Would You Want to Live Underground?

I want to depart for today from India in my blog for a brief moment. In my travels I’ve hit two of four BRIC countries already and am thinking that I may try to hit a third (Brazil) as well, though no plans have been made. But I never considered the “R” in that acronym despite its importance as a world power. That was not for lack of interest in the Russian culture or history (on the contrary, I would relish the opportunity to visit St. Petersburg, Moscow, or the Great Gate of Kiev so immortalized in classical music, or rather where they were meant to be. I was also very jealous of a fellow traveler I met who had taken a trip across the trans-Siberian railway). No, in fact my lack of interest in Russia was merely that I had not found a viable eco-city site to study. Well I stumbled today across this article on a plan unveiled in November of last year to build a subterranean Eco-City in an abandoned coal mine under the ice in Siberia. The article doesn’t give a lot of detail, but it does offer an interesting concept.

The article says that they will pipe sunlight into the development from the surface (assuming the pipes are free from snow), but it still makes me question whether that is a good way to live. I don’t know that I personally would want to live underground, void of natural light, air, and views for my life, no matter how much science fiction has glorified or predicted the necessity of the idea. However, on the other hand, in a place like Siberia where heating is vastly important to living, burying the civilization in the relatively warmer ground where it is not affected by the weather patterns outside would make it easier to efficiently heat the civilization on a large scale. Furthermore, with the number of abandoned mines worldwide, this could provide a model for the future in several nations. I guess there are tradeoffs in every situation, but to me the overarching question is simply “Would you want to live underground?”