Many years ago people had to waste at least 5h 30min by car or 1h 15min by air for a trip between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Elon Reeve Musk (billionaire inventor, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Inc.) changed it forever giving an idea of a new way of traveling between cities. His dream about faster traveling under the grou
nd between two cities came true when after 10 years of engineering works and technological developments the Hyperloop had its first test drive carrying 9 passengers in one capsule.
That was a new mode of transport what brought together two aspects of traveling – being both fast and inexpensive for people and goods. The system was composed of 40 capsules that travel between Los Angeles and San Francisco two one-way tubes. The total one-way trip time was 35 minutes from county line to county line. The capsules were leaving on average every 2 minutes from each terminal carrying 28 people each (as often as every 30 seconds during rush hour and less frequently at night). This gave a total of 7.4 million people per tube that were transported each year on Hyperloop. The total cost of Hyperloop was under $6 billion USD for two one-way tubes and 40 capsules. Despite of high costs of the investment that new transportation system was safer, more convenient, immune to weather, sustainably self-powering, resistant to Earthquakes and faster in those days.
Today everyone prefers to look at the open sky and search the most convenient air-personal vehicle for daily traveling. Only one problem hasn’t been solved so far – how to broaden the capacity of our curved spacetime where any event or physical object is located?! But maybe this is the wrong way to go, and instead of changing spacetime we should think how to resize its elements to make it more spacious?
Picture: Hyperloop route from Los Angeles to San Francisco, SpaceX.