Posted on 01/05/2015 2:18:31 AM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
San Francisco to Los Angeles in 35 minutes flat—that was the dream of the Hyperloop.
Back in 2013, Elon Musk introduced the world to this dream a 60 page white paper. The paper caused a stir. The idea—a levitating, solar-power supersonic train—was both pure geek porn and a transportation revolution in the making. It definitely captured people’s imagination.
But would it ever get made—now that was the question.
Musk himself said he was too busy to take on the project, but if other people wanted in on the cause, well, that was just fine with him. As it turns out, other people have taken him up on his offer—about 100 in total.
Meet Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, (HTT) a company that is not quite a company.
Using JumpStartFund, a crowdfunding and crowdsourcing hybrid service/model, wherein the very workers who are going to build the Hyperloop aren’t paid until the train turns a profit.
How is that possible? Simple, the workers don’t actually work for HTT, or not many of them. Most of them work day jobs at companies spread throughout the country—Boeing or SpaceX or NASA or Yahoo! or Salesforce or Airbus, to name but a few. HTT is a company built on quasi-moonlighters, lending their cognitive surplus to supersonic train design. In technical parlance, they’re a mesh network.
Moreover, they’re a mesh network who had to apply for the job. This means that unlike most crowdfunding efforts, where you have to take what you get, this one got to pick and choose. Not only does this give them a much higher level of talent working on the project, it also gives them a pretty healthy reserve pool, should workers involved get sucked into other projects—which, since nobody’s getting paid for a while, is bound to happen.
And it could be quite a while.
A few weeks ago, the 100 or so engineers who make up the HTT mesh network got together to get going, penning a 76-page report on their plans, arguing they can complete their first Hyperloop (which, as it turns out, may link LA to Las Vegas, contrary to Musk’s originally proposed LA to San Francisco route) in about ten years for a cost of roughly $16 billion.
What strikes me as interesting here is the parallel between the new kind of organizational structure required to build a technology like the Hyperloop—the aforementioned mesh network—and the new kind of social structure the Hyperloop is going to ultimately create.
In macroscopic terms, distance is a brake on business. It comes down to the very human factor of trust. We all know that business requires trust to succeed and that the creation of trust—for reasons that have everything to do with evolutionary biology—requires interpersonal contact. Enter the Hyperloop.
A transportation technology that allows Angelinos to commute to job in Vegas or San Francisco or wherever it ends up, is going to make neighbors of literally distant strangers. Suddenly, people who live in different cities will eat lunch in the same restaurants. They’ll share cabs (arguably robo-driven cabs, but cabs none-the-less). They may go to the same gym. In this way, the Hyperloop will radically extend our interpersonal networks in ways we can’t begin to image and, by extension, reshape the ways we do business.
So on both ends of the spectrum—in the organization structure it takes to build the Hyperloop and in the organizational structures that will emerge once the Hyperloop is built—we’re looking at a revolution in business disguised as a revolution in transport.
Ah, public transportation.
Musk is a salesman especially good at selling to taxpayers under the guise of “private”.
“The idea—a levitating, solar-power supersonic train”
What the hell does “solar-power” have to do with it? I see this in EVERY report. Will it not work at night for some reason, or if it’s too cloudy? Why bring this up at all? Who cares if its tiny bit of power is from the grid or not? Does solar power provide a certain form of electron that allows the system to work, while coal, or hydro, does not? Can’t Mr. Musk simply lay out a set of panels somewhere (anywhere), connect them to the grid, and OFFSET the power used by the system, and therefore not have to worry if the “sun don’t shine”, while having an IDENTICAL benefit to saving the planet (LOL)?
It almost sounds like a STUPIDITY TEST for the reporters - to see if they’re willing to say something TOTALLY MEANINGLESS because they’re TOO STUPID to realize just how dumb they are. It’s like when they named the crew of the Asiana flight at crashed at San Francisco (Sum Ting Wong, Wi Tu Lo, Ho Lee Fuk and Bang Ding Ow)...and they KEEP STEPPING IN IT on this.
I love that video.
Solar powered and supersonic? I think we’ll have teleportation first.
As to its merits, obviously solar power doesn’t matter, but the rest of it seems a bit shaky to me also. For the transcontinental run, it relies on hitting a maximum speed of something like 4000 mph (I’m too lazy to calculate it, but it’s way up there). You basically accelerate at 1G until you reach Kansas, then flip the seats around and decelerate at 1G until you hit your destination (i.e., the opposite coast of the country).
4000 mph is definitely fast, but the Space Shuttle went 4 times faster, when in orbit, so there’s nothing special about it, providing that you don’t have wind resistance, rolling resistance, or other types of friction.
Where it gets more interesting, though, is how you deal with the vertical component of the system. The Earth is NOT perfectly flat, and about the ONLY places it comes close is on dry lake beds, which is why land speed records are always (and only) set there. You don’t go racing through the hills of Appalachia at 600 mph (at ground level) without pulling some SERIOUS G’s, and you sure as hell don’t go over the Rockies at 3000 mph without dealing with the same. In other words, wherever you’re fast (which is most of the run), your slope has to be VERY GENTLE or you will simply crush the passengers - think of a roller coaster on steroids. Same rule for curves, very gentle when you go fast or you’ll be pinning people all over the place.
So what does that mean? It means that you CANNOT follow terrain, or even come close (except over the Salt Flats, maybe). The rest of the time you will either have to bridge canyons, or tunnel through mountains. You get to touch the surface only on rare occasions. HUGE AMOUNTS of earth moving...so let’s just see what the left thinks when they see what the environmental impacts are. I-70, through the Rockies, was likely built for 65 MPH and still required a HUGE AMOUNT of blasting, bridges, and tunneling. That highway will be a CAKE WALK compared to what this will require.
“I love that video.”
Yea, you do have to feel bad for the reporter, though. She is just catching on at the end and knows she’ll be going down in history - just for doing her job.
Reporters seem to fail stupidity tests quite often.
I noticed this thing not only saves the planet and gets people to work fast—the “levitating” part will be a hit with the new agers and the Bring Back the Sixties crowd.
Willie Green — pick up the white courtesy phone, please.
Can the incompetents in California manage a project of this magnitude? A private company might be capable but not a crony-theft oriented enterprise.
I for one would love to see this developed and successful. California might be dying right now, but things could change one day.
The key to success here is making the tickets financially accessible to people. I don’t know that this is possible given the corruption that will inflate the cost beyond imaginable.
Well, I guess it worked for Apple.
What is it with these rich guys having big ideas that always want the workers and the public to pay for to see if they work? Musk’s worth 8 bil, let him and ten of his moneyed-up pals kick in a billion each and let’s see what happens. Always with the schemes to fleece the people’s pockets instead of their own, unlike the old guys who did and many times went bust—and started over yet again!
Amtrak survives on heavy government subsidies and inherited infrastructure. Hyperloop will need completely new infrastructure, and even larger government subsidies. The development and construction cost projections that have been floated (uh, levitated) for such systems are almost certainly woefully low even if you ignore the inevitable waste and corruption that always accompanies large cash flows.
And Huffington Post. [snicker]
Fascinating.
The promoters make a big giant deal that this thing won’t need rails.
No, it will need tubes and massive compressors. Sounds a lot more expensive per mile than some earth moving and a couple of steel rails.
I think there is little doubt it could be made to work technically. Really, really doubt it will ever be economically feasible without truly massive subsidies.
Stephen King wrote about a solar powered levitating train in
The Drak Tower series; it was an insane train that has a passion for riddling.
But of course Musk’s version is nothing like the Dark Tower train.
Hyperloop is the sign of a failing society,we need to feed the poor and commit our resources to redistribution of wealth./S
Now that I think about it, I’ve seen this concept described in SF.
Except they used true staightline tunnels, waaayy below the surface. And in the Moon, tectonically stable rather than the jittery Earth. On the Moon you also have a ready made vacuum.
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