HEAR ME OUT BEFORE YOU DOWNVOTE.
Disclaimer: The hyperloop is an absolutely shit idea right now. I do not support building in any form right now.
Now to the shower thought: Theoretically, a hyperloop can get you from place A to place B on the planet in less than 40 min (back of the napkin calculations assuming constant acceleration and deceleration of around 1G). Being completely underground (more on that below), it would also be a really good piece of infrastructure safe from arial/orbital bombardment.
Now to the obvious problems: We need the tube to be very very straight to achieve high speeds without killing our passengers. We would want the hyperloop to enter city centers. Building such a straight thing in city centers would require a lot of demolition. Therefore, we would have to get it underground. Bringing it on the ground again outside cities doesn’t make sense because we would be introducing steep upward curves, thus reducing its maximum speed. Therefore, it makes sense to build this thing completely underground. Building underground also gives us many more benefits like not having to do much land acquisition, safety from violent attacks and so on.
Our tube would have to be incredibly airtight. It absolutely cannot have any leaks anywhere. Also, we need to be able to achieve incredibly low chamber pressures and maintain them.
If we are building this underground, we would need a shit load of energy to dig and transport the material outside the tunnel. We would also need a shit load of steel and other resources for these incredibly long tunnels.
Where do we get this energy? Where do we mine these resources without destroying the planet? Now this is where the “future” part comes in. We would need energy to be incredibly cheap. The only viable long term method (by “long term”, I mean it from the civilization time scale) would be via nuclear fusion. When is nuclear fusion happening? Well, it’s only 30 years away! /s Jokes aside, the energy source might be when nuclear fusion not only becomes possible, but also incredibly cheap (the nuclear reactor shouldn’t cost billions lol).
About the resources? Well, we probably need to mine them on the moon, no? The moon has A LOT of them right on the surface. If we can mine them and send them back home, we solve our resources problem!
Well, you might ask- doesn’t it make more sense to just have spaceships with engines propelled by nuclear fusion that exit the atmosphere, go at hypersonic speeds and then drop in? Why build expensive underground continent spanning tunnels? Well, what if we are attacked by aliens? They could easily blockade our airspace. Hell, just dropping a few million stealthy pebbles in our lower orbits would be enough to stop all hypersonic travel (the risk of ships exploding on contact with these pebbles would be too high for air travel to continue). Hypersonic spaceships would also face the problem of traditional aircrafts- you would need to build spaceports far from city centers. These spaceports would require a lot of space and cause a tremendous amount of noise pollution (constant sonic booms for every launch and landing).
Therefore, I think I have made my mind. I think I would be voting for a hyperloop proposal that possibly would be tabled in our direct democratic government a 100-150 years from now!
It’s easy to get caught up in all that “cool factor”, but if you really think about it, “cool” is just a stupid person trap.
If you’re really serious about it, look at the fundamental problem it is trying to solve, and consider if there are any more efficient, less expensive ways of addressing that core issue.
- Expensive
- Noise pollution
- Incredibly unsafe
Basically, the future’s version of cars.
It’s okay you can be safe on a train and I’ll be balling with my jetpack.
First principal thinking there is probally no faster possible form of transport on earth, because you can move a shorter distance the.
If the cost were lower than the benifit of having those speeds then its worth it, but honestly I think the push towards robotics and digital twins/digitalization is covering more of peoples needs today then needing to move people to places physically super fast.
Ahh so what the metaverse was supposed to be? I think I do see this being more probable than the underground continent spanning Hyperloop network lol.
Maybe full body suits that produce output sensed by all 5 senses? Hmmm, that’s a lot more probable I suppose (and I think would look a lot more dystopian too lol)
I can’t see any more efficient ways of getting people from place A to B faster. Hypersonic speeds can’t be achieved on the earth’s surface due to its atmosphere. Therefore, I see only two ways to go about it:
- Spaceships that exit and reenter earth’s atmosphere.
- Hypersonic trains in a vacuum chamber, I.e., a Hyperloop .
I did compare this above. Like… Wouldn’t Hyperloops be safer and a lot more efficient than spaceships? Basically, the trains vs flights debate of the future.
The core problem isn’t people needing to get from A to B at hypersonic speeds. It’s that they need to get there in a reasonable timeframe.
I would first off remove the need to commute long distances regularly by putting amenities closer to residential areas with appropriate zoning and encouraging work-from-home where practical.
If right of way and turn radius is the reasons you’re building underground, elevated rail is like 10x cheaper.
You’re wasting too much thought on some douchebag’s scheme to collect government subsidies.
Naah it’s just a fun thought experiment lmao. Don’t care about Mr. Douchebag.
As for the elevated rail thing- we would have to demolish A LOT of on ground infrastructure for that, no? Elevated makes sense for metros n stuff because of smaller turning radii. But for an absolutely straight tube? Ehhh.
Also, we need to factor in vertical turning radii as well, no? Elevation changes r quite drastic on the earth’s surface. Building elevated means building crazy tall pillars and stuff (which also have to be earthquake resistant). Also, we would definitely need to build a lot of tunnels either ways (through hills, mountains, or simple plains whose elevation changes r too steep for our hypersonic vehicle)
TL;DR:
“Once we have nuclear fusion energy will be so cheap we can waste it on even the dumbest projecets”.
The hyperloop is a dumb project today. Think about it this way: U live in Siberia in the 1600s. U just discovered oil (and also processes to refine it). You most likely would make heating oil from it to keep you warm. But then if I told you that you could also use 1000 times the amount you use in a month to go to America in just a few hours, you would probably call me a dumbass. Would you be right then? Yes. Would you be right now? No.
it’s a cool idea, but probably not a good one
Too much money would be spent to simply get people from point A to point B faster
and why do it this fast? these reasons outweigh the price to build such a thing?
I mean… Why build HSR if u just have normal rail? It might get u from place A to B faster by an hour or so… What difference would that make?
Turns out it would make quite a lot of difference, right? Faster human transportation in history has always been a good thing.
As for the price, the assumption is that nuclear fusion and lunar mining are mature tech. That would certainly lower the price a lot, no?
Faster transport hasn’t always been a good thing though, look at Concorde. The fastest passenger vehicle to ever exist and it was retired without a replacement because the extra speed wasn’t worth the cost and it lost money even with government subsidies.
Agreed. The Concorde wasn’t sustainable.
In my premise, energy is abundant. Resources are abundant.
Also, my comment about speed being good was more from a civilisational perspective. Going from running to horses to rail to the plane (for long distances of course) had incredible advantages for humans. My point was that the Hyperloop would be a natural extension to this whenever the resources and necessary tech become available.
Only if in the future they somehow change the laws of physics.
Hyperloops are an engineering problem, not a physical one. The same goes with nuclear fusion. Theoretically, nuclear fusion can be done on Earth. However, engineering such a system has taken more than half a century now (n we still don’t have a nuclear fusion reactor yet).
This is very wrong. Hyperloops aren’t practically possible.
It’s not true that if something is theoretically possible, it is somehow also practically possible given enough engineering effort.
I know it’s easy for futurism fans and tech bros to say bruh it’s just engineering, but in reality we would have no real idea of how to build such a thing. You’d need advancements on so many levels and so many different fields, it’s not even in the ballpark of being possible right now. Engineering is putting existing techniques into practice, creating an optimized design and plans on how to build something. But engineers aren’t in the business of developing new techniques or materials. That’s up to the researchers and scientists to first figure out the basics, then develop it into something that could be useful, then create prototypes and then hand it over to the engineers to put it into practice.
And even if they were possible to build, the amount of energy, effort and resources far out way any problem they aim to solve. Not only can’t you ever make money on them, the timelines are too long for any government to keep such a project going if by some weird miracle it would be started at all.
Long story short: Hyperloops are a pie in the sky futurism sci fi concept which don’t even work in fictional scenarios. They can’t exist in the real world and even if they could, they shouldn’t.
I’ve also never heard anybody explain what problem Hyperloops intend to solve. It’s a solution looking for a problem. We can move people around the world plenty fast enough. And except for recreational use, the need for people to physically be at some location fast has gone way down over the years due to the internet and increasing digitalization of our society. And I for one hope we can get rid of the recreational part in the future, the amount of pollution caused by the use of jets and cruise ships doesn’t way against the benefits of going a long way from home for a holiday imho. But seeing the pollution has increased in these sectors let’s me know I’m the minority there. And anybody who says freight knows nothing about logistics and should perhaps look into that before speaking any further.
Sure, I think I agree with the AR/VR point. We won’t really need such fast travel when this exists.
As for the physics problem, I didn’t see you mentioning any unsolvable ones. As for the energy required and the resulting pollution, we have nuclear fusion (that’s the premise). We r even mining resources from the moon for this.
This might be an economical problem with AR/VR competing. But a physics problem? Naah
I’ve also never heard anybody explain what problem Hyperloops intend to solve.
Speed. If you want a train between east coast and west coast to compete with airplanes, you need it much faster than current maglev trains.
A few hundred miles of tubing that grows and shrinks hundreds of feet daily won’t be able to maintain a vacuum. It very much is a physics problem.
We already build spaceships that have to experience temperature differentials much much greater than what a hyper loop would have to experience. A Hyperloop would just be an inverted extension of this. Again, an engineering problem - not a physical one.
