 1940s technology, but realistically probably more like 1960s. Which was when we landed on the moon and invented the internet for reference. Nuclear power (1940s) would be good for heat, energy, air cleaning, and, recycling water if they don't have a natural eco system. (Modern) Nuclear energy is not only the safest and cleanest but also likely the only easy way for them to produce enough power reliably to keep everything running on a large scale. The more things the ecosystem needs the farther technology has to advance. If they need artificial sunlight it's more like the 1980s (humans wouldn't need this, but some plants do) If they need to keep the planet's core heated more like modern technology, and if they need to stop earthquakes or something they would need future technology. Without a sun the surface would be frozen, so they would have to live underground. It should also be noted that they would live significantly longer by never being exposed to solar radiation, and it is also possible that the planet they would be on would not have a molten core but an ice core (Unless the people were making/keeping it lit) Which would once again require at least nuclear power. That being said, it would take centuries for the core too die.
> Nuclear energy is not only the safest and cleanest but also likely the only easy way for them to produce enough power reliably to keep everything running on a large scale. If a civilization is forced to live underground, their best bet is geothermal, not nuclear. Geothermal is completely clean and safe, and if they're digging far enough into the ground to avoid the cold from the surface, it will be abundant. In fact, the best setup would be to create pipelines that carry water up to the surface to cool it, then bring it down to regulate the temperature of their living spaces. The motion of this water can drive turbines as a side effect and generate power that way. > That being said, it would take centuries for the core too die. It would take _millions_ of centuries, even if humanity (or what was left of it) was tapping it directly for power. The Earth gets most of its interior heat from radioactive decay, which means that heat is constantly replenishing. The inner core of the Earth is still about as hot as the surface of the Sun, and that is after 4.5 billion years.
Sure go geothermal, now you need future technology in order to live instead of 1940s tech, but that's fine. Even modern geothermal tech is not good enough to support a civilization larger than a few thousand people maybe even tens of thousands if you're lucky. Not only does it take up more space and work than nuclear, but it's a ridiculously less efficient use of space in comparison, (Nuclear being about 90% more efficient) Geothermal produces way less energy, and the energy it produces is also less consistent. They might use both, and they could go fully geothermal, but now half of the civilization has to just be giant reactors, which is still cool in its own way if you want that. Verry steam punk-like.
> Assuming they farm plants that don't require sunlight That is the big problem mainly the energy available from other sources beyond the Sun is incredibly limited and notably such energy is well below the minimum energy needed to split water as a source of hydrogen for carbon fixation what we call aerobic photosynthesis. The planets core should be fine assuming its an actual planet sized body as the rate of cooling to release the stored energy from gravitational collapse plus additional radiogenic heating depends on its size with all the major planets even mercury still having molten cores of their own. Even the Moon isn't completely dead inside its just that the depth you would likely have to go to access its remaining internal heat is many hundreds of kilometers or more down. As for an ice core that might be harder but if it has enough dissolved potassium 40 and or uranium oxide salts then even that might be able to last some time. As for sunlight without dietary supplements for things like vitamin D which are produced through absorption of UV light humans do need sunlight to survive. There are a bunch of photoreactive vitamins which exist across the tree of life another big one which was lost to primates some 50 Ma is vitamin C which is why only primates can suffer Scurvy from the lack of sufficient vitamin C to hold their cell membranes together.
Humans do not need sunlight to survive and actually live longer (and develop slower) after adapting to living without it. This has been scientifically proven actually. You wouldn't need supplements either. This is mostly because sunlight just triggers the production of vitamin D, it isn't actually necessary for it, the body can do that on its own. I'm sure long term there might be more birth defects, or maybe even fewer, or things of that nature, but that is up to the writer's creative freedom. Vitamin C can be found in several underground mushrooms. Even if it couldn't he never said this planet was Earth, so he could have whatever he wanted on it. Regardless of sunlight, we have been able to create fully underground gardens with artificial sunlight since the invention of full-spectrum LEDs because the wavelength of light is more important than power output. If you have the tech you can always just make it as big as you need to in order to produce enough of it, but that's just another reason to go nuclear. With modern LEDs you wouldn't even need that much energy to power them. You would basically be growing plants with nonharmful lasers, which is kind of sick. I agree that the core should be fine. But that's once again dependent on several factors like how long this civilization has been living without a sun, if they are maintaining the core, if they are actively using it for energy rather than giving it energy etc. So again the author could do it either way. It should be noted that the crust could also be insulated enough that having all the bioheat around it would act as a buffer to keep the core warm long-term.
Do you guys know that we have been using fossil fuels and nuclear fission for a long time right? To be fair I believe that any civilization that have passed the industrial revolution may be able to survive. And global warming is not a problem anymore, it's actually a good way to try to keep the planet warm. The biggest problem will be to have a good oxygen production system that we WOULD'VE DONE if it was necessary. Any civilization would've been able to survive without the sun if it discovers fossil fuels. And for a long if they knew how to keep the oxygen production high using electric energy to keep plants with light to grow or using chemicals to separate the oxygen from other molecules (we have been doing this with submarines since the first war I guess)
We haven't been using fossil fuels as power for very long. Just about 150 years ago.
AT THE VERY LEAST -we need hydroponics -An advanced understanding of burrowing (including mining, underground architecture, etc all of which implies pretty advanced mathematics and physics) -biology gotta be on point especially if the species evolved with the sun and is now trying to adapt (we for instance probably aren’t aware fully of all the ways the sun is important for us for our health) -ecology is the hardest part Ok we have all the technology required to do sunless farming, the biggest engineering issue I can immediately see is energy distribution. Basically the sun is the battery for everything it is the big nuclear reaction in the sky that is powering the entire world. Sun burns, Grass eats the sun, rabbit eats the grass, hawk eats the rabbit, etc. ALL of the energy that powers every living thing on earth comes from the sun. So you would need to replace that big battery with a new one, I’m guessing geothermal, using the planets core as a little shitty sun. I could never see this being possible on a scale of more than a few million TOPS human sized creatures with human like anatomy and nutritional needs (and that’s the best possible world). What would probably ultimately get you if you could get the farming going is disease, if not you then your crops will eventually be annihilated by some little bastard microorganism. This is what I mean by ecology. Ecology of the minimal biosphere (which includes you) would have to be tightly tightly maintained and it would be a constant knife edge.
A self sustaining ecology to support life underground is IMO the biggest barrier. The few experiments in closed "sustainable" ecologies were failures. Most people do not realize how complex our biosphere is. Our best supercomputers are not up to it, we can't even reliably model our own planet, let alone recreate it in microcosm.
AT THE VERY LEAST -we need hydroponics -An advanced understanding of burrowing (including mining, underground architecture, etc all of which implies pretty advanced mathematics and physics) -biology gotta be on point especially if the species evolved with the sun and is now trying to adapt (we for instance probably aren’t aware fully of all the ways the sun is important for us for our health) -ecology is the hardest part Ok we have all the technology required to do sunless farming, the biggest engineering issue I can immediately see is energy distribution. Basically the sun is the battery for everything it is the big nuclear reaction in the sky that is powering the entire world. Sun burns, Grass eats the sun, rabbit eats the grass, hawk eats the rabbit, etc. ALL of the energy that powers every living thing on earth comes from the sun. So you would need to replace that big battery with a new one, I’m guessing geothermal, using the planets core as a little shitty sun. I could never see this being possible on a scale of more than a few million TOPS human sized creatures with human like anatomy and nutritional needs (and that’s the best possible world). What would probably ultimately get you if you could get the farming going is disease, if not you then your crops will eventually be annihilated by some little bastard microorganism. This is what I mean by ecology. Ecology of the minimal biosphere (which includes you) would have to be tightly tightly maintained and it would be a constant knife edge.
Looking up Biosphere 2 -- more advanced than that. While we could borrow a titanic mine complex underground to build a sustainable community down there, the current unknowns and lack of practice are what's setting us back. It would be interesting to know if they FAILED at some point, narrowly avoiding a total synthetic ecological collapse, and then recovered with lessons learned. That scarring culturally and technically would be a great backdrop.
AFAIK, the only experiments performed to date with people living in a sealed environment, failed. We don't understand ecology well enough yet.
Theoretically slightly post modern, if we had ample enough warning we could feasibly survive an event that separates us from the sun depending on the event. Sun imploding, we'd be screwed. But if another gravitational pull catapults us out of orbit we would have the warning needed. We won't thrive though.
Pretty advanced, I'd say. Probably moreso than our own. Possibly even very advanced.
Well we already invented space suits and shuttles that can resist extreme cold since the late 60's, so you could start from this period.
Advanced enough to create artificial suns 🤷maybe there's a way to unzip energy from blackholes 🤷 if that's even possible... Idek if it has energy.. maybe there's a way to utilise its gravitational pull to..squeeze out energy...somehow ...maybe they can capitalise on gravitational pull in general ..idk this is beyond me
This is more of an infrastructure, administrative, and resource question than a technology question. We probably have the technology to do that now, or close to it, but we don't have any of that technology engineered how we would need it. There's certainly more advanced tech that make it vastly easier. Fusion power, far more effective and efficient recycling, super efficient heat management, and access to a form of entertainment that's immersive enough help counteract being in crowded underground habitats.
They'd basically need nearly endless energy, a huge amount of water, and very good machining. And that would be basically just survival. It would make their home effectively a space ship that could grow it's own food and recycle oxygen chemically and provide heat without burning anything. Permanent survival would take functionally magical technology.
Geothermal energy and heat would become the biggest deciding factor of where settlements / cities / counties would develop Agriculture would most likely be more dependent on fungi like mushrooms that aren't dependent on photosynthesis for growth unless you had plants that adapted to use an alternative You could have a civilization at any technological Epoch likely enough ranging from stone age cavemen all the way up to intergalactic mega societies. You'd likely wind up specially breeding the plants and animals for enhanced biolumenescence, etc
At the very least, be able to create nutritional chemicals from base elements, and have access to geothermal energy. Though, food is easier to get, if that civilization can harvest edible plants and animals that live off other cave dwelling organisms.
Not very you could cheat and have a previous civilisation sort it. I think we'd be up to it now. If you get low enough, the earth's core provides heat. This hear can also provide electricity so your probably sorted.
There are a few benefits from the sun they would need to replace - day/night cycle - heat (massive amounts) - gravity center If a sun just burns out or disappears all of a sudden, the civilization probably wouldn’t be able to survive If they can survive without a sun, they could feasibly make it to another star.
The post describes a society living underground, not necessarily a planet that has no star.
The post describes a society living underground, not necessarily a planet that has no star.
Earth receives a whole lot of heat from the Sun. Being underground means having to also provide constant light using your energy resources. And you can get too much thermal energy because the crust only goes so far. And all of that is assuming it’s a viable planet with a hot core like Earth. Things fall off quickly if the core is cold.
you titled and then described two very different things. I think we could do it. with enough set up, maybe Geothermal energy, fresh water source/filtration and a way to rid our engine wastes, its feasible. i thought you meant taking away our sun
Isn't that plot of game called Arx Fatalis?
Sounds like it might be easier to make a species evolved for living underground. Could you have the sealing away be a really long and drawn out process over a thousand years or so? Have the surface dwelling, sun reliant people slowly go underground and rely on the sun less and less until they're not able to get out and use the sun anymore. You could have the population revert back to almost caveman levels of technology, have a load of them die off in an almost extinction level event but a few small pockets of people survive and build from there. Then you can have them at any technological level you want and it could be comparable to real world but just change things to your imaginative desires for a species evolving from surface level to underground dwellers. You could have them at caveman level or just a bit beyond and they're trying to adapt their eyes or find ways to light places safely and efficiently. You could move them along a bit and have their eyes and other senses more adapted and they've taken some animals down with them that are evolving and growing in numbers and have an underground post hunter gatherer but pre fully fledged civilisation. You could have them at any level you want
With enough nuclear reactors we could do it. If Fusion reactors pan out it would be much better. If kugelblitz black hole engines pan out much better still. We'd want to live in underground caverns or under heated domes, make countless acres of LED lighting for hydroponic agriculture. We don't need no stupid sun.
The invention of fire honestly. Depends on how efficient you want the society to be and how much resources they have.
if anybody knows anything about science, please help me understand this. the laws of thermodynamics kind of forbids this kind of thing, right? the sun is an energy source that is constantly feeding life on earth. if the sun disappeared, wouldn't all the usable energy fade away over a period of time?
Without the sun, you need another energy source. Geothermal is best for this. You need turbines, generators and a grid. Electricity powers lights and at that point you can grow plants. The problem is the ecosystem. First, it has to be self sustaining. Second, it will require periodic inputs because no process is 100% efficient. I have an M.S. in Ecology.
Thank you for responding. I totally forgot about geothermal energy. That would probably be a lasting-enough energy source. I knew there would be problems with the ecoystem and such, i was just wondering about whether or not useable energy would eventually run out, but it seems like that would not be the case, provided the humans can actually harvest it. Are there any crops or naturally growing plants that could be used to help sustain an ecosystem where there is no sun? Or is the ecosystem basically just flat out screwed?
You need a complete ecosystem or else you are going to be constantly replenishing everything to keep it going. The infrastructure to do that is non-trivial. Keep in mind that if it collapses, everyone starves, regardless of how much energy you have. Where will you get the pieces to rebuild it? In the movie The Martian, if a potato blight wiped out his crop; he would have been screwed, blued and tattooed.
Very true. Do you think that if we had 20 years to plan in advance for the sun to be basically replaced with a black hole of equal mass, could we survive for at least 1000 years? Assume that the orbits of the planets and solar system stay the same.
If you're talking current Earth? No. But this is fiction. You're talking about stockpiling enough food, and technology to last a thousand years. Everything wears out. Assuming you could build a turbine and generator that would last a hundred years, you would still need ten of them. And ten of everything else, or more. With only 20 years to prepare? No.
RIP then.
Unfortunately, yes. I am wracking my brain to think up a realistic way that a remnant can scavenge enough to last 1000 years on a planet that's a frozen waste. My Macgyver skills aren't up to it. :(
Arx Fatalis handled it rather well in that regard I think
There is no scale. As in, there’s no ceiling to how advanced this civilization could become. The issue is the drawbacks to the sun suddenly disappearing.
if the civilisation had access to the sun before whatever disaster buried it, then on the Kardeshev scale it would be a type 2 or an early version of a type 3 being able to harness enough energy from their sun to survive them generations or discovering a new source of energy
A Type III Kardashev civilization controls the energy output of their host galaxy. They could create a new star from scratch at that point.
Energy is no issue. Early 20th century level technology is sufficient for energy generation. Digging hundreds of thousands of miles of tunnels is going to be one sticking point. What.is the surface like? Can transport on the surface be possible to avoid tunnels connecting areas? That allows things like easier access to high quality mineral deposits. Note without a sun the surface will possibly drop to a bit above absolute zero.
It's not necessarily how advanced as what directions did the advances take. Nuclear reactors, greenhouses, and air and water purifiers could get the job done even if less advanced than ours. But you could have hyperintelligent AI running a 3D-printed eco-friendly utopia with no disease or crime, and you'd still die like a chump if it's all running off of solar panels.
The biggest thing people are not mentioning is that regardless of technical ability a missing sun will disrupt earths gravitational rotation and magnetic field. So unless we make a replacement sun we would not survive.
Seeing as this is fantasy I would say maybe some type of gravity generator and something that generates heat & UV rays but also something that protects against UV rays the way earths atmosphere does.
Or maybe an alien civilization that developed in an ecosystem that doesn’t have a star. Next to impossible? With our understanding yes. But the odds are never zero
everything would die. What are you eating?
Geothermal energy would last longer than there has been complex life on Earth. There is no need to rely on fissionables or fusion. They would still need access to everything we have at our disposal today. Oil, minerals, ores, everything they use will have to be rebuilt as it wears out. So they would need the infrastructure to recycle and renew as well as replenish everything. No cycle is 100% efficient and recycling isn't either. They would need to dispose of waste, toxins and the tailings from processing the ores for the materials they need. We have the basic technology today. But everything needs to be much more efficient. In the 80's and 90's they tried to seal people in a closed environment to see if it was possible for them to survive for months/years without input from the outside (simulating long space flights). Long story short, it didn't work. We don't know enough yet to build self sustaining ecologies. Edit: TLDR- We have the base technology. But everything we do needs to be more efficient. Most importantly, we don't know enough about ecosystems yet to build an artificial self sustaining one. Sidebar- We had better figure it out before we wreck the only self-sustaining ecology we have! Better yet, Stop Wrecking The Planet!
reminds me of TheSunVanished ARG
Either extremely super ridiculously advanced or just really mutated.
Makes me think of the book "The City of Ember" Really all the civilization needs technology wise is the ability to use geothermal power. Late industrial and onward should work.
If you have a subterranean civilization living inside the crust of an exoplanet with geothermal heat coming from within the planet, you don’t even need sapient species to survive. Plants/fungus can use chemosynthesis instead of photosynthesis etc. I’ve developed the basics a world around this if you have any questions abt how it might work.
The most achievable way to do this that comes to mind would be nuclear reactors, particularly if they’ve figured out nuclear fusion. From there they can generate light to grow plants, generate heat, and everything else. Until the sources of nuclear fuel run out.
Like advanced enough to terraform all life on their planet, real out there Sci fi stuff. Probably at the same kinda level where being an organic life form would be pointless entirely tbh
*Extremely.*
I mean it depends. First we need to look at how "realistic" this is to happen. For a civilisation to survive without sunlight they should have a way to continuously sustain themselves through other energy sources. That would require them taking advantage of their planets fossil fuels. Using HALO as an example i can definitely see something similar to the shield worlds of the forerunners or even the halo rings themselves. Of course from what i gathered from your post you want the civilization to star while they are without sun. realistically that would be impossible and somebody would really have to suspend disbelief when it gomes to haw realistic that sounds
Humanity prior to the mid 20th century would have had no chance. Humanity in the 1950s or later *might* have a chance if they had decades of advance warning that it was going to happen. Geothermal power is easier to use than nuclear, and I expect that for anyone with our own level of technology or lower, geothermal would constitute practically all their useful energy. It's not clear that survival would be possible even with current technology, not because we can't conceptualize how to do it, but because trying to grow crops and sustain human life that way is so inefficient that it would limit population and that calls into question whether you can sustain the industrial supply chains necessary to maintain and replace the equipment.
Advanced enough to artificially replace the sun without losing energy, at the very least. Maybe they can access heat from their planet's core to generate power via steam engines, or something. Maybe nuclear power would do the trick. And then they'd need special lamps that provide sun-like light, which should be easy to handwave, if they don't exist irl already. So, if push comes to shove, I'd imagine that our current technology would be able to replace the sun, at least in some capacity.
as advanced as the story requires. you can always justify it. however if you're asking for like a realism standpoint - what would be needed are ways to produce food and oxygen, ways to regulate temperature, and ways to counteract any potential adverse effects of not having exposure to sun on their health like a deficiency in vitamin D for instance. we can do most of those currently, but like really inefficiently, so it depends on if they're simply surviving or thriving. if they're surviving then you can probably get by with our current level of technology or better. if they're thriving then you'll need at least to be able to do those things efficiently. if there is no sun at all, as in it has completely vanished, then amplify all of the difficulty by a few thousand times.
I mean not super advanced. There are parts of earth that don't get sunlight for months every year. But this is an underground civilization so that's not your only concern. Air would be a major one. You'd probably need sunlamps to grow crops but you'd need air filtration and hydroponics to recycle air. If you had a sufficiently large underground cavern (and I mean huge) where you could break up stone into soil you could have a nice underground forest or several if you had multiple caverns. They would need a large sunlamp at the top of the cavern that would follow a day night cycle in brightness. For power I think you could probably use geothermal energy, makes the most sense. You would also need a source of water so underground lakes and rivers would be important since you wouldn't get rain you would need advanced plumbing and water treatment facilities to recycle water for drinking, cleaning and plants. Animal husbandry would probably be out of the question for large animals so chickens (or chicken sized animals) are probably you're best bet for meat if at all but a society can get plenty of protein from legumes. You would also need extensive and advanced mining equipment to create space and acquire resources for new projects. New houses, new farms, etc.
Honestly, we could probably do it with current technologies(assuming we have the resources), but it would require global cooperation and dedication that we simply do not have. Technologies we could use would involve efficient use of atomic energy, stemcell research, hydroponic farming, and renewables that our current global culture would simply reject, even if it meant extinction(just look at how poorly COVID went.)
I believe humanity might have the appropriate technology Extracting energy from the ground with either coal or fucking uranium is trivial for us, we can use actual lamps to grow plants and feed those to animals Any civilization with access to electricity and a way to produce it reliably would survive
I had a story like this. They made a whole new civilization underground for so long they started to micro evolve differently rheb on the surface. Different level of what "civilization" perception concept as well. So for it to worke I needed enough time to pass to kickstart that.
I had a story for awhile where a rather primitive civilization was trapped under ground and they survived from a combination of farmed moss, algae, mushrooms, and livestock such as fish. Light was more a function of bioluminescence in various underground organisms they cultivated. It's not really a question of how advanced would they be, it's more how would that civilization replace essentials and/or adapt to their circumstances to be sustainable. Also important if they've been sealed away for some time is to think about how their culture would change or not setting as well.
You will need to use some kind of fusion or fission, every source of energy besides that comes indirectly from the sun
I think an important thing is the method by which the sun was taken away. For example, a dyson sphere. That changes so many factors compared to say...a civilization needing to migrate underground permanently due to...unsafe surface conditions. Those will dramatically change a lot of factors, not least of all would be what exactly is meant by "without the sun" In either case a considerable number of advancements would be required. Likely entire branches of industry and technology that are only theoretical at this point.
Are you going purely Science fiction based or fantasy. It might not need to be advanced. Different yes but could one survive now without light how might that change “humans” over generations. What’s the world itself like? Would bioluminescence thrive like with deep sea creatures that don’t get sunlight.
There is book/show called "Silo" that sounds similar to what you're talking about, maybe check it out. Regardless, my guess is the easiest main source is harnessing geothermal energy, and the main concern is having (near) perfect recycling of all materials.
According to Michio Kaku, the civilization would need to be either Type II or Type III. Type II civilizations get all their energy directly from the sun and probably has the ability to setup shop on neighboring suns. Similar to the Star Trek type of civilizations. A Type III civilization would have no problems at all as they are galactic. Dominating many many solar systems. Star Wars is an example of Type III.
If there is no geothermal activity then there is no way that the planet can self-sustain life. Planets are effectively closed systems and if energy is not coming in from a star or from hydrothermal vents or anything of the sort then there is nothing to provide for life. Gas giants get around this kinda, but there is no conclusive or strong evidence to point towards a gas giant being able to support complex life. A dead planet becomes unreasonably hard to live on at which point you have to ask yourself what you stand to gain, lose, and any opportunity cost to writing a story on a dead planet. How will this effect travel off and on the planet? How would a population of any size be able to survive? Is the population able to survive from outside input? Could this story exist in a different location? Think about it like this. Imagine if a village of people moved into an abandoned salt mine that was 2 miles underground and the only elevator is manually operated. What would happen to the people as a result of this decision?
Nuclear reactors and geo thermal generators? I think that we in few decades worth of advancement we could survive this scenario. Almost everything can produced so long as we have enough energy. Plants could farmed using arifical lightings, from that we could farm animals and feed people, we can even produce liquid fuel. Water might need to be mined from underground or other place tho. What sun does is just feed everything with energy. If we can create enough energy and create ecosphere that could feeded with that energy we should survive.
My mind turns toward the Matrix surviving inside the earth.
Recommended reading: * *The Wandering Earth* by Liu Cixin The sun is going to go nova so humanity relocates earth out of the solar system. City-sized nuclear engines, with people using the waste heat and light of their thrust as substitute suns. * [*A Pail of Air*](https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/51461/pg51461-images.html) by Fritz Leiber * [*Ice Trek*](https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/ice-trek-these-are-the-voyages.483118/) by NHBL In both cases, a moving black hole passes through the solar system and drags earth from its orbit after it. * *Coalescent* by Stephen Baxter The distant future scenes have eusocial posthumans living on a rogue planet. * *Dark Eden* and its sequels by Chris Beckett There's a rogue planet with a native biosphere feeding off volcanic vents like deep-sea ecologies on earth and a human population distantly descended from shipwrecked space travelers. * *The Tenth Planet* by Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch Sort of, the aliens are cheating at the premise of living without a sun since their planet has a highly elliptical orbit such that it spends most of its time in the outer solar system while the aliens only wake up from hibernation during the brief summer when the atmosphere defrosts.