Hyperloop Bankrupt and Busted.

[Uttamattamakin]

Summary

When the hyperloop was unveiled it was tech news.  Hyperloop one has gone bankrupt and fully ceased to operate. Lets talk about it and maybe about how to recognize vaporware in general.   

 

Quotes

 Hyperloop One Is Shutting Down, Ending a Literal Transportation Pipe Dream  - PC Magazine.  

Quote

The idea of hyperloop travel has been around for decades, but really started to take off after Elon Musk released a concept paper describing it in 2013. It sounds pretty simple: create a vacuum-sealed tube over vast distances and propel people through it in a pod at hundreds of miles per hour. The basic concept resembles the vacuum tubes that banks use for teller systems. It promised to reduce the time it takes to travel from Los Angeles to San Francisco from nearly six hours to just 45 minutes. But the difference in difficulty between sending bits of paper over a few feet at low speeds and propelling humans hundreds of miles per hour across vast distances can't be overstated. And that shows in how little has been accomplished by the various companies attempting to make the concept a reality.

The hyperloop is dead for real this time -The Verge

Quote

Musk theorized that aerodynamic aluminum capsules filled with passengers or cargo could be propelled through a nearly airless tube at speeds of up to 760mph. These tubes, either raised on pylons or sunk beneath the earth, could be built either within or between cities. He called it a “fifth mode of transportation” and argued it could help change the way we live, work, trade, and travel.

 

Hyperloop One to Shut Down After Failing to Reinvent Transit - Bloomberg

Quote

The company is selling assets, laying off remaining employees.

 

Granted this company had some non technical problems that are part of its specific story. Hyperloop One Suffocates in its Vacuum Tubes  -Spiceworks

Quote

Hyperloop One was founded as Hyperloop Technologies following Elon Musk’s 2013 white paper Hyperloop Alpha, with the billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX calling it the “fifth mode of transportation.” The company has received $450 million in funding, at least $115 of which came from DP World.  Hyperloop One has also been marred in controversy several times following a lawsuit filed against the company by one of its co-founders, allegations of sexual misconduct by another co-founder, and the arrest of its chairman, Ziyavudin Magomedov.  The fact that Saudi Arabia left a project it was planning with Hyperloop One after Branson’s criticism of the Saudi government, resulting in him stepping down as chairman, didn’t help either.

 

 

My thoughts

It should go without saying that the portion of a news post that is someone thoughts is opinion and personal observations.  What to say about a story that took so long to unfold. 

 

Looking at where Hyperloop was uncontroversially discussed on this forum before, it was tech news when it was unveiled, and in many post since then.  If this is somehow someway not now tech news then how would I know that?   

 

It was not "obvious" that this would not work.

Those who know the basic sciences as their profession could see it was never likely to work.

 

Those who beleived in this should not have known that it would not work.  It was sold by a person who has a lot of money and success beyond just degrees and academic credentials.  Sold by someone who supposedly knows how to get things done and how to do them.   There is a place for that and that is a very valuable thing.  There is also a place for just knowing what works and what does not work and why this works and that does not work.   This way we can make real progress using the wheel (in this case high speed rail) rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. 

The basic laws that govern nature are unforgiving.  Laws which if something breaks them will not exist.  Laws which if they are tested to the limit will crush that which pushes their boundaries into twisted metal if not into a black hole, censored from the rest of the universe, without a court of appeal.  

 

If one knew the laws of nature aka physics (high pressure, energy production and delivery into the tube, and thermodynamic issues), matterials, thermodynamics (thermal expansion issue with constructing a big long vacuum or partial vacuum); Then that this would be at least hard if not utterly impossible was easy to see.    It was not "obvious" just as it is not obvious when a computer tech item is vaporware to people who are not into that.   Since it was not obvious no one who is not a specialist in the sciences should feel bad or defensive about having not seen this.  It would've been like knowing a solar eclipse was coming when one was not a keen observer of the sky.  

 

No one who knows these things is saying it was obvious that Hyperloop would not work.  No one is saying that everyone should've seen that and seen past the money to see the science. 

It is part of being a fan of technology that a lot of would be cool to have may be impossible.   It may just be something that pushes the boundaries of physics to a degree that is not practical or economical .  It may be like Hyperloop something that works at a small scale but does not scale up.   Hyperloop was basically taking Pneumatic tubes whcih before email and such would be used to send doccuments within large buildings or at the drive up windows at a bank etc. 

 

It has to be said a lot of people were not very nice to those of us who expressed doubt and pointed out that Hyperloop was very unlikely to work based on our own first hand knowledge of physics, matterials, chemistry, engineering or similar. A lot of us egg heads who do know those things were called all sorts of terrible names for the better part of a decade for not believing against what we know to be true about how nature operates. 

(With guest appearances by Linus and Luke and Veritasium's Derrick and a cavalcade of stars) 

Thunderf00t enjoys busting on Elon Musk in a way that is almost indecent and NSFW.  

 

This presents a larger lesson for all tech.  Remember that many things are tried in the lab and don't work out.  Many things would be great but are vaporware for economic, and political reasons as well. In an age where so many of these things get invested in on Kickstarter by ordinary people who may not know better and just lose their money it is more important than ever to hear out skeptical voices without prejudice.   Hyperloop is just a big spectacular example.
 

Signs of vaporware, in general, in my opinion:

1. Promising a tech product which would push the boundaries of then known physics, chemistry, engineering or matterials.  A product that would make all existing products that accomplish the same or similar task obsolete.   
   1. IF something requires that we first obtain unobtanium then apply it in a novel way it is likely vaporware.
   2. Example: The United States National Aerospace Plane.  Never heard of it?  There's a reason. 
   3. Quantum Computing as anything that would be used on a daily basis  especially considering ...
2. Promising to deliver a product that fits the first criterion in a very short period of time.  Not just promising to obtain the unobtanium but also to apply it, and make it cheap.   
   1. Quantum computing may well eventually be crucial but there is a lot of work to do on using it in any practical way.  It's a 10 to 50 year project not a 5-10 year project. 
   2. So many Kickstarter projects that promise to deliver in say a year but years and years latter nothing. 
3. If the economics are too good to be true then it is likely to be vaporware.  
   1. If it is something seeking investment, if the promise is that it will make you or your company or your state/city/country rich in a short time be very warry. 
   2. If it is promising to overnight make obsolete other proven modes of accomplishing a task obsolete be warry.  Anything that involves any sort of infrastructure takes time.
   3. NFT's and most if not all cryptocurrencies might fit this bill as well. 
4. If an idea fits the above and is announced by a large company that will be fine if it does not work out, while encouraging others to act based on their promises it might be vaporware. 
   1. This comes from the example of Microsoft in the 1990's they would announce products that would just never come out.    The first use of it was supposedly internally at Microsoft in reference to Microsoft's Xenix Operating system.  A really cool Unix variant for X86 PCs.  Immagine if they had stuck to keeping Xenix around for high end business PC's right up until the 386 and 468 era and beyond.  We'd all be running Unix.  They basically abandoned it and we had Dos then NT.  
   2. MS and other companies would announce software or frameworks or "form factors" for products that they would then not support really at all.   For example the dual screen / folding screen PC concepts and products.  While cool they are hardly common. 
   3. It was part of a strategy named internally at Microsoft as "Embrace Extend and Extinguish".  -- US Department of Justice  It has been reported that Elon Musk’s Hyperloop idea was just a ruse to kill California’s high-speed rail project  --Fresno Bee Editorial Page

Please be civil in any discussion of this. 

 

Sources

 

Hyperloop One Is Shutting Down, Ending a Literal Transportation Pipe Dream  - PC Magazine. 

The hyperloop is dead for real this time -The Verge

Hyperloop One Suffocates in its Vacuum Tubes -Spiceworks

Hyperloop One to Shut Down After Failing to Reinvent Transit - Bloomberg

Elon Musk’s Hyperloop idea was just a ruse to kill California’s high-speed rail project  --Fresno Bee Editorial Page

 

[Shimejii]

Trains. Just use trains. Whole idea was to prevent High speed rail from getting funding so they had to "Show" something.

[soldier_ph]

Yeah I knew that this was never gonna become a real thing. Cool concept in theory. Trains would be an easy solution but that's never going to seriously actually happen in the US outside of big Cities. IMO the US is just too large for that to develop a sophisticated Train Network nowadays which can cover the majority of the Land on the Mainland. They would've needed to start working on that in the 20th Century when other Countries, most notably Switzerland, were building their own Rail Networks. But I guess they were busy with other things which is fair enough. Also many more of Elons dreams are just that, dreams and in rare cases like this it's a cool concept in Theory.

[Uttamattamakin]

8 minutes ago, soldier_ph said:

IMO the US is just too large for that to develop a sophisticated Train Network nowadays which can cover the majority of the Land on the Mainland. 

My thought on that is that the US really went all in on rail in the 1850's to 1860's etc.  You know what the government did to make that happen?  When it came to the trans continental railroad Union Pacific and Central Pacific were granted ownership of all real estate basically as far as the eye could see from the rails.  (The railroads have their own police force.  Granted it was not only a "Manifest Destiny" thing but the railroads had unbelievable power in those days.   

Now to build a railroad or anything of the sort means respecting the property rights of everyone along the right of way.   That means either taking land by eminent domain, violating this or that Treaty with an American Indian nation out west, huge environmental impact assessments etc etc.    The same reason that the Organization of American States cannot make a road across the Darien Gap (between South America and Columbia).   One could not just have a moving small town/city at/near the end of the track able to just barge through and bulldoze whoever or whatever was there already. 

I'd bet that other countries that respect property rights, and environmental concerns, have the same issue with new infrastructure. 

 

Now Airtravel has none of those issues.  In between airports one can zip along at about 550 MpH or 900 kpH and not disturb one bit of soil.  It however uses a lot of fuel which means HIGH carbon. They are working on that. 

Rolls Royce and others are working on that. https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/alternative-fuels/hydrogen.aspx  In fact the one place I think Hydrogen as a "fuel" might wind up winning out is in aviation. At least for jet liners and turbo-props. 

[Uttamattamakin]

38 minutes ago, Shimejii said:

Trains. Just use trains. Whole idea was to prevent High speed rail from getting funding so they had to "Show" something.

He as much as admitted this.  Which is why I compared it to Microsoft's known past strategy of proposing vaporware or otherwise taking a competing technology.  Embrace: Mass transit. 

Extend: Mass transit that requires new barely possible, if possible at all technology. 

Extinguish: What bro I was just musing about that.  You thought that was a real product? LOL. 

[LAwLz]

13 minutes ago, soldier_ph said:

Trains would be an easy solution but that's never going to seriously actually happen in the US outside of big Cities. IMO the US is just too large for that to develop a sophisticated Train Network nowadays which can cover the majority of the Land on the Mainland.

I always dislike when the US talks about "it doesn't work because we're too big", as if having a train network (or fiber, which is another area where it often gets brought up) is a binary thing where it either has 100% coverage or none at all.

All of these major infrastructure projects has to be done in stages, and it's most likely going to be a neverending project since cities change. New cities are built, parts of cities become more or less relevant, and so on. Same with fiber-optics-based Internet access networks. You can't view it as something you just build during a period and then it's done.

 

I am not even sure if it's true that the US is "too big". It's all about priorities.

China is slightly bigger than the US when looking at land area, and China is heavily investing in railways. If China, which is larger than the US, isn't "too big" then I don't see why the US is.

 

I am fairly sure the US has more railroads than China does at this point in time. Two of the big issues with the US railway network are:

1) It seems to mostly be used for just transporting goods, not people.

2) It's really old and outdated. Electric trains are unarguably far superior to coal and diesel trains. The US has about 2,000 kilometers of electrified railway. China has about 100,000. China's electric railroad network is about 50 times larger than the US's network. Even my country, Sweden, has over 8,000 kilometers of electrified railway. 

The US's railway network is massive and already covers (in my opinion) >90% of the important stuff. It's just that it's old and outdated because it hasn't been a priority to fix and upgrade it.

[Zodiark1593]

6 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

I always dislike when the US talks about "it doesn't work because we're too big", as if having a train network (or fiber, which is another area where it often gets brought up) is a binary thing where it either has 100% coverage or none at all.

All of these major infrastructure projects has to be done in stages, and it's most likely going to be a neverending project since cities change. New cities are built, parts of cities become more or less relevant, and so on. Same with fiber-optics-based Internet access networks. You can't view it as something you just build during a period and then it's done.

 

I am not even sure if it's true that the US is "too big". It's all about priorities.

China is slightly bigger than the US when looking at land area, and China is heavily investing in railways. If China, which is larger than the US, isn't "too big" then I don't see why the US is.

 

I am fairly sure the US has more railroads than China does at this point in time. Two of the big issues with the US railway network are:

1) It seems to mostly be used for just transporting goods, not people.

2) It's really old and outdated. Electric trains are unarguably far superior to coal and diesel trains. The US has about 2,000 kilometers of electrified railway. China has about 100,000. China's electric railroad network is about 50 times larger than the US's network. Even my country, Sweden, has over 8,000 kilometers of electrified railway. 

The US's railway network is massive and already covers (in my opinion) >90% of the important stuff. It's just that it's old and outdated because it hasn't been a priority to fix and upgrade it.

I’m in agreement here. If the US really had the willpower to make rail the dominant public transportation, utilizing and updating existing rail network in addition to repurposing some highway routes, can do the job without needing to acquire private-owned property. 
 

The US simply lacks the willpower to do the job. 

[leadeater]

@LAwLz Have a look at Brightline Railways in the US, what they are doing is relatively new and actually going well. Glacial tides seem to be changing, slooooowwwly

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brightline

 

Lots and lots of work needs to be done for intercity rail and inner city rail in the US, inner city the most though. All the track layouts and stations are very inefficient and were put in long ago for a very different type of service and envisioned passenger needs.

 

Also highspeed rail is very often faster than aircraft total end to end time even over moderately long distances. If you want to move a lot of people around and quickly air travel isn't it.

 

Far as I can tell it's a perception issue, passenger rail transport in the US is view much the same as "Greyhound buses".

[Uttamattamakin]

12 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

I always dislike when the US talks about "it doesn't work because we're too big", as if having a train network (or fiber, which is another area where it often gets brought up) is a binary thing where it either has 100% coverage or none at all.

True true. 

 

12 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

The US's railway network is massive and already covers (in my opinion) >90% of the important stuff. It's just that it's old and outdated because it hasn't been a priority to fix and upgrade it.

In the PRC no one owns land.  It's all a 99 year lease the rights to which are bought and sold between people.  One could say that in theory land in the US is not really owned either.  We mostly have only Fee Simple title contingent upon paying property taxes.  While only the states, Amerindian nations, and the Federal government hold true allodial title to land.  

Never the less, in practice our government has to pay people and people are reluctant to sell.  People are also NIMBY's .  They love the idea of high speed rail or an elevated train within say 5-10 minutes walking distance.  They just don't want to be the one that has the L going by their apartment.  They want a Bus that will take them to the depot but they dont' want the bus depot or stop right directly by them.  They want to park at the depot for their car, but would complain about the traffic if they lived next to the depot.  The net effect is it just doesn't get built.  OR it gets built where the people are poor, or otherwise ... socioeconomically disempowered... and cannot resist as well. 

 

On the bright side living in such a place and being on the short end of the NIMBY stick means now we have a bus stop in front of our house and cheap access to fiber and had cable decades before other people since the ugly infrastructure for it was built in our neighborhood.  So ha ha. 

 

1 minute ago, leadeater said:

@LAwLz Have a look at Brightline Railways in the US, what they are doing is relatively new and actually going well. Glacial tides seem to be changing, slooooowwwly

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brightline

Great example of a state and private company working together to get it right.  Though it's rail but it looks more like Metra / Regional rail as we have it in Chicagoland in effect.  It's not really like "high speed" rail but having the right of way to build the rail is half the battle.    IT can always be upgraded.  

 

1 minute ago, leadeater said:

Also highspeed rail is very often faster than aircraft total end to end time even over moderately long distances. If you want to move a lot of people around and quickly air travel isn't it.

No lies detected.  I think I saw/hear of a study about this and Mythbusters tested it.  Ou to about 500 miles even driving is faster.  When you arrive for a flight 2-3 hours early.  The flight is say 1 hr 45 long.  Then it takes 1-2 hours to get where you are going in the next city.  That's what 5-8 ish hours.   

It's why I drove from Chicago to Omaha for a funeral a little while back.  That and Southwest wanted 1500 bucks for tickets.  I flew to Europe for about that much with hotel over the summer.   Amtrack didn't look at them.  They tend to be sold out on the California Zephyr though.  A lot of people get on that train not to go from Chicago to SF or LA but to take a senic train ride. 

[TetraSky]

They really should just focus on making TGV trains instead of this unrealistic hyperloop stuff bought back into discussion by Elon's crazed mind.

It's above ground and relatively simple to build.

[Uttamattamakin]

5 minutes ago, TetraSky said:

They really should just focus on making TGV trains instead of this unrealistic hyperloop stuff bought back into discussion by Elon's crazed mind.

It's above ground and relatively simple to build.

Even better the revolutionary but long developed next step is ... mag lev. 

 

 

Speaking of Which I am SOOO glad that in Cyperpunk 2077 they did not somehow make the Transcontinental Maglev into a Transcontinental Hyperloop. 

[leadeater]

31 minutes ago, Uttamattamakin said:

Great example of a state and private company working together to get it right.  Though it's rail but it looks more like Metra / Regional rail as we have it in Chicagoland in effect.  It's not really like "high speed" rail but having the right of way to build the rail is half the battle.    IT can always be upgraded.  

It's not high speed, just a good example of US actually making progress. Brightline does have development plans to introduce highspeed rail but I can't remember when. I should, I watched a video about it no more than 2 days ago but oh well haha.

[starsmine]

 I'm not big on the framing of "it will never work" before actually doing tests to see if it would work. The dubiousness of the entire project was... trains being an established and underutilized option due to political reasons, and how monorails never work financially as its obvious competition.  Its isnt will it or wont it work, its the economic/political viability that buried the project from the start before even finding out if it would work. 

[Uttamattamakin]

7 minutes ago, starsmine said:

 I'm not big on the framing of "it will never work" before actually doing tests to see if it would work. The dubiousness of the entire project was... trains being an established and underutilized option due to political reasons, and how monorails never work financially as its obvious competition.  Its isnt will it or wont it work, its the economic/political viability that buried the project from the start before even finding out if it would work. 

I get that.  

 

The thing is things like a train in an evacuated tube have been tried and tried. The fundamental issue is that a large vacuum chamber is a lot like a bomb.  If it fails it fails explosively.  Its the same reason that when the door feel off that 737 Max 9 it explosively decompressed.  Had it been at cruising altitude the pressure differential and the energy released would be much greater.  Maybe even destroy the plane.  Similar incidents ended in mass casualty tragedy.  

Now scale that up to failure of a vacuum chamber say 20 meters in diameter and 100 Km long.   How many kilotons of equivalent explosive energy would that be I wonder.  

You know what speaking of Vaporware this reminds me of something called LiFi.  It's been talked about for years but where is that?  Basically it was going to pulse a light, like the bulb in your room very fast, so fast your eye would not notice it as a way to send data. Apparently there is even a standard for it 802.11 bb.  I've never heard of a product. 

[StDragon]

Depending on where you live (suburban or rural), everything starts and ends with the car: everything else is sandwiched in. So for the non-urban dwellers, you have to take a car to a bus/train/airplane first, before taking the final leg of the journey. Then go in reverse on the way back home.

That's why many of these alternative forms of transportation fail. It's never about how long of the distance, it's about how much time will the journey be. With air travel so much of a PITA to check in and check out, those short distances are so much of a hassle that driving a rental car would be more beneficial.

[Uttamattamakin]

2 minutes ago, StDragon said:

Depending on where you live (suburban or rural), everything starts and ends with the car: everything else is sandwiched in. So for the non-urban dwellers, you have to take a car to a bus/train/airplane first, before taking the final leg of the journey. Then go in reverse on the way back home.

That's why many of these alternative forms of transportation fail. It's never about how long of the distance, it's about how much time will the journey be. With air travel so much of a PITA to check in and check out, those short distances are so much of a hassle that driving a rental car would be more beneficial.

True.  Basically, the same "last mile problem" as seen in high speed internet.  At least in that case one can in theory push fiber all the way to the home, or eventually all the way to the jack on the back of your computer.   I think a lot of people were really hoping for a version of this which was like... you hop into your hyperlooping pod at home.  Then zip through tunnels underground which then join up and split off to spit you out at your destination.  Replacing streets, high ways, railroads etc.   

Could that work in theory perhaps.  The real issue with all of that IMHO is always the need for evacuated tunnels and such.  As for burying all the transport infrastructure that could easily work it would just cost a lot. 

[RejZoR]

So funny everyone was dissing Thunderf00t for saying it's a stupid idea and how Elon stole the 100 years old idea and portrayed it as his own invention. And here we are now lol

 

I agreed with Thunderf00t from beginning. I'm not a scientist or engineer, but I have basic understanding of engineering and physics and I also thought there is no way this will ever function, let alone be practical. Just thermal expansion of a metal tube that also needs to be depressurized was just absolutely ridiculous idea. And they wanted to basically drag the tube through a desert. Deserts, which are known to be super hot during day and very cold during night. Literally a recipe for a disaster when you involve huge metal objects (aka Hyperloop's metal tube).

 

On top of that, the stations would have to use bulkheads to preserve vacuum in the rest of the tube when people need to enter and exit the hyperloop "train" carts. That adds additional complexity and failure point. Imagine if there is a problem with bulkhead door and train smashes into it. It would kill everyone onboard, potentially people in the station and collapse entire system on re-pressurization. I also can't imagine how they'd service the tubes. You'd have to pressurize them again, work on them and then take several days to depressurize it again. Even with stupid powerful pumps, it would take forever to depressurize 300 kilometers of a tube that has diameter of what looks like 3 meters.

 

What baffles me is how they dumped half a billion dollars into this, for something I could tell was a stupid idea with no scientific or engineering background. What the hell were they thinking? Imagine what 500 millions would do to evolve existing high speed trains that already achieve insane speeds and are proven technology? Just look at how we evolved them across the world. Europe has several high speed trains that mostly run at 350 km/h, same with China and Japan. Sure it's slower than Hyperloop is on paper, but they have almost none of the Hyperloop issues other than thermal expansion and contraction of rail tracks which don't need to be depressurized.

 

Anyway, I'm glad they officially buried this dumb idea.

[Quackers101]

what's next? will the americans go "bullet train"? bullet + train, shoot the goddamn train to the moon!

maglev in japan isn't all that much better in some ways but more of an future, but at least its real and faster. but cost usage and building it. maybe with future tech faster maglevs could work overall?

[Monkey Dust]

It's amazing what some people are willing to believe & invest in. It never passed the sniff test. Even if it could be made to work, the costs would be so astronomical it could possibly turn a profit.

 

I'm surprised they only burnt through 500 mill. That won't go far if you're buying land, large bits of tube and prototype vehicles. Suggests to me even hyperloop weren't taking it seriously. 

 

 

 

[Needfuldoer]

Oh no! Not the genuine, bona-fide, electrified, six-car hyperloop!

[Kisai]

3 hours ago, Shimejii said:

Trains. Just use trains. Whole idea was to prevent High speed rail from getting funding so they had to "Show" something.

 

The conspiracy theorists just assume that Hyperloop was proposed to kill High Speed rail projects. And indeed, it did distract from them.

 

As for the idea behind it, I felt the basic idea was sound, but there was some very practical reasons why it wouldn't work:

- It would need a very long, straight, guideway between stops

- Any accident inside the tube = everyone dead. The amount of safety requirements would likely remove most of the benefits of being a "vaccuum train" at all.

 

Like there really was only ever two potential uses for this:

- point to point between two remote locations that, underground. Eg NYC to London, Vancouver/Seattle to Japan/Singapore/Hawaii/Alaska, Bering Strait crossing, Vancouver Island to Mainland BC, basically any crossing that would have to be built by sinking a tunnel. Thus ensuring a perfectly straight tunnel. Very obvious problem, plate tectonics.

- point to point between two locations that would be bored (Eg through a mountain/extinct volcano), again same problem, plate tectonics/vulcanism

 

Short of those two use cases which a pressurized human tin can in a straw would make some kind of sense where a conventional tunnel would be impossible due to pressure from water/stone/soil crushing the tunnel. But again, one mistake and everyone dead. Even deadlier than air travel. At that point you may as well fly then.

 

And that's basically what it boils down to, Hyperloop doesn't solve something that (Japanese/European) high speed rail didn't already do good/good-enough and air travel would still be competitive for. If at some point jet fuel becomes too expensive or, air travel by jet becomes too much of an environmental risk to keep doing it by Jet (eg we switch to electric dirigibles)

 

Even if the materials existed to to accomplish it, it would not be competitive with air travel in cost, and would not be competitive to high speed rail WHERE IT EXISTS.

 

 

 

[thorhammerz]

15 minutes ago, Monkey Dust said:

It's amazing what some people are willing to believe & invest in.

The bizarre simply propagates themselves into reality when interest rates are zero/near-zero .

[starsmine]

Just now, Kisai said:

 

The conspiracy theorists just assume that Hyperloop was proposed to kill High Speed rail projects. And indeed, it did distract from them.

I hate that conspiracy theory has two meanings because there is strong real evidence of this being a thing, its not just nut jobs making up connections. Not to argue its the whole truth, just that it was a motivation that influenced where money was going. 

 

[leadeater]

36 minutes ago, Quackers101 said:

what's next? will the americans go "bullet train"? bullet + train, shoot the goddamn train to the moon!

Freedom trains? 2nd Amendment trains?

 

Is embracing the term bullet the answer to the perception change? lol

[Lunar River]

44 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Freedom trains? 2nd Amendment trains?

 

Is embracing the term bullet the answer to the perception change? lol

trains that are launched from a railgun (pun not intended, but quite fitting)