Your boyfriend seems to be confusing two different shows it seems, one about a real life completed tunnel, the other in question was an episode of Extreme Engineering. The theoretical Trans-Atlantic tunnel is a pneumatic tunnel with a passenger Mag-Lev train that would travel between NYC and London in something under 2 hours. While they say the technology in theory should work for this, the cost of the project is at something like $100,000,000,000,000 and would take over 100 years to construct. Obviously, not the most practical of projects and unlikely to ever turn a profit.
But think of what effect this would have on horoscopes, not to mention all those loveless singles who are so earnestly seeking someone with whom to walk down a moonlit beach. One must not discount the impact of esthetics.
For that, we’ll release the hounds.
Stranger
Time for a new boyfriend?
It’d be easier to just catapult your car across…
I’ll tell you what kind of transatlantic tunnel I want to see built: a giant pneumatic tube. At either end, you check in. They take your luggage and put it in a capsule, then fire it down the tube. (You see them do this, so your know your luggage isn’t going off to Tokyo.) Then they give you a shot of something to make you go to sleep, you climb in the capsule and buckle yourself in, and as you doze off you get shot to the other side of the ocean. When you arrive, they give you a shot with the antidote; you wake up and there you are, with your luggage waiting for you. Painless. The person who figures out how to do this will make a fortune and become a hero to hundreds of thousands of frustrated travellers 
Unfortunately it’s just as much a pipe dream as all the other transatlantic tunnel projects. Drat.
Nah, it’d be MUCH easier to just blow the Moon to smithereens. This would have the added benefit of giving Earth an attractive ring system. To pull this off, we need some kind of powerful energy weapon, perhaps from a couple decades after the turn of the previous century…
Tunnels, PAH! There’s a bridge over the Atlantic already. It just needs a bit of extra length, that’s all.
pic Cross the Bridge over the Atlantic near Oban, to the Isle of Seil and explore from the Tigh na Truish Inn to Balvicar, then to Cuan and Luing and finally on to Easdale island through Ellenabeich
Re. “Chunnel”, I know that when the thing was only a twinkle in engineers’ eyes, (I’m thinking early-mid 1970s here) the newspapers and television would often call it “Chunnel”, as an attempt at cutesieness. I’m not convinced that many actual people in Britian call it anything other than the “Channel Tunnel” now though.
Yes I get that although the only thing I remember about is that the engineer was named Washington and he was a descendent of George. What are props?
Those things that make the plane go. Duh.
Well, I don’t know too much about catapult technology, but in a well-designed and implemented space elevator system, the biggest costs would be getting your car from New York to Equador and from Kenya to London. The cost of lifting things into orbit, sending them around to the other elevator, and lowering them back down can, in principle, be made arbitrarily low.
I have actually met people in Britain who firmly believed that the Mormons built a tunnel under the Atlantic in the 1850s so that they could steal the young girls away to Utah and make them polygamous wives.
Usually these were the same people who believe that all Mormons have horns on their heads.
Make it reasonable fast (say 45 knots), and you can go from NYC to Cork in about 50 hours! Then you disembark, and take the tunnel under the Irish Sea (TBB), and then rail car under the English Channel.
So they considered this to be a documentary?
Oh, and ralph124c, I like the ferry idea, but could we go to Portugal instead? I hate driving on the left hand side of the road.
You neglect, however, to note that the transport distance has now gone from being roughly 8,000 miles to almost 52,000 miles (not counting all the up and down time). Never mind the engineering complexities of building this dual-elevator and tether transport system; it just doesn’t sound all that efficient.
How about a material transporter that beams matter as data between to distant points? It’s almost as technically feasible as a transAtlantic tunnel and more flexible to boot. (I presume you can move the transmitter and receiver about with only modest effort.) Just don’t make too large a change in lattitude…
Stranger
Thanks for all the answers and discussions! I showed my boy this thread and his initial response was “Naw, I know what I saw, these people just aren’t believers!” :smack: But then I talked to him some more and I managed to pry from him that the two shows he saw were indeed about different tunnels. One about the chunnel 
and another about the theory of the transatlantic tunnel. Because he has incredibly bad memory, he thought the construction and such of the chunnel that he saw was of the transatlantic tunnel. Now, he’s pretty much seen the evidence that no such thing exists and I revel in my chanting of “told you so” to him.
I don’t think I neglected to note the ground transport distance, seeing as I said that was the most significant part. And the part in orbit is both far quicker and far cheaper than any current technology for moving cars long-distance: You could reasonably expect the above-Ecuador - above-Kenya leg of the trip to take only a few hours or less. Now, it may be that giant catapults or other technologies could be even cheaper, without the need for the long ground legs, but I already admitted I wasn’t up on those techs. And while the Space Elevators themselves are technologically daunting, they’re probably no more so than the Trans-Atlantic Tunnel (probably significantly less so; the cost estimates I’ve seen for the first Space Elevator are only in the tens of billions of dollars, not the hundreds of trillions, and any subsequent ones would be cheaper yet), and certainly more practical, in that they have a much greater payoff.
Another subtler populizer may have been a 60 Minutes piece that aired sometime around late 1989-early 1990. It concerned the various parallel efforts to get the Channel Tunnel started … fundraising, politicking, engineering, and so forth.
In any event, the news crew filmed a band playing in a small pub playing somewhere in England. The band wrote and performed a (politically charged, IIRC) song about the “Chunnel” and referred to it as such throughout the song. 60 Minutes aired a bit of this performance.
I remember the song bit clearly in this particular episode of 60 Minutes. I also think I recall some quoted residents of Great Britain calling it the “Chunnel” here and there throughout the piece … but I’m not 100% certain of that memory. It wouldn’t prove anything anyway – lots of things get “renamed” in the public conciousness shortly after going live. “Chunnel” just didn’t seem to stick over there (excepting possible regionalisms).
I saw the episode of extreme engineering about the transatlantic tunnel, followed by another episode which described a new tunnel under the Alps, which is being built. I think it’s more likely that’s the one he’s thinking of.
More on the geology of the mid-Atlantic divergent plate boundary. In rift zones where the sea floor is spreading apart, where the earth’s crust is thinnest and opens up, magma from beneath is welling up and hardening to form new sea floor to replace the rock that has moved away from there in both directions. When they put the tunnel across the plate boundary, can they guard against damage from the heat?
For an especially exuberant example of the Mid-Atlantic plate boundary’s geologic activity, remember the volcanic island of Surtsey that suddenly sprang up out of the waves in 1963. One cubic kilometer of lava came out during the series of eruptions that formed Surtsey. It gets really really got down there.
There’s a brief seafloor spreading video by NOAA at that link http://www.oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/03fire/logs/ridge.html
Assuming you’re talking about conservation of momentum (and why not, if it affects Puppeteer stepping discs then why shouldn’t it affect any human teleportation device?) a radical change in longitude is just as bad. Your speed is the same but the direction of travel is substantially different… something never brought out in Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders series.