Ask Lemmy

Silo is absolute pants on head as far as realism. Here's just ONE example: the light bulbs in the bunker(s). To show what an immense challenge it would be to keep light-bulbs in the bunker, let's make some assumptions:

Suppose the silo houses 10,000 people and has around 150 floors. If each person uses about 1.5 rooms on average, and each room has two light bulbs, that's already 30,000 bulbs just for personal and work spaces. Add another 7,500 bulbs for common areas like hallways and stairwells, assuming 50 bulbs per floor. Throw in another 2,500 for things like emergency lighting and equipment. That brings the total to roughly 40,000 bulbs.

Now, consider that the average bulb lasts around 2,000 hours. If lights run about 16 hours a day, a bulb would last approximately 125 days. With 40,000 bulbs in use, about 320 of them would burn out every single day. That means someone needs to replace 320 bulbs a day, every day, just to keep the place lit. That alone is a full-time job for a crew of maintenance workers.

Storage becomes another massive problem. If they want to keep a 10-year supply of light bulbs, they would need 320 bulbs a day times 365 days times 10 years, which adds up to about 1.17 million bulbs. That is a staggering amount of fragile, breakable glass to store in an underground bunker.

And what about manufacturing? Are they making glass, vacuum-sealing bulbs, mining tungsten, and wiring filaments all inside the silo? Are there glassblowing workshops next to the hydroponics farm? Are they running vacuum pumps on diesel just to get replacement bulbs?

This is just one mundane aspect of life in the silo, and it already falls apart under the slightest scrutiny. Unless there's a whole floor dedicated to crafting light bulbs by hand like some sort of monastery of electricians, it simply doesn't add up.