Worried you won’t be able to sustain your privileged lifestyle after the coming apocalypse? Vivos may have a solution for you; luxury underground bunkers.

The Vivos design is based on a spoke and hub complex, with 10 radiating wings surrounding a 2 story central dome. Vivos designed its shelters to provide as much comfort as reasonably possible for its co-owners, with a population density of 1 person per 100 square feet of floor area. FEMA recommends just 50 square feet per person for long-term shelter.

The Vivos web site has a lovely bar along the bottom which lists “Nuclear War / Bio War / Terrorism / Anarchy / Electromagnetic Pulse / Solar Flares / Pole Shift / Killer Comet / Global Tsunami / Planet X / Super Volcano” to remind you of all the horrible things that are probably JUST ABOUT TO HAPPEN!

Notice the 3 man-sized safes for the storing of loot

I’m not sure if this is for real – the renderings look like screen captures from someone’s weekend project on The Sims and the idea seems to have been borrowed from Fallout, but I have no doubt that there’s a market for this.  I wonder what other frontiers are waiting to be gentrified?

This is the second proposal I’ve seen lately which involves renovating 60′s-era missile silos (the other being for a secure data center).  What other uses could these things serve?  They would probably make great wine/cheese caves!

Here’s an Atlas-F silo for sale which has been renovated into “a 2300 sq. ft. 2-story (3 bedroom, 2 bath) luxury home with fiber optic lighting and a contemporary finished interior… Breathtaking mountain views surround this lovely, secure home.”

Designer lighting and tan carpet really set off the 2000-lb blast doors!

I’ve been looking into methods of excavating stone for a new project, and it turns out that the world of rock excavation is much more interesting than I realized.

If you’re looking for crushed stone, a rock drill and some dynamite is all you need, but to get large usable slabs of stone requires a bit more finesse.  Cararra marble used to be quarried by drilling a series of holes on the edge of a cliff, inserting wooden ‘wedges’ and then soaking these with water – the expansion would cause the stone to crack along the line of holes and the resulting ‘bench’ was then moved to another facility to be cut to the proper sizes.

Modern methods are much cooler, and use two basic tools; gallery saws and wire saws.  A gallery saw is basically a 12-foot long chain saw for cutting stone.  They move along tracks and can cut either vertically or horizontally.  Wire saws are basically big motors attached to a huge rubber band studded with diamond discs.  The rubber band gets wrapped around the piece of rock you want to cut, then the wire saw pulls it tight and starts rotating it.  The diamond discs slowly slice the stone in half, like a cheese wire.

This video shows one of those chain saws in action.

Here’s a horizontal cut

This shows the wire saw – isn’t the space created after removing the slabs amazing?

And here’s what happens after the cutting’s finished…