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Imagine what it would be like
if you could wake up in your New York City apartment
at 7:00 a.m.,
and make it to your job in London, England
by 9:30 in the morning.
That would be a possibility if we dug tunnels
between the two continents.
Just try not to get sick.
Believe it or not,
something like this is possible.
That's right,
a tunnel like this is possible.
I mean, a tunnel that's similar to this
already exists.
It's called the Channel Tunnel,
or Chunnel.
And in just about 35 minutes,
you can drive from England
to France.
Without it, you'd have to take either a ferry
or a plane.
Compared to what we'd be building,
the Chunnel is tiny at just over 50 km (31 miles).
Our tunnel would be over 5,500 km (3,417 miles)
if we wanted to go from New York to London.
So how would we make our tunnel?
Let's use the Channel Tunnel
as an example of what our tube might look like,
to give us some context.
The Channel Tunnel took six years to build,
and it also took decades of planning before that.
As for the price?
If we were to build another Chunnel today,
it would cost a whopping $13 billion.
Okay now multiply these numbers by 100,
as that's how much bigger our tunnel would be,
and you get the idea.
This thing would take an incredibly long time,
and would cost a ridiculous amount of money.
But let's assume we've got all this covered,
and we have unlimited time and money.
Just because we have enough resources
doesn't mean we should be stupid in how we use them.
If we tried to avoid all the water and went
underneath the seafloor,
we'd have to bore through the ground
from England all the way to America.
This would take an incredibly long time.
And there's always the possibility
that the tunnel we built more than 5,000 meters (16,404 ft) underwater
would cave in from the ocean's pressure.
Instead, the best way to make the tunnel
might be like this.
You would make one,
massively long, 5,500 km (3,417 mile) tube
and put it over the ocean.
Then, using anchors,
you would drag the tube down about 45 meters (154 ft).
You would then secure the tube using wires tied to the ocean's floor.
Okay, now that we have our tunnel,
what do we fill it with?
Will we drive through it?
Pfft, that's so 21st century.
Instead, we'll be taking a train.
I know, I know,
that might sound even more old-school than using a car,
but this won't be just a regular train.
To travel through our tube so quickly,
we'd need to use vactrains.
This system would essentially act as a vacuum
that would take all the air out of the tube.
This will allow the train to travel at incredibly high speeds
due to there being little or no air resistance.
Not only that, but
our train would also be levitating,
using high-powered magnets or
with air, kind of like an air hockey table.
Where my Canadians at?
After propelling the train forward with a high powered engine,
it could cruise for hundreds, if not thousands of kilometers,
since there's no friction to stop it.
With this little resistance,
the vactrain can go up to 8,000 km/h (4,970 mph).
But we won't be going that fast, as
that could be incredibly dangerous.
Not just for the train but for your physical well-being.
Instead, you'd be going about 2,000 km/h (1,242 mp/h),
which is almost double the speed of sound.
But don't be too alarmed by this.
Your body should be able to handle it just fine.
After all, the Concorde passenger jet flew this fast
for years before it was decommissioned.
So it is possible that we'll see a pipe that connects across the Atlantic Ocean one day,
as long as we have enough money, time and resources.
Now imagine that this supersonic train
actually exists,
and we could casually travel from Europe to America in just under an hour.
Think about how industry, our economy, and travel would change.
But what if we never even had to travel from Europe to America
as the land masses were already connected?
Well, that sounds like a story for another WHAT IF.
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