I just thought of another showstopper that makes the other issues now seem insignificant: how could you ever determine whether or not the suits and shelters work to prevent bacterial contamination? The problem here is that humans are already "contaminated" and another problem is that the world isn't contaminated with a unique kind of bacteria or bacteria-sized particle that you could test for. So, there's actually nothing to test for. Even if you could test for something, how could you even detect one or a few bacteria that got through? I don't see any way around this.

Air Supply Leaks

The below diagram illustrates the airflow dynamics. The air system is designed with a series of pressure gradients (P1 > P5 > P4 > P3 > P2), ensuring that any leak results in airflow from clean to dirty areas, not the reverse. This mechanism minimizes contamination risks, even in the event of small leaks. This principle is widely used in cleanroom and laboratory settings to maintain sterile environments.

This still doesn't address gasket leaks (leaks between the filter's gasket material and the filter tunnel). The potential for such leaks could be eliminated be permanently bonding the filter to the filter tunnel but that would mean that the filters couldn't be replaced.

Cleanrooms and labs aren't failure-proof, and failure would happen a lot more often in the messiness of the real world. 

Membrane Integrity and Large Holes

You're correct that larger holes or tears could compromise the shelter. To mitigate this, the material used for the shelter will be selected for its tear resistance and self-limiting properties. Existing materials for bubble hotels, for example, do not propagate tears. For DIY or lower-cost implementations, layering materials (e.g., plastic sheets reinforced with fabric) could provide additional durability. There is already extensive research on tear resistant fabrics, as well as substantial data from people actually living in such structures, such as bubble hotels. For mass production, it would be useful to carry out research on how to achieve tear resistance across a variety of materials and fabrication methods.

Even if tiny holes or material defects wouldn't grow into large tears due to air pressure alone, what if something else impinged on the membrane? Couldn't a large enough stressor conceivably cause a small hole to grow? After all, suits and shelters would often get banged up by normal use and the occasional red truck.

It's probably safe to assume that small leaks couldn't deflate these bubble hotels, but I doubt anyone has been motivated to look at whether some of these leaks could grow large enough to let in small amounts of particulates. Suit durability probably suffers from the same lack of research.

Component Failures

While no system is failure-proof, redundancy and robustness are central to the shelter's design. Key measures include:

• Longevity Testing: Components will undergo extensive real-world and simulated stress testing. Suppliers' lifetime analyses will be leveraged to ensure reliability.

If you're lucky, you might get away with testing thousands of shelters and suits, but if you want something really robust, you probably need to test hundreds of thousands and potentially millions. How will you get hundreds of thousands of people to isolate themselves for years at the minimum? Mars simulation theme parks? I'm only half joking; perhaps some sort of rotation system might work, but on the other hand, that might defeat (or at least minimize) the purpose of testing the practicality of continuously (without any breaks due to personnel changes) sealing out external contamination.

• Redundant Systems: Critical systems like air supply will have manual overrides and backup power (e.g., a UPS to sustain operation during power transitions). Simple mechanical solutions will be emphasized to reduce dependence on complex electronics - in a crisis it can probably be assumed that one could rely on shelter inhabitants for at least some operation and maintenance.

How long could (and should) these redundant systems last? Years? Decades? What would be their failure rate? Spare batteries can fail if they're not used, gaskets can become brittle or warped, metal can oxidize, and so on.

Redundancy might increase durability in the short term, but it also increases complexity, and complexity can create its own problems. Complexity might not be an issue when you can usually get all of the spare parts you need, but if industry no longer exists (because you want to minimize the time you spend outside), you'd need to stockpile a lot of parts and/or entire shelters and suits. That would increase costs. And how long would that stockpile actually last? How long would membrane material remain folded without degrading along the folds in a garage or warehouse that's not climate controlled? There are likely to be many issues like this with long-term storage.

• User Training: Shelters are designed for inhabitants to manage minor troubleshooting (e.g., switching power sources).

How will you train millions of people about how to live and survive in suits and shelters before a catastrophe happens? This goes way beyond simple maintenance procedures and troubleshooting.

It would be risky to wait for a catastrophe to happen due to the possible social disorder that might occur and logistical issues with distribution (e.g., trying to outrun simultaneous releases of mirror bacteria in all major population centers).

Mass Production Challenges

Scaling production to millions of units is indeed ambitious, but starting with smaller-scale production allows us to address these challenges iteratively. The simplicity of the design—based on off-the-shelf components—makes rapid scaling more feasible compared to more complex systems. Even producing tens of thousands of units could substantially reduce existential risk in high-priority scenarios.

Where will the incentive for mass producing millions of units come from? Or even tens of thousands?

Suit Usage and External Transfers

For outside missions, the focus is on minimizing exposure. Techniques used in gnotobiotic (germ-free) animal research, such as sterilized transfer tunnels filled with vaporized hydrogen peroxide (VHP), could be adapted for human use. Vehicles retrofitted with small shelters can serve as transfer units, reducing reliance on suits for complete protection.

What happens when the suit inevitably gets dirty? There'll be a lot more mud and dirt in a world in which infrastructure isn't maintained, and I doubt VHP will be adequate. So, there'll probably need to be another elaborate decontamination procedure. More complexity, more points of failure, more cost.

Will those retrofitted vehicles be self-driving? If not, the cabin would need to be shelterified. Yeah, good luck with that. If it's a self-driving truck with a shelter bolted on, you might also need a datacenter to go alone with that. But that means you'd need to maintain the datacenter and have more spare hardware and spend more time outside and maintain a power source for the datacenter, and so on. On the other hand, if self-driving will depend only on a local system, you'll probably need an AGI for that. But if you have an AGI, you'd also probably have an ASI which should be able to make something way better like almost fail-proof suits and shelters, self-sufficient, impenetrable underground cities, or quickly eliminate the mirror bateria threat (e.g., by drexlerian nanobots, assuming they're physically possible to construct).

-air supply leaks: the whole air supply is inside the shelter with a fan at the inside end. Thus, any leak goes from clean to dirty and is not an issue

I'm not sure what you're describing here. Unless you're talking about some sort of closed-loop system (like on a submarine or spacecraft), leaks are always a possibility. Can you share an illustration of what you're trying to describe?

-leaks through membrane (including airlock doors): not a major issue, the positive pressure will not let anything from the outside come inside

It might not be a major issue for a tiny pinhole but what about a larger hole or tear? What if that pinhole suddenly creates a larger rupture (helped out by a red truck perhaps?) in the membrane?

-shutdown due to failure of critical components is not foreseen to be an issue

Famous last words. Battery BMS fails → positive pressure is lost → bacteria gets in via tiny membrane hole(s) → everyone in the shelter dies

- all components should be possible to engineer for long continuous operation

These components will need to be mass-produced by the millions and continuously used under real world conditions to have any decent chance of being reliable. Even if certain components are already mass-produced for other uses, integrating them into a reliable system would still require integrating them into millions of shelters. But as I mentioned before, that's not likely to happen.

The suits are indeed only 50k protection factor but it should be possible to use proven methods used to transfer germ free mice between facilities.

The leak problems that plague shelters would also apply to suits. And we are talking about using suits in the outside world, right? All facilities except shelters and perhaps food warehouses would not be protected and suits would be needed to access them.

I am happy to address this in more detail as we have spent quite a bit of time turning many stones. That said, a team of people can still make mistakes so I appreciate that you are helping me looking into this and this is part of the reason I posted - I would love to take a call to if that would be easier to hash this out.

If solutions to at least some of these issues are documented elsewhere, perhaps you can provide some links?

At least for now, public discussion seems more appropriate.

This shelter idea has many points of potential failure, possible showstoppers, and assuming a small population of shelters (hundreds or a few thousand), seems extremely unlikely to maintain an MVP for more than a few months.

Points of failure:

• Leaks from the air and water filtration system (e.g., gasket leaks)
• Leaks from the airlock
• Leaks from the biohazard suits
• Leaks from the shelter membrane
• Shutdown of the filtration system due to mechanical or electrical failure

Showstoppers:

• Food production or storage will require massive warehouses using the same extreme filtering as the suits and shelters. An alternative is to use some sort of disinfection tech like gamma ray sterilization, but I don't know how practical that would be.
• Producing all food indoors is currently not possible and seems unlikely be achieved anytime soon.
• To mitigate the risk of these points of failure, millions of suits and shelters (along will massive amounts of supplies such as food and spare parts) will have to be manufactured and distributed, and millions of people will need to be trained in how to use them before any catastrophe occurred. Obviously, this is extremely unlikely to happen anytime soon, and I strongly suspect it won't happen before mirror bacteria is created (due to the acceleration of biotech and AI progress) and released into the wild.

There would still be term limits: violent death, revolutions, invasions, and so on.

You might want to consider adding additional protection measures (like a respirator), as the effectiveness of some vaccines can be moderate to non-existent. The effectiveness of the flu vaccine in years when its well-matched to the circulating strains is between 40% and 60%, and when the vaccine is not well-matched, it's protection against illness plummets, although it may still offer some protection against complications such as pneumonia. Vaccines don't exist for bad colds and the stomach flu.

There seems to have been plenty of papers on airborne aerosol transmission of the flu and experiments with human subjects strongly suggested that the common cold is transmitted via aerosols. So, this makes it even more surprising that the experts got transmission so wrong and took forever to correct their mistake.

Yes, but your post seemed to focus on the individual, and that's why I didn't mention future humanity.

For humanity, it did go from no doom to maybe doom which is worse. And perhaps it's worse for the individual in the long run too, but that's a lot more speculative.

In any case, there's still some hope left that our luck will last long enough to avoid doom, even if it will be by the skin of our teeth.

The virus most likely leaked from the gain-of-function experiments that they were doing under BSL-2 and not from the BSL-3 or BSL-4 labs.

Third scenario: bat-to-researcher transmission during field work at bat caves or from the bat repository/colony or unaltered bat viruses at the labs in Wuhan.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/25/opinion/coronavirus-lab.html