If you were designing an underground bunker to house and protect around 10,000 people for an unknown number of centuries, what would be your number one priority? OK, you have to make sure they have food and water. But after that, the most important thing is to design for repairability. Beware—spoilers ahead.
The world of Silo is a completely closed environment. Nothing comes in, and nothing goes out (although there’s something about some mines that we don’t understand yet, and what does the giant generator in Mechanical generate its electricity from, exactly?). Which means that everything you put in there should be designed to last, and when it breaks, it should be simple enough to fix.
Repair, Reuse, Repeat
After a few hundred years down there, pretty much everything will have been repaired at some point, and the incredible prop and set design certainly lets you know it.
If you watch Adam Savage’s series of behind-the-scenes videos on the Silo sets, you’ll see right away the ridiculous amount of work and thought that has gone into the design of the sets, costumes, and props. And some of those props have to actually work.
When Juliette Nichols has to dive down into deep water, the prop goggles she uses have to work. She has to be able to see, and they have to keep her nose clear for the air coming in via the prop air pump, which actually works, and in the story is repurposed from another machine. These underwater scenes took weeks to film, so those DIY props had to be as safe and reliable as any commercially-built diving gear—a perfect metaphor for everything in the show.
Another neat touch, which probably goes past too fast to notice, is that the weapons used in the uprising are cobbled together from stuff that the lower floors would have around. A wrench handle with a knife blade welded to the end, for example.
But let’s get back to the world of the story, rather than the equally-well-improvised world of the prop builders.
Never Ending Story
Let’s take recycling, for example. Anything that is broken ends up tossed down a chute into Mechanical, where engineer Martha Walker and her team sort everything to be repaired, repurposed, or used for spares. Martha’s workshop is a tinkerer’s dream, and it seems like the skills and tricks are passed down through the generations. Given that there’s no way to get anything new into the Silo, repair is utterly essential, and the Silo repair techs are probably the best repair techs that humanity has produced so far. And another excellent aspect is that the top repairers are all women.
You see the evidence of reuse and repair all over the silo, especially in the apartments of the inhabitants. Everything is beaten up. And everything, by design, is also rather primitive.
If you’ve seen the last episode of season 2, then you’ll know that the silos appear to have been built in our current era, more or less. So why are they filled with stovetop kettles (more on those later), bulky CRT displays instead of flat monitors, and extremely basic DOS-like software in the handful of computers that they use? Landlines, radios, stoves instead of microwaves, and so on.
The answer is pretty obvious to anyone who has used both old and new tech. The silo uses these old technologies because they are reliable. If you want a monitor to last for hundreds of years, you’re using a CRT (although I’d like to know how they avoid burn-in on the screen). The simpler things are, and the fewer computers involved, the more reliable and repairable they are. Think about the difference between fixing a regular bicycle, which can last forever with just simple repairs, and trying to repair an electric scooter, with its computer brain and its motors.
Gotchas
There are a few oddities down there, though. The question that everyone who has seen the show must have asked themselves is, why is Simms the only one to get a leather jacket?
Also, a hard drive plays a prominent role in the show, and although HDDs are pretty reliable, there are easier-to-repair storage media. Magnetic tape might be slow, but the technology required to read it is analog. For real long-term data archival, microfilm would do the trick.
One problem that the silo won’t have to deal with is format obsolescence. Nobody is developing new apps and software, so any files you could read at the beginning will still be readable forever, as long as the computers and storage still work.
Another gotcha is that there seems to be a lot of glass in the silo. Maybe they have access to sand, but if not, then those fancy glasses used by the folks up top have to be seriously antique. Glass can be recycled easily enough, but the result doesn’t look like that. You get a much rougher material, especially if you keep recycling the same glass for hundreds of years. And the glass jugs and hotplates of the coffee percolators seem like they would be better replaced by steel thermos jugs.
And while we’re talking about oddities in the silo, it’s interesting to note that the whole setup is totally US-centric. For example, when characters boil water to make tea, they use water kettles that heat on the stovetop, which is way less efficient than using an electric kettle. This, I guess, is down to the US mostly not using electric kettles today, maybe thanks to your 110 Volt power, which boils the water slower than the 230-240V in the U.K. where every home (and every hotel room) has an electric kettle.
And what about those cops? There’s no way a non-American silo would have a paramilitary force of armed and armored cops like that. And why put guns down there at all? That seems like a terrible idea, when every other society on Earth manages without guns, and even some police forces don’t carry them (the U.K. again).
But the final weird discrepancy is also a major plot point. Why, in a place where repair and reuse is in the bones of everybody alive, is their gaffer tape so bad? Surely that would be the most important thing to get right! At least down in Mechanical they make their own, and that’s the good stuff. But still, if anything marks the silo out as a dystopia, it’s the lack of proper gaffer or duct tape. After all, that might be the most useful repair tool of all.
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