Hyperloop

The Long History of the Future: Why Tomorrow's Technology Still Isn't Here

by Nicole Kobie  · 3 Jul 2024  · 348pp  · 119,358 words

Cars Chapter 2: Artificial Intelligence Chapter 3: Robots Chapter 4: Augmented Reality Chapter 5: Cyborgs and Brain–Computer Interfaces Chapter 6: Flying Cars Chapter 7: Hyperloop Chapter 8: Smart Cities Chapter 9: Who Builds the Future? Acknowledgements Bibliography Index INTRODUCTION It’s been said that the best way to predict the

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world, it’s one heck of a lot harder. Virtual reality is remarkable, offering up whole digital worlds to explore – unless it makes you vomit. Hyperloops work in simulated models, but building one requires a route-length concrete tube propped up on towers in the sky. Driverless cars must contend with

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the Elizabeth Line (aka Crossrail) that now links the airport directly to Canary Wharf in 45 minutes. CHAPTER SEVEN Hyperloop I am standing in the rain in Edinburgh, waiting for a hyperloop. Don’t worry, this isn’t some sci-fi future-looking scene set 20 or 30 years in the future

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where I imagine what life will be like when these technologies eventually arrive. (I wouldn’t do that to you.) Instead, I am at European Hyperloop Week (EHW) 2023, straining to see through a crowd of hundreds of students wearing team-proclaiming sweatshirts and jackets – merch is a big deal here

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front of us is a short track, and hanging below it like a high-tech bat is a hyperloop pod built by students from Delft University. The Dutch contingent is one of the larger hyperloop projects, with 40 or so students. They’ve won previous competitions run by EHW and Elon Musk

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, two, one!’ followed by a clunk and then a disappointed awww from the crowd, myself included. We want this to work – I am not a hyperloop supporter, but it’s impossible not to be won over by these students with their charming enthusiasm. Eventually, the Delft team admit defeat, but only

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bright yellow shirt proclaiming ‘not a BORING competition’. But the projects these students strive all year on are unquestionably tied to Musk, who sparked the hyperloop industry with a 58-page white paper detailing the technology in 2013, before all but dropping out of the race. As yet, no

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hyperloop has been built beyond a few short test tracks. What is a hyperloop? It’s like flying, but at ground level in a tunnel: the pods are aircraft without wings, they accelerate

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’s one of the better ideas. Eventually the money dried up and steam won out. But, nearly 200 years before Musk uploaded his PDF about hyperloops to the internet, an inventor sat in his London office, sketching out his version of pneumatic transport. Like Musk, George Medhurst wasn’t laughed out

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with new versions, from vactrains to hovertrains and even magnetic levitation. These have been tested, trialled and have (mostly) failed over the intervening centuries, meaning hyperloop developers are following in the stumbling footsteps of many who believe there’s a better way to build trains, and that it involves sucking or

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outside Cambridge in the UK, and sitting unused at railway museums around the world are the rotting remains of these ideas: trains and tracks for hyperloop’s pneumatic and hovercraft predecessors that whisper words of caution to anyone who thinks trains should float through tunnels: no one wants to pay for

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technology clearly isn’t easy, given the long gestation period. But it does at least exist now – which is more than can be said for hyperloop. It takes decades to prove and perfect a new train technology. Maglev may simply be ahead of the curve, or perhaps

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arrive after several more decades of work. Fast trains are slow in coming. * * * Back in Edinburgh, we wait for the Delft team to recharge the hyperloop pod for another attempt at a demonstration. In the meantime, there’s a demo from ETH Zurich’s SwissLoop, so the crowds rush to the

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members in hard hats and hi-vis vests, like a costly but slow game of air hockey. An earlier demo, from Germany’s Mu-Zero Hyperloop, also focused on levitation, with its pod sans chassis floating in a metal frame. The smoothness with which it levitated impressed those standing around me

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the 100kg wasn’t there. The science works, in other words. But as impressive as these engineering student projects are, there’s not yet a hyperloop in operation, though to be fair, they only really got their start in this form back in 2013 when Musk dropped his

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‘Hyperloop Alpha’ white paper. What is a hyperloop? There are three main elements, though, of course, the finer details are where the problems happen. The first element is a low-pressure

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calls for a ‘truly new mode of transport’ that he describes as the ‘fifth mode after planes, trains, cars and boats’. That would be a hyperloop, at least for situations where two cities with high traffic are less than 1,500km (900 miles) apart – any further, and we should all just

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two, with a low-pressure system using pumps to overcome any air leaks. In the years since Musk’s hyperloop paper, designs have evolved, and details have been filled in. Generally, a hyperloop network requires a concrete or similar tube around 3.5–4m (12–13ft) in diameter to be held above

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ground level on pillars, though some subsequent designs have suggested digging tunnels underground. Hyperloops require mostly straight journeys, with any turns as wide as possible to avoid slowing down. Earthquakes and other ground fluctuations could damage the tubes (just

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’s government to delay or cancel the high-speed rail plans. That said, Musk has revived the idea throughout the years, pledging to build a hyperloop running through the northeast of the US, saying he had ‘government approval’ for a tunnel linking New York and Washington, DC. But in 2022, SpaceX

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into nothingness in Slovakia and China, and completed a $1.2 million feasibility study in 2020 for a Great Lakes Hyperloop linking Chicago, Cleveland and Pittsburgh, but that’s remained on paper. Hyperloop TT is keeping the dream alive with a more recent contract for a feasibility study in Veneto, Italy, an

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30m (100ft)-long test track – yes, that short – and has ambitions to build a network linking Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport with others across Europe. Virgin Hyperloop One, once but no longer backed by rich Brit Richard Branson, built a test track in 2020, sending actual humans (both riders were employees) down

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it at speeds of 172km/h (106mph) for half a kilometre; though it’s the longest hyperloop test track in the world, the short distance means the test lasted less than seven seconds. The company has touted routes in Saudi Arabia, but

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since pivoted to freight only, laid off staff, and is now apparently working on developing the world’s first hyperloop to shuffle packages across the UAE.15 My personal favourite not-yet-a-hyperloop is a line proposed by TransPod, running between my hometown of Calgary, Canada and the provincial capital city

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platform, wait for the next train and board. Each pod will carry 50 passengers, leaving every couple of minutes – a claim frequently made by other hyperloop companies. If TransPod managed to run trains every two minutes, it would be one of the most frequent services in the world. I know this

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the way in just 90 minutes. Oh, and it’ll only cost CAN$9 billion, which – as ever – won’t require public funds. Neither the hyperloop nor high-speed train is likely to happen, but if you were making the choice, which would you go with

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? Hyperloop may or may not ever be technically feasible, though it’s currently an excellent research project for students and gives plenty of work to transport

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consultants. But governments need to pick technologies that they know work, and for hyperloop startups there’s one very serious challenger: trains. Existing trains are fast. Italian Frecciarossa zip along at 300km/h (185mph). Japanese Shinkansen speed between cities

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on the more than six hours it’d take by car in light traffic but longer than the 35 minutes Musk promised in his Alpha Hyperloop paper. However, his proposal linked county line to county line, whereas trains can more easily whip into the centre of cities. There are, of course

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pods and test tunnels first, and get the whole apparatus certified by regulators. Musk’s dismantled track aside, no one else has successfully built a hyperloop track beyond 500m (1,640ft) long. And no test has topped 500km/h (310mph), let alone that promised 1,000km/h (620mph) top speed. But

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of transport rather than exacerbating the climate crisis by flying or driving slowly in intense traffic.16 Now, about the further point alluded to above. Hyperloop feasibility reports have a funny tendency to claim that no public funds are necessary, and that the entire project can be paid for using private

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! – as well as to private investors hoping to rake in the big bucks. Indeed, analyst reports suggest the hyperloop market is worth well over a billion dollars already, though no hyperloop exists yet. Hyperloops are cheap when marketed to governments, but lucrative when seeking out investors – this is magical maths. But of course

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, all the numbers are a bit fudged: we have no real-world example to look to because hyperloops don’t exist. Someone, someday will build something like a hyperloop, if only to say they were the first. Perhaps it’ll be an oil-money-rich Middle Eastern state, or

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China will pip everyone else to the finishing line with both maglev and hyperloop. Either way, if you want super-fast public transit now, remember that high-speed trains already exist, and pneumatic tubes, hover trains and

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hyperloops still don’t, despite more than a century of effort. Building better transport systems is worthy of applause. If only we invested more in improving

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you can’t build a website within several months, I’m not getting in your 700km/h (435mph) pod.16 It’s worth noting that hyperloops are only as green as their local energy mix, as they do require electricity; that electric trains do exist; and that stacking concrete or steel

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track technology had to be invented from scratch, and it had been difficult to predict costs and to streamline the production,’ Günel writes. Just like hyperloops, eVTOLs and other new forms of transport, if you’re building now, you need mass transit systems that exist now. So, the PRT was cancelled

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is threatening human existence, of course. There’s nothing to fear with virtual or augmented reality beyond a bit of nausea and ugly glasses. And hyperloops don’t exist, so what’s the problem? There is an opportunity cost, as we risk failing to invest in the right things – say, green

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transport – when we focus on nonexistent options, like hyperloop. The same holds for robotics. If enough people believe humanoid robot helpers will solve the looming care crisis, we’ll fail to address it in

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technology is inevitable; turning science into reality is sometimes impossible; and we get to decide what happens next. So do you still want flying cars, hyperloops, and driverless vehicles? Or perhaps … something better. Notes 1 As with any well-known quote, there’s discrepancy over who actually said it first, but

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and Challenges.’ AIAA 2023–2096 Session: Advanced Air Mobility and Distributed Electric Propulsion II. Jan 19, 2023. https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2023-2096 Hyperloops Arbose, Jules. ‘Britain Ends the $12-Million Hovertrain Project’ New York Times, February 18, 1973. https://biturl.top/73IjUn Atmore, Henry. ‘Railway Interests and the

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. Hadfield, Charles. Atmospheric Railways: A Victorian Venture in Silent Speed. Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1967. Hawkins, Andrew J. ‘Saudi Arabia reportedly cancels deal with Virgin Hyperloop One.’ The Verge, October 17, 2018. https://biturl.top/bquA7j ‘The Kingstown and Dalkey Atmospheric Railway.’ Illustrated London News, January 6, 1844. Johnson, Eric M

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. ‘Virgin Hyperloop hosts first human ride on new transport system.’ Reuters, December 4, 2020. https://biturl.top/RBr6na Mars, Roman (host). ‘A Series of Tubes.’ 99% Invisible

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, Kevin. ‘The Atmospheric Railway to Dalkey.’ Dublin Historical Record, vol. 5, no. 3, 1943, pp. 108–20. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30080115 Musk, Elon. ‘Hyperloop Alpha.’ Tesla website. https://biturl.top/Vbiiqq ‘Obituary record: Alfred Ely Beach.’ New York Times, January 2, 1896. https://nyti.ms/3rQncrp ‘Underground Tube Is

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Camden and Kentish Towns Reporter, January 28, 1910. Temperton, James. ‘The strange tale of the hovertrain, the British hyperloop of the 1970s.’ WIRED, July 2, 2018. https://biturl.top/Qn2iqq Thompson, Clive. ‘The Hyperloop Will Be Only the Latest Innovation That’s Pretty Much a Series of Tubes.’ Smithsonian Magazine, July 2015

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. https://biturl.top/2aiMBr Valdez, Jonah. ‘Elon Musk’s Hyperloop prototype tube is gone. What does it mean for his tunneling dream?’ Los Angeles Times, November 5, 2022. https://biturl.top/miuuMf Vance, Ashlee. Elon

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Hommet, Christophe here, 2241 Honda here, here, here Hopps, John here House, William here Howlett, Eric here HTC Vive VR headset here Hyman, Albert here hyperloops here, here, here 20th century pneumatic trains here Beach Pneumatic Transit Company here cable systems here Dalkey Atmospheric Railway (DAR) here Elon Musk here, here

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, here, here Eric Laithwaite and Tracked Hovercraft here, here European Hyperloop Week (EHW) (2023) here, here George Medhurst and Victorian pneumatic transport here, here, here, here Hyperloop TT here Isambard Kingdom Brunel here Jean Bertin and Aérotrain here John Vallance’s air-propelled carriage, Brighton

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Samuel Clegg here Shinkansen here, here, here Tracked Air Cushion Vehicles (TACV) programme here TransPod here Victorian atmospheric and pneumatic transport here, here, here Virgin Hyperloop One here IBM here, here, here, here ImageNet here Industry on Parade TV programme here the Information website here Ingels, Bjarke here Intel here, here

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives

by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler  · 28 Jan 2020  · 501pp  · 114,888 words

ten years from today is going to look radically different—and this prediction doesn’t include everything that happened after Elon Musk lost his temper. Hyperloop On an empty swatch of desert outside of Las Vegas, perched atop a high-tech stretch of track, a sleek silver pod begins to quiver

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a second later, it’s not just moving, it’s a hundred-mile-per-hour blur. Ten seconds after, it’s zipping down the Virgin Hyperloop One Development Track at 240 mph. If these tracks continued—as they someday will—this high-speed train would take you from Los Angeles to

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San Francisco in the time it takes to watch a sitcom. Hyperloop is the brainchild of Elon Musk, just one in a series of transportation innovations from a man determined to leave his mark on the industry

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, the train too sluggish. Teaming up with a group of engineers from Tesla and SpaceX, he published a fifty-eight-page concept paper for “The Hyperloop,” a high-speed transportation network that used magnetic levitation to propel passenger pods down vacuum tubes at speeds up to 760 mph. If successful, it

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dreamers have long envisioned high-speed travel through low-pressure tubes. In 1909, rocketry pioneer Robert Goddard proposed a vacuum train concept similar to the Hyperloop. In 1972, the RAND Corporation extended this into a supersonic underground railway. But just like flying cars, turning sci-fi into sci-fact required a

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involved. In January 2013, Musk and venture capitalist Shervin Pishevar were on a humanitarian mission to Cuba when they fell into a discussion about the Hyperloop. Pishevar saw possibilities, Musk saw overwhelm. He was irate enough to publish a white paper, but way too busy to start another company. So Pishevar

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), former White House Deputy chief of staff for Obama Jim Messina, and tech entrepreneurs Joe Lonsdale and David Sacks as founding board members, Pishevar created Hyperloop One. A couple of years after that, the Virgin Group invested in the idea, Richard Branson was elected chairman, and Virgin

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Hyperloop One was born. The other required convergences were technological in nature. “The Hyperloop exists,” says Josh Giegel, the cofounder and chief technology officer for Hyperloop One, “because of the rapid acceleration of power electronics, computational modeling, material sciences

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, and 3-D printing. Computational power has increased so much that we can now run hyperloop simulations on the cloud, testing the whole system for safety and reliability. And manufacturing breakthroughs ranging from the 3-D printing of electromagnetic systems to

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structures have changed the game in terms of price and speed.” These convergences are why, in various stages of development, there are now ten major Hyperloop One projects spread across the globe. Chicago to DC in thirty-five minutes. Pune to Mumbai in twenty-five minutes. According to Giegel

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: “Hyperloop is targeting certification in 2023. By 2025, the company plans to have multiple projects under construction and running initial passenger testing.” So think about this

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timetable: Autonomous car rollouts by 2020. Hyperloop certification and aerial ridesharing by 2023. By 2025—going on vacation might have a totally different meaning. Going to work most definitely will. And Musk

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of the Apollo moon landing, Musk tweeted again: “Just received verbal govt approval for The Boring Company to build an underground NY-Phil-Balt-DC Hyperloop. NY-DC in 29 mins.” In the spring of 2018, with $113 million of Musk’s own money, the Boring Company began boring. They started

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on a 10.3-mile Maryland stretch that will eventually connect the two. And while the tunnel is being designed as “Hyperloop compatible”—meaning it is able to house a Hyperloop—the current plan calls for an interim high-speed train step, where the first trains through will travel around 150 mph

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three-stop subway beneath Las Vegas’s sprawling convention center—which they hope to have open for the 2021 Consumer Electronics Show. While not a Hyperloop—the distance is just way too short to bother—it does mark the Boring Company’s first paying customer. Finally, while the company has started

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traditional version. It’s also worth noting that all of the innovations discussed in this chapter will work in concert. In the minutes before a Hyperloop pod arrives at a Boring Company–drilled station, the AI behind Uber’s aerial ridesharing service and the AI behind Waymo’s driverless ridesharing fleet

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Uber provides nothing less, equipped with a lay-down-flat backseat and a fresh set of sheets. The car/bed takes you to the local Hyperloop station, where your freshly rested self is transferred into a high-speed pod, then zipped downtown. From the roof of a Cleveland skyscraper, Uber Elevate

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. Already, it’s on the brink of autonomous car displacement, which is on the brink of flying car disruption, which is on the brink of Hyperloop and rockets-to-anywhere decimation. Plus, avatars. The most important part: All of this change will happen over the next ten years. Welcome to the

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by stagecoach. A few decades later, trains reduced that to roughly four days. Airplanes shrunk it to four hours. But a few years hence, the Hyperloop will be doing that trip in under an hour, and virtual reality and avatars have the potential to take that to zero. Sensors add intelligence

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changing the relationship between here and there. So what happens when driverless cars, flying cars, and the Hyperloop make proximity a possibility for all? If Las Vegas to Los Angeles becomes a half-hour Hyperloop commute; if upstate Vermont to middle-of-Boston becomes a flying car ride away; if remote Virginia

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, 2018. MIT professor of urban planning: Eran Ben-Joseph, ReThinking a Lot (MIT Press, 2012), pp. xi–xix. Hyperloop is the brainchild: For the original whitepaper: https://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/hyperloop_alpha.pdf. Robert Goddard: Malcolm Browne, “New Funds Fuel Magnet Power for Trains,” New York Times, March 3

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High Speed Transit,” Rand Corporation, 1972. See: https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P4874.html. In January 2013: For the full story of Hyperloop One development, see: https://hyperloop-one.com/our-story#partner-program. (Author note: Peter’s VC firm is an investor.) Josh Giegel: Author interview, 2019. It also gave

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tweet: See: https://twitter.com/elonmusk. with $113 million of Musk’s own money: Dana Hull, “Musk’s Boring Co. Raises $113 Million for Tunnels, Hyperloop,” Bloomberg, April 16, 2018, See: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-16/musk-s-boring-co-raises-113-million-for-tunnels-and

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-hyperloop. a three-stop subway: Aarian Marshall, “Las Vegas Orders Up a Boring Company Loop,” Wired, May 22, 2019. electric boring machines: Ed Oswald, “Here’s

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risks and, 235–36 finance industry and, 189–96 flying cars and, 9–12 food industry and, 201–8 healthcare and, 68, 89, 154–55 Hyperloop and, 17–18 insurance industry and, 183–89 longevity and, 169, 173, 179 real estate industry and, 196–200 renewable energy and, 217–18 robotics

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, 45, 46 HTC Vive VR headsets, 148 Hughes, Nick, 191, 193 Human Genome Project, 67 Human Longevity Inc., 158, 266–67 hydroponics, 204 Hydrostor, 220 Hyperloop, 16–19, 26, 72, 199 hyper-personalization, 120–21 IBM, 28, 35 Watson computer of, 103, 130 ICOs, see initial coin offerings IDs, blockchain and

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multiple world models, 86 Musk, Elon, 40, 81, 146, 161, 219, 231 Boring Company and, 18–19 brain-computer interfaces and, 255–56, 257–58 Hyperloop and, 16 space colonization and, 20–21, 250, 251–54 Myanmar, 226–27 My Drunk Kitchen (YouTube program), 128 Myers, Norman, 241 Naam, Ramez, 216

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, David, 65 video, user-generated, 127–28, 131 video games, 25 as addictive, 246–47 user-generated content for, 131 VirBELA, 196 Virgin, 40 Virgin Hyperloop One, 16, 17–18 virtual reality (VR), 25, 26, 86 audio in, 51 behavioral change and, 52 convergence of AI and, 148–50 education and

How the Railways Will Fix the Future: Rediscovering the Essential Brilliance of the Iron Road

by Gareth Dennis  · 12 Nov 2024  · 261pp  · 76,645 words

2023 the company was liquidated. I have, as many of you will realise, navigated us to the world’s only ostensibly functional and now former hyperloop test track. Because it is here that we can stand back, scratch our heads a bit and get a handle on why the railways serve

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-efficiency they like. But taking even slightly more than a cursory glance provides plenty of examples to counteract their bullshit. We’ll come back to hyperloop, but since we’re already in Las Vegas, let’s take Elon Musk’s Loop (this is different to

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hyperloop and should not be confused with it) as the first in a pair of examples that accompany each other deliciously, exposing the problems inherent in

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, scale model or computer-generated renders and people will suspend their disbelief to let you spout your ideas unopposed. There is no better case than hyperloop. All of its claims of greatness rely on those who bankroll or authorise its early trial projects believing that it is — to use Musk’s

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own self-hyping terminology when he first pitched the idea — “the fifth mode of transport”. This isn’t true. Hyperloop is an extrapolation of linear-induction motor transport — magnetic levitation or maglev to most of us — and this technology is not new, it isn’t

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attempt to convince people of its merits today. They suffer on in the shade of hyperloop, obscure enough that nobody in the tech journalist sphere thought to draw parallels. Even hyperloop’s bizarre name isn’t original, given “Hyperloop Inc.” existed as early as 1975, later owned by Lucas Industries, a British company

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of the company’s innovation strategy (and for giving Ozzy Osbourne his nickname2). Equipped with this context, we see that there’s nothing new about hyperloop, and this realisation strips away much of its appeal, or at least it ought to. The next ploy is the “bait and switch”, and it

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gadgetbahn solutions, enormous effort is dedicated to proving how much better the world would be if we only built a new transport system, such as hyperloop reports talking about how transformative fast transport can be, or the CAM showing how much Cambridge and its surrounding environs needs some form of mass

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, and certainly don’t have the understanding to ask challenging follow-up questions even if they do manage to land an inadvertently probing query. Google “hyperloop news” and even today, as the technology sucks its last partial vacuum-inducing breath, you’ll have to sift through pages and pages of articles

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technocratic planners in favour of real solutions? What’s the harm in people having grandiose visions of the future? Why shouldn’t Marvel put a hyperloop in Wakanda? Well, if you focus on flashy FM proposals, this provides the perfect reason to delay, pause or cancel real public transport solutions. In

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a fawning 2015 biography, Musk admitted to the author that his hyperloop creation was not intended to be built; rather, it was specifically intended to derail California’s high-speed rail project by suggesting to legislators they

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on two Musk-adjacent ventures perceived as being on the cutting edge of a new frontier in transport systems: the Boring Company’s Loop and Hyperloop One (later Virgin Hyperloop, later Hyperloop One again). We’ve talked plenty about Loop, but let us now talk in a bit more detail about

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hyperloop. Hyperloop has been particularly effective in sapping public research funding, journalistic attention and administrative capacity. Accordingly, these tech bubbles end up being vehicles for the weirdest

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buffoons do as much damage as possible to the chance of real public transport solutions being implemented. Off the bat, let’s sink this ship. Hyperloop fails on four fronts: capacity, corridor, complexity and cost — the four Cs, if you like. We’ve already talked about capacity at great length. We

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,000 pphpd. Therefore, to achieve the same capacity as a single high-speed line would require eight hyperloop tubes in each direction. That’s sixteen tubes. Which leads us onto the corridor problem: hyperloop is beholden to the same rules of physics that any railway is, and so it can only maintain

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those high speeds with very shallow curves. For our example hyperloop system, the minimum curve radius is 40 km, which is essentially dead straight. Nowhere in the world, not even the Saudi desert, will tolerate a

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Thunderbirds. Interchanges between routes would make Spaghetti Junction look like an Anne Truitt sculpture. This then leads us to complexity — not a single company “pursuing” hyperloop is considering bored tunnels. All of them are basing their proposals on above-ground elevated structures, partly to allow them to weave some mythos around

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European Union has spent (or torched, depending on your point of view) upwards of €55m on the various scattered companies pretending that hyperloop is real. Of the fifteen hyperloop companies that I can find, only eight have created anything material. Between them, there are five mini-scale mock-up pods and four

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table when it came to steering transport policy in the US, EU and UK. Taking a long, dusty walk around the perimeter of the late Hyperloop One’s test track, set as it is into a mighty and unforgiving landscape, might well give you the opportunity to consider what technologism actually

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

by Ashlee Vance  · 18 May 2015  · 370pp  · 129,096 words

next to Musk). They met with students and members of the Castro family, and tried to free an American prisoner. ©Shervin Pishevar Musk unveiled the Hyperloop in 2013. He proposed it as a new mode of transportation, and multiple groups have now set to work on building it. Photograph courtesy of

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’s great value in what Elon is doing.” The true believers came out in full force in August 2013 when Musk unveiled something called the Hyperloop. Billed as a new mode of transportation, this machine was a large-scale pneumatic tube like the ones used to send mail around offices. Musk

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prohibitive, and you don’t want tubes every which way. You don’t want to live in Tube Land.” Musk had been thinking about the Hyperloop for a number of months, describing it to friends in private. The first time he talked about it to anyone outside of his inner circle

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the cities today and five hours to drive, placing the train right in the zone of mediocrity, which particularly gnawed at Musk. He insisted the Hyperloop would cost about $6 billion to $10 billion, go faster than a plane, and let people drive their cars onto a pod and drive out

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into a new city. At the time, it seemed that Musk had dished out the Hyperloop proposal just to make the public and legislators rethink the high-speed train. He didn’t actually intend to build the thing. It was more

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me during a series of e-mails and phone calls leading up to the announcement. “Down the road, I might fund or advise on a Hyperloop project, but right now I can’t take my eye off the ball at either SpaceX or Tesla,” he wrote. Musk’s tune, however, started

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to change after he released the paper detailing the Hyperloop. Bloomberg Businessweek had the first story on it, and the magazine’s Web server began melting down as people stormed the website to read about

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the invention. Twitter went nuts as well. About an hour after Musk released the information, he held a conference call to talk about the Hyperloop, and somewhere in between our numerous earlier chats and that moment, he’d decided to build the thing, telling reporters that he would consider making

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become the closest thing the world had to Tony Stark, and he could not let his adoring public down. Shortly after the release of the Hyperloop plans, Shervin Pishevar, an investor and friend of Musk’s, brought the detailed specifications for the technology with him during a ninety-minute meeting with

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with Musk and Obama in April 2014. Since then, Pishevar, Kevin Brogan, and others, have formed a company called Hyperloop Technologies Inc. with the hopes of building the first leg of the Hyperloop between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. In theory, people would be able to hop between the two cities in

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releases and contacting the press as he sees fit. Quite often, Musk does not let his communications staff in on his agenda. Ahead of the Hyperloop announcement, for example, his representatives were sending me e-mails to find out the time and date for the press conference. On other occasions, reporters

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Mars,” he said. “And it seems like a very expensive way to drive whatever breakthroughs you might get from it. Then, you hear about the Hyperloop. I don’t think he has any intention of doing it. You have to wonder if it’s not meant just to be publicity for

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and could challenge it in the race to be the first $1 trillion company. A handful of groups have also set to work building prototype Hyperloop systems in and around California. Oh, and Musk starred in an episode of The Simpsons titled “The Musk Who Fell to Earth,” in which Homer

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ever experience. It seems that he’s become almost addicted to expanding his ambitions and can’t quite stop himself from announcing things like the Hyperloop and the space Internet. I’m also more convinced than ever that Musk is a deeply emotional person who suffers and rejoices in an epic

Supertall: How the World's Tallest Buildings Are Reshaping Our Cities and Our Lives

by Stefan Al  · 11 Apr 2022  · 300pp  · 81,293 words

, these elevators only travel up a few stories at best. With the development of the ultra-fast Hyperloop train, which travels through a low-pressure sealed tube, perhaps one day we will see a Hyperloop elevator. Maybe there is an end to this elevator madness after all. Several companies have decided their

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tall, mixed-use buildings. Physical proximity has long been of the essence for access. However, better mobility systems can also improve access. With autonomous vehicles, hyperloops, and aerial ridesharing in the near future, we may be up for a wild ride! Plus, along with it, land that was previously less desirable

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areas grew up to a vast 40-mile radius. Today, a prime “location” may be even more of a moving target. Various companies are developing hyperloops, sealed tubes with magnetically levitated pods that could convey people in a highly energy-efficient way. Capsules carrying people can reach a top speed of

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in downtown Los Angeles to Las Vegas, where prices are lower, and live in a bigger home. The race will be on for the first hyperloop-integrated skyscraper. Autonomous vehicles (AVs) could desensitize people to distance, possibly lengthening Marchetti’s “constant” of commuting time. Without having to attend to the wheel

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have yet to accept their urban skylines flocked with the noise of buzzing drones. It is easy to be seduced by the speed of hyperloops or the aerial sophistication of a flying drone. While hyperloops are faster, they probably won’t come close to the transport efficiency of the good old subway

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. Hyperloops can carry 3,360 passengers an hour.29 A single subway can carry more than ten times as many people. (While it might not carry

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as many people, a hyperloop’s higher speeds would prevent people from otherwise taking a more carbon-intensive ride.) If Marchetti’s constant continues to hold, building new developments around

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, July 8, 2020, https://www.bcg.com. 28.Ben Hamilton-Baillie, “Towards Shared Space,” Urban Design International 13, no. 2 (2008): 130–38. 29.SpaceX, “Hyperloop Alpha,” August 12, 2013, accessed February 27, 2021, https://www.spacex.com. EIGHT: The Greening of Vertical Cities: Singapore 1.Emporis, “Skyline Ranking,” accessed February

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The House, New York City, 135–36 HSBC Building, Hong Kong, 132, 132–33 Hudson Yards, 202–3 HVAC consultants, 122 hyperboloid structures, 6–10 hyperloops, 233, 234, 236–37 Industrial Revolution, 91, 154, 155, 217, 234 inequity, 16, 17, 261–62 Information Based Architecture, 8 infrastructure, 42, 270 for transportation

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and parks in, 248 subways capacity of, 220–21 Hong Kong, 214, 215, 220, 225–27, 231, 237–38 London, 217–18 more efficient than hyperloops, 236–37 New York, 219 Suger, Abbot, 56–57 Sullivan, Louis, 268 Sully, Maurice de, 57 sunscoops of HSBC Building, 132–33 sunset, later at

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane

by Brett King  · 5 May 2016  · 385pp  · 111,113 words

we could have self-flying cars, because the technology for automation seems mainly achievable, but what will fuel these self-flying cars? Maglev and the Hyperloop On 21st April 2015, a new maglev train near Mount Fuji in Japan clocked speeds of 375 mph (603 km/h). Maglev is short for

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to an assembled group that he was thinking about a “fifth mode of transport”, calling it the Hyperloop. On 12th August 2013, Tesla and SpaceX (both companies founded by Musk) released preliminary designs for a Hyperloop Transportation system on their blog sites. Musk called this open-source design, asking others with interest

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to contribute to the design. The initial proposed route for a US$6 billion passenger version of the Hyperloop ran from the Los Angeles region to the San Francisco Bay Area with an expected transit time of 35 minutes. The

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Hyperloop would thus traverse the 354-mile (570-km) route at an average speed of around 598 mph (962 km/h), with a top speed of

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760 mph (1,220 km/h). In January 2015, Musk announced that he was building a privately funded Hyperloop test track in Texas, about 5 miles (8 km) in length, for university and private teams to test and refine transport “pod” designs. Two additional

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start-ups, Hyperloop Technologies and Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, are both building their own two-mile and five-mile test tracks, respectively. The Hyperloop is a form of vactrain, or near-vacuum train. The biggest challenge traditionally in creating high

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5,000 miles (8,000 km) per hour. Meaning the transit time from New York to London would be less than an hour. The “Musk” Hyperloop resembles these vactrain proposals but would operate at approximately one millibar of pressure, qualifying as a “partially evacuated tunnel”. Because of the low-pressure, warm

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air proposed for the Hyperloop steel tubes, the pods projected to travel at around 760 mph (1,220 km/h) through these steel tubes would not actually break the sound

Elon Musk: A Mission to Save the World

by Anna Crowley Redding  · 1 Jul 2019  · 190pp  · 46,977 words

idea for getting around the planet, as he put it, a fifth mode of transportation: the hyperloop. Think bullet train, but crash proof, weatherproof, and much, much faster. He felt sure you could take a hyperloop from downtown Los Angeles to downtown San Francisco in thirty minutes. As he started talking about

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—with the hope that others in the tech community would pick up the idea and run with it. And they did. A start-up called Hyperloop One quickly set to work developing high-speed vacuum tunnel travel, eventually building a test site in Nevada. Another group of entrepreneurs and engineers started

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a company called Hyperloop Transportation Technologies. You can read Elon’s original paper here: www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/hyperloop_alpha.pdf And it wasn’t like Elon did not have enough to work on. SpaceX had

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. Elon’s take? He says the book is fantastic for understanding the basics of structural design. EXTRA LOOPY There’s Loop and then there’s Hyperloop. There’s high speed and then there’s something just shy of teleportation. Imagine entering a pressurized pod in a vacuum tube that can take

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mph. Why a vacuum? Because it eliminates air friction, enabling the pod to travel at much greater speeds. Five years later, he’s built a Hyperloop vacuum tube for testing that’s 0.8 miles long and six feet in diameter. It sits right outside SpaceX headquarters and tests pods traveling

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. “We don’t really have mach problems. We aren’t creating massive sonic booms because we evacuated the air,”161 Elon said. “We built a Hyperloop test track adjacent to SpaceX, just for a student competition, to encourage innovative ideas in transport. And it actually ends up being the biggest vacuum

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work to be done and problems to be solved. But the test tunnels will allow for tons of research on both the Loop and the Hyperloop. The Hawthorne test tunnel as of October 28, 2017. (© The Boring Company.) EARTHQUAKE! What would happen in the tunnel during an earthquake? Experts say one

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, and most tunnels are reinforced and built to withstand seismic activity. And as with Loop development, not only are Boring Company employees working on the Hyperloop project, but so are some of the top engineers from SpaceX. “We are taking world-class engineering talent, applying it to this problem, and seeing

Upgrade

by Blake Crouch  · 6 Jul 2022  · 396pp  · 96,049 words

room, a mol-bio lab, and an armory. The GPA didn’t have field offices in most major cities, but since Denver was the main hyperloop hub of the West, it made sense to have a dedicated base of operations here. We were a young but quickly growing agency, with five

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base of the mountains, the younger Cenozoic sediments under the shoulders of the peaks. For a while, in the distance, we could see the white hyperloop tube stretching across the desert—the line between Denver and Albuquerque. We crossed rivers I’d heard about while watching Westerns with my father. To

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closed. The Glasgow airport and train station are closed. All trains on the Northern Transcon will be detoured around the city. There will be no hyperloop regional service to Glasgow. A stay-at-home order remains in effect with no essential activity exemptions. A shipment of MREs just arrived from the

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if a ticket had been purchased for anyone in Block D (the potential test group and super-spreaders). I wrote a subquery: Return target = airline; hyperloop; bus; train tickets purchased by or on behalf of Block D, within time range T—twelve months. The left screen flashed up my master query

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City. Now for my sketch of Kara. Five days ago, her face had been captured in Durango, Colorado. After that, nothing. There was a regional hyperloop station there. She had probably stayed in a motel and augmented her features before hopping a pod out of Colorado. And the face I’d

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those 38 were her test group. I opened the results from my subquery—financial transactions related to travel. There was a list of flight and hyperloop ticket numbers for Block D. Relief flooded through me. Out of 291 AI-collated candidates, 94 people from Block D had international airline tickets purchased

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with gentle purple lighting and a calming soundtrack of synthesizers played over ocean waves. We began to move. There were slit windows built into the hyperloop tube at ten-meter intervals. I got four glimpses of the gates below Union Station and then we were off into the tunnel under the

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became very still. If you do not fasten your seatbelt, you will be fined five hundred dollars and barred from future travel on a Virgin hyperloop. I slowly raised my arms now, the hornets two inches from my skin, their stingers arcing toward my face and neck. I watched my thumbs

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sequenced our own DNA and built machines that could think. But for all our progress, ten million people die of hunger every year. We have hyperloops and rampant nativism. Phones more powerful than the computers that took us to the moon, but no more coral reefs. And year after year, nothing

Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil

by Hamish McKenzie  · 30 Sep 2017  · 307pp  · 90,634 words

transport” that he said could take passengers from Los Angeles to San Francisco in half an hour. He wrote the blueprint for his so-called Hyperloop in an all-nighter and then published it on the Tesla and SpaceX corporate blogs. He didn’t plan to build the

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Hyperloop himself, but he hoped someone else would make it a reality. The ensuing news coverage bestowed on Musk the kind of attention usually reserved for

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Steve Jobs. Given the task of coming up with an article about the Hyperloop announcement for Pando, I wrote that Musk was more important to society than Jobs ever was. While Jobs did the world a great service by

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. As well as Faraday’s billion-dollar factory, the governor had landed Tesla’s Gigafactory in northern Nevada. Over a hill from the Faraday site, Hyperloop One was building a track to test its realization of Musk’s so-called “fifth mode of transport.” Bigelow Aerospace, maker of the Bigelow Expandable

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blog post—“the second model will be a sporty four door family car”—and not even the Roadster was available for sale. In 2013, the Hyperloop was just one man’s science project, sketched out through rough calculations in a white paper that he had written in an all-nighter. In

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side projects, such as Neuralink, a brain-computer interface start-up he cofounded, the Boring Company, which plans to make tunnels for cars, and the Hyperloop, another of his pet interests. Can he do it all? The job juggling certainly comes with pressures. On July 30, 2017, Musk published a series

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(documentary), 58–59 Horowitz, Ben, 36–37 Hot August Nights (Reno), 193 Huber, Berthold, 167 Huijin Lifang, 95, 116 hybrid cars, in China, 131–132 Hyperloop, 7, 84, 199, 251 i3 (BMW), 139, 237–238 i8 (BMW), 236–238 i-MiEV (Mitsubishi), 13, 158 Impact (GM), 31–32 “Importance of Being

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youth of, 17–18 on “complete autonomy,” 267–268 on disruption, 177–181 early business ventures of, 18–24, 108 education of, 18, 22, 64 Hyperloop, 7, 84, 199, 251 innovation by, 6, 86, 107 marriages and children of, 19, 23, 26–27, 76, 80, 138 on Model S safety, 42

Bulletproof Problem Solving

by Charles Conn and Robert McLean  · 6 Mar 2019

Source: Jonathan Bays, Tony Goland, and Joe Newsum, “Using Prizes to Spur Innovation,” McKinsey Quarterly, July 2009. Elon Musk's Hyperloop project is an attempt to rapidly advance transportation technology. The Hyperloop is a pod transportation system currently under development, designed to transport people over long distances at astonishing, near supersonic speeds

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, and a large, diverse population of problem solvers, many of whom are students willing to accept the risk and hungry for the experience, the SpaceX Hyperloop competition is a great example to test the power of crowdsourcing. With an available testing track at its disposal, SpaceX ran its

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in January 2017. By hosting a competition they were able to increase the quantity of prototypes being simultaneously explored. The jury is still out on Hyperloop as a viable concept, but the process is harnessing resources in a way not seen even a decade ago. Game Theory Thinking The analytic big

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sold, 60 Homelessness, analysis, 130 Horizon events, planning process, 203 framework, origins, 220 Hotspots, case study, 141 Human level machine intelligence (HLMI), 202 Hyperloop Pod Competition, 167 Hyperloop project (Musk), 166–167 I IBM, PC business loss, 200 Ideation, structure, 97 Incremental improvements, 99 Independent science review (ISRP), 230 Independent variable, usage

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