Humans Could Survive Underground, but It Would Take a Lot More Than Shovels

Trevor Weathermill sits with his son Brett while his wife prepares food in the kitchen March 6, 1989 in Coober Pedy, Austrailia. Photo: Dirck Halstead/Liaison/Getty Images

By Eleanor Cummins

At the Whitney Museum of Modern Art, you can stand under a boxy old TV, mounted on the wall just above eyesight, and watch the pixelated clouds from Mario Kart slowly blow across the screen. Stripped of their context in the larger Nintendo game world, Super Mario Clouds, 2002, by multimedia artist Cory Arcangel, the artificial sky feels uncanny: just familiar enough the difference threatens to drive you insane.

While tracking the slow creep of Arcangel’s creation, I wondered: If rising sea levels, air pollution, and temperatures one day push humanity underground, is this all we’ll have to remember the sky?

Humans have lived underground for millions of years, but only in fits and starts. Our cave-painting ancestors left behind handprints and hunting scenes. In Tunisia, many people still live in what the The Atlantic calls “crater-like homes,” with rooms built into the Earth, and a central circular patio open to the sky. And in the “dugout” village of Coober Pedy, Australia, locals pray in a subterranean cathedral and visitors sleep in sediment-streaked hotel rooms.

Underground development continues to this day. Many northern cities maintain underground tunnels, some so elaborate as to be christened “shadow cities,”, in…