The agency clarified that the request was in support of the “urban” round Subterranean Challenge (SubT Challenge), a team-based competition to develop and use technologies for navigating unfamiliar underground spaces.
“As teams prepare for the SubT Challenge Urban Circuit, the program recognizes it can be difficult for them to find locations suitable to test their systems and sensors,” DARPA Chief of Communications Jared Adams told Live Science in an email. “DARPA issued this [request for information] in part to help identify potential representative environments where teams may be able to test in advance of the upcoming event.”
The Twitter thread began with a cheery “Attention, city dwellers!” (you know, that thing normal humans say when addressing other humans) and devolved from there into jokes about “demogorgons” from the TV show “Stranger Things.” But it’s remarkable that the official request went up late on Aug. 20 — just 10 days before the 5 p.m. EDT deadline on Aug. 30 — for someone to offer up a suitable tunnel complex.
Before the agency clarified the purpose of the request, Twitter users made a meme of the request, suggesting all sorts of reasons DARPA might be hanging out in the basement, and the story took on a life of its own. Adams noted that he’d spent his day trying to clear up “misperceptions” about the request.
Anyway, if you happen to be the owner of a buried tunnel system sufficient for DARPA’s purposes, and enjoy the idea of people running around them trying to make the military better at doing war things, you can offer it up by 5 p.m. EDT tomorrow here on this website.
https://www.livescience.com/darpa-weird-tunnel-tweet.html