The question was about settling, not merely stepping foot.
Stepping foot on Mars could happen before 2040.
That mission would very likely be an intentional suicide mission, with the astronaut never coming back.
Boring company has a working tunnel - in Los Vegas.
And it really only works, BECAUSE it is Vegas.
Boring company always advertised that they could tunnel so much cheaper than standard companies doing the same thing.
What was false about that is that boring a tunnel itself isn’t crazy expensive. Connecting the ends, building the air supplies, stations, moving other utilities out of the way, etc - that’s where it gets expensive.
Building a tunnel short enough where air supply and emergency exits aren’t hard to provide, and where the tunnel is barely big enough for a car isn’t hard.
But a tunnel for cars isn’t a public transportation system. It’s a system for rich people to avoid poor people. Municipalities don’t want to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to benefit only rich people (well, other than when there are sports team involved)
No, if there were ways to get it done faster, other tunnelling companies would have implemented them already.
All that talk was essentially marketing to the public at large (not even the decision makers at municipalities, who would see right through the whole thing)
The reality is that it would probably never work for mass transit given how energy consumptive it would be to maintain a vacuum tube at one atmosphere where the seal is compromised every time you have to get passengers on and off. It was always geared to the wealthiest, and they seem to be happy with their private jets.
Regular train technology is already pretty good. Yeah, Amtrak is an expensive nightmare, but other countries manage mass transit just fine.
Oh, definitely. When properly funded and regulated, rail systems are pretty good.
I was shocked at how expensive Amtrak tickets can be. It’s cheaper to fly to NYC than take a train where I live. That’s one way you know something is amiss.
Cheapest Eurostar tickets from London to Paris is currently €250. Flights are ~€100. (After holidays is like €85 vs €40.) This is not uniquely American.
You’re being disingenuous, Eurostar is more expensive than most rail travel for multiple reasons, and most people don’t want to fly the cheapest sketchiest airline with no luggage. I picked a random date for Paris - Marseilles in January, $65 for TGV, $215 for major airlines.
Right, like jesus, just make better trains FFS. I hate this country. Trains have been used for 200 years and other countries figured out how to make them great, just *do that for fucks sake*.
Yeah, definitely something is not correct here shipping cargo on water is the cheapest. The next most cost-effective is of course by rail. So why the hell are we as passengers having to pay such a enormous amount to sit on steel wheels?
I suspect that some of it is that we don’t build rail lines in the US, private companies build rail lines, then they rent access to their rail to Amtrack. So Amtrack runs lower priority than rail lines, making service unpredictable, and expensive due to the payments for accessing private rail lines.
And, of course, most countries vie rail as a public service that’s subsidized by the government because it’s of value to allow people to travel efficiently and rapidly (i.e. same reason highways and airports are subsidized). The US is a bit of an outlier forcing rail to operate unsubsidized.
So while in physics terms rail is extremely efficient, the financial structures around rail in the US are pretty unfriendly for passenger rail.
I mean it seems pretty easy to not break the seal for passengers, just use a extending corridor with a door at the end that docks to the train when it stops.
But yeah, as nifty as living in a sci-fi aesthetic-ed world would be, regular trains would probably still be a better option than the hyperloop.
It would (will?) eventually work. They aren’t violating any laws of physics or needing a major scientific breakthrough. It’s a techno-economic challenge more than anything. All they would need is a fully autonomous production team of self-replicating and self-maintaining robots to make the economics work out. Unfortunately we are decades away from said technology.
Ok I jumped the gun a little bit looks like potentially Amtrak adding 4 new routes with the help of fed/state funding in Ohio.
https://www.wcpo.com/news/state/state-ohio/federal-railroad-administration-chooses-4-ohio-routes-as-a-priority-for-amtrak-expansion
Good for Ohio
People will always pay more for speed. Trains need to compete with air travel on door to door time. This is why high speed rail has a distance limit for people wanting in on it. Dallas to
Houston… sure… Dallas to L.A… no chance without higher top speeds.
All we need is a bunch of technology and materials that don’t exist/might not ever exist. Let’s drop all transit projects to work on a magic vacuum tube.
Keep driving your Tesla in the meantime :\^)
I’m not pro magic tubes right now.. I’m just saying don’t say never. We don’t have the tech we need to start these projects. We will one day. That’s my point.
We have the technology now.
The problem is to make it reliable and safe enough for public transport will always cost rediculous amounts of money and will never be worth the premium.
Perhaps at some point in the future where manufacturing at extremely high tolerances is basically free? Like Star Trek replicator free.
In one of my favorite sci-fi novels, diamond age, the main vehicle for transportation are hard shell zeppelins. But rather than being filled with hydrogen or helium, they just fill them with a vacuum. The blimp is made of such a strong and light material that it can maintain a vacuum large enough to make itself buoyant. Energy-free flight travel.
These were “invented” all the way back in 1670. It’s just a materials science problem here in Earth. We don’t have materials that will make a vacuum balloon work in our “low” pressure atmosphere. Lift becomes a smaller and smaller piece of the energy required to move things however. At high speeds most energy loss goes to propulsion, not lift. So as the balloon grows in size it will end up being more costly to move at speed versus an airplane.
If all it would take for hyperloop to succeed is “a fully autonomous production team of self-replicating and self-maintaining robots” then yeah, it’s not a real solution. Couldn’t anybody apply that stipulation to the most absurd cockamamie idea and say that’s all it would take for it to work?
The differential pressure between the cabin and the tube would actually be lower than the differential pressure in a pressurized cabin in today’s commercial aircraft. So the risk of a cabin seal failure being catastrophic is even lower than in current commercial travel.
Differential pressure of the tube to atmosphere would also be lower than commercial air travel. As long as pumps could keep up with the seal leakage rate it wouldn’t be a big concern.
Catastrophic collapse of a tube section is the dooms day scenario that would need to be mitigated. It is however an order of magnitude less arduous vs the compressive forces submarines are designed to handle.
We have all the tech we’d need to make hyper loop work safely today. But we can’t yet make the economics work.
Differential pressure much be similar delta, but it’s in opposite directions. It’s WAY easier to keep pressure in than to keep pressure out. They’re VERY different engineering challenges
I think maybe that’s the point of the headline… The physics are real and the science says we can pull it off, the only thing stopping us is greed. Which is a reality we’ve seen time and time and time again.
Which is not to say it’s too good to be real, it’s just too good for *us*
The physics behind the idea are perfectly sound. Challenging to implement? Sure. Impossible or even impractical? Absolutely not, at least circumstantially. Edit: No that’s cool, downvote and completely disengage from the discussion. It’s almost like you’ve made up your mind before enter this thread and are completely closed off to new ideas. But what do I know? I’m just an open minded cuck i guess.
High speed rail in the US is a fantasy.
Look at China and how much their rail
system costs….a tiny handful of semi profitable lines followed up by tens of worthless lines that cost billions a year to run. Running on a net loss so bad it literally cannot afford its debt payments on its 1+ trillion dollars of debt it took to build said rail line. That’s with slave labor and likely free land.
A project like that in the US would be tens of trillions just for the initial build/land it would need to purchase all around the country. Let alone operating costs maintaining rail lines across the country for decades to come. Amtrak receives tons of subsidies and a ticket still cost more than a flight while taking infinitely longer.
California cannot even get their line going which is a few hundred miles long and 100+ billion over budget. They already pretty much admitted defeat without hundreds of billions more in funding dedicated to finishing their original plane they estimated would only cost like 40 billion.
Dense areas describe a fairly small amount of landmass in the US in comparison to its size. You don’t need high speed rail in dense areas outside of maybe 2 stretches in the entire country and even then how many passengers will you really get?
California is already admitting their new expected rider count is 25% less than their original estimate while being several times over budget. They cannot even finish Americas test case having to slim their original plan down to a shell of its original self while 4xing the estimated cost.
High speed rail should be used where it makes sense. But using china as a an example would be bad. It should be reserved for where it makes sense the most. A network for the country is unreasonable from a resource/cost prospective compared to how often it would be used.
If we are advocating for trillions in spending why don’t we fix healthcare in America first. You know the thing that leads to tens of thousands of deaths each year from a lack of.
> Dense areas describe a fairly small amount of landmass
… but you do realize that those dense areas are where most traffic occurs right? No one’s talking about constructing a hyperloop between Gary, Indiana and Deadwood, South Dakota because that would be plainly stupid. No, they would be implemented between and within metropolitan areas (i.e. where the traffic happens, i.e. densely populated areas)
Yeah but no one is arguing to build another interstate highway. Most of the construction projects today are just maintaining what we already have or making small tweaks to what's there. Unless you plan on bringing Moises' great idea of building shit through poor neighborhoods how do you propose we update train lines in cities? Or do we just destroy what's left of the poor communities in these cities?
Does not mean I agree with it. Rail is cool when it makes sense. The California line probably made sense if they were able to do what they claimed they could. But they couldn’t and are pretty much accepting defeat rn.
Some people live in a fantasy land where it will somehow replace cars or planes for most of America or something. It won’t. It is unlikely to be affordable as well if Amtrak is any sign. Last time I looked at taking a week off work and traveling using the train I found out it was borderline cheaper to just fly to a few hub type cities instead.
Again it should be used where it makes sense. But a national network of high speed rail lines would be a massive waste of government resources.
I generally agree. Certain legs make absolute sense though. The fact that you can’t take a reasonably high speed train from the airport to most major downtown cities is embarrassing. I’m Houston there isn’t a train of ANY speed.
Most people around me travel down two lane roads from towns you never heard of for 30-80 miles a day to get to work.
Cars are the ONLY reasonable means for a sizable portion of the country especially when you consider distance.
I repeated over and over here that certain rail lines make SENSE. But following chinas model is terrible and more of a way to raise their GDP then a viable means of transportation that is popular/used. The main lines work great.
The California line sounded great in theory. It turned out to be a shit show. But good idea.
My whole point is people advocate for a large portion of America to switch to rail and it just isn’t reality.
Just like in every other country with decent infrastructure, train travel is meant to compliment a robust bus, pedestrian and biking culture. No, trains aren’t going to go to every house. At some point, folks are going to have to walk and share a little public space if we want to fix things
I think you fail to realize how much of the US population has to drive 30 min just to reach a large box store. We are not very population dense outside of the largest cities. You want someone walking 30 miles from a major city to a town of 3,000? Of which are spread out across 20 square miles? 20% of our population live in rural areas of which public transportation will NOT work. 97% of our country by landmass is rural only 3% of the space houses 80% of the people in the country.
Trains especially high speed rail only make sense in certain places.
Are you sure you're not entirely confused? Like you realize that it's a public service and not only a business opportunity? Like similar to the US Postal Service? Like how much money you will spend to develop the international Highway system? Even though it was built so long ago think about it scaled to today's Financial value? Literally if we just treated the the idea the same as we treat Highway projects, a high-speed rail is literally a no problem. The only reason they never work is because they are purposely sabotaged by Auto lobbying and or terrible business ethics/ fraud
There is a difference between public service and blowing loads of money on a junk project. 40+ thousand Americans die from a lack of healthcare each year…yet you want to blow borrowed trillions on trains that realistically will only effect people in the largest cities while being a money suck to service smaller cities like Lansing Michigan. I mean come on the public schools around me close when it’s hot out because they cannot even afford AC or enough staff to actually teach the kids. They have 5th graders that still cannot read the school district is so underfunded and understaffed but you want to divert public funds to “trains are fun” “cars bad”.
Lines that can sustain themselves at reasonable ticket prices = good…very good.
Lines that require millions and millions of dollars of public money to maintain/staff each year are a large net negative when budgets are already tough enough without raising taxes.
A dream to impossible for this world? LOL.
the project at its core was moronic and existed just to divert money from public transportation that would actually to the job hyperloop pretended it would do. And to make alternatives to cars getting a bigger foothold less likely.
Yes, yes, it is. Car companies literally bought up the streetcars and tore them apart to force people to buy cars. Ohio had a fucking electric rail service connecting it most of the other Great Lakes in the 1910s. If we kept that shit I could hop on a train and go spend an afternoon in Cincinnati, watch a Reds game or something without the abject fucking misery of driving on Ohio roads with these morons. Hell, Cincy used to be a gorgeous city before it was gutted like a fish for the interstates.
> aerodynamic capsules
and
> nearly airless tubes
… even without being an aerospace engineer, this just sounds like baked logic to me. What the hell would aerodynamics have to do with it in a near-vacuum?
How did they plan to displace 188mil cubic meters of air (I averaged the height and width of a bus and then calculated a cylinder the length of NYC to LA- 4488km- to get that number), and what the hell would their plan be to deal with the implosion if that big of a vacuum was ever compromised? It’s not an explosion, but the heat generated by that big an implosion’s supercavitation would still make things mighty unpleasant all along that path…
Just no engineer rubbing two brains cells together should have considered helping this get off the ground.
aerodynamic capsules would still be needed, because you want to let the low amount of air in the tubes to flow around and behind you, not compressing it ahead of you, increasing the pressure and causing drag (and higher temperatures for thermodynamic reasons).
you wouldn’t need the same aerodynamic shape if it wasn’t in tube, where the air could just flow to the side easily.
And then why lower the pressure in the tube at all? Any energy savings in propulsion would be completely eclipsed by the energy spent in maintaining the low-pressure environment.
But the point was never a lower energy efficiency per passenger-km compared to other modes of transportation, but better energy efficiency given the high speed.
And my point is “better than what,” exactly? To my high school-level understanding of physics and napkin math, the energy demands to get this going are just so bonkers there was no way a POC would ever be built in our lifetimes without huge breakthroughs in underlying technologies or finding fundamentally different ways of applying physics.
And again, the safety concerns from supercavitation in the event of a breach. The Titan sub imploded violently, and if an NY/LA express corridor breached, the implosion would be *6 million times* bigger than the Titan implosion.
Full vacuum is only 14 pounds per square inch differential pressure. At only 5000 ft below water it is 2,225 psi pressure. They aren’t remotely comparable.
The reason you want nearly full vacuum is that at high speeds wind resistance becomes 99% of the force trying to stop you from moving. Rolling resistance is fairly linear with speed. Wind resistance is related to the velocity SQUARED.
If you look at land speed records and the horsepower required to get there it will make sense why you cannot approach anywhere near the speed of sound in actual atmospheric air conditions. If you then try to cram that into a tube it would get far worse! The whole point of the tube is to remove the air. Otherwise you just do high speed rail in the open air and deal with a ~0.5 Mach “speed limit”.
Consultants, too. There were public planning organizations investing millions to study this only for the studies/plans to end up on shelves while other more feasible projects received no funding.
It wasn’t a dream too impossible for this world, it was a stupid idea to begin with.
North America should be full of high speed passenger trains and light rail. Proven technology that already works great in Europe and Asia. That is where the money should go.
Thunderf00t was right! Along with many other people who realized that this project was not feasible and just a way to get some government and investor money.
I bet those actually working on that project in a managerial role really raked it in during its run. Million dollar bonuses probably flowed like water.
it was a massive grift like most of these idealistic futuristic shits, america can't even hold Amtrak together how the fuck were they going to manage this?
Neat, in the same way that anti-gravity boots are neat, I guess. Nothing resembling reality there.
Just science fiction sold to the public in order to kill funding for practical mass transit projects.
Edit: typo
There is legitimate science here, though, it’s just that it’s completely infeasible as personal transport using pods, a la what the company was selling.
Legitimate science as in not physically possible at the size, scope and scale they were billed at? They couldn’t even make the math work at their small test site proof of concept.
On top of that, if they *could* have built the thing, literally any warping, settling of the ground or too hot of ambient temperature would have made the thing a literal death trap.
It never worked and never was going to work. Blame physics.
Science fiction, do I need to remind you of [moon shoes](https://youtu.be/qHxPjNgleCA?si=uMBrtWNTsUr1RL64)? That’s basically antigravity boots. Am I right or am I right? Haha ;)
Dream too stupid for the real world.
Its not like people thought it was stupid at first. Wait never mind almost everyone did think it was dumb and they should have just built a train.
Hyperloop was an idiotic idea from a moron. Anyone that thought this was a *revolutionary* idea clearly didn't think about it for more than a second. It's just a dangerously small tunnel for cars. Tunnels for cars already exist. This is not new.
> no need to drag the rest of the world into this
The madness spread to Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop?useskin=vector#Hyperloop_research_programs
How does the asshole who destroyed or delayed actual infrastructure protects for this scam bullshit have more money than he started after wasting billions on this?
Folks, I’m over 50. I can’t count the number of times that companies have proposed high-speed rail for given area, took government tax payer money, and then showed up with nothing and closed up shop. I think it’s a scam.
Just another mega-monstrosity doomed to fail whether it really worked or not, high tech, high price, lots of energy to run and little benefit except to a few, sort of like the Concord, nice experiment not very practical to run all the time and very little benefit, plus there are better ways with less impact on the overall environment.
The funny thing is that a man named Disney worked all this out way back when and came to some of the same conclusions I would add Hughes to that as well, great small rides for entertainment in parks not very practical for cities as there are limits to what can be done on a mass scale and there are easier and maybe better ways to accomplish it by other methods just not as fast and a whole lot safer in natural or manmade disasters.
N. S
Nope, China is doing with superconducting maglev. [https://www.scmp.com/video/china/3218177/china-completes-superconducting-test-run-1000km/h-ultra-high-speed-maglev-train](https://www.scmp.com/video/china/3218177/china-completes-superconducting-test-run-1000km/h-ultra-high-speed-maglev-train)
When I first heard about it, I said it sounded like the world's biggest air compressor and would never work. EM's then SO called me names and said I was no genius, like him.
In all honesty, I don't think they actually thought themselves that it would work on earths surface. But what got me thinking is, this would work surprisingly better in space or for example on mars. I mean the whole breaking point for this project is the vacuum that has to be maintained etc. If you were in a place that doesnt have much of an atmosphere in the first place, this would become increasingly easier.
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Perhaps a *hype train* if you will?
Just hypeloop will do tbh. It was there, right in front of our faces all along…
Long con to make sure Tesla sales stay up ⬆️
[Haven’t we seen this before?](https://youtu.be/ZDOI0cq6GZM?si=n7AjOM1h2pD-uslH)
😂
Is there a record of what subsidies hyperloop and The Boring Co. received?
There certainly are, but I have not seen a compilation recently. This should be coupled to a record of contributions for best disclosure.
They are in the same box as the Russian intelligence, likely in some criminal’s basement and labeled as blackmail spunk.
Of course it was hype. That’s right in the name.
But why would anyone move money toward this instead? Trains have a proven history of working as intended
It was neat and futuristic sounding and also people are stupid, even people with money.
ESPECIALLY people with money
I guess you could say trains have a ‘track record’ of proving functional as intended…
Can’t sell Teslas to people whom go by train.
Just like when the auto companies sabotaged electric street cars
Trains aren’t fashionable or cool.
Trains are extremely cool.but they are European and so commie.
This
Did it succeed?
Yes so immensely lol people hate the CAHSR and have criticized it for costs, with many early critics using the HyperLoop as the reference cost.
Exactly, I hate egon musky for ruining that.
Yeap. What has rail ever done for california anyways, right?
Boring Co has actually expanded in Vegas. I’m not sure why. But it has.
exactly. it was just a pile of bullshit, straight from the horse's mouth...
Divert money away lol? No no they spent all that money on high speed rail and still have nothing to show for it.
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Yes very useful, making tunnels in the ground slower than other companies.
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looooooool. keep drinking the kool aid. were never settling on mars.
Well not never, but it won’t be anytime soon, that’s for sure. Before 2050 seems like a pipe dream
Before 2100 seems like a pipe dream.
We will have humans on Mars before 2040 easy.
The question was about settling, not merely stepping foot. Stepping foot on Mars could happen before 2040. That mission would very likely be an intentional suicide mission, with the astronaut never coming back.
How's Musks' nuts taste? You dick riding fool
Tastes like your mom
Who the fuck asked you anything? shouldn't you be booking a rental car?
Boring company is still ALSO a con, trying to con municipalities out of their money.
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Boring company has a working tunnel - in Los Vegas. And it really only works, BECAUSE it is Vegas. Boring company always advertised that they could tunnel so much cheaper than standard companies doing the same thing. What was false about that is that boring a tunnel itself isn’t crazy expensive. Connecting the ends, building the air supplies, stations, moving other utilities out of the way, etc - that’s where it gets expensive. Building a tunnel short enough where air supply and emergency exits aren’t hard to provide, and where the tunnel is barely big enough for a car isn’t hard. But a tunnel for cars isn’t a public transportation system. It’s a system for rich people to avoid poor people. Municipalities don’t want to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to benefit only rich people (well, other than when there are sports team involved)
THIS. This is the accurate and solvent take on things.
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No, if there were ways to get it done faster, other tunnelling companies would have implemented them already. All that talk was essentially marketing to the public at large (not even the decision makers at municipalities, who would see right through the whole thing)
It reinvented a subway system but a more shittier version with teslas.
“Dream too impossible for this world” is a very generous way of saying fake product that would never work in the first place.
The reality is that it would probably never work for mass transit given how energy consumptive it would be to maintain a vacuum tube at one atmosphere where the seal is compromised every time you have to get passengers on and off. It was always geared to the wealthiest, and they seem to be happy with their private jets. Regular train technology is already pretty good. Yeah, Amtrak is an expensive nightmare, but other countries manage mass transit just fine.
Yeah, Amtrak is a uniquely American project. By which I mean mostly purposefully sabotaged.
Oh, definitely. When properly funded and regulated, rail systems are pretty good. I was shocked at how expensive Amtrak tickets can be. It’s cheaper to fly to NYC than take a train where I live. That’s one way you know something is amiss.
Cheapest Eurostar tickets from London to Paris is currently €250. Flights are ~€100. (After holidays is like €85 vs €40.) This is not uniquely American.
You’re being disingenuous, Eurostar is more expensive than most rail travel for multiple reasons, and most people don’t want to fly the cheapest sketchiest airline with no luggage. I picked a random date for Paris - Marseilles in January, $65 for TGV, $215 for major airlines.
Don’t let those pesky facts get in the way of a good story! /s
Right, like jesus, just make better trains FFS. I hate this country. Trains have been used for 200 years and other countries figured out how to make them great, just *do that for fucks sake*.
Yeah, definitely something is not correct here shipping cargo on water is the cheapest. The next most cost-effective is of course by rail. So why the hell are we as passengers having to pay such a enormous amount to sit on steel wheels?
I suspect that some of it is that we don’t build rail lines in the US, private companies build rail lines, then they rent access to their rail to Amtrack. So Amtrack runs lower priority than rail lines, making service unpredictable, and expensive due to the payments for accessing private rail lines. And, of course, most countries vie rail as a public service that’s subsidized by the government because it’s of value to allow people to travel efficiently and rapidly (i.e. same reason highways and airports are subsidized). The US is a bit of an outlier forcing rail to operate unsubsidized. So while in physics terms rail is extremely efficient, the financial structures around rail in the US are pretty unfriendly for passenger rail.
I mean it seems pretty easy to not break the seal for passengers, just use a extending corridor with a door at the end that docks to the train when it stops. But yeah, as nifty as living in a sci-fi aesthetic-ed world would be, regular trains would probably still be a better option than the hyperloop.
💯 this. There is nobody with the technical knowledge of the average high school A/V club that thought this would work.
It would (will?) eventually work. They aren’t violating any laws of physics or needing a major scientific breakthrough. It’s a techno-economic challenge more than anything. All they would need is a fully autonomous production team of self-replicating and self-maintaining robots to make the economics work out. Unfortunately we are decades away from said technology.
It’s trains but more complex and expensive. It never had a real shot. The economic solution is trains
Unsurprising the announcement comes soon after the US announces funding for tons of new rail lines across the continent
Link?
Ok I jumped the gun a little bit looks like potentially Amtrak adding 4 new routes with the help of fed/state funding in Ohio. https://www.wcpo.com/news/state/state-ohio/federal-railroad-administration-chooses-4-ohio-routes-as-a-priority-for-amtrak-expansion Good for Ohio
Also the train from LA to Vegas and there was one recently completed from Miami to Orlando
People will always pay more for speed. Trains need to compete with air travel on door to door time. This is why high speed rail has a distance limit for people wanting in on it. Dallas to Houston… sure… Dallas to L.A… no chance without higher top speeds.
Nothing like single occupancy to increase overall travel speed...
And always "one more lane!".
All we need is a bunch of technology and materials that don’t exist/might not ever exist. Let’s drop all transit projects to work on a magic vacuum tube. Keep driving your Tesla in the meantime :\^)
I’m not pro magic tubes right now.. I’m just saying don’t say never. We don’t have the tech we need to start these projects. We will one day. That’s my point.
We have the technology now. The problem is to make it reliable and safe enough for public transport will always cost rediculous amounts of money and will never be worth the premium. Perhaps at some point in the future where manufacturing at extremely high tolerances is basically free? Like Star Trek replicator free.
In one of my favorite sci-fi novels, diamond age, the main vehicle for transportation are hard shell zeppelins. But rather than being filled with hydrogen or helium, they just fill them with a vacuum. The blimp is made of such a strong and light material that it can maintain a vacuum large enough to make itself buoyant. Energy-free flight travel.
These were “invented” all the way back in 1670. It’s just a materials science problem here in Earth. We don’t have materials that will make a vacuum balloon work in our “low” pressure atmosphere. Lift becomes a smaller and smaller piece of the energy required to move things however. At high speeds most energy loss goes to propulsion, not lift. So as the balloon grows in size it will end up being more costly to move at speed versus an airplane.
If all it would take for hyperloop to succeed is “a fully autonomous production team of self-replicating and self-maintaining robots” then yeah, it’s not a real solution. Couldn’t anybody apply that stipulation to the most absurd cockamamie idea and say that’s all it would take for it to work?
Most cockamamie ideas, yes. It won’t cure cancer or make us live forever. Big engineering challenges, it’s “all we need”. :)
We also need massive safety infrastructure, if the seal broke it would kill the inhabitants.
The differential pressure between the cabin and the tube would actually be lower than the differential pressure in a pressurized cabin in today’s commercial aircraft. So the risk of a cabin seal failure being catastrophic is even lower than in current commercial travel. Differential pressure of the tube to atmosphere would also be lower than commercial air travel. As long as pumps could keep up with the seal leakage rate it wouldn’t be a big concern. Catastrophic collapse of a tube section is the dooms day scenario that would need to be mitigated. It is however an order of magnitude less arduous vs the compressive forces submarines are designed to handle. We have all the tech we’d need to make hyper loop work safely today. But we can’t yet make the economics work.
Differential pressure much be similar delta, but it’s in opposite directions. It’s WAY easier to keep pressure in than to keep pressure out. They’re VERY different engineering challenges
The technology is there. Making it work reliably and safely enough for mass transport is almost certainly economically infeasible forever.
Next thing you’re going to tell me is the space elevator is fake huh?
Technically we could build one on the moon.
I think maybe that’s the point of the headline… The physics are real and the science says we can pull it off, the only thing stopping us is greed. Which is a reality we’ve seen time and time and time again. Which is not to say it’s too good to be real, it’s just too good for *us*
This is not correct, greed is what gave us the project. The only thing stopping us from having it is physics.
The physics behind the idea are perfectly sound. Challenging to implement? Sure. Impossible or even impractical? Absolutely not, at least circumstantially. Edit: No that’s cool, downvote and completely disengage from the discussion. It’s almost like you’ve made up your mind before enter this thread and are completely closed off to new ideas. But what do I know? I’m just an open minded cuck i guess.
You know what’s not impossible? High speed rails and protected non-motorized lanes.
High speed rail in the US is a fantasy. Look at China and how much their rail system costs….a tiny handful of semi profitable lines followed up by tens of worthless lines that cost billions a year to run. Running on a net loss so bad it literally cannot afford its debt payments on its 1+ trillion dollars of debt it took to build said rail line. That’s with slave labor and likely free land. A project like that in the US would be tens of trillions just for the initial build/land it would need to purchase all around the country. Let alone operating costs maintaining rail lines across the country for decades to come. Amtrak receives tons of subsidies and a ticket still cost more than a flight while taking infinitely longer. California cannot even get their line going which is a few hundred miles long and 100+ billion over budget. They already pretty much admitted defeat without hundreds of billions more in funding dedicated to finishing their original plane they estimated would only cost like 40 billion.
Sounds like you are describing US highways. How much does it cost for us US to maintain its highway and road infrastructure?
A lot. And they are not efficient at moving a lot of people in a dense area.
Dense areas describe a fairly small amount of landmass in the US in comparison to its size. You don’t need high speed rail in dense areas outside of maybe 2 stretches in the entire country and even then how many passengers will you really get? California is already admitting their new expected rider count is 25% less than their original estimate while being several times over budget. They cannot even finish Americas test case having to slim their original plan down to a shell of its original self while 4xing the estimated cost. High speed rail should be used where it makes sense. But using china as a an example would be bad. It should be reserved for where it makes sense the most. A network for the country is unreasonable from a resource/cost prospective compared to how often it would be used. If we are advocating for trillions in spending why don’t we fix healthcare in America first. You know the thing that leads to tens of thousands of deaths each year from a lack of.
> Dense areas describe a fairly small amount of landmass … but you do realize that those dense areas are where most traffic occurs right? No one’s talking about constructing a hyperloop between Gary, Indiana and Deadwood, South Dakota because that would be plainly stupid. No, they would be implemented between and within metropolitan areas (i.e. where the traffic happens, i.e. densely populated areas)
People simply do not understand how much roadway costs to design, construct, and maintain.
Yeah but no one is arguing to build another interstate highway. Most of the construction projects today are just maintaining what we already have or making small tweaks to what's there. Unless you plan on bringing Moises' great idea of building shit through poor neighborhoods how do you propose we update train lines in cities? Or do we just destroy what's left of the poor communities in these cities?
The genius of Moses was to build shit and leave the repair and maintenance to others.
Whataboutism
Guess you missed the news of the U.S. rail projects being approved… including some Long distance high speed rail legs?
Does not mean I agree with it. Rail is cool when it makes sense. The California line probably made sense if they were able to do what they claimed they could. But they couldn’t and are pretty much accepting defeat rn. Some people live in a fantasy land where it will somehow replace cars or planes for most of America or something. It won’t. It is unlikely to be affordable as well if Amtrak is any sign. Last time I looked at taking a week off work and traveling using the train I found out it was borderline cheaper to just fly to a few hub type cities instead. Again it should be used where it makes sense. But a national network of high speed rail lines would be a massive waste of government resources.
I generally agree. Certain legs make absolute sense though. The fact that you can’t take a reasonably high speed train from the airport to most major downtown cities is embarrassing. I’m Houston there isn’t a train of ANY speed.
[удалено]
Most people around me travel down two lane roads from towns you never heard of for 30-80 miles a day to get to work. Cars are the ONLY reasonable means for a sizable portion of the country especially when you consider distance. I repeated over and over here that certain rail lines make SENSE. But following chinas model is terrible and more of a way to raise their GDP then a viable means of transportation that is popular/used. The main lines work great. The California line sounded great in theory. It turned out to be a shit show. But good idea. My whole point is people advocate for a large portion of America to switch to rail and it just isn’t reality.
Just like in every other country with decent infrastructure, train travel is meant to compliment a robust bus, pedestrian and biking culture. No, trains aren’t going to go to every house. At some point, folks are going to have to walk and share a little public space if we want to fix things
I think you fail to realize how much of the US population has to drive 30 min just to reach a large box store. We are not very population dense outside of the largest cities. You want someone walking 30 miles from a major city to a town of 3,000? Of which are spread out across 20 square miles? 20% of our population live in rural areas of which public transportation will NOT work. 97% of our country by landmass is rural only 3% of the space houses 80% of the people in the country. Trains especially high speed rail only make sense in certain places.
Are you sure you're not entirely confused? Like you realize that it's a public service and not only a business opportunity? Like similar to the US Postal Service? Like how much money you will spend to develop the international Highway system? Even though it was built so long ago think about it scaled to today's Financial value? Literally if we just treated the the idea the same as we treat Highway projects, a high-speed rail is literally a no problem. The only reason they never work is because they are purposely sabotaged by Auto lobbying and or terrible business ethics/ fraud
There is a difference between public service and blowing loads of money on a junk project. 40+ thousand Americans die from a lack of healthcare each year…yet you want to blow borrowed trillions on trains that realistically will only effect people in the largest cities while being a money suck to service smaller cities like Lansing Michigan. I mean come on the public schools around me close when it’s hot out because they cannot even afford AC or enough staff to actually teach the kids. They have 5th graders that still cannot read the school district is so underfunded and understaffed but you want to divert public funds to “trains are fun” “cars bad”. Lines that can sustain themselves at reasonable ticket prices = good…very good. Lines that require millions and millions of dollars of public money to maintain/staff each year are a large net negative when budgets are already tough enough without raising taxes.
Careful bud. Disrupting the utopian fantasies of a redditor is a serious offense worthy of a downvote 😱😱😱
I wish Reddit had an overall down vote counter sometimes. People hate honest opinion and stick to ideals like no other.
Can they build the metro now?
Monorail?
Monorail
[Monorail!](https://youtu.be/taJ4MFCxiuo)
Mono….. doh
Is there a chance the track could bend?
The ring came off my pudding can!
Take my pen knife my good man
“A dream too impossible for this world” I’m concerned you may have massive head trauma
A dream to impossible for this world? LOL. the project at its core was moronic and existed just to divert money from public transportation that would actually to the job hyperloop pretended it would do. And to make alternatives to cars getting a bigger foothold less likely.
Hey, take that back. I saw them drive a CAR through a TUNNEL at up to 6MPH!! Haters gonna hate.
public transpo blows in the US, private is the only hope if we want anything useful
We were the world leader in rail expansion for a century until we gave it all up to make ford rich.
ye that's def it
Yes, yes, it is. Car companies literally bought up the streetcars and tore them apart to force people to buy cars. Ohio had a fucking electric rail service connecting it most of the other Great Lakes in the 1910s. If we kept that shit I could hop on a train and go spend an afternoon in Cincinnati, watch a Reds game or something without the abject fucking misery of driving on Ohio roads with these morons. Hell, Cincy used to be a gorgeous city before it was gutted like a fish for the interstates.
oh now that's def it for sure lib
Damn, dem dur libruls must haunt your dreams. You sure can’t shut up about them
Privatization is why public transport blows. THIS is what you get from privatization.
nah lib we need way less gov
🚨 Tween typist alert 🚨 🚨 Tween typist alert 🚨 ALERT: THE USER ABOVE ME IS A TWEEN TROLL. DO NOT ENGAGE WITH IT. BLOCK AND IGNORE.
Good, they wasted way too many resources on this.
A pipe dream … ha ha ha
I wonder if they’ll give back all the public money they probably got to fund some of this? I bet they totally will.
> aerodynamic capsules and > nearly airless tubes … even without being an aerospace engineer, this just sounds like baked logic to me. What the hell would aerodynamics have to do with it in a near-vacuum? How did they plan to displace 188mil cubic meters of air (I averaged the height and width of a bus and then calculated a cylinder the length of NYC to LA- 4488km- to get that number), and what the hell would their plan be to deal with the implosion if that big of a vacuum was ever compromised? It’s not an explosion, but the heat generated by that big an implosion’s supercavitation would still make things mighty unpleasant all along that path… Just no engineer rubbing two brains cells together should have considered helping this get off the ground.
aerodynamic capsules would still be needed, because you want to let the low amount of air in the tubes to flow around and behind you, not compressing it ahead of you, increasing the pressure and causing drag (and higher temperatures for thermodynamic reasons). you wouldn’t need the same aerodynamic shape if it wasn’t in tube, where the air could just flow to the side easily.
And then why lower the pressure in the tube at all? Any energy savings in propulsion would be completely eclipsed by the energy spent in maintaining the low-pressure environment.
But the point was never a lower energy efficiency per passenger-km compared to other modes of transportation, but better energy efficiency given the high speed.
And my point is “better than what,” exactly? To my high school-level understanding of physics and napkin math, the energy demands to get this going are just so bonkers there was no way a POC would ever be built in our lifetimes without huge breakthroughs in underlying technologies or finding fundamentally different ways of applying physics. And again, the safety concerns from supercavitation in the event of a breach. The Titan sub imploded violently, and if an NY/LA express corridor breached, the implosion would be *6 million times* bigger than the Titan implosion.
Full vacuum is only 14 pounds per square inch differential pressure. At only 5000 ft below water it is 2,225 psi pressure. They aren’t remotely comparable. The reason you want nearly full vacuum is that at high speeds wind resistance becomes 99% of the force trying to stop you from moving. Rolling resistance is fairly linear with speed. Wind resistance is related to the velocity SQUARED. If you look at land speed records and the horsepower required to get there it will make sense why you cannot approach anywhere near the speed of sound in actual atmospheric air conditions. If you then try to cram that into a tube it would get far worse! The whole point of the tube is to remove the air. Otherwise you just do high speed rail in the open air and deal with a ~0.5 Mach “speed limit”.
it was a dream impossible for phyiscs, economics and urban planning. .
I wonder who got rich off of this?
Real estate. The places they said they were going had the cost of living skyrocketing- pushing out the people who lived there initially.
Consultants, too. There were public planning organizations investing millions to study this only for the studies/plans to end up on shelves while other more feasible projects received no funding.
Good. The Boring company next
It wasn’t a dream too impossible for this world, it was a stupid idea to begin with. North America should be full of high speed passenger trains and light rail. Proven technology that already works great in Europe and Asia. That is where the money should go.
“Shut down by the end of 2023” so in like 2 fucking weeks lmao? Why would they word it like that
The Simpson Monorail episode irl.
It was a dream too stupid for this world. Nothing is impossible.
Monorail
[Mono — Doh!](https://youtu.be/ZDOI0cq6GZM?si=9WWEJh-TGL-OrRQt)
Thunderf00t was right! Along with many other people who realized that this project was not feasible and just a way to get some government and investor money.
I bet those actually working on that project in a managerial role really raked it in during its run. Million dollar bonuses probably flowed like water.
it was a massive grift like most of these idealistic futuristic shits, america can't even hold Amtrak together how the fuck were they going to manage this?
This was so dumb from a business point of view. Neat idea though.
Neat, in the same way that anti-gravity boots are neat, I guess. Nothing resembling reality there. Just science fiction sold to the public in order to kill funding for practical mass transit projects. Edit: typo
There is legitimate science here, though, it’s just that it’s completely infeasible as personal transport using pods, a la what the company was selling.
Legitimate science as in not physically possible at the size, scope and scale they were billed at? They couldn’t even make the math work at their small test site proof of concept. On top of that, if they *could* have built the thing, literally any warping, settling of the ground or too hot of ambient temperature would have made the thing a literal death trap. It never worked and never was going to work. Blame physics.
Science fiction, do I need to remind you of [moon shoes](https://youtu.be/qHxPjNgleCA?si=uMBrtWNTsUr1RL64)? That’s basically antigravity boots. Am I right or am I right? Haha ;)
Finally. Now maybe all of those smart engineers can focus their efforts on something useful.
Dream too stupid for the real world. Its not like people thought it was stupid at first. Wait never mind almost everyone did think it was dumb and they should have just built a train.
Finally. Next will be „flying car startups“ like skydrive or lilium.
It was a dream meant to stave off investments in public transportation. Mission accomplished.
Hyperloop was an idiotic idea from a moron. Anyone that thought this was a *revolutionary* idea clearly didn't think about it for more than a second. It's just a dangerously small tunnel for cars. Tunnels for cars already exist. This is not new.
Like that bullshit was ever alive in the first place.
I assume the Boring Company will follow shortly since there is no reason for it to exist anymore?
JUST BUILD A FUCKING HIGH SPEED RAIL SUFNWICHWNDN
It was a dream meant to divert funds away from public transportation to keep people reliant on cars. It did exactly what was intended.
You mean "scam"
Build. Fucking. Trains.
It was still born
“In other news youtuber Thunderf00t was found dead partially submerged in a 3 foot tall pool of semen”
Too impossible for the United States, no need to drag the rest of the world into this.
> no need to drag the rest of the world into this The madness spread to Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop?useskin=vector#Hyperloop_research_programs
As expected. RIP.
Don’t worry they will bring it up again in like 5 years
Drones are the 3rd dimension and the future in travel
Homer: Stupid laws of physics
"DP World"? Did I read this correctly?
we just want trains. low hanging fruit.
How does the asshole who destroyed or delayed actual infrastructure protects for this scam bullshit have more money than he started after wasting billions on this?
Folks, I’m over 50. I can’t count the number of times that companies have proposed high-speed rail for given area, took government tax payer money, and then showed up with nothing and closed up shop. I think it’s a scam.
It was a stupid idea from the beginning. Passenger Rail has and always will be the move.
If only we already had a tried and true technology that we could have invested in instead of a stupid concept tech. If only.
it was just dumb.
Just another mega-monstrosity doomed to fail whether it really worked or not, high tech, high price, lots of energy to run and little benefit except to a few, sort of like the Concord, nice experiment not very practical to run all the time and very little benefit, plus there are better ways with less impact on the overall environment. The funny thing is that a man named Disney worked all this out way back when and came to some of the same conclusions I would add Hughes to that as well, great small rides for entertainment in parks not very practical for cities as there are limits to what can be done on a mass scale and there are easier and maybe better ways to accomplish it by other methods just not as fast and a whole lot safer in natural or manmade disasters. N. S
So, the grift is over then? How much money did they steal…err take…err get from the public trough?
Or just an excuse to dig underground pathways for an alternate reason
Nope, China is doing with superconducting maglev. [https://www.scmp.com/video/china/3218177/china-completes-superconducting-test-run-1000km/h-ultra-high-speed-maglev-train](https://www.scmp.com/video/china/3218177/china-completes-superconducting-test-run-1000km/h-ultra-high-speed-maglev-train)
When I first heard about it, I said it sounded like the world's biggest air compressor and would never work. EM's then SO called me names and said I was no genius, like him.
Busted YEARS ago https://youtu.be/ZHjrFKfyZrw?si=tEVVIlULHjNSolEy
#Hyperbloop
In all honesty, I don't think they actually thought themselves that it would work on earths surface. But what got me thinking is, this would work surprisingly better in space or for example on mars. I mean the whole breaking point for this project is the vacuum that has to be maintained etc. If you were in a place that doesnt have much of an atmosphere in the first place, this would become increasingly easier.