Gadgetory

when I first got to coober pedy I had no idea what to expect this is a town in the middle of the Australian desert it's eight hours drive to the nearest city I had to take two flights to get there and when I was flying in it's kind of like flying into Mars everywhere you look there's just red dust as far as the eye can see and the whole landscape is dotted with these piles of dirt kind of like ant hills Cooper Petey's a mining town so all of those piles of dirt I just left over dirt from mine shafts but it's not just about mining here in summer it gets insanely hot and in winter when I visited it was absolutely freezing so most of the town is actually built underground to escape these extremes and all I could think was how do people actually live here how do people survive and I guess most importantly how do you get tech to work when you're in the middle of the Australian outback and you're living underground so more than half the town lives in dugouts which is the name for these homes built inside the sandstone into the rock and they blow them out with explosives they dig them out with excavators and they're kind of like rabbit warrens the rooms are kind of circular they have round ceilings they wind every which way into the rock there's really no consideration for architecture but the cool thing is that they don't need air-conditioning or climate control because when you build into the rock the rooms stay cool all year round the only thing they need is really basic ventilation so that's just as simple as a tube that runs up to the ground above and keeps air flowing into the house it's amazing so Cooper Petey looks kind of like something out of the Flintstones but I was really surprised that the townspeople actually use a lot of tech they use things like Wi-Fi hotspots to stay connected underground and Australia's National Broadband Network has started installing satellites so people can get internet in their underground homes there's plumbing and electricity like any normal house and often the people who build these houses why are they electricity in themselves stringing the wires over the rock the whole town is completely off the electricity grid so while they used to have to rely on diesel generators and diesel trucked in from out of town now they have this big renewable project that has brought wind turbines and solar meaning they can power the town with renewables the whole town was built on opal mining and people actually still mined there so they have these converted trucks called blowers that sucked it out of the ground they blast out mine shafts with explosives and they still go over Rock seams digging out opals by hand they finish the opals by hand too they cut and polish them into these beautiful iridescent gemstones that look kind of like shards of rainbow coober pedy is like something from a completely different world people living hundreds of miles from anywhere in the middle of the outback in the most extreme conditions and yet somehow this communities survived by jury-rigging tech to work for them it's kind of like something from Mad Max this one last outpost of humanity in the middle of the harsh Australian desert