That would have even worse problems. In fact, I can think of several reasons why no engineer would be able to listen to this with a straight face.
Sorry, Mange, but if we could do that we’d have no need for a tunnel at all.
[QUOTE=smiling bandit]
That would have even worse problems. In fact, I can think of several reasons why no engineer would be able to listen to this with a straight face.
[QUOTE]
Without your sharing these reasons, the comment comes across as mere derision.
Regardless of any future technology you’ll never see this. Not in 100 years, not in 1000. There’s simply no advantage to traveling between continents under the water. And there are huge disadvantages. Air travel is well established, reasonably efficient, and most of all, its FAST!
No one will ever be interested in taking a ‘road trip’ where there’s absolutely nothing to see along the way (and that takes weeks to get there!)
The Seikan rail tunnel which connects the Japanese main island of Honshu with Hokkaido, is generally regarded as kind of a failure because by the time it was completed (+25 years) air travel had become cheap, fast, and routine. The trip by rail takes over 12 hours whereas by plane its less than 2.
It’s also extremely oil-hungry. And a major contributor of greenhouse gases. Not a problem now, but in 100 years, 1000?
The major emphasis of any tunnel would have to be on freight traffic. How competitive it would be against the efficiency of sea transport is questionable. When air transport becomes less viable, a tunnel would be an attractive way to ship fresh goods, mail, etc. Not that I’m arguing that it would be able to pay its own way.
If petroleum is a problem in 100 + years, we won’t be building tunnels, we’ll be building sailboats. Highly efficient sailboats, but sailboats.
The concept of vacuum tunnels has been around for some time…and there are ways to tunnel quickly: years ago, the US Dept.of Energy developed a technique whereby tunnels could be bored out by MELTING the rock! A tunnel shiled was equipped with electrically heated elements, which would melt the rock. This resulted in a tunnel that needed to lining-the walls were smoothly fused rock. Such a tunnel could be bored in several hundred feet per day…so a trans-Atlanyic tunnel actually could be built! Of course, such a tunnel could not be used for atutomobile traffic, as has been pointed out.
I don’t see why floating platforms, similar to oil drilling platforms, cannot be used as anchors. Or the tunnel could be a neutrally buoyant structure with active controls (thrusters or ballast tanks) to keep it at a constant depth.
Another possibility is to optimize it for speed and go for the Concorde market. That means maglev trains running inside vacuum tunnels. With no air resistance or mechanical friction, it shouldn’t be hard to exceed Concorde speeds.
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Control. You think its easy to control 100 trillion machines so small they cannot have any computer? How would you organize them? How would you get them to recognize where they need to connect? This is, to put it mildly, a non-trivial problem, one that no one yet has a practical solution.
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How would you keep them powered and fed? Even with that, they will be “dying” in swarms day after day. How will you get them to rebuild? If you equip them with the tools and energy needed to reproduce, how will you supply them with extra power and materials to accomplish this feat? How can you get them to work at great depths and low temperatures?
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The process of laying this, assuming you managed to accomplish all of the above, would be enormously slow. Nanites are not fast. They crawl slowly. How would you make sure that deep currents didn’t push them all away from their spot while building? After that, would it be worth it to wait long enough-years, if not decades- to extend it all the way across the ocean?
I’m not at all convinced there’s a “sweet spot” where you can build a practical nanobot that can swim, have all kinds of construction tools built in, and link up with other in a a watertight seal, and carry enough juice to live on.
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OK, you get all of the above. If you can do that, extending it every year to account for the atlantic rift would be nothing. But what about failure? What if the nanite-tubebreaks - and it will break from time to time, its going to be under immense pressure. You’ve just flooded the whole tube, which must be laboriously repaired and pumped clean.
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Finally, after all of these problems, why bother? I’m not going to say it can’t happen, but it will likely take centuries to accomplish it, by which time there should be many much better methods of conventional transit. I can’t imagine it being cost-effective. You can, of course, claim that we’ll surely have answers to all fo these problems, but that’s merely invoking magic. I find it unlikely that the costs involved will be less than cost of continued transportation, or even laying a solid line (with some extension sections for growth) underneath the ocean.
I appreciate your elaboration and I see most of your points as quite valid, but you are quite wrong to suggest that I am going to take the route of ‘in the future, everything will be possible’ - I’ve argued against such assumption in the past myself (in FTL threads, IIRC). Am I just reading you wrong or is there some reason why you are coming across as rather irritated and terse about this?
If there was a sustainable market for “Concorde speeds”, there’d still be regular supersonic operations across the Atlantic. There isn’t, and there aren’t, and that’s without the multi-billion investment of any tunnel project.
I’ll just comment on this one, as it seems to be a problem many people (including muself) have with nanotech.
Controlling trillions of tiny selforganising devices seems impossible from an engineer’s point of view;
but from a biologist’s point of view it is something that happens everyday, when an egg grows into a chicken, or an acorn an oak tree;
the challenges of nanotech are closer to biology than engineering.
This seems to imply two things- products manufactured by nanotech will be created very slowly, so that large scale manufacturing techniques will be faster in many cases; and the design of such products will be difficult to achieve.
In fact your last comment is even more germaine- why bother? By the time nanotech is capable of such complex feats we will be telecommuting across the Atlantic even more than we do today; there will be little need for travel except for recreation, and most recreation will be virtual.
SF worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html
How does it get cold?
By Mangetout:
Perhaps I misread your comments, but you seemed to say that it was not only possible but a reasonable idea. If you meant it as a pie-in-the-sky plan then, well, c’est la vie. It just didn’t sound that way to me.
Its true I dislike the use in media (and by people on messageboards) of nanotech - they treat it like magic, a Holy Grail of science or some nonsense. So I may have been too tense [sic] in my reply. I was trying not to let myself ramble on too much or I was afraid I’d get angry.
By eburacum45
But consider that life has had multi-billion year tests to create the code to run it. It is an engineering problem if you’re the guy who has to make it work. We can’t wait for it to evolve into what we want (and I’m having a hard time trying to figure out how we could exert evolutionary pressure that way). The critical problem is that we have absolutely no way to test in large scale (which we must do) before implementation, in a reasonable time frame.
A biological organism is not comparable. A creature is not spread out over whole continents in harsh environments. The biggest creature on earth is a blue whale. Nor do cells have to remain in place doing a non-life-giving function. Heat would be a nontrivial problem, since this thing wil have huge surface area compared to its empty volume. You’d have to send power down to it - I highly doubt we can make an energy extraction system capable of producing sufficient energy at those depths.
I’m not saying its impossible, just that we’d have to design a creature from the ground up including bnuilding a “genetic code” for this machine, and the results would still not be up to reasonable standards. Its just too much stress on our materials.
I’m not so sure of this. At least, not in the sense that it will be more virtual any more than today. People with lots of money like to go places and see things. We already can view the world through computers and games and TV, but we like taking long trips. I expect in the future demand for high-quality travel will increase, while prices decline compared to purchasing power over the long run. Why? Well, there’s money at be made at it.
This is all very fine, but I think I’ll just continue to take the suborbital rocket plane when I’m in a hurry, and the Zeppelin when I’m not.
What?
It was certainly very much in my mind that the suggestion was fanciful, quite possibly to the extreme of genuine impossibility; I’m sorry if I failed to make that abundantly clear.
Having said that, I think we quite possibly will eventually have practical applications of nanomachines, with deployment on a much smaller scale, perhaps in the reduction of manufacturing defects in VDUs, or intricate laboratory processes, or maybe even relatively mundane things such as adhesives - the problem of power distribution and control are indeed significant, but on a small scale they might not be insurmountable.
Yes, walls and tunnels made entirely from self-organising autonomous machines is and may forever be SF, but damn good SF, in my opinion.
Vaguly reminds me of an SNES game called “Secret of Mana”, except they used Cannons.
What about flying cars? Won’t we have flying cars?
While your prediction of increased data flow across the Atlantic seems pretty safe, to state with such authority that there will be no need for travel in the future, or that recreation will be virtual, strike me as being ridiculous - right on par with the predictions from the 50’s of flying cars. Global movement of goods is increasing, not decreasing, and there’s no reason I can see why actually travelling for recreation should become less popular.
The problem with predicting technology is that everybody wants all the magic to happen immediately.
Nanotech will have small scale uses in the next hundred years, but it won’t be capable of any large scale contruction projects, or any of the other miraculous things that its proponents are predicting.
Nevertheless you may find that by the end of that hundred years practically all consumer goods will have some nanotech component.
Given three or four hundred years of development and convergence between the nanotech and biotech industries, it likely *will * be possible to design and grow massive construction projects, like floating islands and tunnels, space elevators, kilometer high cities using a wide range of macro- nano- and biotech.
But four hundred years will also bring changes in society and entertainment; it is difficult to predict how the people of that period will spend their time. Will all ten billion of them be constantly migrating round the globe, yet keeping the same long distance social circle?
If so, then maybe a transatlantic tunnel is on the cards.
They may prefer to stay at home and explore endless imaginary worlds instead.
Or a mixture of both.
SF worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html
No sunlight, no heat. See
http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/earth/Water/temp.html
The link you supplied suggests that the water temperature at ocean depths may be as low as zero degrees C – not what most would call “too cold to support human life.” And if the tunnel is beneath the ocean floor, presumably it will encounter rising temperatures, as in deep mines.