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What could be a believable reason for technologically advanced underground people to not notice the end of surface war for hundreds of years? Question
Consider the following scenario:
We are in a far future. Technology has advanced quite a bit.
A large, devastating global war has broken out. One faction decides to hide from that war underground; thanks to their technology they can create an autonomous society that's completely separated from the above-ground societies. There still exist a few connections to the outside world, but those are well hidden from the outside, and have protection technology to keep surface people out who might accidentally discover those.
The war has now ended hundreds of years ago, and the people on the surface have lost all advanced technology. However for some reason the underground people didn't notice the end of the war, and still believe it is going on.
My question now is: What could be a believable reason that those underground people, who never lost their advanced technology, would not notice the end of the war for hundreds of years, and nobody ever went to the surface to look, despite the entrances still existing and being usable?
I don't think that anyone can really answer that without first answering how they expected to know in the first place. …
2mo ago
The war was devastating but nobody thought it would be so bad they'd nuke all advanced technology from their memory. Eve …
2mo ago
I've read one novel with a similar setting where the answer was: a small number in the government know the truth, but th …
2mo ago
They can only see a cut-out of the reality Depending on their technological capabilities underground people might hav …
2mo ago
An alternative Maybe they did notice the war had ended, but still chose not to leave the safety of their underground so …
2mo ago
Philip K. Dick would posit[^the-defenders] that the surface war is all done by robots. The robots lie about what is happ …
2mo ago
The underground society may be technologically advanced, but they are still humans, and humans have a tendency to create …
2mo ago
Vault-Net has control It was considered at some point to install an AI that would help the underground people to have …
2mo ago
If they are acting rationally, it's not possible. It is only logical for them to monitor the progress of the situation t …
2mo ago
First, this scenario is highly implausible. Surely the people that went underground intended to pop up again once the w …
2mo ago
They lost the key The outside gate was rather "low tech" like a vault door. Then over time need arised to add layers …
2mo ago
Undergrounds is a garden of Eden The people undergrounds love to live there. They have all they need and have not dev …
2mo ago
12 answers
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First, this scenario is highly implausible. Surely the people that went underground intended to pop up again once the war was over. That means they created some means to monitor the situation on the ground so that they'd know when that was.
However, if you insist, you might be able to hand-wave something about they only have radiation monitors left on the surface. Those show continuing radiation. The war may be over, but it might be another few 100 years before the radiation levels get back to habitable levels. The people underground see the high radiation levels and stay underground.
This could be made a little more plausible (still rather implausible overall) by the pure chance of their location being used as a waste storage area, like what Yucca Mountain was originally planned to be. However, this was during a war, and there wasn't much careful planning nor execution. Some of the containment vessels break over the hundreds of years exposed to the elements, due to their hasty (possibly deliberately fraudulent by the contractor) construction in a war zone. These occasional breakages cause spikes in the monitored radiation levels, leaving the people underground to think that hostile activity is still going on.
Again, this is still quite implausible. Surely those underground would have geophones and seismometers, and can see when and where there are nuclear blasts within a large radius, possibly over the whole earth. They would see that the radiation spikes don't correlate to any such activity.
In short, you can handwave a few scenarios, but I don't think any of them will be convincing that the underground people truly forgot. Even getting fooled by the signals they do see is implausible enough.
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The war was devastating but nobody thought it would be so bad they'd nuke all advanced technology from their memory. Even those who'd seen it happen couldn't believe their eyes, and those born after the war wouldn't believe their fathers.
The entrances are hidden... but that was not the original plan. Rather it is the inevitable consequence of the flow of time. Huge metal hatches eventually got covered in a layer of dirt, and then trees, and then wildlife. And yet they hold firm. The few extrusions to the surface that are still in operation are fully automated. And of course, none of them have any cameras above ground.
Originally the plan was to hunker down behind well-guarded doors, and since they rightfully thought so well of their defenses, they decided to keep their doors clearly visible to any stragglers that might want to join them. They even set up a beacon by each door, and a way to notify the guardsmen of their arrival remotely. All you needed was a smartphone with a Mid-range Field Communication.
That was centuries ago. The doors are now covered with dirt, and anyone who even knew MFC was a thing is now dead. Which the depth dwellers absolutely do not know. What they do know is that the beacons are operational, and have received no reply since the late XX00s. What most depth dwellers know is what they heard in the history lessons, minus what they gleefully forgot five seconds after the final exam.
As to the entrances being usable, it's complicated. A common citizen - if they even know where the elevator is - is told by a beefy looking official that the surface is off-limits due to the potential risk from the surface, which the government is keeping a close eye on. Beefy looking officials don't know much more. Any access to surface needs lots of paperwork and a very good reason. Somebody ringing a doorbell would justify populating the main security post and swinging out the big hatch. A civillian being unsure if just maybe actually we could open the surface already does not. And as far as they too do know, it is the government's duty to keep track of the status of what's aboveground. And the government, well... periodically releases a PSA that the entrances are still operational and closely monitored (in that the MFC receivers report status operational and that somebody's set up to receive a ping in case the receivers do receive a signal) and there has been 1 security incident (somebody scraping the big metal hatch while digging) last year.
Actually monitoring more than just the doorbells would require a mission to the surface... and nobody wants the PR disaster if a tech gets killed while installing an above ground camera, because of the war that's (maybe) going on. We do have thought of sending a drone a couple of years after the Hunkering, but the security protocols built into these doors prevent us from opening them without anyone being in the security airlock or somebody calling in from the surface and getting authorized. So yeah... no mission to the surface for the foreseeable future, tell the citizens that there's still war outside, and definitely kick out that journalist before anyone learns we don't actually know anything.
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I don't think that anyone can really answer that without first answering how they expected to know in the first place. Did they plan to monitor the outside world through some technological means? Did they plan to have someone jump out into a potential war-zone with who-knows-what new environmental hazards every few years and get their news from the first one to return safely? Did they expect a phone call?
That sounds flippant, but consider what our knowledge of various wars would look like if only communications got cut. For a lot of us, it'd probably take an active effort to find out what's happening more than a short drive away, and we (presumably) don't live several generations down in a forgotten bunker.
The short answer to the question, I think, is just that whatever system that they had in place to find out about the end of the war failed, because most conventional systems will inevitably fail for all sorts of reasons. The surveillance system didn't survive the war or a fuse burned out. The people who went topside to check got arrested for public indecency, got eaten by mutant kittens, or ran off. There's nothing outside to connect to for news.
And it might also matter what kind of war this was. It's a lot easier to notice the end of constant carpet-bombing than biological warfare, for example. In the former case, you might need a reason for continued shaking that they didn't account for.
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They can only see a cut-out of the reality
Depending on their technological capabilities underground people might have something like periscopes, cameras or drones available to take a "peek" on the overground world (they could also have antennas for receiving radio signals, though).
Maybe they have the unlucky situation to live in a remote area that was "green" once but during/after the war turned into an uninhabitable desert. Overground societies developing again decided to declare that desert a "no-go-zone" not knowing about the underground people.
If needed this can be pushed to the extremes like: One continent is thriving again, but they are on the continent that did not. So the "world" looks still devastated to them.
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I've read one novel with a similar setting where the answer was: a small number in the government know the truth, but they intentionally deceive everyone else in order to retain power. Anyone who wants to go outside is given a protective suit and sent into exile, but the suit is sabotaged and kills them pretty soon after leaving.
Spoiler! The novel in question:
Wool, by Hugh Howey.
An alternative
Maybe they did notice the war had ended, but still chose not to leave the safety of their underground society. Over time, this alternative reason for staying could drift into the situation you picture, where most of the society is unaware that returning to the surface is a possibility.
Fashion and prejudice
In our world, throughout history, each generation has complained about the next. It only takes a decade or two for many people to start making criticisms of the changes that have occurred, even those changes that are little more than fashion.
How many of these have you heard?
People today don't:
- Recognise good music.
- Know how to dress.
- Respect their elders.
None of these things are unique to recent generations. People have been saying similar things for thousands of years. Fashion is part of human instinct, and groups of humans have always settled on arbitrary patterns of behaviour, treating those who differ with suspicion and disapproval.
I would expect this alienating effect to be even stronger when your entire society is just a few thousand people. (The size of the underground society is not specified in the question - this may affect the likelihood of the situation described here.) The differences are also likely to be significantly larger after the two populations have been diverging for centuries rather than just decades.
There are likely to be exceptions - people who are fascinated by how different the outside world is, and want to go out and experience it. However, this may be seen as a threat to the society's "respectable" (currently fashionable) way of life, so even those who want to go out and embrace the new ways of living are forbidden from leaving. Many may feel that the comfortable life underground with plenty for all depends on keeping it secret.
This may lead to prejudice that restricts what people can say or do beyond just preventing them from leaving. If leaving is illegal, then dressing like an overgrounder, or even using the colloquial language of the overgrounders, may be disapproved of at first, and later even punishable by fines or imprisonment. A small society with a history that started with an extinction threat (a fear even worse for many than personal death) may make undoing such harsh laws difficult.
Insular policy
Resistance to laws preventing going outside may lead to gradually stronger laws, at first preventing emulating the overgrounders, and eventually forbidding discussing them at all. As a result, access to the recordings of the current state of the outside world may then be restricted to a few people in authority, and as generations pass the general public may have no knowledge of the outside, beyond whispered myths of "those dangerous people with their constant wars" even though the surface has been largely peaceful for centuries.
Each new set of people in authority may choose to continue this situation due to sharing the prejudices that have arisen, or out of a belief that the society is better off here, or a desire to maintain power - ruling the world is easier when the whole world is a small underground society.
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Vault-Net has control
It was considered at some point to install an AI that would help the underground people to have a comfy life.
The programming was something like "Protect the underground people so that they live the best life they could."
Adhering its program to the word, Vault-Net decided that the overground world is a worse place to live than undergrounds. To ease the psychological implications on the people underground, Vault-Net is faking any and all communication with the outside world. Blocking incoming transmissions, defending the entrances from "intruders" (who actually tried to reach and maybe rescue survivors) and generating fake imagery of the outside world.
Everybody undergrounds is totally convinced they have no other choice.
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Philip K. Dick would posit[1] that the surface war is all done by robots. The robots lie about what is happening on the surface, and ended the war as soon as no one could independently verify the situation.
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The Defenders on Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, or LibreVox (track 4). ↩︎
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The underground society may be technologically advanced, but they are still humans, and humans have a tendency to create their own explanations for visions and experiences they cannot scientifically explain. They believe there are supernatural forces on the surface. These supernatural forces are a threat, and will wipe out the underground society if it discovers their presence. They hide underground in fear of what they believe lingers on the surface.
Before or during the surface war, one human faction realized a way to use their technology to create illusions; these illusions sparked fear and created theories of supernatural forces amongst the other factions. The other factions failed to research them within the time they had available, and therefore never learned they were artificial. One or more of them hid underground, but left monitoring equipment on the ground that transmits to the society now deep below.
The "supernatural" faction now used their illusions to fight the war. Eventually this faction perished, but their technology continued running on its own. Because of this, the underground society's equipment also continues reading the signals, reinforcing the view amongst the people below that the surface is too dangerous to revisit, and that any attempt to establish contact will lead to their discovery. The information they can read from the surface, is not sufficient to learn more, and so the only safe assumption is that the information they are able to read, indicates the fatal threat lingers.
If there are survivors left above the ground, they have either come to peace with the illusions, or they are living in fear of them, but not in harm. They have failed to locate their sources, as they no longer possess the technology themselves, that would be necessary to find it.
1 comment thread
If they are acting rationally, it's not possible. It is only logical for them to monitor the progress of the situation that was bad enough to force them to move underground. Even if society was largely uninterested in topsiders, there would be researchers, adventurers, daredevils, outcasts and criminals that would seek them out anyway. They could not stay in the dark if we're talking at least millions of people and hundreds of years. There might even be talk of coming back up after the combatants are devastated and collecting resources. Regardless, advanced technology implies they will be interested in Space, so they would have to go through the surface anyway to get into orbit.
For them to stay uninformed to that level, there would have to be some kind of irrational mass hysteria.
- There could be a strict religious prohibitions against interacting with the surface. There will always be some heretics who do it anyway, but the religious sentiment would suppress them and prevent word from getting out.
- The government could follow an aggressive propaganda campaign suppressing the information, perhaps orchestrated by the elites to protect their power structure. This would be a bit like 1984... But then you have to explain how the state survives unchanged for hundreds of years, something rare in history. The state that inspired 1984, imploded after 70 years - 40 from the publication of the book.
Either of these implies also a significant decay in the underground people's society. Decay alone (technological or social) would also account for them being uninformed. It makes it sound as if they are effectively some sort of doomsday cult, steadily shrinking and declining from the date of exodus, and would be irrelevant by the time of the discovery. The alternative would be if there was an unrealistic "new frontier" underground - like the Underdark of Forgotten Realms where you can endlessly dig deeper to find resources (including food, light, air, water) and living space, as well as magical portals to new, vast realms. In a more realistic setting like Earth, they would essentially have to find something like the buried gates from Stargate.
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They lost the key
The outside gate was rather "low tech" like a vault door. Then over time need arised to add layers of improved gate technology in the inner area. Also maybe adding several layers of defensive systems (turrets, mines, drones, ...).
The innermost door now is a computer controlled thing that needs a advanced cryptographic secure key to open up. If the wrong key is used, the door either don't move at all or still opens up but the defensive systems are attacking anyone. This was intended to prevent underground people from trying to exit without the consent of all.
At some point they either lost the "usb-stick" (of course some gold-plated key card is cooler) with the key on it, it got damaged or they deliberately decided to destroy it and stay undergrounds forever.
Story could focus on the social conflicts and behaviors among humans in dire situations. The one or the many - who decides things, etc.
Undergrounds is a garden of Eden
The people undergrounds love to live there. They have all they need and have not developed an urge to go overground (yet).
1 comment thread