Could you build a city in an underground cave?

Fantasy and sci - fi are replete with hole-and-corner city : Ember , Zion , Menzoberranzan , Khazad - dûm and more . But are there any caves on Earth that are expectant enough to really contain a real , functional metropolis ?

Illustration viaObsidian Portal .

Earth ’s incrustation is riddled with massive underground space . There are so many that humans will in all probability never find them all , even though we ’re constantly finding newfangled ones . In aggregate , there ’s sure as shooting enough space underground to house a serious chunk of the human population . But can we find a single space large enough to domiciliate a respectable city ?

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The world ’s largest known cave system is Mammoth Cave in Kentucky . The explore and surveyed part of the organisation bring up to more than 300 naut mi of caves . The expectant exclusive chamber within Mammoth Cave is Chief Temple , 150 thousand x 100 m x 40 m high . That ’s impressive ( and I extremely recommend you make a misstep to Mammoth Cave some sidereal day ) , but it ’s nowhere near the largest chamber in the world .

Within a cave called Gua Nasib Bagus on the island of Borneo is Sarawak Chamber . It ’s 700 m foresightful , 400 m wide and 70 meter gamey . When it was discovered in 1981 , the explorers had no concept of how heavy it was , because their light could n’t strive far enough to find the wall . Even today , after the bedchamber has been measured by lasers , there are few undecomposed pic of it because it ’s just too huge and morose .

Then there ’s Hang Son Doong . This cave in the jungle of Vietnam extends more than two miles . It is n’t a single chamber like Sarawak , and it ’s manifestly not as extensive as Mammoth Cave , but over the course of that two miles , Hang Son Doongencompasses a monumental volume , 100 m wide in places and 200 m high . It ’s so huge that , beneath massive 100 m fanlight , it contains entire underground jungles nutrify by sunlight glimmering down from the surface .

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Now we have some mind of how great caves can get , so lease ’s do some reckoning on city size of it and population density . Sarawak Chamber is only 0.28 km2 ( really less because it has an irregular shape ) . Hang Son Doong , if we feign ideal uniform dimensions ( which is certainly does not have ) is somewhere around 0.4 km2 .

The most densely populated metropolis in the worldly concern , like Mumbai and Chennai , achieve population density of 20,000 per straight km . With its height of 200 m , Hang Son Doong would not be able-bodied to fit any of the tallest 300 skyscrapers in the world , a considerable blow . Even if we assume that the cave could somehow wangle a population density comparable to Mumbai , that still only amounts to 8,000 citizenry . Not precisely a bustling urban snapper . Then again , 8,000 people living in a unmarried giant cave would still be passably awing .

How does this liken to fictional surreptitious metropolis ? Sion from the Matrix series held upwards of 250,000 people , but it was actually a serial publication of large cavern . Menzoberranzan , a drow city within D&D ’s Forgotten Realms campaign stage setting , is home to over 30,000 individual ( both dark pixy and slaves ) , and it ’s arrest within a unmarried chamber in the Underdark that‘s roughly 4 km2 in sphere . Zion is plausible give that the Machines likely change or retrace the caverns to house the homo , and Menzoberranzan maintains a logical level of population denseness , but is a far enceinte bedchamber than any cave on Earth .

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