Every time I walk in here I hear Eddie Murphy’s voice doing the bit about his grandma saying, with an exaggerated drawn out drawl, “Eddie, it’s cold in here…”

I guess that’s one of the points of building a house under ground - natural protection from the heat of the sun.

Of course these days cold is relative. Ever since we hit the 5 degree Celsius point-of-no-turning-back global warming, all of us who are left up here in the Pacific Northwest — CDC estimates a 50% population decline through death and northward migration — only brave the outside at night. Daytime temperatures are well over 120 degrees Fahrenheit on a good day.

So our houses are built underground, and just about everything else is too. We’ve got entire underground cities, with streets, food grow operations, water extraction systems, what passes for restaurants these days, and even performance spaces for live music and theater.

We do go outside, or at least I do. Whenever I can, I head up to the surface. The heat, even at night, is oppressive, but the expansive dessert sands covering what once were forests and grass lands are awe inspiring. And on a good night you can see the moon and the stars pushing through the orangish smog overhead.

I do appreciate the coolness of our underground home. Holographic image generators behind the “windows” of our house create the illusion of three dimensional lakes, forested hillsides, corn fields, or whatever images from nature’s past suit our fancy on a given day. If we are feeling especially ironic or defeated we have the generator project skiers gliding down a snow capped cascade peak.

What the technology can’t solve for is the heaviness. It’s inescapable. No matter what you think you see out the windows, or hear through the INSE (the immersive nature sounds experience), you know you’re underground. Your body knows there’s rock on all sides. Even if you are not claustrophobic, you sense that you could be crushed at any moment.

Humans are adaptable. So we go on living with the heaviness. From a distance the scenes on the underground streets probably appear pretty familiar. Someone from 21st century Manhattan might feel right at home in the perpetual dusk; it’s a lot like the persistent shadows cast by those rows of skyscrapers that left so little room for sunshine.

But things are not what they appear to be. The heaviness has changed us. We are adapting to survive, but the adaptations come at a cost - a steep cost. We are losing the ability to create beauty.