Elon Musk’s Tunnel Plan Isn’t as Crazy as SpaceX or Tesla
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
One of the challenges will be building out underground habitats, and establishing mining for critical resources. Gaining experience with how to do that efficiently here on Earth will make it easier to set it up on Mars.
Furthermore when you start colonizing Mars, you're going to want high speed transport between locations. Rockets will work, but are wasteful. Airplanes don't work with thin atmosphere. But a hyperloop will.
So let's learn how to bore hyperloops cheaply and efficiently. Prove out the technology, make it repeatable. Then when SpaceX is ready to take us to Mars, we arrive with key pieces of technology that we'll need to colonize it.
The scope of his vision is breathtaking.
Honesty has phenomenal draw in marketing when the recipient agrees with the message. Even if one's disagrees, the product is harder to attack when everyone around it is honest.
https://medium.com/the-mission/first-principles-and-the-art-...
tl;dr --
1) Reduce the problem to a question answerable by a hard science like physics, chemistry, or biology, and pay attention to the theoretical limits.
2) If you can, find data on related industries and see if you can find long term trends. (Example: http://rameznaam.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Lithium-ion-... )
3) Extrapolate into the future.
4) Think of some way to exploit the information you've uncovered to gain a market advantage.
Other helpful techniques: Is there an industry which is subject to some form of bureaucracy which is distorting the market? How can technology be used to disrupt this?
* Planning the traffic impact and how it interacts with other transport lanes, all the above-ground building work to make the tunnel useful,
* Emergency ventilation and escape routes, and all other infrastructure that goes into the hole,
* Avoiding any building foundation piles, unmapped tunnels, pipes and cables, re-planning and fixing them if you do hit them,
* In Europe at least, archeological surveys.
Remove all of this from state, county, and municipal jurisdiction. Centralize the rules. Local government will still be controlling the portals where it must surface and interact with the surface world.
This will have to merge with mineral rights, but the intersection of mass transit and mining is minimal.
No, it doesn't. You are confusing the severability and frequent separate sale of mineral rights to a federalization of all subterranean property.
How do you make a very long, very deep, narrow-diameter, elevator-accessed tunnel safe from fires and toxic gas releases? You can make it a vacuum but then what if you have to escape a vehicle? How does this thing not become a death trap in the event of a fire?
Fire is the number one cause of fatalities in tunnels (remember it's the smoke that kills). Tons of engineering and expense goes into trying to devise shelter and evacuation solutions.
The Channel Tunnel is only 31.5 miles long vs 230 miles (driving) from New York to DC, but having an access shaft every 30 miles or so wouldn't be that bad.
I'm not sure how you'd deal with the vacuum issue though - I guess doors at regular intervals that can be sealed, so a section of the tunnel can be bought back to atmospheric pressure, and the emergency doors can be opened between the car-tunnel and tunnel-emergency tunnel.
The Gotthard tunnel has them about every half mile, but the Boring Company will use smaller diameter tunnels where smoke and gas spread faster, so they'll probably need them more tightly spaced -- say, every quarter mile. And they'll use separate tunnels for each direction of traffic. So that's three tunnels plus 230 x 4 x 2 = 1,840 cross passage tubes.
This is all technically achievable, but the Boring Company's vision is all about cost.. building tunnels 10X cheaper. This is, I think, at least as great of a challenge as getting government approvals to dig very deep.
Solution: Do not connect the tunnel directly to the road network.
Emergency ventilation
Solution: Build a kind of infrastructure that only allows onboard backup as emergency ventilation.
Escape routes
Solution: Minimize escape shafts and provision emergency rescue vehicles capable of transporting an entire pod. Maximize reliability by exploiting the increased reliability of electric drivetrains and leveraging institutional knowledge from SpaceX and Tesla.
all other infrastructure that goes into the hole
Solution: Minimize "all other" which is not simply the hole.
Avoiding any building foundation piles,...archeological surveys
Solution: Go deep enough to avoid all of these.
> Solution: Do not connect the tunnel directly to the road network.
Then how do people get there? Train? OK, then you have to plan how it interacts with the train network's traffic and schedules, duh.
At least that's easier than car traffic... OH WAIT! Train stations usually have parking, or even if they didn't, are in the middle of a city, not at the top of a tower in the himalayas. So even if you don't want them to, people can drive to near an entrance and park. There will be induced traffic, and there is no way to keep the two networks unrelated without making the tunnel network totally useless.
> Solution: Build a kind of infrastructure that only allows onboard backup as emergency ventilation.
FWIW This also means you have to ban internal combustion engines (which should be OK). Just to deal with ICE exhaust, the Holland tunnel replaces all the air inside it every 90 seconds.
> Solution: Minimize "all other" which is not simply the hole.
You don't even know what "all other" is, do you? I don't either, but this whole set of solutions is really borderline "Why don't they just make the whole plane out of the black box?" ignorant sounding.
> Solution: Go deep enough to avoid all of these.
And I'm as ignorant as you, but I remember reading somewhere that digging costs can be exponentialish as depth increases, for a bunch of reasons.
Your reasoning applies equally to airports. Congrats, you just "debunked" the airplane! (duh!)
So even if you don't want them to, people can drive to near an entrance and park. There will be induced traffic
This is vacuous. There will always be induced traffic for such a project. But the kind of planning required for the kind produced by an airport is materially different from the kind produced by an entirely new highway. Also, if your new "airport" requires the construction of a new road in the future, this isn't as big a short term barrier as those around an entirely new major highway, and will be borne by the local government.
FWIW This also means you have to ban internal combustion engines
FWIW, I'm glad you finally caught up with my actual idea!
You don't even know what "all other" is, do you?
That's not relevant at this level. I don't have to know all the details of building a road to know that not building a road and flying a cargo will avoid those expenses and incur different ones. What is your point, here?
(Here's a hint, when discussing major infrastructure, don't automatically ascribe to others straw man positions of zero cost! That's not exactly a "charitable" reading.)
And I'm as ignorant as you, but
...a little soft in the reasoning. If digging costs are exponential with depth, then this would be an interesting point. I'm not sure if I should really credit that. Well, I guess one would deserve credit for bringing that to attention. So your comment makes, charitably, a "half point."
That's not really in dispute.
> Congrats, you just "debunked" the airplane! (duh!)
If by “debunked the airplane” you mean “demonstrated the already widely-accepted fact that air travel only is effective with considerable attention to the surface transport connecting airports to the places people actually want to go to and from in the area serviced by the airport”, sure.
Well, yes! Perhaps I shouldn't have used the click-baity, "Solved:" but those are my best guesses as to the strategies used to minimize the problems.
-Rock type
-Groundwater flow
-Tectonic activity
You can have a whole career as a geotechnical engineer. There are genuine and difficult problems that require consideration if your tunnel isn't to collapse after a few years of use. I don't think these problems magically disappear with new technology or going deep enough.
It is easy to speculate on why something might not work. Most of the universe consists of nothing (by volume) or a random assortment of very fast moving hydrogen and helium ions (by mass) (not sure where black holes fit in). Interesting things are rare. They are very complex systems that have built-up and evolved over time. If you want to try and build such a system, a good way is to look at the problem from a fundamental physics and economic view (first principles, as Musk would say) to see if it is possible. If it is, then start thinking about it seriously, gather like-minded people, and start building things. It's impossible to plan all the necessary steps before starting a journey that never been done before.
However, if you want the government to subsidize it / provide tax breaks, then you want to be able to go to politicians in every state and show them how this tunnel is going to bring jobs and money. You pull up a big map and say, "This is going to go from San Francisco to New York, and if you are willing to help we'll make sure it goes right through your state!"
That's the political game that you play. (It also makes it politically unfeasible to shut down later. See: military contractors in every state)
Once I realized I might be wrong about him, I started following him closely, watching all his interviews, and then seeing one success after another.
Nowadays, I'm flabbergasted by people that would mock his ideas when he's proven over and over again that his visions have a stubborn way of becoming reality, one way or another (sometimes late).
Can he stumble and be totally wrong and fail? Of course, I'm surprised it hasn't happened yet, but to mock him is just being plain ignorant.
This is the power of 1st principles reasoning. The power of physics becomes your power!
1. A new, successful car company.
2. A new, successful space launch company.
My comment was an exploration of the title "...Tunnel Plan Isn't as Crazy..." Then the article didn't seem to explore any of the crazy aspects of the purpose of the tunnel.
Talking about the "craziness" of digging the tunnel separate from the purpose seemed...odd.
Edit: Appears I may also be confused as to which "Tunnel Plan" in the article title maps to which "tunnel plan" the article is talking about.
"That superfast train, known as the hyperloop"
Edit: Ah, perhaps the article structure is just confusing to me. It's hard to map which "Tunnel Plan" they mean in the article.
It sounds like he's less concerned about disturbing the people above, as it's apparently not an issue at certain depths (I am not an engineer). Seems like the existing underground infrastructure might be a bigger problem.
I don't think air resistance is the largest cause of expense in transportation. Am I wrong here? How much does it cost to overcome air resistance per mile in trains and trucks?
If you want to go fast (the plan for the hyperloop) then air resistance becomes a significant cost. The power it takes to overcome aerodynamic drag increases with the cube of velocity.
I imagine the hyperloop design where cars are independent makes drag costs worse compared to trains (compared at the same speed).
However, autopilot cars don't have to operate independently over long distances, in ways that specifically reduce air resistance!
https://youtu.be/hpDHwfXbpfg?t=1m17s
edit: added the word "interview"
When mankind first started to burn fossil fuels nobody anticipated that it would impact climate on a planetary scale. This is an idea that needs much more study before we rush into it.
It isn't. Just ask the builders of the Chunnel. It's only 31 miles long and went 80% over budget and 20% behind schedule. A tunnel from New York to DC would be nearly 10 times as long and run under some of the most densely populated land in the country. Rockets and electric cars are trivial by comparison.
That's not what it is at all. It's a company that makes tunnels. Ultimately, they will be used for whatever infrastructure needs tunnels to work.
How does this help people stuck in LA traffic all day?
I think a lot of legitimate criticism of HN's darlings starts with which markets and demographics they aim at, and whose problems they deem worthy of solving.
As for the OP, are there no long distance transport problems worth solving? Really? It's just a daft and pointlessly negative comment, a variation on lazy whataboutism.
He doesn't, because long-distance solutions depend on integration with local network solutions; you can solve local without long distance but not vice versa.
Most airports just put in parking and sometimes a shuttle bus to move people around their massive parking complex, but even as large as those systems are they peanuts compared to the Airports main concern, Air Travel.
Why are tunnels different?
No, you can't, which is why when commercial airports are actually built, they are either carefully sited near freeways with excess capacity or have new freeways built and/or capacity added to existing freeways, often have local rail connections built, involve major upgrades to local surface roads, and involve other extensions of local mass and individual transit capacity.
There are many viable solutions for many problems. The choice of which problem to give first priority to, given an abundance of viable solutions for many problems, reveals much. As does the claim that only that particular problem has a viable solution.
HN's priorities are skewed toward solving the problems of people who are, on the whole, similar to HN commenters. I happen to think this is a bad thing, and reflects a poor set of priorities; it's not "whataboutism" to suggest a different priority order. "Whataboutism" is commonly misunderstood (by those selfsame HN commenters) to mean an evasion of any priorities.
The article mentions that the cost of digs are prohibitively expensive. Reducing costs could help LA and the people stuck in traffic all day.
Not sure if that's short distance enough but it seems like it