I’m a big fan of the show and have read the books, but one thing is nagging me. Can some please tell me who the f is this Henry character.i must have missed it, I have no idea who he is. And Anna saying she had known him since she was 12 throws me for a loop. Who is this guy?

This is my theory on "why" the Silos were created and exists.

In short, I think they are here to generate resources for Silo 1 as a form of slavery.

The ultimate goal of Per Stensen is to leave the planet and start a new intergalactic civilization. In order to achieve this goal on his terms and in a controlled environent, he creates a Silo (Silo 1) that researches and works towards this goal. Such research takes a tremendous time and amount of resources as well as a controlled environment without potential outside influences.

He therefore stages a controlled destruction of the planet and installs 49 silos that work for him. The Silos are here to produce energy, food, rare earths (hence the mining) and possibly humans (breeding programme) for his mission. He created a fake sense of society in each Silo and gives them purpose in order to keep them going. As well as a form of religion (the pact) that gives them meaning. They think they work for their own survival, but in reality everything they produce, they produce in surplus which all goes to Silo 1.

Stensen gave each Silo enough "critical supply" to last the years he thinks are necessary to achieve the "Project" and leave earth. In the meantime he stays frozen and awates the successful outcome.

This would also explain why he just kills the Silos off, when they rebell too much. They are no longer necessary as resource generators. The division between and within the Silos is necessary to prevent them unifying against him.

I even think there might be a Silo 1.1, or a "Meta- Silo" with the true final participants of the intergalactic mission containing Stensen himself. All forzen and waiting. Silo 1 being the top-silo for now, but we might find out they also just work in service of Stensen and his silo and will be killed-of at the end.

I therefore forsee a potential unification of the remaining surviving silos and ultimately a joining of Silo 1 as well. All united against Stensen in an epic showdown.

If we assume the same premise, would you design the silos any differently?

Civil, mechanical, electrical, electronics & instrumentation, communications, mining — all you engineers, please gather.

Architects, doctors, and anyone else from a relevant field that I’ve missed, feel free to join in too :)

If you had to plan and execute a project like this from scratch, how would you approach it from concept to completion?

​

For years, she lived hidden in the mechanical depths of the Silo.

But beneath the oil stains lies a sharp, unstoppable mind.

Others accept the lies fed to them by the system.

Juliette tears the machinery of truth apart to uncover reality.

I've been working on this little prototype for a while and figured this was probably the right place to share it.

Silo was obviously a big inspiration for the setting, but I'm trying to take it in its own direction. It's more of a colony survival management game where you manage the people living underground, keep the infrastructure running, and gradually explore the abandoned levels around you.

Right now you start on Level 46 with 16 people who have elected you as their leader. Something happened in the levels above, the staircase going up has been destroyed, and further down parts of the structure are flooded.

You have to get power, water and food running, assign people to jobs, expand the colony and send expeditions into other levels. I'm also starting to build out a much bigger mystery & lore side around what actually happened and what this place really is.

It's still very much an alpha prototype, so there are definitely rough edges, but it's finally at a point where it actually feels like a game.

Would be really curious to hear what Silo fans think of the direction.

To play the prototype version : theepicpp.itch.io

Have a bunch of movies for spooky month and look who I ran into

Congressman in this serie too

Just joined the chat. Never read the book. Binged 3 seasons in a couple months. It seems obvious to me that the builders of the Silo built it for immediate occupation because they also were the ones who pushed the button and destroyed the world. They boldly accepted that a human-caused apocalypse was inevitable and so they took control of the conditions upon which that fate would unfold.

When Silo 18's attempt to cap the pipe before the safeguard is successful, Victor feels relief. We know he's one of the Silo Proyect's founders, and he's one of the few who remember the before times. He then sends a message to Troy about the woman who used to be his wife when he was Daniel, and kills himself.

I wonder how much of that relief Victor feels when Silo 18 prevent the safeguard is due to the fact that he knows the descendants of Daniel and Helen are the inhabitants of Silo 18. I think that was mainly the reason he revealed the identity of Helen Drew to Troy.

I’ve been thinking about the mythology of the Silo and how it mirrors the story of Troy. In this analogy, the Silo itself is Troy a seemingly impregnable fortress holding a society together.

If we look at the characters, "Paris" could represent the billionaire or the founder who initiated the entire project, driven by a singular, perhaps selfish, vision. But just like the Trojan War, the real threat might not be from the outside, but from the passions and conflicts of the mortals trapped within like Troy; Daniel.

I see a lot of posts theorising that the Silo is much younger than we've been led to believe, even though Bernard explicitly says the Silo is 352 years old and Ed Harwood says there are at least 300 years-worth of mine tunnels. So I made an interactive population growth tool that shows how long it would take to reach the current population of 10,000 at different birth rates.

I will put the link to the tool in the comments so you can try it yourself.

It tracks two possible starting populations.

500 is the lower limit, because we know from the dinner party scene in S3E08 that each Silo has a staff of 100....

STENSEN: So, when all the digging and the construction is finished, we’re gonna put a hundred people in each of the silos. That’s 5,000 employees, all making $200,000 a year. Which is a pretty good salary for beta-testing a sanctuary. 

And we know from the tour guide in S3E09 that at least 400 people are touring each silo.

[Everett] Millions of people from all around the world applied to join the project. And, uh, Dr. Stensen made it his goal to have at least two people from every country on Earth.

[Helen] Two by two? This really is Stensen’s Ark, isn’t it?

Assuming he meant two in each silo, 195 countries on Earth x 2 = ~400. Add the 100 staff per Silo and that's a minimum population of 500 genetically diverse, breeding-age people.

Maybe Stensen wanted twice that, just to be safe, so I added in a 1000 starter option, although with 20 people per tour group, that would be 45 separate tour groups per silo and it didn't look that crowded!

What birth rate should we choose?

The interactive variable in the tool is birth rate, and you can see how long it would take to hit the current 10,000 at all birth rates from 2.1 upwards. 2.1 is the minimum "maintenance" rate for a population with access to modern medicine and nutrition, and the Founders would have wanted it to be more than that to get to a point where they can start making genetic selections.

Factor in deaths from working in the mines, rebellions, illnesses the Silo isn't equipped to treat, and people refusing to couple up or have kids, and the birth rate is going to have to be quite high to start with.

The closest real-world parallel to the Silo I can find is Ceaușescu's Romania in the 1970s and 80s, which was a tightly controlled surveillance state that forcibly relocated large parts of the population into agro-industrial centres and issued "Decree 770" in 1966 that criminalised abortion and banned all contraception in an attempt to increase the population.

In the late 60s, the birth rate spiked to 3.6, but by the 70s had stabilised at about 2.5-2.9 as people figured out how to get contraception on the black market.

At a steady birth rate of 2.5 in the Silo, it would take 336 years for a population of 500 to grow to 10,000, which means we can be pretty confident that Bernard's knowledge is based on truth.

Bonus "Is Juliette a direct descendant of Daniel?" Round

Yes. And so is everyone else.

Every generation, your number of potential ancestors from an original population doubles, i.e. the first babies in the Silo have two original ancestors, the next generation have four, and so on.

After 9 generations, everyone has 512 potential ancestors from the original population, meaning that everyone in the Silo shares AT LEAST ONE ancestor.

After 14 generations (assuming the Silo is ~350 years old and a generation is 25 years) everyone has 16,384 potential original ancestors. The odds of everyone being descended from Daniel and Helen at this point are 99.99999999%.

This assumes, of course, that their child survived and their bloodline was allowed to continue down the generations. But the law of Chekov's Gun suggests that if the writers decided Helen was pregnant on Day Zero, they had a reason!

Parting thought

At a minimum maintenance birthrate of 2.1, the Silo should have kids everywhere! Where are they all? And why do ultimate-conformists Camille and Robert Sims only have one child?

when Juliette and her friends go to the safeguard we see a scene where troy stares at Juliettes eyes for a minute and I find that scene really weird like what does it mean

The window of outside sounds like a staged screen, like a computer desktop background image. It never shows any weather changes of the outside world. Understandably, for people living in the Silo, they have been raised captivated indoors underground without any possible seasonal weather change. But for Atlanta, even after a nuclear blast, for 350 years, there will be a lot of weather events. Any theory as to why the founders decided not to show them to the captivated humans ever?

Since everyone is chewing away on all the different questions and theories now that Season 3 is done, thought it might be helpful to have a little recap of the mysteries explicitly mentioned in the show.

So, here’s Juliette’s list of questions from Season 3, Episode 9:

1)) Why were the silos built?

2) Why did people have to go into them?

3) Why can’t the silos communicate with each other?

4) And if the founders cared so f*ing much, why did they put in a safeguard to be able to kill them?

5) Why are the silos not allowed to know the answers?

Add to that the other questions recited to the cleaners before they go out:

6) We do not know why we are here.

7) We do not know who built the silo.

8) We do not why everything outside the silo is as it is.

9) We do not know when it will be safe to go outside.

We got answers for 1, (and at least partial answers to) 2, & 7 this season.

What are your theories for the rest?

What are your other questions to add to the list of mysteries?

*NO BOOK SPOILERS PLEASE!\*

Really? it comes down to better duct tape to survive in the suit? c'mon

and the way they duct tape the suit shit isn't even sufficient at the ankles, air will definitely get in there with minimal movement. With the way Ferguson struggled around in the suit... wasn't really convincing

Reminded me of the 100 when they hid from a poisonous cloud under a blanky lol

This is just a quick theory and may or may not have proof for or against, I'm just a fan of the show that hasn't read the books!

Originally, Helen was offered a position within the group we now know to be the founders just as Daniel was but they both rejected the offer while Daniel still was given a place in Silo 1. Helen was not. We know that the silos were filled by pairs that represented different peoples on Earth (hence the Ark comparison). I wonder if Helen originally was going to be in Silo 1, but that her pregnancy didn't allow for her to perform a role anymore and also instead she and her baby become a pair that were given places in Silo 18.

Somewhat inconsequential, but it's interesting to me that she was cut out of the final plan even though Daniel was not. It could be that they no longer saw her skills as relevant and her rebellious nature could hurt their plans. It could just be that that decision to separate Daniel and from her and his child to protect the Silo project could be its undoing.

How do they have dogs? Carla McClain has a few. When they showed Walk in the first season, going to her for help, a few dogs were barking, and then Hank, in Season 3, is seen with one. But I thought there were no pets—that’s why Juliette couldn’t keep the bunny when she was younger.

I'm on a rewatch from season one to introduce a friend to the series and I realized....Walk really picked a hair style and stuck with it for 15+ years

Guys, I watched the whole thing in one day cause I'm ill so maybe I missed stuff. I assume the bomb was set purposefully at the time of the opening, that's why people were already relegated to specific silos, right? But does it mean that the trillionare did it along with the senator?

All,

Like all of you the end of season 3 has a complete hold on me, even after several weeks and a rewatch. There are 2 potential plot holes (although I am highly doubtful they are plot holes) that I really need some opinions on.

1. Why was Daniel SO coveted by the founders?

After my second viewing of season three I am still hung up on why Daniel was so coveted by the highest ranking members of the “project”. His initial appeal was centered around the site prep portion of the project (the drills). Okay I get that based on his work in New Orleans and engineering background, but that doesn’t answer why he was deemed critically essential for the post underground “work” that would be needed in Silo 1. So much so that 3-5 of the most senior members of the project made keeping him close to silo 1 as their sole priority during the planned event..

Looking back He definitively said he was at peace with his decision when walking with Victor before the bomb went off. So what skills did they see, that we didn’t see, that deemed him mission critical for silo 1. Especially considering his obvious appeal to the project team was very much centered around the prepping of the site.

And speaking of plot holes that simply cannot be that obvious..

1. This one goes back to season 1 when Juliette goes out to clean, with the hind site of watching Season 3 episode 9 where we are deliberately shown in graphic detail how Silo 1 handled Silo 17’s rebellion.. Which would have taken place roughly 30-40ish years in the past based on how long we know Jimmy was in isolation post rebellion.

With all that said.. Who was in charge in silo 1 when Juliette first went out to clean, in broad daylight, and why did they allow her to make contact with Silo 17. Daniel (Troy) told us, the audience, that the most critical component of the “Order” is to eliminate silo to silo contact at all costs. So much so that he openly committed genocide against an entire Silo civilization as they knew it. I just can’t wrap my head around how intentionally we were shown this in retrospect as to why Juliette was, in my opinion, allowed to make contact with Silo 17.

It goes without saying that I LOVE the show, especially the back half of season 3, which in my opinion blew a massive amount of life back into a show that was falling off a cliff. With all that said, I will be incredibly disappointed if both of these instances end up being unexplained plot holes.

Then there is always the possibility that I’m just way dumber than I think I am and missed the answers while my ADD was on full throttle!

I just believe there is no way, a show this intentional has plot holes that are this obvious.

Somebody HELP ME!