I'm deadly serious about megatunnels, vows Elon Musk That's more like it. Elon Musk is completely serious about building megatunnels under Los Angeles, buffing up his credentials as a real-life Bond villain. He's promised to start within "a month or so". Musk announced on Twitter that the first would be "Starting across from my desk at SpaceX. Crenshaw and the 105 Freeway, which …
This isn't about Earth or traffic at all. This is actually about Mars and asteroids.
If people colonise mars we won't live on the surface at all. The surface is bathed in radiation, dust and has no viable atmosphere.
To colonise you need to be able to automatically and remotely dig BIG tunnels to create your underground, pressurised work spaces and gardens.
To mine an asteroid you need to automatically dig it under low or spin gravity.
Musk is clearly using the immediate issue of transport on earth (an idea investors can get behind) to create the tech needed for his grander plans of getting humans off just one vulnerable rock.
Reminds me of the Dr Who episode 'Gridlock' .. ah, what a future we have to look forward to. :)
"Wouldn't turning left at Albuquerque make the tunnel end somewhere in Canada?"
Depends on the situation. A few examples
Yeah but the savings from fleeing LA would likely, in a single year, pay to move, feed, and house his entire labor force in North Platte. Heck the savings in CA taxes alone would get them all a new Tesla and put solar panels on the roofs of their much larger North Platte houses. In an ironic twist it would also do more the improve the traffic in LA than any tunnel would.
Maybe he should have considered North Platte, Nebraska.
Musk is addressing the symptom, not the problem (of over-sized cities). As such, all that a few tunnels will do is bring traffic faster into the already congested centre and pinch points.
Even if you build a bypass for through traffic, because policy makers allow/encourage the urban centre to keep growing then the bypass itself clags up. For UK readers, the M25, Birmingham Box, and M60 round Manchester illustrate this a treat.
For corporate bureaucrats, fat cats and politicians, when it comes to cities, big is beautiful. If that results in a shitty quality of life for the proles from congestion, poor public and private transport, pollution, cramped and expensive living, that's a price the elite are more than happy to pay.
Hyperloop makes more sense in the UAE etc, where a spin-off is starting work.... Dubai / Abu Dhabi or links to the other kingdoms. Throw billions of petrodollars at it in an earthquake free zone with no red-tape, and if it all blows up no worries...
Experience in earthquake zones so far is that tunnels hold up well. A lot of the damage on the surface is caused by an "inverted pendulum effect" of buildings swaying as they're shaken from the base. Tunnels, being 'immersed' in the moving ground, tend to move as a unit. The exception is if you cross an active fault, in which case you may have trouble at the strike/slip plane.
Besides LA, the Bay Area also has subways and even a couple of underwater tubes, and I'm not aware of any earthquake-related catastrophes in those.
That said I think Musk is nuts. Tunnel projects almost always go massively overbudget. He will be literally pouring money into a hole in the ground.
""The more voices of reason that the president hears, the better," said Musk. "Simply attacking him will achieve nothing. Are you aware of a single case where Trump bowed to protests or media attacks?" he asked.
But, to be fair, are you aware of a single case where Trump bowed to reason? The only time he changes his mind is when random cosmic rays flip a neurone in his head.
Read / watch this:
http://dailycaller.com/2016/07/26/scientist-lays-out-5-huge-problems-with-elon-musks-hyperloop-video/
then read this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#University :
"
In 1995, at age 24, Musk moved to California to begin a PhD in applied physics and materials science at Stanford University, but left the program after two days to pursue his entrepreneurial aspirations in the areas of the Internet, renewable energy and outer space
"
.... Maybe he should have stayed the course, then he wouldn't still be thinking the HyperLoop/ Megatunnel is a viable solution.
Dr. Phil Mason is why things can't get done. A bullet hole in steel isn't going to create a killer shockwave in a tube so massive. If the tube was lined with fault sensors and periodic emergency vents, even a complete failure would have a short range shockwave. The tube could also have an interior plastic lining that collapses and crumples to diffuse shockwaves. Dealing with expansion is as simple as not making the tube perfectly straight and rigid. Suffocation is, again, solved by sensors and periodic emergency vents.
"Maybe he should have stayed the course, then he wouldn't still be thinking the HyperLoop/ Megatunnel is a viable solution."
Hyperloop does seem a rather silly, impractical idea and I don't see it happening any time soon (other than possibly the occasional small prototype). Putting roads in tunnels is not at all the same thing, and there's nothing silly or impractical about. More to the point, there's nothing original about it either, so it seems a bit odd to criticise Musk for it. Putting roads underground is something people have done many times before when there hasn't been space to fit them above ground. Also railways, parts of buildings, a variety of pipes and cables, and pretty much anything else that takes up space in places there isn't much free space. As far as I can tell the only original part of this proposal is that he's attached the prefix "mega" to a perfectly ordinary concept for marketing purposes.
It could be a part of a roundabout face-saving. Most of the problem with the hyperloop idea could be solved by using a tunnel rather than an above ground tube. If Musk could fine a way to do for tunnelling what he's currently doing for the space launch industry an underground hyperloop might be feasible. Well, really just an underground vacuum maglev system of the sort I've been reading about for the last forty years. But if he could make it work, even as an airport city centre shuttle it would be an impressive achievement.
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You obviously took the wrong fork at the tunnel interchange on board the good ship RTFM - which you obviously didn't. Your bad.
You thing those barges are just for landing rockets on? Just be grateful you didn't end up in his secret underground Island Lair! Bet you didn't bring any cat food either......
One of the big problems with Atlanta is that it is based on and wheel&spoke type design, and our mass transit always goes through "the hub" to get from one part of the rim to another... taking a 15 minute ride and turning it into 1.5 hours. Or, all thru traffic (of the 18 wheel variety) gets shunted onto the rim with the commuting traffic. Or all of the interstate traffic from the east coast and midwest (I85/75) headed to Florida must go through a single pathway ("the connector") .Previous attempts to create an "outer perimeter" were seen as transparent attempts to create new development corridors. All are very bad ideas that contribute to huge traffic jams that could be ameliorated with tunnels. It sounds kind of spooky and like science fiction, but if it would work....
Surely the city, county and state have something to say about someone wanting to tunnel underneath publicly and privately owned land? Or is he going to stay solely within land he or his companies own? Even then I'd imagine there are regulations.
At least LA isn't like older cities west of the Mississippi that have layers and layers of underground infrastructure, making planning any sort of tunneling take years to get all the required permits and easements. But I'd be shocked if it was so easy as his "boring company" tweet last spring to starting next month if that tunnel is going to go more than a few hundred feet on his own property.
If no-one has noticed this is all related to his Mars project.
Electric cars - no freely available oxygen on Mars to run an ICE, so vehicles will need to be electric.
Solar Panels - Power the Mars Habitat.
Batteries - For vehicles above, in Space and on Mars.
Mars Habitat - Will probably have to be underground, so dig, hence digging company.
Hyperloop - Long Term Surface transport on Mars.
Awaiting something on either Hydroponics or Nuclear power.
Hydroponic technologies are advancing quite nicely - Japan already boasts indoor multistorey lettuce farms. Not only can they grow more lettuces per square foot, but the plants are raised so that (the ageing workforce of Japan) don't have to stoop down to harvest them. Labour on Mars will be expensive, and your humans puny - so make food production as easy for them as possible.
Then there is the legalisation of marijuana in several US states, which means that the development of some hydroponic kit is more in the open, developing LED lighting sources that emit different frequencies at different times (some wavelengths work for photosynthesis*, other wavelengths influence the plant's budding cycles).
* There are different types photosynthesis pathways found in nature, some pathways being more efficient, some more tolerant of temperatures, some require a leaf to have particular structures. This is why we currently have botanists and geneticists working in this area to improve crop yields, and develop crops for the climatic conditions that might be expected in a few years time.
The main driver for this is safety for his workers (along with other possible motivations). There was a hit and run incident that injured 3 employees. So this tunnel will mean safer commute to work.
Not sure if he is totally serious about 'The Boring Company' but I could see him doing it for sure if he can get this first tunnel done without major incident. This will have a use possibly in the Mars colonisation plan so as he has shown before he will take a gamble at creating another company if he feels it will benefit that plan in terms of technology and also increased revenue.
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