This shelter idea has many points of potential failure, possible showstoppers, and assuming a small population of shelters (hundreds or a few thousand), seems extremely unlikely to maintain an MVP for more than a few months.
Points of failure:
Leaks from the air and water filtration system (e.g., gasket leaks)
Leaks from the airlock
Leaks from the biohazard suits
Leaks from the shelter membrane
Shutdown of the filtration system due to mechanical or electrical failure
Showstoppers:
Food production or storage will require massive warehouses using the same extreme filtering as the suits and shelters. An alternative is to use some sort of disinfection tech like gamma ray sterilization, but I don’t know how practical that would be.
Producing all food indoors is currently not possible and seems unlikely be achieved anytime soon.
To mitigate the risk of these points of failure, millions of suits and shelters (along will massive amounts of supplies such as food and spare parts) will have to be manufactured and distributed, and millions of people will need to be trained in how to use them before any catastrophe occurred. Obviously, this is extremely unlikely to happen anytime soon, and I strongly suspect it won’t happen before mirror bacteria is created (due to the acceleration of biotech and AI progress) and released into the wild.
You raise important points but some of these issues are less of a concern:
-air supply leaks: the whole air supply is inside the shelter with a fan at the inside end. Thus, any leak goes from clean to dirty and is not an issue
-leaks through membrane (including airlock doors): not a major issue, the positive pressure will not let anything from the outside come inside
-shutdown due to failure of critical components is not foreseen to be an issue—all components should be possible to engineer for long continuous operation
The suits are indeed only 50k protection factor but it should be possible to use proven methods used to transfer germ free mice between facilities.
Water and food are not completely solved yet, agreed. I think food will be the harder part and I’m happy organizations such as ALLFED are working on this.
I am happy to address this in more detail as we have spent quite a bit of time turning many stones. That said, a team of people can still make mistakes so I appreciate that you are helping me looking into this and this is part of the reason I posted—I would love to take a call to if that would be easier to hash this out.
-air supply leaks: the whole air supply is inside the shelter with a fan at the inside end. Thus, any leak goes from clean to dirty and is not an issue
I’m not sure what you’re describing here. Unless you’re talking about some sort of closed-loop system (like on a submarine or spacecraft), leaks are always a possibility. Can you share an illustration of what you’re trying to describe?
-leaks through membrane (including airlock doors): not a major issue, the positive pressure will not let anything from the outside come inside
It might not be a major issue for a tiny pinhole but what about a larger hole or tear? What if that pinhole suddenly creates a larger rupture (helped out by a red truck perhaps?) in the membrane?
-shutdown due to failure of critical components is not foreseen to be an issue
Famous last words. Battery BMS fails → positive pressure is lost → bacteria gets in via tiny membrane hole(s) → everyone in the shelter dies
- all components should be possible to engineer for long continuous operation
These components will need to be mass-produced by the millions and continuously used under real world conditions to have any decent chance of being reliable. Even if certain components are already mass-produced for other uses, integrating them into a reliable system would still require integrating them into millions of shelters. But as I mentioned before, that’s not likely to happen.
The suits are indeed only 50k protection factor but it should be possible to use proven methods used to transfer germ free mice between facilities.
The leak problems that plague shelters would also apply to suits. And we are talking about using suits in the outside world, right? All facilities except shelters and perhaps food warehouses would not be protected and suits would be needed to access them.
I am happy to address this in more detail as we have spent quite a bit of time turning many stones. That said, a team of people can still make mistakes so I appreciate that you are helping me looking into this and this is part of the reason I posted—I would love to take a call to if that would be easier to hash this out.
If solutions to at least some of these issues are documented elsewhere, perhaps you can provide some links?
At least for now, public discussion seems more appropriate.
Thank you for your detailed response. I appreciate the opportunity to clarify these points and address potential weaknesses. I’ve included a drawing to illustrate the air supply concept.
Air Supply Leaks
The below diagram illustrates the airflow dynamics. The air system is designed with a series of pressure gradients (P1 > P5 > P4 > P3 > P2), ensuring that any leak results in airflow from clean to dirty areas, not the reverse. This mechanism minimizes contamination risks, even in the event of small leaks. This principle is widely used in cleanroom and laboratory settings to maintain sterile environments.
Membrane Integrity and Large Holes
You’re correct that larger holes or tears could compromise the shelter. To mitigate this, the material used for the shelter will be selected for its tear resistance and self-limiting properties. Existing materials for bubble hotels, for example, do not propagate tears. For DIY or lower-cost implementations, layering materials (e.g., plastic sheets reinforced with fabric) could provide additional durability. There is already extensive research on tear resistant fabrics, as well as substantial data from people actually living in such structures, such as bubble hotels. For mass production, it would be useful to carry out research on how to achieve tear resistance across a variety of materials and fabrication methods.
Component Failures
While no system is failure-proof, redundancy and robustness are central to the shelter’s design. Key measures include:
Longevity Testing: Components will undergo extensive real-world and simulated stress testing. Suppliers’ lifetime analyses will be leveraged to ensure reliability.
Redundant Systems: Critical systems like air supply will have manual overrides and backup power (e.g., a UPS to sustain operation during power transitions). Simple mechanical solutions will be emphasized to reduce dependence on complex electronics—in a crisis it can probably be assumed that one could rely on shelter inhabitants for at least some operation and maintenance.
User Training: Shelters are designed for inhabitants to manage minor troubleshooting (e.g., switching power sources).
Mass Production Challenges
Scaling production to millions of units is indeed ambitious, but starting with smaller-scale production allows us to address these challenges iteratively. The simplicity of the design—based on off-the-shelf components—makes rapid scaling more feasible compared to more complex systems. Even producing tens of thousands of units could substantially reduce existential risk in high-priority scenarios.
Suit Usage and External Transfers
For outside missions, the focus is on minimizing exposure. Techniques used in gnotobiotic (germ-free) animal research, such as sterilized transfer tunnels filled with vaporized hydrogen peroxide (VHP), could be adapted for human use. Vehicles retrofitted with small shelters can serve as transfer units, reducing reliance on suits for complete protection.
Documentation and Public Discussion
I recognize the need for comprehensive and accessible documentation. My aim is to consolidate detailed analyses into digestible formats for public dissemination. If certain topics merit deeper exploration, I welcome collaboration to address them systematically.
I look forward to your feedback and would be happy to delve further into any specific areas of concern. This kind of exchange is invaluable for refining the concept and ensuring it is as robust as possible.
I just thought of another showstopper that makes the other issues now seem insignificant: how could you ever determine whether or not the suits and shelters work to prevent bacterial contamination? The problem here is that humans are already “contaminated” and another problem is that the world isn’t contaminated with a unique kind of bacteria or bacteria-sized particle that you could test for. So, there’s actually nothing to test for. Even if you could test for something, how could you even detect one or a few bacteria that got through? I don’t see any way around this.
Air Supply Leaks
The below diagram illustrates the airflow dynamics. The air system is designed with a series of pressure gradients (P1 > P5 > P4 > P3 > P2), ensuring that any leak results in airflow from clean to dirty areas, not the reverse. This mechanism minimizes contamination risks, even in the event of small leaks. This principle is widely used in cleanroom and laboratory settings to maintain sterile environments.
This still doesn’t address gasket leaks (leaks between the filter’s gasket material and the filter tunnel). The potential for such leaks could be eliminated be permanently bonding the filter to the filter tunnel but that would mean that the filters couldn’t be replaced.
Cleanrooms and labs aren’t failure-proof, and failure would happen a lot more often in the messiness of the real world.
Membrane Integrity and Large Holes
You’re correct that larger holes or tears could compromise the shelter. To mitigate this, the material used for the shelter will be selected for its tear resistance and self-limiting properties. Existing materials for bubble hotels, for example, do not propagate tears. For DIY or lower-cost implementations, layering materials (e.g., plastic sheets reinforced with fabric) could provide additional durability. There is already extensive research on tear resistant fabrics, as well as substantial data from people actually living in such structures, such as bubble hotels. For mass production, it would be useful to carry out research on how to achieve tear resistance across a variety of materials and fabrication methods.
Even if tiny holes or material defects wouldn’t grow into large tears due to air pressure alone, what if something else impinged on the membrane? Couldn’t a large enough stressor conceivably cause a small hole to grow? After all, suits and shelters would often get banged up by normal use and the occasional red truck.
It’s probably safe to assume that small leaks couldn’t deflate these bubble hotels, but I doubt anyone has been motivated to look at whether some of these leaks could grow large enough to let in small amounts of particulates. Suit durability probably suffers from the same lack of research.
Component Failures
While no system is failure-proof, redundancy and robustness are central to the shelter’s design. Key measures include:
Longevity Testing: Components will undergo extensive real-world and simulated stress testing. Suppliers’ lifetime analyses will be leveraged to ensure reliability.
If you’re lucky, you might get away with testing thousands of shelters and suits, but if you want something really robust, you probably need to test hundreds of thousands and potentially millions. How will you get hundreds of thousands of people to isolate themselves for years at the minimum? Mars simulation theme parks? I’m only half joking; perhaps some sort of rotation system might work, but on the other hand, that might defeat (or at least minimize) the purpose of testing the practicality of continuously (without any breaks due to personnel changes) sealing out external contamination.
Redundant Systems: Critical systems like air supply will have manual overrides and backup power (e.g., a UPS to sustain operation during power transitions). Simple mechanical solutions will be emphasized to reduce dependence on complex electronics—in a crisis it can probably be assumed that one could rely on shelter inhabitants for at least some operation and maintenance.
How long could (and should) these redundant systems last? Years? Decades? What would be their failure rate? Spare batteries can fail if they’re not used, gaskets can become brittle or warped, metal can oxidize, and so on.
Redundancy might increase durability in the short term, but it also increases complexity, and complexity can create its own problems. Complexity might not be an issue when you can usually get all of the spare parts you need, but if industry no longer exists (because you want to minimize the time you spend outside), you’d need to stockpile a lot of parts and/or entire shelters and suits. That would increase costs. And how long would that stockpile actually last? How long would membrane material remain folded without degrading along the folds in a garage or warehouse that’s not climate controlled? There are likely to be many issues like this with long-term storage.
User Training: Shelters are designed for inhabitants to manage minor troubleshooting (e.g., switching power sources).
How will you train millions of people about how to live and survive in suits and shelters before a catastrophe happens? This goes way beyond simple maintenance procedures and troubleshooting.
It would be risky to wait for a catastrophe to happen due to the possible social disorder that might occur and logistical issues with distribution (e.g., trying to outrun simultaneous releases of mirror bacteria in all major population centers).
Mass Production Challenges
Scaling production to millions of units is indeed ambitious, but starting with smaller-scale production allows us to address these challenges iteratively. The simplicity of the design—based on off-the-shelf components—makes rapid scaling more feasible compared to more complex systems. Even producing tens of thousands of units could substantially reduce existential risk in high-priority scenarios.
Where will the incentive for mass producing millions of units come from? Or even tens of thousands?
Suit Usage and External Transfers
For outside missions, the focus is on minimizing exposure. Techniques used in gnotobiotic (germ-free) animal research, such as sterilized transfer tunnels filled with vaporized hydrogen peroxide (VHP), could be adapted for human use. Vehicles retrofitted with small shelters can serve as transfer units, reducing reliance on suits for complete protection.
What happens when the suit inevitably gets dirty? There’ll be a lot more mud and dirt in a world in which infrastructure isn’t maintained, and I doubt VHP will be adequate. So, there’ll probably need to be another elaborate decontamination procedure. More complexity, more points of failure, more cost.
Will those retrofitted vehicles be self-driving? If not, the cabin would need to be shelterified. Yeah, good luck with that. If it’s a self-driving truck with a shelter bolted on, you might also need a datacenter to go alone with that. But that means you’d need to maintain the datacenter and have more spare hardware and spend more time outside and maintain a power source for the datacenter, and so on. On the other hand, if self-driving will depend only on a local system, you’ll probably need an AGI for that. But if you have an AGI, you’d also probably have an ASI which should be able to make something way better like almost fail-proof suits and shelters, self-sufficient, impenetrable underground cities, or quickly eliminate the mirror bateria threat (e.g., by drexlerian nanobots, assuming they’re physically possible to construct).
This concept is inspired by established systems like Nordic civilian defense against nuclear threats or lifeboats on ships.
But those systems weren’t designed with the survival of humanity in mind, and so, they’re obviously going to be much less robust.
I might not have emphasized this sufficiently in the post, but the aim is not to achieve near 100% robustness. Instead, the goal is to provide people with a fair chance of survival in a subset of crisis scenarios.
My initial intuition is that even if 70% of the units function effectively in a crisis, this would be a success.
You need to think about how much time these shelters could buy. 70% survival for how long? A few months is probably doable, but shelters and their associated infrastructure will not last forever.
If shelters buy a few months of survival, the crisis will need to be solved in a few months. That also means the shelters will need to be targeted to experts that might be able to provide a solution or allow enough time for a solution that already existed to disperse and kill off the mirror bacteria. If a solution will need to be developed, a lot of time will need to be spent in unprotected labs which will increase risk. Think about this: you’re stuck in a suit, you can’t eat, drink, peep, poop, or even type fast (because you have thick gloves), while at the same time you’re trying to do complicated experiments to save the world. These scenarios aren’t impossible to survive, but I expect they’ll have a high likelihood of failure. So you’d probably want to aim for a least a few years rather than months.
While rigorous testing will enhance confidence and could refine the design, the significant likelihood that the shelters will work as-is—supported by Los Alamos results and cleanroom precedent—suggests that they could prudently be deployed even without exhaustive testing if a crisis emerges and the above testing is not completed.
To stretch survival to years, you’d need to do a hell of a lot more real-world testing and design work. There’s no close-enough precedent for what you’re trying to do; I highly doubt that you can only rely on lessons from cleanrooms, labs, or nuclear bunkers. Has any cleanroom or lab demonstrated perfect containment for years? How about the mobile kind? Nuclear bunkers aren’t designed to be livable for years or be sterile. At best, lab testing and case studies can indicate that hardware may work, not that it will work in the real world.
And there’s a lot more to consider besides maintaining the mechanical and electrical system that supports the suit and shelter filtering system. You’d also need climate control systems; that’s one heat pump for the suit and one for the shelter. You’d need cooking devices and indoor air cleaners or an air recirculation system. And don’t forget about the VHP system. A comms system for the suit would also be nice. But things get complicated pretty fast. I suppose you can have two or three of each suit and shelter and alternate between them to add redundancy. But things get costly pretty fast.
The more you think about it, the more impractical (and less appealing to stakeholders) it seems to get. So, to convince anyone that this is anything other than a hail mary, extensive real-world testing must be done. And maybe you can mitigate the testing showstopper I mentioned earlier by periodically sterilizing and retesting used shelters and suits. Of course, ease of sterilization will need to be incorporated in the initial design.
Unless you seal most of industry inside shelters or risk being outdoors for long periods of time, decades of survival is probably close to impossible.
Your suggestion of using permanent bonds could indeed be a practical solution in such cases.
But you’d still have a gasket where the ductwork meets the membrane (and where it would be more exposed to temperature fluctuations), and a one-piece assembly would increase costs substantially and introduce space constraints due to the need to stockpile many assembly units.
I might not have emphasized this sufficiently in the post, but the aim is not to achieve near 100% robustness. Instead, the goal is to provide people with a fair chance of survival in a subset of crisis scenarios. This concept is inspired by established systems like Nordic civilian defense against nuclear threats or lifeboats on ships. Neither of these protections guarantees survival for everyone—lifeboats, for instance, are not designed to save lives in every conceivable disaster, such as an airplane crash into shallow water at high speed.
The shelters are similarly intended to offer a reasonable chance of survival under specific catastrophic scenarios, recognizing that perfection is neither feasible nor necessary.
Setting Performance Requirements
Determining the appropriate performance threshold will require ongoing dialogue and input from various stakeholders, including potential users. There are several considerations:
User Expectations: Inhabitants’ wants, needs, and available resources will play a significant role in defining acceptable performance levels.
Justifying the Investment: The level of protection must also justify the effort and resources required to produce and deploy the shelters. For example, a hypothetical 90% survival rate might make this intervention compelling compared to doing nothing. On the other hand, if the expected success rate falls near or below 1%, the intervention is unlikely to garner much support.
My initial intuition is that even if 70% of the units function effectively in a crisis, this would be a success. However, these thresholds should not be set arbitrarily—they should involve input from a wide range of stakeholders, particularly those who might depend on these shelters for survival.
For the current production, we plan to use certified components to ensure reliability. For example, the Camfil CamCube AC is certified and tested to Leakage Class C, meaning that the overall ductwork-filter assembly performs at least as well as the filter alone. This level of quality control significantly reduces the likelihood of leaks in the system.
It’s true that during a large-scale crisis, the luxury of certified components might not always be available. Your suggestion of using permanent bonds could indeed be a practical solution in such cases. As mentioned elsewhere, there is still time to prepare for scaling up production, which includes exploring how to adapt to components of varying sizes, qualities, and production environments. Ensuring robust performance across diverse conditions will be an important part of this preparation.
Thank you for raising these points. I’m breaking my responses into separate comments to ensure we tackle each thoroughly. Here, I’ll address your concerns about testing:
Testing for these shelters involves two distinct stages, each addressing a different challenge:
Design and Physics Testing: Can the system work in principle?
This stage focuses on validating whether the design meets theoretical and engineering requirements for contamination prevention.
Particle Filtration: Shelters are particle-agnostic, meaning inert particles (e.g., aerosols or dust in the 0.3–1.0 micron range) can be used to simulate real-world contamination scenarios. This eliminates concerns about biological sterility during testing.
Proven Reductions: Sequential filtration systems, such as those studied at Los Alamos, have already demonstrated extreme levels of filtration efficacy, achieving 13-log reductions under controlled conditions. Similarly, pressurized cleanrooms provide real-world evidence that positive pressure and filtration can prevent particle intrusion, even in demanding environments. These precedents suggest that 14-log reductions are achievable with proper design.
Envelope Integrity: Testing with simulated pinhole leaks and pressure differentials can confirm whether the positive pressure prevents inward contamination under scenarios like wind gusts or mechanical stress.
The good news is that we have time to carry out these tests thoroughly before shelters need to be deployed. This stage is about getting even higher certainty around core physics and engineering principles in a deliberate and methodical way.
Production-Quality Testing: Were the units manufactured to meet the design’s specifications?
This stage ensures that individual shelters and suits perform to spec once they are mass-produced.
Challenges Under Time Pressure: If a crisis emerges, manufacturing will need to ramp up quickly, and ensuring consistent quality at scale becomes harder under time constraints.
Factory Testing: Each unit would need to pass specific tests (e.g., leak detection, pressure stability, and filtration efficiency) before deployment. This could involve simple protocols like smoke tests for airflows and particle challenge tests for filters.
Mitigating Production Errors: Early small-scale production runs will be invaluable for refining manufacturing processes and building quality control procedures.
Why This Distinction Matters
For the first stage, we already have time to test the fundamental design and physics—this is a well-defined engineering problem, albeit a challenging one. For the second stage, time and conditions are more constrained, especially in a sudden crisis. Scaling production while maintaining quality will be a major logistical challenge, which is why starting now (with prototypes and small-scale runs) is critical.
In summary, the feasibility of shelters rests on both validating the design (theoretical and physical testing) and ensuring that production methods consistently meet those validated standards. I’m cautiously optimistic about the first and focused on mitigating risks for the second through early preparation—this is exactly the type of work we now have time to perform at relatively low cost and that might be relevant for other cleanroom and related fields.
A Note on Deployment Without Full Testing
While rigorous testing will enhance confidence and could refine the design, the significant likelihood that the shelters will work as-is—supported by Los Alamos results and cleanroom precedent—suggests that they could prudently be deployed even without exhaustive testing if a crisis emerges and the above testing is not completed. This approach is not a matter of desperation but rather a strategic gamble with decent odds—akin to the logic behind Nordic nuclear bunkers, where survival is not guaranteed for every individual but the overall precaution substantially increases the chance of saving lives.
By leveraging existing knowledge and technology, we can make an informed decision to move forward under high-risk conditions, understanding that the alternative—inaction—could have catastrophic consequences. This dual approach balances the urgency of mitigating existential risks with the need for further refinement and testing where time allows.
I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this distinction and whether it addresses your concerns. Looking forward to discussing your next point in detail!
This shelter idea has many points of potential failure, possible showstoppers, and assuming a small population of shelters (hundreds or a few thousand), seems extremely unlikely to maintain an MVP for more than a few months.
Points of failure:
Leaks from the air and water filtration system (e.g., gasket leaks)
Leaks from the airlock
Leaks from the biohazard suits
Leaks from the shelter membrane
Shutdown of the filtration system due to mechanical or electrical failure
Showstoppers:
Food production or storage will require massive warehouses using the same extreme filtering as the suits and shelters. An alternative is to use some sort of disinfection tech like gamma ray sterilization, but I don’t know how practical that would be.
Producing all food indoors is currently not possible and seems unlikely be achieved anytime soon.
To mitigate the risk of these points of failure, millions of suits and shelters (along will massive amounts of supplies such as food and spare parts) will have to be manufactured and distributed, and millions of people will need to be trained in how to use them before any catastrophe occurred. Obviously, this is extremely unlikely to happen anytime soon, and I strongly suspect it won’t happen before mirror bacteria is created (due to the acceleration of biotech and AI progress) and released into the wild.
You raise important points but some of these issues are less of a concern:
-air supply leaks: the whole air supply is inside the shelter with a fan at the inside end. Thus, any leak goes from clean to dirty and is not an issue
-leaks through membrane (including airlock doors): not a major issue, the positive pressure will not let anything from the outside come inside
-shutdown due to failure of critical components is not foreseen to be an issue—all components should be possible to engineer for long continuous operation
The suits are indeed only 50k protection factor but it should be possible to use proven methods used to transfer germ free mice between facilities.
Water and food are not completely solved yet, agreed. I think food will be the harder part and I’m happy organizations such as ALLFED are working on this.
I am happy to address this in more detail as we have spent quite a bit of time turning many stones. That said, a team of people can still make mistakes so I appreciate that you are helping me looking into this and this is part of the reason I posted—I would love to take a call to if that would be easier to hash this out.
I’m not sure what you’re describing here. Unless you’re talking about some sort of closed-loop system (like on a submarine or spacecraft), leaks are always a possibility. Can you share an illustration of what you’re trying to describe?
It might not be a major issue for a tiny pinhole but what about a larger hole or tear? What if that pinhole suddenly creates a larger rupture (helped out by a red truck perhaps?) in the membrane?
Famous last words. Battery BMS fails → positive pressure is lost → bacteria gets in via tiny membrane hole(s) → everyone in the shelter dies
These components will need to be mass-produced by the millions and continuously used under real world conditions to have any decent chance of being reliable. Even if certain components are already mass-produced for other uses, integrating them into a reliable system would still require integrating them into millions of shelters. But as I mentioned before, that’s not likely to happen.
The leak problems that plague shelters would also apply to suits. And we are talking about using suits in the outside world, right? All facilities except shelters and perhaps food warehouses would not be protected and suits would be needed to access them.
If solutions to at least some of these issues are documented elsewhere, perhaps you can provide some links?
At least for now, public discussion seems more appropriate.
Thank you for your detailed response. I appreciate the opportunity to clarify these points and address potential weaknesses. I’ve included a drawing to illustrate the air supply concept.
Air Supply Leaks
The below diagram illustrates the airflow dynamics. The air system is designed with a series of pressure gradients (P1 > P5 > P4 > P3 > P2), ensuring that any leak results in airflow from clean to dirty areas, not the reverse. This mechanism minimizes contamination risks, even in the event of small leaks. This principle is widely used in cleanroom and laboratory settings to maintain sterile environments.
Membrane Integrity and Large Holes
You’re correct that larger holes or tears could compromise the shelter. To mitigate this, the material used for the shelter will be selected for its tear resistance and self-limiting properties. Existing materials for bubble hotels, for example, do not propagate tears. For DIY or lower-cost implementations, layering materials (e.g., plastic sheets reinforced with fabric) could provide additional durability. There is already extensive research on tear resistant fabrics, as well as substantial data from people actually living in such structures, such as bubble hotels. For mass production, it would be useful to carry out research on how to achieve tear resistance across a variety of materials and fabrication methods.
Component Failures
While no system is failure-proof, redundancy and robustness are central to the shelter’s design. Key measures include:
Longevity Testing: Components will undergo extensive real-world and simulated stress testing. Suppliers’ lifetime analyses will be leveraged to ensure reliability.
Redundant Systems: Critical systems like air supply will have manual overrides and backup power (e.g., a UPS to sustain operation during power transitions). Simple mechanical solutions will be emphasized to reduce dependence on complex electronics—in a crisis it can probably be assumed that one could rely on shelter inhabitants for at least some operation and maintenance.
User Training: Shelters are designed for inhabitants to manage minor troubleshooting (e.g., switching power sources).
Mass Production Challenges
Scaling production to millions of units is indeed ambitious, but starting with smaller-scale production allows us to address these challenges iteratively. The simplicity of the design—based on off-the-shelf components—makes rapid scaling more feasible compared to more complex systems. Even producing tens of thousands of units could substantially reduce existential risk in high-priority scenarios.
Suit Usage and External Transfers
For outside missions, the focus is on minimizing exposure. Techniques used in gnotobiotic (germ-free) animal research, such as sterilized transfer tunnels filled with vaporized hydrogen peroxide (VHP), could be adapted for human use. Vehicles retrofitted with small shelters can serve as transfer units, reducing reliance on suits for complete protection.
Documentation and Public Discussion
I recognize the need for comprehensive and accessible documentation. My aim is to consolidate detailed analyses into digestible formats for public dissemination. If certain topics merit deeper exploration, I welcome collaboration to address them systematically.
I look forward to your feedback and would be happy to delve further into any specific areas of concern. This kind of exchange is invaluable for refining the concept and ensuring it is as robust as possible.
I just thought of another showstopper that makes the other issues now seem insignificant: how could you ever determine whether or not the suits and shelters work to prevent bacterial contamination? The problem here is that humans are already “contaminated” and another problem is that the world isn’t contaminated with a unique kind of bacteria or bacteria-sized particle that you could test for. So, there’s actually nothing to test for. Even if you could test for something, how could you even detect one or a few bacteria that got through? I don’t see any way around this.
This still doesn’t address gasket leaks (leaks between the filter’s gasket material and the filter tunnel). The potential for such leaks could be eliminated be permanently bonding the filter to the filter tunnel but that would mean that the filters couldn’t be replaced.
Cleanrooms and labs aren’t failure-proof, and failure would happen a lot more often in the messiness of the real world.
Even if tiny holes or material defects wouldn’t grow into large tears due to air pressure alone, what if something else impinged on the membrane? Couldn’t a large enough stressor conceivably cause a small hole to grow? After all, suits and shelters would often get banged up by normal use and the occasional red truck.
It’s probably safe to assume that small leaks couldn’t deflate these bubble hotels, but I doubt anyone has been motivated to look at whether some of these leaks could grow large enough to let in small amounts of particulates. Suit durability probably suffers from the same lack of research.
If you’re lucky, you might get away with testing thousands of shelters and suits, but if you want something really robust, you probably need to test hundreds of thousands and potentially millions. How will you get hundreds of thousands of people to isolate themselves for years at the minimum? Mars simulation theme parks? I’m only half joking; perhaps some sort of rotation system might work, but on the other hand, that might defeat (or at least minimize) the purpose of testing the practicality of continuously (without any breaks due to personnel changes) sealing out external contamination.
How long could (and should) these redundant systems last? Years? Decades? What would be their failure rate? Spare batteries can fail if they’re not used, gaskets can become brittle or warped, metal can oxidize, and so on.
Redundancy might increase durability in the short term, but it also increases complexity, and complexity can create its own problems. Complexity might not be an issue when you can usually get all of the spare parts you need, but if industry no longer exists (because you want to minimize the time you spend outside), you’d need to stockpile a lot of parts and/or entire shelters and suits. That would increase costs. And how long would that stockpile actually last? How long would membrane material remain folded without degrading along the folds in a garage or warehouse that’s not climate controlled? There are likely to be many issues like this with long-term storage.
How will you train millions of people about how to live and survive in suits and shelters before a catastrophe happens? This goes way beyond simple maintenance procedures and troubleshooting.
It would be risky to wait for a catastrophe to happen due to the possible social disorder that might occur and logistical issues with distribution (e.g., trying to outrun simultaneous releases of mirror bacteria in all major population centers).
Where will the incentive for mass producing millions of units come from? Or even tens of thousands?
What happens when the suit inevitably gets dirty? There’ll be a lot more mud and dirt in a world in which infrastructure isn’t maintained, and I doubt VHP will be adequate. So, there’ll probably need to be another elaborate decontamination procedure. More complexity, more points of failure, more cost.
Will those retrofitted vehicles be self-driving? If not, the cabin would need to be shelterified. Yeah, good luck with that. If it’s a self-driving truck with a shelter bolted on, you might also need a datacenter to go alone with that. But that means you’d need to maintain the datacenter and have more spare hardware and spend more time outside and maintain a power source for the datacenter, and so on. On the other hand, if self-driving will depend only on a local system, you’ll probably need an AGI for that. But if you have an AGI, you’d also probably have an ASI which should be able to make something way better like almost fail-proof suits and shelters, self-sufficient, impenetrable underground cities, or quickly eliminate the mirror bateria threat (e.g., by drexlerian nanobots, assuming they’re physically possible to construct).
But those systems weren’t designed with the survival of humanity in mind, and so, they’re obviously going to be much less robust.
You need to think about how much time these shelters could buy. 70% survival for how long? A few months is probably doable, but shelters and their associated infrastructure will not last forever.
If shelters buy a few months of survival, the crisis will need to be solved in a few months. That also means the shelters will need to be targeted to experts that might be able to provide a solution or allow enough time for a solution that already existed to disperse and kill off the mirror bacteria. If a solution will need to be developed, a lot of time will need to be spent in unprotected labs which will increase risk. Think about this: you’re stuck in a suit, you can’t eat, drink, peep, poop, or even type fast (because you have thick gloves), while at the same time you’re trying to do complicated experiments to save the world. These scenarios aren’t impossible to survive, but I expect they’ll have a high likelihood of failure. So you’d probably want to aim for a least a few years rather than months.
To stretch survival to years, you’d need to do a hell of a lot more real-world testing and design work. There’s no close-enough precedent for what you’re trying to do; I highly doubt that you can only rely on lessons from cleanrooms, labs, or nuclear bunkers. Has any cleanroom or lab demonstrated perfect containment for years? How about the mobile kind? Nuclear bunkers aren’t designed to be livable for years or be sterile. At best, lab testing and case studies can indicate that hardware may work, not that it will work in the real world.
And there’s a lot more to consider besides maintaining the mechanical and electrical system that supports the suit and shelter filtering system. You’d also need climate control systems; that’s one heat pump for the suit and one for the shelter. You’d need cooking devices and indoor air cleaners or an air recirculation system. And don’t forget about the VHP system. A comms system for the suit would also be nice. But things get complicated pretty fast. I suppose you can have two or three of each suit and shelter and alternate between them to add redundancy. But things get costly pretty fast.
The more you think about it, the more impractical (and less appealing to stakeholders) it seems to get. So, to convince anyone that this is anything other than a hail mary, extensive real-world testing must be done. And maybe you can mitigate the testing showstopper I mentioned earlier by periodically sterilizing and retesting used shelters and suits. Of course, ease of sterilization will need to be incorporated in the initial design.
Unless you seal most of industry inside shelters or risk being outdoors for long periods of time, decades of survival is probably close to impossible.
But you’d still have a gasket where the ductwork meets the membrane (and where it would be more exposed to temperature fluctuations), and a one-piece assembly would increase costs substantially and introduce space constraints due to the need to stockpile many assembly units.
Regarding the Level of Robustness
I might not have emphasized this sufficiently in the post, but the aim is not to achieve near 100% robustness. Instead, the goal is to provide people with a fair chance of survival in a subset of crisis scenarios. This concept is inspired by established systems like Nordic civilian defense against nuclear threats or lifeboats on ships. Neither of these protections guarantees survival for everyone—lifeboats, for instance, are not designed to save lives in every conceivable disaster, such as an airplane crash into shallow water at high speed.
The shelters are similarly intended to offer a reasonable chance of survival under specific catastrophic scenarios, recognizing that perfection is neither feasible nor necessary.
Setting Performance Requirements
Determining the appropriate performance threshold will require ongoing dialogue and input from various stakeholders, including potential users. There are several considerations:
User Expectations: Inhabitants’ wants, needs, and available resources will play a significant role in defining acceptable performance levels.
Justifying the Investment: The level of protection must also justify the effort and resources required to produce and deploy the shelters. For example, a hypothetical 90% survival rate might make this intervention compelling compared to doing nothing. On the other hand, if the expected success rate falls near or below 1%, the intervention is unlikely to garner much support.
My initial intuition is that even if 70% of the units function effectively in a crisis, this would be a success. However, these thresholds should not be set arbitrarily—they should involve input from a wide range of stakeholders, particularly those who might depend on these shelters for survival.
On Gasket Leaks
For the current production, we plan to use certified components to ensure reliability. For example, the Camfil CamCube AC is certified and tested to Leakage Class C, meaning that the overall ductwork-filter assembly performs at least as well as the filter alone. This level of quality control significantly reduces the likelihood of leaks in the system.
It’s true that during a large-scale crisis, the luxury of certified components might not always be available. Your suggestion of using permanent bonds could indeed be a practical solution in such cases. As mentioned elsewhere, there is still time to prepare for scaling up production, which includes exploring how to adapt to components of varying sizes, qualities, and production environments. Ensuring robust performance across diverse conditions will be an important part of this preparation.
Hi Florin,
Thank you for raising these points. I’m breaking my responses into separate comments to ensure we tackle each thoroughly. Here, I’ll address your concerns about testing:
Testing for these shelters involves two distinct stages, each addressing a different challenge:
Design and Physics Testing: Can the system work in principle?
This stage focuses on validating whether the design meets theoretical and engineering requirements for contamination prevention.
Particle Filtration: Shelters are particle-agnostic, meaning inert particles (e.g., aerosols or dust in the 0.3–1.0 micron range) can be used to simulate real-world contamination scenarios. This eliminates concerns about biological sterility during testing.
Proven Reductions: Sequential filtration systems, such as those studied at Los Alamos, have already demonstrated extreme levels of filtration efficacy, achieving 13-log reductions under controlled conditions. Similarly, pressurized cleanrooms provide real-world evidence that positive pressure and filtration can prevent particle intrusion, even in demanding environments. These precedents suggest that 14-log reductions are achievable with proper design.
Envelope Integrity: Testing with simulated pinhole leaks and pressure differentials can confirm whether the positive pressure prevents inward contamination under scenarios like wind gusts or mechanical stress.
The good news is that we have time to carry out these tests thoroughly before shelters need to be deployed. This stage is about getting even higher certainty around core physics and engineering principles in a deliberate and methodical way.
Production-Quality Testing: Were the units manufactured to meet the design’s specifications?
This stage ensures that individual shelters and suits perform to spec once they are mass-produced.
Challenges Under Time Pressure: If a crisis emerges, manufacturing will need to ramp up quickly, and ensuring consistent quality at scale becomes harder under time constraints.
Factory Testing: Each unit would need to pass specific tests (e.g., leak detection, pressure stability, and filtration efficiency) before deployment. This could involve simple protocols like smoke tests for airflows and particle challenge tests for filters.
Mitigating Production Errors: Early small-scale production runs will be invaluable for refining manufacturing processes and building quality control procedures.
Why This Distinction Matters
For the first stage, we already have time to test the fundamental design and physics—this is a well-defined engineering problem, albeit a challenging one. For the second stage, time and conditions are more constrained, especially in a sudden crisis. Scaling production while maintaining quality will be a major logistical challenge, which is why starting now (with prototypes and small-scale runs) is critical.
In summary, the feasibility of shelters rests on both validating the design (theoretical and physical testing) and ensuring that production methods consistently meet those validated standards. I’m cautiously optimistic about the first and focused on mitigating risks for the second through early preparation—this is exactly the type of work we now have time to perform at relatively low cost and that might be relevant for other cleanroom and related fields.
A Note on Deployment Without Full Testing
While rigorous testing will enhance confidence and could refine the design, the significant likelihood that the shelters will work as-is—supported by Los Alamos results and cleanroom precedent—suggests that they could prudently be deployed even without exhaustive testing if a crisis emerges and the above testing is not completed. This approach is not a matter of desperation but rather a strategic gamble with decent odds—akin to the logic behind Nordic nuclear bunkers, where survival is not guaranteed for every individual but the overall precaution substantially increases the chance of saving lives.
By leveraging existing knowledge and technology, we can make an informed decision to move forward under high-risk conditions, understanding that the alternative—inaction—could have catastrophic consequences. This dual approach balances the urgency of mitigating existential risks with the need for further refinement and testing where time allows.
I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this distinction and whether it addresses your concerns. Looking forward to discussing your next point in detail!
Just a note that I intend to answer this comment, but it might be a couple of days.