I saw a Discovery Channel special on this recently (coincidentally enough on a plane to Canada): it would be expensive but feasible. Each of the 27 supports would effectively be a floating icebreaker hull. There would be a tunnel inside the bridge for trains and oil, and the upper road surface would be closed for 8 months per year. All for an amount comparable to that of the Iraqi war/rebuilding program.
Or better still, the capsule would be caught by a huge baseball glove.
mounted on an enormous spring.
Bering Strait Intercontinental Peace Bridge:
http://www.headway.us/read.php?i=141
http://www.coe.berkeley.edu/labnotes/0802/history.html
Lin died recently…
As for being cheaper to drive, that’s often not true within the US, let alone (theoretically) crossing the Atlantic. Distance from New York to London is about 3500 miles. Even if you are able to build a “staight shot” tunnel, that’s an expensive trip. Cars cost are typically around $0.50 per mile, so that’s $3500 roundtrip just for car expenses. Cheapest you can run a car is about $0.20 per mile, or about $1400. Gas alone is about $0.05 per mile or $350 for the trip (assuming $1.50/gallon and 30 mpg). Add meals and lodging for a week (assuming you drive 1000 miles per day – that’s a lot, at any speed) and toss in the week of vacation you waste just driving.
You can fly almost anywhere in Europe for $600, roundtrip. Sometimes it is considerably less (New York - Paris or Frankfurst is often $300, off season).
A Bering Straits crossing would only be twice the length of the English Channel, and would be feasible as and when enough support is raised to push forward the engineering needed.
The problems, though, should not be minimized. The climate is severe, severe winter storms being an issue much of the year. A tunnel therefore would be preferable to a bridge.
However, connecting Cape Wales and Cape Uelen (interestingly with related names) is not the critical problem, but rather their remoteness from most of the populated areas of the two continents. Both areas are several hundred miles from the nearest “through” roads (though Nome has a few roads in the immediate vicinity, they do not connect to the highways of the rest of North America). And these must be built to deal with permafrost and the mucky summer conditions of Alaska and Eastern Siberia, a more significant problem than it might sound at first glance.
There is also the problem that any tunnel of a mile or longer requires significant venting if used by combustion-engine vehicles.
I mjean no offense by this, but you are invoking magic. You may call it nanotech, but its still magic. We have nothing more definite than “and here a miracle occurs” to describe the process of creating a trans-contintinental bridge built by tiny robats. It would be horribly slow and inefficient to build, and that assume you could somehow guide them all.
Its an insane plan. Nanotechnology is not a magic pill. It will most likely not help us build any large structural objects.
How about Brazil to Africa?
What about some sort of bridge between North America and South America? That way, people in the U.S. could drive all the way to Brazil or Chile?
Oh wait. We’ve got one of those. I think it’s called “Panama.” And we never use it. Of what possible advantage would a transatlantic tunnel have over boats/planes? Aside from the purely individualistic joy of driving your OWN CAR across the ocean?
Besides–can you imagine the Toll costs?
I also saw a program on Discovery Channel (“Extreme Engineering”) which explored the floating tunnel method - there’s a website about it here.
As I understand it, there are a couple of areas along the Pan-American Highway that are not only not completed but totally impenetrable, even with four-wheel drive off-road vehicles. Resolve them, and you would be able to drive from Fairbanks to Comodoro Rivadivia.
The Old World-New World connection intrigues me, though – with crossings of the Sunda Straits and a few other things, you’d be able to visit an Oldsmobile dealer in Topeka and get a Toronado to transport you from Kansas to Oz! 
The Darien Gap: http://www.outbackofbeyond.com/gap.htm
Although there is no actual road through the Darien Gap in eastern Panama and western Colombia, four-wheel drive vehicles have crossed it at least 3 times (a Jeep and a Land Rover in 1959-1960, the British Transamericas Expedition using Range Rovers in 1972, and Loren and Patricia Upton using a Jeep in stages between 1985-1987). A road could certainly be constructed, but there doesn’t seem to be any pressing need for one. (I have traversed the route by river from the Panama side to within about 8 miles of the Colombian border.)
I kind of assumed that the poster realized this and was simply making a tongue-in-cheek comment. Obviously, by the time we have something like nanotechnology that can dig tunnels, science will have changed every significant aspect of life. We may have teleportation or cheap space transportation that would make the idea of a tunnel obsolete. Perhaps we’ll be living in virtual fantasies and won’t need to physically travel anywhere.
the simple answer to this thread is yes, its possible, and no, it will never happen. it’ll never happen because it is truly pointless, and a waste of money like no other. a fraction of the potential budget could be used to develop more advanced air & sea travel, where it is more safe and a lot faster, there really is no need whatsoever for a trans-oceanic tunnel.
although it would be cool.
Are you sure? Forget people, think goods.
The only way I can see it happening is as a response to the loss of fossil fuels;
Europe is now served by high spped traains travelling 200kph r more, and the evacuated tube will allow 10x this speed- all run on electricity, which can be generated in a myriad ways…
a system of supersonic trains in evacuated tubes is quite likely to be built to move people around within continental landmasses; this method of transport has the advantage that fuel does not need to be carried by the moving component so is more efficient.
Rather than building tunnels for privately owned vehicles to tootle along at 100kph, the vactrain will convey hundreds of people at 2000kph.
There is no need for the electricity of the future, generated by solar power, fission, fusion or biomass to be converted into hydrocarbons or hydrogen to fuel aircraft or motor vehicles;
maglev trains for intra- and inter-continental travel running on electric power are certainly an efficient use of resources.
Perhaps- just perhaps - a floating tube railway across the atlantic **will ** be built one day.
SF worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html
we can move anything we need already by air or sea. the tunnel would only allow for faster transport of goods, and still not be able to transport extremely large items, which can be done with ease with ships already. the money could be spent instead on impoving current technology. perhaps on a super sonic cargo plane? lol
Please outline for us how a several-thousand-mile-long ribbon of concrete and steel, under constant punishment by the elements, and certainly costing at least TRILLIONS of dollars to build and God knows how much to maintain (and to maintain at sea/underwater)–that still doesn’t transport goods, mind you; you still need to spend money on fuel to push that stuff–could be cheaper/more effective than a bunch of cargo ships (for bulk) or airplanes (for speedy delivery).
I believe (looking for cites) that it’s usu. cheaper to ship by water than by land, assuming both means are available, and loading/unloading times are not so tight (obviously, better to throw a package on a high-speed train than to pack it into a cargo container for a ship/barge that may take days to load, travel, then unload)/
The robots wouldn’t build the tunnel; the robots would BE the tunnel - ‘smart materials’ might be a better way of describing it.
Of course it may very well never be possible, I realise that.
Sadly, I agree. In most areas of the U.S., building conventional urban subways or railways is ufeasible. Even worse, in many areas it’s economically unfeasible to leave existing rail lines in place. All over L.A., for instance, you’ll see where rail lines have been pulled up and/or paved over, and replaced by parking lots, paint stores, impound lots, you name it. And I’m not just talking about old ‘red car’ lines, but rather heavy rail trackage that was once used to shunt rail cargo from the downtown rail yards to various points around the city. Until about 7 years ago, most of my working career was in the San Fernando Valley, and on recent visits to the area I’ve been shocked to see how much more track has been obliterated. Considering all the effort that goes into building a railroad, you would think that we would want to at least retain existing track, as an alternate form of transportation, but no.
All that track gone just means more trucks on our freeways. :rolleyes: