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!
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 don’t think AR/VR will play a big role, I was talking about the acceptance and incorporation of digital systems in our every day lives. Corporations more willing to see digital meetings (even if it’s just chat or voice) as a viable alternative to physical meetings. The integration of e-mail in business processes and corporate communication. AR/VR isn’t needed at all, that’s just a gimmick to sell shit. But the techniques employed today have already reduced the need for people to be on a given location fast for work to such a low level, there really isn’t a need for any higher speed transport.
A comment on Lemmy really isn’t the best place to start a discussion about all the advances needed to make something like a Hyperloop possible. Plus there’s already plenty of resources online that go into great detail about all the things that are totally impossible. I’d also like to point out the burden of proof is on the people claiming a Hyperloop can actually exist. If you think it can exist, please tell us how to build one, without going all hand-waivy and saying that’s just engineering. Because it really isn’t, as soon as you even start to contemplate this you run into huge issues.
If you’d like to envision a fictional world where we have free energy in the form of nuclear fusion and are mining resources on the Moon and have working Hyperloops. Great! Go for it, write a book about it. I love reading sci-fi. But keep in mind it’s totally fictional.
As a little aside: I’m not sure where the whole nuclear fusion = cheap (almost free) and clean energy thing comes from. A nuclear fusion energy facility wouldn’t be that different from a nuclear fission facility. They would be huge, very expensive to build and maintain, with plenty of safety concerns. They still need fuel, they still produce nuclear waste. You’d still need to jump through all the hoops and get all the permissions that make nuclear fission facilities so expensive. You still need a whole bunch of water and have to deal with the same pollution / environmental impact issues a fission plant has. It would be cleaner and better than what we can do with nuclear fission in principle, but in practice we’ve had 50 years of experience with nuclear fission and the first fusion plant that produces energy in a usable way is still decades out. So in reality the difference might not be that big in the short term. A big advantage may be the unwarranted fear people have towards nuclear fission, which prevents a lot of them being built over the past 40 years and even has some perfectly fine facilities shutdown (looking at you Germany). If nuclear fusion can brand itself in a different way, maybe the publics fears would subside enough to let those facilities actually be built. But at the end of the day, the power wouldn’t be that much cleaner than we can get out of nuclear fission plants and would certainly be more expensive than current nuclear power (which is pretty cheap, but not free by a long shot). There is a big advantage in the fact nuclear fusion plants wouldn’t have the proliferation issues nuclear fission has. But on the other hand we know only the richest of rich countries in the world would have access to nuclear fusion and they already have nuclear weapons. So in that regards it’s kind of a non issue.
Again this points to me a blurring of lines between sci-fi and real life. I know in sci-fi small nuclear fusion plants are used as a literary device to explain to the reader why impossible things are possible and even practical, without needing to actually solve the problem or go into a big explanation that detracts from the main story. But let’s keep in mind sci-fi is fiction and doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the real world.
I mean… AR/VR is a step forward in audio/visual IO systems. You technically don’t NEED an HD monitor and a good camera to have a video call. But it definitely makes things easier, no? AR/VR right now sucks. Although it doesn’t mean that it has to suck 100 years in the future.
None of them talking about the physical impossibility of it. All issues of the hyperloop are economical ones. My premise removes these issues.
Them being economical issues. NOT physical ones.
Sourcing fuel is incredibly easy if we have a mature nuclear fusion energy supply ecosystem. Most likely, nuclear fuel would be deuterium and tritium. Sourcing deuterium is very very easy. For tritium, you would just need breeding blankets at reactor walls. I don’t see how this tech won’t be mature a 100-150 years from now. As for nuclear waste, the fusion processes produce negligible waste. It’s the breeding blankets that could be the source of waste. They too won’t produce waste that would have to sit for more than a 100 years without being recycled/repurposed/disposed off.
The politics around this is changing slowly. I don’t think it would be that many decades before people start liking nuclear fission again.
I’m going to stop engaging with you. You don’t listen to anything other people say and instead of looking into stuff you just answer with bad faith arguments.
Goodbye.
I’m sorry you feel that way. I think I explained my position very clearly whenever I disagreed with you.
I did “look into stuff” as you asked. Perhaps I didn’t look into the resources that you were talking about. Maybe you should’ve linked those sources in your post instead of saying “go look it up”.
I do listen to what other people have to say. That doesn’t mean I have to agree with it always, no? Whenever I disagree, I always explain my underlying motivation.
I really cannot see how I was arguing in bad faith anywhere above.
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.
OK but how is this better than airplanes?
Just sounds much much more expensive.
Should be less pollution. It’s going to be hard or next to impossible to make planes not run on fossil fuels.
I think airbus managed to get pretty far with their hydrogen jet engine tests a couple years back, plus because hydrogen is lighter than air it means the aircraft that run on it would be even more efficient due to the lower weight
I’d like to see the size of that. Weight, size, location of tanks also has to be considered.
Jet fuel is interesting because that tank can be shaped quite efficiently inside the wing.
Idk if they’ve got a fully worked out solution but some of their renders from a few years ago just had a big hydrogen tank in the tail, you don’t really need to worry about the centre of mass shifting as the fuel drops if the fuel doesn’t weigh anything
That’s really not how this works. Yes, hydrogen is very light. But it also much less dense and has lower energy density then regular jetfuel. So if you want the same range on your plane, you’d actually have to load more hydrogen by weight than you would jetfuel.
Hydrogen is lighter then air because it’s less dense. So it takes a lot of space to store very little hydrogen. So to have get any useful amount of hydrogen on a plane, you need to store it cryogenically under high pressure. That makes hydrogen planes much heavier and less efficent … even if you could figure out how to keep the hydrogen cooled on longhaul flights.
It’s also just a general saftey nightmare. And on top if that you’d still produce water vapour as an exhaust, which is a potent greenhouse gas when emitted at altitude.
Overall hydrogen planes are a terrible idea that don’t really solve anything.
Eh we’re talking about the future. We might have nuclear fusion engines for all we know. But sure, planes could run on hydrogen in theory. Sooo making them green in a hundred years? Sounds kinda possible, no?
Expensive TODAY. But when we have nuclear fusion and lunar resources? Not really, no?
This would essentially be a trains vs planes debate of the future. Hypersonic planes or mach speed maglev trains in a vacuum?
Tunneling is always going to cost more than surface construction.