Would living underground during an impact winter be ideal?
I was looking at these two questions:
Expanding Occupied Underground Habitations Safely
Does Living without access to Sunlight have known Physical/Psychological effects?
And in a story I'm writing, the characters are hurled into an impact winter progressing over a period of weeks. And so, in an attempt to survive where help isn't coming, they search for other survivors and so on. And so I'm wondering, when these survivors get together, assuming an asteroid has hit elsewhere and screwed up the ozone/blocked the sun (partially? All of it? Not sure how that works.) - would an ideal place to re-start civilization be underground? What challenges would be faced and what would the benefits be?
Also, bonus points if you think parts of the NYC subway system that haven't been flooded/destroyed yet could be used as a starting point for underground "cities".
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/2656. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
Their main problem would probably be to find food. Plants don't grow underground/without sunlight. Of course, if they have sufficient supply of canned food to survive until the surface is habitable again, that would solve the problem.
However without fresh food, there may still be deficiency diseases, especially Scurvy. However again, this problem may be solved with supplies of food supplements or specific long-lasting foods like pickled cabbage. Also maybe it's possible to temporarily come to the surface (potentially with appropriate protection measures) to collect fresh plants even if living on the surface is otherwise not possible.
The problems of missing sunlight have already been explored in the other question you linked to.
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