Anybody heard of this cross atlantic tunnel? Some rich guy is proposing this tunnel that is for a maglev train and it would be vacuum sealed. He claims that it would bring the train to a speed of 1500-2000 mph and could cross the atlantic in roughly 30 minutes because there would be no track or air resistance. Is this really possible?
Cite? Sounds like bullshit to me…
Or should I say a pipe dream?
Straight line distance from New York to london is about 3500 miles. At 2000 MPH, that would take an hour and 45 minutes. Someone isn’t so good at math.
After having read that, that pipe dream is full of bullshit.
*a free floating pipe submerged 100 feet below the surface of the atlantic ocean
*extending across from USA to England
*This entire length is kept in a vacuum
*has maglev rails throughout its whole length
*trains travelling in excess of mach 3
*trains would carry 1000 passengers
the only thing that article left out were the elves that would build this thing financed by pots of gold borrowed from Leprechaun bank of Ireland.
No, no, it’s financed by gnomes, investing their huge profits from stealing underpants.
I thought you were talking about something else:
Years ago there was talk of a shuttle-like passenger plane that would shoot straight up into space and then come straight back down - supposedly the earth would have rotated so that a trip like this would make a trip from NY to London under 30 minutes.
I supposed the underwater train could be constructed…although I think a lot of people (myself included) wouldn’t be eager to go on a speeding, underwater bullet.
I bet it could be done.
I doubt it ever will be done. The cost alone would be stupendous…don’t see how it would ever get financed as it would take several lifetimes for them to recoup the investment.
Not to mention the fact that Ireland is inconveniently in the way.
I suppose it’s technically feasible. But the cost to build and maintaining it would be astronomical.
The main problem with the proposal cited in jb_007clone’s link is how the hell you’re going to manage to maintain a vaccuum in a 4000 mile long tunnel that’s sitting under 1000 feet of water.
Um, what exactly is the speed of sound in vacuum?
It sure has hell won’t fit in my vacuum.
So, you want me to ride on a train…
… with no track
… going 1,000 mph
… in a vacuum
… 100 feet underwater
… with 1,000 other people?
Jeez, not like anything could go wrong with that, huh? Um, you go ahead, I’m going to wait for the next steamliner.
So, you want me to ride on a train…
… with no track
… going 1,000 mph
… in a vacuum
… 100 feet underwater
… with 1,000 other people?
Jeez, not like anything could go wrong with that, huh? Um, you go ahead, I’m going to wait for the next steamliner.
There’s a 5 hour time difference between N.Y. and London, isn’t there? Doesn’t that mean it takes 5 hours for the planet to rotate that distance? So you couldn’t just go straight up and then straight back down and find you’d travelled from N.Y. to London, unless it took you 5 hours to go straight up and back down.
There is no speed of sound in a vacuum…
As for the maintaining of the Vacuum. I think the hard part would be keeping the structual integrety of the tunnel. It would be hard enough to keep it intact with air in the tunnel, let alone with nothing to help support it. I see a way to maintain the vacuum itself. You have airlocks every mile or so. The section the train is in will be vacuum. When the train is about 1/2 way through the section, a valve is opened between the next section and the previous section (which still would have a vacuum). The 2 sections equalize and REALLY high power vac pumps turn on to get out the rest of the atmosphere. This would, unfortunatly, cause different sections of the tunnel to have different Boyancies and cause alot of problems.
Well, not really. A tube stretching from the eastern seaboard of the USA to England would have to go on a northward diagonal and would miss Ireland. The trouble is it would arrive at Cornwall and the train from Penzance to London Paddington currently averages about five and a half hours!
As mentioned there is no speed of sound in a vacuum. A nuke could go off 10 feet from you in a vacuum and you wouldn’t hear it (nevermind that you would be atomized in a nanosecond).
However, I think you can still use Mach as a measure of speed in a vacuum as it means the speed of sound at sea level on earth. If you know that speed then saying you are travelling Mach 8 in a vacuum still tells you something.
I haven’t bothered to read the link, but I suspect what they really mean is just very low pressure, and not a true vacuum.