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Re:The Boring Company [video] by kolinko on Friday April 28, 2017 @06:16PM (#14223588)
Perhaps if you're building a cellar. If you want to make a 10-story building - even in a virgin terrain, it's a complicated operation.

Not to mention that you need to make the materials such that they resist a huge side pressure, water leaks and so on.

Psychological costs are also costs.

Re:The Boring Company [video] by Retric on Friday April 28, 2017 @06:19PM (#14223615)
Water leaks are not going to be a problem on mars. Significantly lower gravity 3.711 m/s vs 9.8m/s also drastically lowers pressure from burrowing.
Re:The Boring Company [video] by clock_tower on Friday April 28, 2017 @06:21PM (#14223632)
Wide-open spaces, even enclosed ones, can reduce the psychological burden of confinement quite a bit -- there's a variety of Russian strategic-missile submarine with a swimming pool, for example. This subject also comes up frequently in SF (science fiction, not San Francisco, which has the opposite problem); there was some discussion of it on the "Atomic Rocket" worldbuilding guide, IIRC.
Re:The Boring Company [video] by lambdadmitry on Saturday April 29, 2017 @07:07PM (#14229262)
I… I think the picture of that "pool" in your head is slightly wrong [1].

Tangential: the source [2] is pretty interesting.

[1]: http://pics.livejournal.com/igor113/pic/001e551p

[2]: http://igor113.livejournal.com/27205.html

Re:The Boring Company [video] by ChefDenominator on Friday April 28, 2017 @06:19PM (#14223618)
Why build layers at all? Urban concentrations too high?