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Comment by blip54321 | Hacker News Reader

I'm really not sold on the costs of digging down being all that high, long-term.

I'm 100% sold on it being expensive today, but I can come up with ways to drive them /way/ down with automation. The critical thing is:

1) You don't need materials.

2) You don't need to transport anything other than a digger

I agree it's hard, like engineering a CPU was hard, but I think Elon's got the right idea with the Boring Company. It's not /fundamentally/ expensive. Fundamentally, building in-place with available materials should, some day, be cheap.

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> 1) You don't need materials.

In this context, you do. You need material structural stability (which is nontrivial, even for partially bermed structures; digging down further is a different story too) and for human habitation. Even above-ground you see retaining walls everywhere in places like New England because dirt likes to move. Worse, you'll need relatively expensive materials, and ones that are OK with contact with a lot of moisture. Maybe plastics can be the answer to some degree, if ones that are structurally sound and not tasty to microorganisms can be employed en masse, but the default answer is probably steel, and that won't last forever (or even all that long).

Beyond that? People aren't generally high on dirt walls and floors. And smoothing stone to presentation levels in-place, ensuring regularity, etc. is not a trivial task.

It could be done, don't get me wrong. But we have wear and decay problems above the surface that probably pale in comparison.

I feel like the materials are whatever is found on site.

That may mean that a machine may need to be able to sort, smelt, sinter, form, ram, engrave, or otherwise process whatever it found on-site.

That's definitely non-trivial, but in the sense of making a CPU with millions of transistors, and not in the sense of Mt. Rushmore. The R&D costs will be astronomical, but there isn't much there which is /fundamentally/ expensive, at least so long as you're not going to deep.

I can describe a number of beachheads and early markets -- places where you don't need all of that at one, or ultralow costs. I think the Boring Company has a decent one.

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