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Elon Musk's grand transportation vision
At the D11 conference, transportation pioneer and Paypal founder Elon Musk briefly discussed a mass transit idea he is actively working on. He calls it the hyperloop.
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Far fetched as it may sound, if anyone can revolutionize transport it is Elon Musk. |
Musk's great great grandchildren will be so honored on opening day.
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The last "earth-shattering revolution" in transportation was the Segway, so forgive my suspicion.
http://img88.imageshack.us/img88/2506/homerensegway.png |
Sorry, but this is bullshit. Maybe he knows how to make electric cars; I don't know - his cars don't function well in Northeastern weather. But he doesn't seem to know anything about trains, their power requirements, their weight requirements, etc. "Self-powering if you put solar panels on it" is the key tell that he's bullshitting; a full-length train needs 16-20 MW just to achieve regular HSR speeds, and even the expensive panels used in space, where weight costs more than platinum coating, don't have the efficiency to generate the required amount of power.
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Don't function well in the northeast but they do well in Norway where they are selling out? You know that NYT article was BS right? The NYT report on cold weather was proved to be fabricated http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/most...iar-test-drive As for solar panels, I don't think he was talking about on the train but rather the track/tube. 5ft wide X 300 miles long = over 175 acres, a 20 MW solar plant usually takes about 100-200 acres depending on whether you use crystalline or amorphous solar cells. |
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I like the guy a lot. Wish we had more billionaires that had such an interest in advancing civilization. |
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Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
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I think the real problem is the infrastructure. Are you really going to dig a 300 mile long tunnel or god forbid, build any kind of elevated structure whatsoever, in this country?
I once had this idea of the "vac-train" thing using much smaller vehicles that run in something that is more like a pipeline that the chunnel. It would just go in a trench. Even then, if it is going really fast it must be precisely engineered and I imagine they would still have to tunnel through hills and the like. |
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I see. Just because he's rich and has people working on it doesn't mean it's going to work. Bill Gates is rich and has had people working on things and Microsoft has still managed to fall behind Apple and produce abortions like Vista and Windows 8. People in the US have this fetish for listening to entrepreneurs. The idea being that if someone is tagged as an entrepreneur then his ideas are automatically worth listening to. It's frustrating. Madrid builds subways for about one fortieth the cost American cities build them for, and the CEO of Madrid Metro even talks about the way they did procurement to ensure low costs, and it gets ignored in the American media. But someone with zero experience in the subject bloviates about a technology that doesn't exist and doesn't even come close to existing and he's suddenly a great entrepreneur who probably employs people who understand. |
it WILL NOT be vaccum, Musk was clear about it.
most probably, it will be the OPPOSITE. Air will be used to move the cars inside the tubes. therefore, you can move at supersonic speeds with the problems of friction against the air, since the air moves together. |
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Every few years someone comes out with an idea like this. But it never materializes because it simply isn't feasible at this time.
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if there is someone who can create successful and inovative companies, its him. He would have my vote for president of Earth. |
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PayPal is as far as I know leader in internet monetary transactions. (at least for small volumes at a time) you talk about cost reduction but thats EXACTLY what Elon is doing at SpaceX, the way NOBODY HAS DONE BEFORE, in 50 years of manned space flight! and btw, I am not someone "in the US". |
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Note, by the way, that nowhere on the list of what Madrid did right is any of the usual US superstar tropes. It's all about procurement issues, conservative construction standards, avoidance of consultants, and contractor incentives that keep costs down. Quote:
Infrastructure does not work like the Internet. The increasing returns effect is a lot smaller, which means that the first mover does not get to dominate the market. The amount of capital required is astounding, which is why none of this ever gets done by the private sector, except for the Chuo Shinkansen, which is built by a company that has windfall profits from the Tokaido Shinkansen. And Chuo comes after decades of experiments with the technology and has had a working test track for years. The workers are usually unionized, and a good business culture is crucial. A political culture that makes it easier to build things cheaply is also crucial - and no, China doesn't build things cheaply at all; try Spain, Italy, and South Korea. The technology is old, so innovation happens gradually, after extensive testing, and often the innovations are not about technology but about better organization and political cooperation (for example, through-service between different private companies). Meanwhile, people with real-world experience in transportation infrastructure have built high-speed lines at a cost per unit length that would give LA-SF for about $13 billion. But they are not Great Entrepreneurs who sound like they could be Randian heroes, so you never hear about that in the media. |
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the good news is that according to the LA Business Journals list of wealthiest Angelenos, Musks wealth increased from 2 billion in 2011 to 5.7 billion in 2012... at this pace, he could fund whatever the hell he wants in a couple years
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so funny that you kept only the part about him being entepreneur of PAYPAL and decided to completely ignore, conveniently, the part about SPACEX and TESLA MOTORS. :rolleyes: THIS IS NOT the internet. Quote:
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Honestly, as far as I'm concerned, if Musk has an opinion on toothpaste, I'm listening. |
in the 1940s and '50s, there was a whole culture devoted to visions like this. everyday people bought copies of popular mechanics and considered weird futures where they lived on balloons or built negative skyscrapers deep into the earth's core.
the fact that musk's vision is being met with such negativity here is interesting. are we a more reasonable people, free of our mid-century hubris? or are we a culture in decline? |
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Sounds interesting and I am actually a fan of Elon Musk. However, his claim is that he can do this at a significant cost savings over the current HSR California plan. Right of ways or tunneling, either way is super expensive. I agree that why bother go through all the effort and then create a semi-fast HSR. But his claim that the actual costs would be significantly less are hard to believe.
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Considering that "the most he would say is that the Hyperloop is a 'cross between a Concorde, a railgun and an air hockey table.'"
...that doesn't give you a whole hell of a lot to even speculate about. Pointing out the obvious, spaceships =/= infrastructure. Spaceships require engineers + money. Infrastructure requires engineers + money + politics Politics are by far the most difficult part to deal with, especially in this country. edit - forgot to mention: infrastructure also requires a lot of land. In places like California, that involves forcefully moving thousands of people out of the way so that you can build your chunk of concrete. There is also the big fuzzy issue of profitability - and in that case, proven technologies are always going to win. |
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^^ Yeah, this. The last time private interests built extensive new infrastructure (100-150 years ago) they got around the political problem with rampant and shameless bribery. That's a lot harder than it used to be. The land problem was pretty easy, too - cities were smaller and more compact, and most of the infrastructure preceded new development in empty areas. Environmental impact statements were unheard of.
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I'm not saying Musk is going to pull this hyperloop thing off because that would be utterly stupid since we have absolutely no details. But I am saying that writing him off is equally stupid since we have no details and Musk has created multiple companies that have successfully tackled some of the most "impossible" and technically challenging ideas of our day. Just some food for thought: up until Musk came along, everyone assumed that spaceflight was something that could only be achieved by governments (or massive pseudo-governmental corporations like Boeing). It only took him about 10 years to eviscerate that notion, maybe he will have blown away your skepticism about this hyperloop idea as well in another 10 years. |
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:haha: |
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308K Superconductor Yield is terrible though. |
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this is a very interesting and complete link on the Hyperlook, from what we know.
http://jacquesmattheij.com/elon-musk-and-the-hyperloop |
He might ace the science, but stuff like engineering and politics often get in the way. Something might be possible but just very expensive and disruptive.
That said, of course I'd love to travel this way. |
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Our achievements were feasible because of scale or the adaptation and evolution of technology. Space shuttles and airplanes were remarkable because they didn't require physical guideways for entire length of their journey. Now we have to build a guideway that is perfect and a vehicle that is faster than anything out there. How does one accomplish both of those with decades future resources? |
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Exactly. Even short tunnels like subways and sewers often run into lots of unforeseen conditions, because we really have a terrible sense of what's going on underground; water movements, changes in soil type, fault lines, gas deposits, and so forth all contribute to uncertainty in tunnel construction.
My sense is that in rural areas, one could use cut and cover techniques to keep the costs predictable, with very shallow tunnels and prefabricated tunnel sections. Even for this, the costs are predictable but not low - digging hundreds of miles of trench and then backfilling is not cheap. It is commonly done for oil pipelines, though not at the diameter needed for transport. In urban areas, you would need to use bored tunnels to avoid huge disruption to the surface, and since our urban areas are so sprawling, that's a lot of deep tunneling with lots of uncertainty. |
I have a mad respect for Mr Musk's dreams, he appears to be some kind of crazy billionaire freak that I find useful. But Hayward and ardecila are convincing (just as those 2 often are) in their exposure of actual constraints. We won't see such magic in our lifetimes. Those luckier who'll live long after us, possibly.
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Might not be the most pretty thing to look at, but, a 6 inch thick reinforced concrete circular section 8 to 10 meters in diameter at ground surface might be as cheap per kilometer as a two line freeway 8" or 10" slab for the same distance. |
I'm a big believer in Elon Musk. I've invested heavily in Tesla and will do so with SpaceX whenever it finally goes public. I think the guy has vision and the drive to accomplish it.
That being said, he's made some pretty ignorant comments lately poo-pooing California's High Speed rail project. Talk is cheap, and its easy to say that something that's currently just an untested concept in his mind is going to be so much better and cheaper than what is already planned for California. The thing is, infrastructure projects are expensive in America period, and his hyperloop - if ever built, won't be immune from that. There's eminent domain costs, tons of safety regulations, strict engineering tolerances, union labor, lawsuits, etc. His project would have to jump through all the same hoops that CAHSR is currently jumping through- all of which makes the costs balloon. It pisses me off because the CAHSR project is already on thin ice and has lost popularity in voters eyes. If there was another referendum on the ballot it could get yanked completely, and it would be decades before the project got started again. Musk has no business making comments to help derail a real-world project that is actually happening for an untested, conceptual, more-expensive-than-he-thinks-it-will-be project that only exists in his brain. |
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17 miles underground for $9 billion, with tolerances of what, nanometers? Ok probably not, but still. It does require a guideway system, essentially a tunnel-within-a-tunnel. The LHC cost $529 million/mile, so a 4,000 km system built to the same tolerances would cost ~$2.1 trillion. Surprisingly affordable for a nation such as the United States or the EU, as it is a fraction of GDP. |
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