Realistically, None of that would apply.
How do you figure? In California, no concerns about disability access?
I think Sigene meant that it’s not getting built, and therefore irrelevant :).
Actually, I see no reason why there have to be special capsules. They open up from the side, and so it would be easy for the attendants to help a disabled individual into one of the seats. The wheelchair would then be placed into the luggage compartment.
It would be even easier than on current airplanes, where people have to first transfer to one of those narrow wheelchairs that can fit down the aisle. They still have to be helped into a seat.
Well, handwaving away disability compliance is certainly in the spirit of the project.
What about height and weight limits? Health concerns? Can somebody be too big to ride it? Too small? Too pregnant?
I dunno if I’d call it handwaving away. Most disability compliance is pretty straightforward, common-sense stuff. The biggest issue will be with the stations… but they’re just buildings, and compliance is a solved problem with buildings.
Obviously, a sufficiently fat person won’t be able to ride. Children might need special seats. Pregnant shouldn’t be a problem.
This is the sound of one hand waving.
Pressure drops can trigger premature birth- it goes back to when we had babies in caves.
A storm front rolls though, pressure drops, babies are born, storm masks smell of blood.
Pregnant women are advised not to fly, and even a road trip from say, Texas to Colorado can result in a 28-week preemie.
To me, it sounded more like the arm movements of someone making vague accusations of problems without any specific indication of what those problems might be, or how they differ from the same problems solved in other industries. Oh well.
Another comment about it.
One specific suggestion is that much of it could be done at ground level–thus substantially lowering the costs in those areas.
Well it seems no one has been willing to invest substantial sums of money to investigate this, but there are some people looking into it:
So Musk’s effort at crowdsourcing has resulted in… someone else making an effort at crowdsourcing. What’s new about what JumpStartFund is doing now, vs. what Musk did last year?
A Forbes article:
Hyperloop Is Real: Meet The Startups Selling Supersonic Travel
I [del]read[/del] skimmed the article and I don’t see much of anything important that wasn’t said or implied in the Wired article you posted in December. Obviously, Forbes is going to stress the business end and the investors.
It’s terrific that people are looking seriously at it as more than a single transportation corridor. Whether the initial concept works or not, thinking about new ways to develop infrastructure is crucial.
But… They really need to tamp down the hype; this is something that is still decades away and nobody can say what the final form will look like or if people rather than objects will ever be able to use it. New technologies that overpromise wonders have an awful track record.
New technologies have an awful track record whether they overpromise or not. That’s just the nature of technology; for the most part you don’t know how useful something will be until you build it. But hype gathers investors. Some because they buy into the hype, but (more respectably) others because they only reason they knew about the technology is from widespread, hyped-up news coverage. Smart investors will still do their due diligence.
There’s a difference between new technologies and new technologies that announce themselves as The Future! I’ve been watching technologies that proclaim they’re going to change the world since laser fusion in 1970 and I’ve studied earlier technologies for a century earlier. There is an almost perfect inverse relationship between hype and performance. New technologies that change the world almost always come out of nowhere and surprise us.
A Law of the Internet says that someone will post a single hyped technology that worked and say that proves me wrong.
I dunno. I searched old Popular Science magazines for the announcement of the transistor, and it was just as breathless as all their articles on flying cars. Same goes for their articles on early jet liners (de Havilland Comet, etc.), and container ships (McLean’s Ideal X). All world-changing ideas that, at the time, were indistinguishable from articles on death rays and atomic cars.
I think you have a confirmation bias problem. You don’t know about all those technologies that were born quietly and died quietly, and those almost certainly account for the greatest fraction of all new ideas.
If that weren’t the case, I could make a fortune by selectively investing in little-known, unhyped ideas. I wouldn’t do that. Would you?
So you’re basically saying that the entire issue of awareness is moot. I disagree.
But if you want to place bets on things, let’s bet on who has read more old issues of Popular Science and similar magazines. Hyping everything has the same effect as hyping nothing. You have to learn to look past that to get a sense of what the total public awareness was. It’s an extremely difficult exercise but I don’t believe that nothing can said on the subject.
“Moot” is a bit much. I’ll say this: I think the magnitude of the “hype” effect, in whichever direction, is going to be utterly dominated by the selection process for what constitutes hype. I used an appearance in Popular Science as a proxy for this, but certainly wouldn’t claim that’s the only methodology. One could alternately “define away” the problem by claiming that overhyped technologies by definition have a 0% success rate (since overhyped means that the claims exceeded the results), but that’s hardly a fair methodology.
Oh sure, I think you could pick a reasonable definition and find some patterns based on that. I’m sure the findings would be interesting, but I don’t think they’d have any real predictive value.
I’m curious what your examples of underhyped technologies are. I couldn’t think of any. Basically everything relating to computers or transportation entered the public consciousness quickly and with a lot of hype. There are a few dead ends along the way (supersonic jets) but overall both utterly dominated and defined the 20th century.
When looking for examples, I also looked for *penicillin *as a world-changing invention. Couldn’t find any early references in Popular Science. I tried penicillium and got earlier results, though still not early enough. Not sure if this is a “quiet invention” or if my searching skills just reached their limits.
These are interesting developments from two perspectives.
(1) Developers are changing focus to freight, where billions upon billions of long distance trucking expenses are incurred every year. This mirrors driverless car technology in a way, in that the first really autonomous vehicles we’ll see regularly on the highways will probably be package delivery bots. In both cases human life isn’t risked until the technology is proven safe.
(2) Heavyweights are entering the field. The auto companies are racing each other to develop ever more effective driving aid technologies and Google, with its many billions of surplus cash, continues to participate. At $45.3 million per mile to construct, Hyperloop will cost $22 billion to connect cities 500 miles apart, not an unreasonable sum to raise or finance these days and the ROI is enormous and immediate. The crowdsourcing effort notwithstanding, the technology is well past the garage-workshop stage now.
Interesting times. Please return to your regularly scheduled naysaying now.
Nothing has predictive value. That’s the first thing you come to understand while studying the future. The future cannot be predicted. In Asimovian terms, it’s mules all the way down.
The history of hyping technology can be looked at and some broad statements can be made. That’s a long and dense book yet to be written.
One thing that can be said is that for the most part, technology hype was rare before the 20th century. One major exception may have scared others. Canals were all the rage in Europe in the first quarter of the 19th century. The Erie Canal was widely mocked, not least because nobody in the U.S., including the guy hired to build the thing, knew the technology. Its fantastic success was copied everywhere but nobody saw that that the vast majority of people who rushed to duplicate it would lose their shirts because a truly transformative technology would take its place. The locomotive was thought of as little more than a short-haul system for mining. They were wrong.
Somewhat similarly, the telegraph was not expected to be successful, let alone transformative. Electricity itself wasn’t; it was too new and too minimal. But the telegraphed warped space by bringing distant cities into chronological abutment. It changed the very conception of time.
You can continue this thread for a long time. Nobody hyped sending voices over wires before the telephone’s success. Edison thought the recording system he put together would be used for business dictation. In the lead-up to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, famous names were invited to write short essays on America 100 years into the future. They proved to be concerned much more about social changes than technological ones, with their tech merely being larger and faster versions of current tech.
The Exposition itself created the culture of hype. It blew people away. Technology was celebrated in every corner of it. Afterward future writing exponentially increased its focus on new technologies and what they might accomplish.
The success rate for predictions remained small. How one defines “prediction” and “rate” and “success” is a huge problem in itself. Flight, for example, was the one truly hyped technology throughout the 19th century. But that was entirely about the *concept *of flight, the exhilarating “slipping the surly bonds of Earth” notion of taking to the air, free as a bird. The airplane as we came to know it seldom figured in to these dreams. Even in the 20th century, when the airplane slowly became a reality against legions of scoffers, the hype remained centered on personal freedom: the flying car, the helicopter or autogyro, the compact commuter plane. (Not the jet pack; that’s an exercise in fake nostalgia - it was never taken seriously for the masses.)
If what is required to convince you is a neat list of hyped and unhyped technologies and their success rate, then you have me. That people are consistently terrible in picking technologies to hype as The Future! is an observation based on my reading. I won’t claim anything more.