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.
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.