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Underground Freight Networks
morphovar writes "The German Ruhr University of Bochum is conducting experiments with a large-scale model for an automated subterranean transport system. It would use unmanned electric vehicles on rails that travel in a network through pipelines with a diameter of 1.6 meters, up to distances of 150 kilometers. Sending cargo goods through underground pipelines is anything but new — see this scan of a 1929 magazine article about Chicago's underground freight tunnel network (more details). Translating this concept to the 21st century would be something like introducing email for things: you could order something on the Internet and pick it up through a trapdoor in your cellar the next morning."
Many large cities in the US had a Pneumatic Telegraph at one time. Basically one of those pneumatic tube package delivery systems, but spanning the whole city. This was back in the 1800's. The more things change, the more things stay the same.
Something about the $200 bucks I spent for a plumber to roto-rooter the tree roots out of my drain this week makes me think this is a very bad idea!
As a side note, roots that are growing in your sewer are not the best smelling things in the world.
And the materials will get to you how?
Denver International Airport tried something along that line.
Things went so badly that when they sent camera equipped luggage to trouble shoot the system, they lost their camera equipped baggage. Forever.
United finally abandoned the system a few years ago, though they're still paying for it.
Never shake hands with a man you meet in a fertility clinic.
Apparently a contractor was doing work driving pilings into the river bed near one of the bridges, and in the process they damaged the roof of one of the tunnels where it went under the river. Chicago's system had been largely abandoned, but it still connected into subbasements of buildings all over downtown. It shut down downtown for days. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Flood
Let's not get panicky. Many cities already have labyrinths of sub-basements under their downtown areas (the aforementioned one in Chicago, where I live, and many others). Moreover, think about the maze of tunnels running under Washington, D.C.?
The point is to be sensible about securing it, not to not have it. We still fly planes, don't we? We still allow rental of U-Haul trucks, right? Just because it CAN be used for bad behavior doesn't mean a) it will be, or b) it can't be secured with a reasonable amount of caution. Hell, if we felt THAT way about things, guns would have been outlawed a long time ago. (AND they would still exist anyway, AND people would still use them for bad stuff.)
All that said, though, of course subterranean tunnels make a tasty target for destructive behavior. The point is that a tunnel system under a metropolitan area should be carefully monitored. And if it can be quickly flooded (or all oxygen can be quickly removed) in the event of fire or "evildoers," all the better.
In effect, the tunnels under Chicago DID cause widespread damage a few years ago. A construction crew drove a piling down into the Chicago river and punched through the tunnel wall underneath, flooding the entire downtown area's basements with river water. So it can be dangerous to have the tunnels, but better provisions for evildoers and morons (probably more the latter) would have minimized the problem. That's an old tunnel system, but a new one could be built with the ability to quickly isolate one problem section.
I guess I'm reacting to the terror terror, you know? We must be wise and sensible, but if a tunnel system under the city is the only appropriate and complete solution to a given problem, we can't let fear of something rare (in fact, so rare as to be historically significant when it happens) take it off the table.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Recycled from trash, etc.
Actually, I think that fabbing is going to run into the same "intellectual property" felgercarb that music and video is running into. As far as I know, the only physical objects with copyright hinderances on them are buildings (not sure about china patterns, and silverware).
Right now, there are patents. Are there fair use clauses for patents? If I download a fabbing pattern from a foreign source, am I breaking patent law, or breaking import law? If I scan an object and distribute a fabbing pattern, have I broken patent law? What if I fab something I saw in a TV show, is that a copyright violation, a trademark infringement, or a patent violation? If a beautiful young female made off with one of my silverware fabbing patterns can I say that the dish ran away with the spoon?
I think we may look back on the halcyon days of yore when we only had the RIAA to deal with.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The first thing that one must ask, after ohh-ing and ahh-ing over the fantastic concept, is 'Why did this fail in the past?' Because really great ideas in city planning are never new, and have always been tried before. If it is still around, then it worked. If not, then it was abandoned because it didn't work. Why?
This mini-tunnel concept was done in Paris about 100 years ago. Small packages were delivered around the city using compressed air in a long series of tubes. It was abandoned by the late 1960s.
Tunnels have problems. Especially in the middle of cities. The buildings are high and the foundations are deep. The tunnels have to be deeper. And their sides re-enforced.
How are you going to keep the water out of them?
What do you do when they become obstructed by cave-in or automated-container collisions?
Who's going to pay for all this?
Who's going to pay to fix it in twenty to fifty years when it becomes known that massive amounts of money were stolen during the initial construction phase? (like the 'big dig' in Boston).
One of the great things about being a student of German history is to watch them meticiously design, craft, and build an elaborate 'solution' and then blow it all up in a fit of Wagnerian madness. Then pick up the pieces, go back into 'DeutscheKraftwerk' (not a real word but a real concept) mentality, and begin the whole process all over again with a new generation purified by fire and the triumph of the will. While the rest of the world just watches and feels sorry for their neighbors.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
"In the apartment buildings on Roosevelt Island, residents drop their trash down chutes, and it gets sucked at nearly 60 miles per hour through 20-inch underground pipes that run more than a half-mile up the island. After arriving at the ground floor of a gray three-story building at the north end of the island, the trash is compacted to about one-twentieth of its original size, sealed in a container and trucked to landfills outside the state." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/19/nyregion/19trash.html
Actually, there is. In warmer climates basements are often cool and damp (which can make it feel even cooler) compared to the upstairs (this is true in Wisconsin where summers, while generally mild, can still hit 100 F on the hottest days. You spend more time in the basement on these days, usually next to your home-made dry bar. =P Of course tornadoes are irrelevant as generally if tornado sirens go off, everyone is running upstairs to stand on their porch to watch the tornado. hehe).
Given the extra living space, it's not uncommon to have a bedroom in the basement allowing for cooler and much more comfortable living conditions without having to resort to air conditioning. However, the other points such as water table, geography, natural disasters, hold true. Basements just aren't feasible in some areas.
"The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth." ~1984 George Orwell
A basement complicates a lot the construction, and adds a lot more to the price: it's almost the same as building a two-stories house, with the added expense of having to dig a big hole, and later the expense of keeping that hole drained. Basements made sense in crowded cities/towns where the land price would be greater than the overhead imposed by an habitable basement.
1.6 meters of height ? Who is going to do maintenance in those tunnels? Hobbits ?
I wonder how are they planning to dig those tunnels in cities that already exist. It would be horribly expensive, those that would make this attempt will have to pay for a lot of structural damage to the buildings above due to vibrations, and a lot of buildings would have to be excluded because it would be mightily unsafe to alter the foundations to allow for "stations".
[I am an euro-skeptic] I call this "draining EU funds for sci-fi projects". The same bloody attitude resulted in the GM industry in Europe to fall behind: they wasted money on plastic-producing-rapeseed and other such projects in the early 1990s, and now are upset Monsanto et. comp stole the ground from below their feet with more practical research.[/I am an euro-skeptic]I dream of a city of the future. Big forward thinking tech companies find some land at some highway crossing somewhere, invest in offices and infrastructure:
What you end up with is:
A beautiful, livable AND dense city for technology-oriented companies to open offices in. Optimal outdoor space use generates congregating areas that people actually want to go to. Easy to use and clean (in terms of power) public transportation with private transportation for those who want it; sustainable agrarian supply of perishables - imagine buying groceries from the corner store and having them be delivered from forty feet away instead of a thousand miles..
It would probably never happen, but who knows :) I wouldn't live there until a suitable artistic / musician culture blossomed...
My understanding is that I *do* own whatever is under my property. If there's oil/gas/other valuable stuff under the property that I own, then those resources are my property.
Or not. In many areas, the government sold off the mineral rights (the rights to the underground resources you're talking about) to a mining company decades ago.
A friend of mine (pardon the pun), worked for 30 years in a limestone mine. Most people in the mid-sized city above the mine didn't even know it was there, and didn't know that a huge amount of stuff had been (and continues to be) mined out from under their land.
As an aside, he was full of fun stories about how when they reopened part of the mine that had been closed off for thirty years they found a bunch of 1950s cars buried down there, and how when they needed to get water for the machines they drilled upwards - and the water came out hot.
Remember the Simpson's episode featuring the "Burns Slant-Drilling Company" that sucked out all of the oil from under the school? It's not so far from reality.
Conversely, if there's nasty stuff in the ground under my property (old chemical tanks, etc.), then I'm responsible to remove said stuff or pay the price for environmental damage that they might cause.
Ah, that's where they get you, because you're most likely correct about that.
Putting moderation advice in your
That reminds me, if I see hurricane-wrecked American town, I always wonder: Why do you build your houses from wood instead of brick or concrete? Is it cheaper? I would think brick or concrete houses would take a lot less damage? I'm rather clueless since I live in Europe where there are almost no wooden houses. It's all brick (or some concrete) with a sturdy foundation and almost always a basement.
Google has a few chapters of Richard's book about military tunnel-digging posted.
-FL