- Elon Musk has taken things to a new level
when it comes to transportation.
If he gets his way, you'll soon be able
to take a train from New York City
to Washington, D.C. in about 30 minutes,
or if you're on the West Coast,
you can go from L.A. to San Francisco in about 35.
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The hyperloop is a train type vehicle
which has these pods that travel
through a vacuum-sealed tube.
The technology is really just based
on a couple other technologies that have been around
for more than a century now.
The basic way it works is a segment
of the train or pod is contained in a tube
that has practically no air left in it.
Now, the train itself is suspended
using magnetic levitation.
This comes from an old idea called a vactrain,
which is also based on another type of train
that actually does exist called maglev,
or magnetic levitation.
Maglev trains do not make contact with the ground,
and use their magnets for both lift and propulsion.
This reduces friction and allows the train
to travel at extremely high speeds,
by today's standards, anyways.
The problem with maglev trains
is that they still have air that causes friction
and slows them down, because they're outside of the tube.
They're out in the open.
Now, this all reminds me of the pneumatic tubes
people used to send short messages
throughout buildings over 100 years ago.
In fact, the idea of sending people
through pneumatic tubes isn't new.
The first patent to transport goods in tubes
was taken out in 1799 by the British
mechanical engineer and inventor George Medhurst.
In 1812, Medhurst wrote a book
detailing his idea of transporting passengers
and goods through airtight tubes
using air propulsion.
Even the first attempt to build an underground
transit system in New York City
was based on this technology.
It was called the Beach Pneumatic Transit.
So, this idea isn't really new,
it's just that Elon's new company,
the Boring Company, as he calls it,
is making it economically feasible
due to their advancements in tunneling,
as well as other advancements in air propulsion.
So, who cares?
Is this really a thing?
Well, yes, yes it is.
Elon Musk recently tweeted out
his Boring Company received approval
to build a tunnel from New York City
to Washington, D.C.
This would people get them from city center
to city center in about 29 minutes.
At roughly 226 miles between New York
and D.C., that means they would have
to travel near 450 miles per hour on average.
That's pretty fast.
However, it's not as fast as the initial design
put out by the SpaceX and Tesla teams
back in 2013.
In their paper published in August of 2013,
they proposed a route between SF and LA
that would get passengers there in about 35 minutes.
To achieve this, they would need
an average speed of 600 miles per hour,
that's almost 1,000 kilometers an hour,
and a top speed of 760 miles per hour.
Until his latest tweet, it wasn't clear
that any of Elon's companies or he himself
was gonna be pursuing hyperloop.
They open sourced their designs
and hosted competitions to encourage
others to build companies to do this.
Meanwhile, he was running Tesla and SpaceX
and doing all these other things.
So, now it seems like at least
the Boring Company is going to be digging the tunnels.
Who knows whether or not they'll
actually be installing the hyperloops themselves.
SpaceX is helping develop this technology,
however, by hosting competitions.
In January 2017, SpaceX offered
its hyperloop transportation services
to 27 teams from across the country and world
in the first hyperloop pod competition
at the SpaceX track.
The competition's goal is to accelerate
the development of functional prototypes
and encourage innovation by challenging teams
to design and build the best high-speed pod.
Teams put their pods through a litany
of tests, which was made possible
by their hyperloop system.
This competition was the first
of its kind anywhere in the world.
Based on the high-quality submissions
and overwhelming enthusiasm surrounding
the first competition, SpaceX
has moved forward with the hyperloop pod competition 2,
which will culminate in a second competition
on August 25th through 27th of 21017.
This is also going to be held
at the SpaceX hyperloop track
up in Hawthorne near Los Angeles.
Hyperloop competition 2 focuses
on a single criterion, maximum speed.
The competition will include new
and returning student teams, some of which
have already built and tested their pods
during the first competition.
Several companies have sprung up
that are looking to use the hyperloop
design and create this new form of mass transit,
the most popular of which is called Hyperloop One.
Hyperloop One recently made history
with their full-scale system test run in Nevada.
At this instant, they achieved control,
propulsion, and levitation in their
production-scale vacuum environment.
This was a short test, but an important one
if this technology is ever to become a reality.
The skate they built only went
for about five seconds, yet it achieved
the magnetic levitation in a pressurized tube,
something never done before.
So, what's next?
Well, if Elon gets his way, the Boring Company
is gonna start digging tunnels.
They'll be winning federal and state
and local contracts to make this possible,
and then companies like Hyperloop One will install them.
So, there's a lot of things that still
need to happen, but the fact that Elon
is tweeting about it is a positive sign
for the rest of us that, one day,
this may become a reality.
Bloomberg reported that a person close to Musk
said his plan is to build the entire thing,
including the hyperloop system.
Musk also holds a trademark for hyperloop
through SpaceX, which could be used
to prevent other companies from using the term,
according to US public records.
Now, this is some next level stuff
that could seriously disrupt air travel,
as it'll be almost as fast, or in some cases
potentially faster, plus safer,
more convenient, and hopefully, one day cheaper.
A big outstanding question is if this
will really change things much for the daily commuter.
An Italian physicist, Cesare Marchetti,
came up with this notion that we all
spend about an hour traveling every day,
regardless of our mode of transportation.
His theory came from transportation analyst
and engineer Yakov Zahav, who studied this
going back to Ancient Greece,
where people would commute across the city on foot.
The cities then were built just big enough
that it would take about 30 minutes
to walk across the city each way,
meaning that the average commute
for a person was probably around 30 minutes
even back then.
So, what do you think?
Is this pure science fiction, or do you
think this is a good idea?
I'd love to know your thoughts.
Please leave me a comment down below.
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(rhythmic music)