Wunderkind Elon Musk, creator of Tesla Motors and Space X, has, for the last few months, been teasing about a concept he calls “hyperloop”, a revolutionary means of transportation that could travel from LA to San Francisco in 30 minutes.
Details from Musk will be released August 12. Anybody have any ideas besides what Gardi has proposed? Is this a “Segway” fake-out, or is Musk really on to something?
It’s an interesting concept - probably not actually impossible.
I don’t think it will ever be much more than an interesting concept, and if it did, I’d have thought there would be better (that is, more geologically stable) places to build it than San Francisco.
I can’t see how you could travel that fast, and still manage to start and stop without people’s brains turning to mush from the G forces. I’d imagine an awful lot of damage to the tiny sacs in the lungs as well.
That said, if a zero friction system could be built which would handle cargo, that would still be a major win.
Looking at a map of fault lines, yeah, going from LA to SF and back might be a poor choice. Depending on how the tech works for switching tracks, so to speak, you could do a short (risky) hop from LA to Bakersfield, then a long, straight run to Sacramento, then transfer to another line that goes from Sacramento to SF.
However, traveling anywhere near the speed of sound anywhere near the ground is not my idea of a good time, earthquakes or no.
A few decades ago, Scientific American published a rather speculative article about high speed rail transit. He imagined a tube drilled straight through earth from, say, NY to LA. And he meant straight. The main motive power would be force of gravity, accelerating you as you got closer the center of the earth and decelerating you as you approached destination. Air resistance would be minimized by partially evacuating the tunnel ahead and the power to overcome frictional and other losses would provided by allowing ordinary pressure behind you. I estimate that when you are under Kansas, say, you will be nearly 250 miles below the earth’s surface. I don’t know if this is the sort of thing Musk has in mind. Stay tuned.
I believe he (or someone) said it would cost $6 billion to create a line from LA to SF. If it were underground it would cost much more than that, so I don’t think there is anything underground to this line.
I’m betting my money on a segway that goes 700 mph.
I don’t understand why that would be a risk. People fly in commercial airliners that go 600mph all the time. The concorde went at mach 2, and people didn’t die or get injured from it.
People seem to be assuming a much higher rate of acceleration, rather than just a higher top speed; I think it’s the comparison to a pneumatic tube, where you put the cylinder in the tube, close the door and phoot! it’s gone.
I wonder if geological shifting would be a major problem.
I think that assumption would be in error. Musk is not an idiot, to suggest an idea whose only drawback was breaking the necks of the passengers.
That was my impression. I don’t know the math/physics of g forces but accelerating from 0-55mph in my car in 15 seconds has never given me problems. So wouldn’t accelerating from 0-600mph in about 2-3 minutes be just as painless?
A funny car drag racer can go from 0-300mph in under 5 seconds. Its not recommended, but people survive.
I think he’s just trying to raise money to start development on something that years from now might produce some beneficial results, possibly far from the original proposal. Also, possibly a big waste of time.
LA to SF is about 380 miles. That means to do it in 30 minutes you’ve got achieve an average speed of 760 mph.
How fast do airplanes travel the same distance?
Now that I think of it though, pilots have survived mach III so I guess I’m wrong.
OK, so an approximation of Mach 3 at sealevel (it’s complicated) would be over 2,200 mph. So yeah, Ignore my comment above.
Airline schedules are around 90 minutes for that route, but that includes some padding. Plus, the air is free - no need to build infrastructure over the entire distance - and it’s immune to seismic events.
This obviously isn’t a practical proposal, but if Musk’s real intention is to break down some misconceptions and get the public to think more imaginatively again, then I love him for it.
G forces are a product of acceleration, not speed.
I think this is a nice idea but doubt how likely it will be implemented.
I’m skeptical that anything useful will come from this. The last time a billionaire inventor tried to generate hype about a thing that was going to revolutionize transportation before he actually revealed said thing, that thing turned out to be the friggin’ Segway. I know the claims are a little different here (no one claimed the segway was going to be supersonic), but let’s just say I’ll believe it when I see it.
The deepest hole ever dug is the Kola Superdeep Borehole at ~12.2 km (7.6 statute miles) deep. This is probably as deep as it will ever be practical to dig due to temperatures and pressures at those depths. The Earth’s mantle starts between 5 and 70 km (3 to 45 statute miles), and I think it is obvious that it would not be possible to maintain a stable horizontal bore through the mantle without some kind of fantastical material technology, not to mention having to cross three major fault lines.
Even digging a more shallow bore the distance between Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area is implausible from just a logistical standpoint alone, much less the technical challenges of making it stable across the seismically unstable Transverse Ranges and maintaining vacuum integrity and sufficient alignment. A cursory comparison to other tunneling and digging projects such as the Channel Tunnel or the Boston Central Artery Tunnel project shows that just the removal of material would cost trillions of dollars aside from the technical challenges.
While it is true that aircraft move at comparable speeds, they are powered through all phases of flight and so the maximum sensed acceleration is limited to what is necessary to achieve lift. A linear accelerator would have to accelerate a capsule up to speed in the length of the accelerator; for obvious reasons (cost, power and maintenance requirements, et cetera) you would want to make it as short as feasible within the tolerance of passengers and cargo.
In short, the idea of high speed ballistic transports flying across regional distances through evacuated tubes under the surface is even less practicable than orbiting hotels and space elevators. Nor is their any pressing need for such a capability or any expectation of ever obtaining a profitable return on such a massively expensive investment even if the technical challenges could be overcome.
Stranger
Stranger, thanks for your insight, you started out really on the money, but went way off track at the end. There is indeed pressing need for such a project, as you’re probably unaware that California voters (myself included) approved a proposition to raise money I the form of bonds to create an intrastate bullet train. It now turns out that through various technical challenges, the winners or planners of the contracts to implement this would give us only like the lamest most pathetic bullet trains of them all. Pressing need indeed.
I’m well aware of the ill-conceived “bullet train” initiative and both the technical and throughway challenges thereof. It is unfortunate that the bond measure passed despite lacking a firmly established implementation and that the money is essentially handouts to companies to perform study after study for years without a single piece of hardware being built, but to assume that this proposal is going to add something substantive to the effort is naive. Unless the actual proposal is something more grounded and the claims less bombastic than the what is presented in the article, I am highly dubious that anything will come out of this in the near term.
And regardless of feasibility, there is simply not enough passenger traffic between Los Angeles and San Francisco which requires such high speed transit to make the investment of developing and building such a system fiscally viable or necessary. Improvements to the efficiency, reliability, and safety of air transportation systems–which are not tied to any specific destination and therefore offer a more expansive benefit per dollar invested–would be a wiser route for development.
Stranger