h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: Inexpensive Housing - A26646023
Author: Tumsup - U8423395

This seems clear enough to me but every writer needs an editor

"The only way out is up."

What about 'down'?

Down is certainly possible but that involves digging. Where would you put the dirt?

There's a claustrophobia problem. We need windows to look out of though big screen tellys might solve that.

I visited the Tucson art gallery when I was in Arizona a few years ago. I had a great deal of trouble finding the place. Although I was following directions, I kept walking past a small unimpressive building before realizing that that was it. It felt like stepping through the door of the Tardis. It's many times bigger on the inside than the outside.
Tucson is in the middle of the desert so energy costs for heating and cooling are very high in a normal building. The architect of the art gallery brilliantly solved that problem by going straight down. Heating and cooling costs are minimized that way. There's little rain and so little ground water that they don't have the pumping costs that an underground building would normally have.
Also, being an art gallery, you're not there to look out the windows anyway.

Another problem with living underground. In the future, we would have that long climb every night to the surface to get Eloi to snack on.

I hadn't thought about where the dirt would go. Over the top of eroding landfill sites? Into those big holes that we end up with once they've finished digging things out of the earth?

There are some good places built into the earth. Hockerton is sort of half built into a hill, although I think it's a 'fake' hill. http://www.hockertonhousingproject.org.uk/

There are a lot of insulating properties in the earth (as you've mentioned), so that would help with affordable housing as it would cut down on bills. I'm not sure whether I'd like living without windows, or a garden. But if I was in a flat, I still wouldn't have a garden. Or be able to see anything helpful out of a window.

Can't we have underground lifts for when we're peckish?

The first settlers to the Canadian prairie dug down and built what walls they had out of sod. There was essentially no wood for building or for fires so they dug down to escape the -50 C temps in the winter. They also lived with their animals so that kept them warm.

Can you imagine what that smelled like or what a pleasure the first bath in spring felt like?

I think a lot of people lived with their animals when it was cold. You also get used to the smell.

Jared Diamond in his book Guns, Germs and Steel mentions that we got most of our common diseases from our farm animals. Indiginous people in the Americas didn't have farm animals so had not developed resistance to these diseases. Thus Germs in the title.

What's the go with this? Could be a great EG Entry.

I'm lately completely rethinking this. I've started a model which has helped me visualize it in more detail.

For instance, I was stumped on the problem of how to get the apartments into place. They have to be built on the ground so I've been stuck with the necessity of some kind of crane. That violates the rule that I set at the outset which was to avoid heavy equipment.

The solution is to begin with a square open frame with the build shop on the bottom and a roof that folds to allow the apartment to be hoisted vertically up the centre of the building and over the top to be fixed into place.

In a month or two I should have some pictures to post (I understand that one can do that now on this site) so that will help to describe it.

I'm also going to remove the pessimistic bit at the end. I was at the bottom of the pole (as in bi-polar) when I wrote that.

Sounds like you have a plan, good luck with keeping it in motion, keep us paged

Thanks, Matt, for the encouragement, it helps a lot.

Are you still working on this, Tumsup?

I am indeed. I'm currently bogged down in the usual tools to make tools to make tools.

It started with making a display. A plywood board looks nothing like a landscape so I thought about the usual way of representing land. Papier mache. I have some difficulty with doing things the usual way so I departed from there.

High density foam is just the thing except you can't actually carve it. It doesn't yield to knives and the hot wire method doesn't yield to anything realistic looking. I made a number of hot wire thingys and am now the expert on making things that look like they're made with hot wire thingys. Like ice floes. If you use blue foam and freeform hot wire thingys, you can make some impressionistic looking ice floes.

I tried an electric side grinder with a wire brush. It makes a perfectly good tool to represent about any shape in blue foam. The foam that is removed is reduced to a cloud of small blue particles. Electrically charged particles that seek to stick to whatever they can find. They are partcularly fond of eyeballs and nostrils.

In my shop I have been keeping an electric broom which is like a small hoover on a stick. I got rid of the stick and added a cutter to the fan motor so now I can carve foam without the snow storm.

I now have a landscape with a building site. There's even a road leading to it.

All the details are worked out. I can now show how to build a building to house a limitless number of people using no tools or material larger than a single person can carry.

Which I will do as soon as I have finished making the best ever trailer for my motorbike.

I'd like to propose Back to Entry as the author has ed.

<BB<

Well I'm not dead yet but my life has taken a strange turn so I haven't been back to HooToo for a while.
I have some pictures of the model that I'm making though I haven't done any work on that in a couple of years.

Well, if you're back, then please feel free to continue to work on this and re-submit it to Peer Review.

<BB<

I'll probably just start over and re-write the whole thing. For one thing it has lately occurred to me that the way that the building grows is not so much like a tree as like a coral. The individual animals in a coral reef absorb minerals from sea water then secrete them is solid form under their butts. The whole aggregate expands up and out increasing the number of animals with no limit to size.
The building grows something like that.