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Foodtubes Proposes Underground, Physical Internet
geek4 writes "Automatically routed canisters could replace trucks with an Internet of things, says Foodtubes. A group of academics is proposing a system of underground tunnels which could deliver food and other goods in all weathers with massive energy savings. The Foodtubes group wants to put goods in metal capsules two meters long, which are shifted through underground polyethylene tubes at speeds of up to 60 miles per hour, directed by linear induction motors and routed by intelligent software to their destinations. The group, which includes an Oxford physics professor and logistics experts, wants £15 million to build a five-mile test circuit, and believes the scheme could fund itself if used by large supermarkets and local councils, and could expand because it uses an open architecture."
Ok, I'll be the man in the middle
---
That was Ted Stevens, not George W. Bush.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
Yeah, that worked real well.
And what happens when a capsule full of something like corn syrup breaks?
... so it's like a series of tubes, right?
Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) said that, not Bush.
DDOS = distributed denial of snacks
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
1: Getting right of way to drill the holes needed for that stuff.
2: Maintaining it. It sounds like if the induction motors break down, fixing those would be a PITA.
3: Unsticking the cargo if it gets jammed somewhere.
4: How many of these can travel through the tube network at a time? If the induction motors can't handle that many, it might not be as efficient as the company touts.
5: Security of cargo. I'm sure there will be people who would love to divert things to their end.
6: Transients climbing in the tubes, and cleaning the messes up if they get struck. If a bum dies in the tunnel, does the company get sued for wrongful death?
7: Plans for power outages.
There are a number of basic logistical concerns. It would be nice to have a freight tunnel system, but it is fraught with a number of issues.
Short haul truckers will resist this, but I doubt they have a good lobby...yet.
USPS, UPS and FedEx will like this IF they are involved. Otherwise they will fight it tooth and nail.
It's too bad we already built cities and housing for 6.7 billion people. Maybe next time we could re-start with this in mind.
Global water shortage ensues as people rush to the bathroom after eating so much Chinese food.
"Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad." [Ecclesiastes 7:3]
I like the idea, but I think that the biggest problems they might encounter on a larger scale is the need to obtain easements as the pipes will inevitably run onto private property at some point.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
You could have an above ground solution which would be much easier to maintain. You could call them "TRAINS".
Sounds like a new infrastructure terrorist target. Blow up the tubes...kill trade easily.
Much harder to blow up a bunch of individual trucks driving all over the place.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
This was in an issue from about 20 years ago. Kudos to anyone who can find a copy of this spread.
So what happens when the canned Spam going 60mph gets accidentally jammed between the ham and lamb? Would we have something to ram the spam through this ham & lamb dam?
I think we already had an energy-saving networked system like this that produced way less carbon than Diesel trucks, they were called TRAINS.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Finally, it will be the Hormel kind.
It can run even faster and we can see the the spectacular foul ups.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
I'm not saying this new system will be bad, but ask anyone who worked maintenance at the Johnson Space Center building 30 what happened when people sent Cokes through the P-Tube system. You piss off a bunch of techs! (seriously though, I love the idea of a freight tunnel system, it's something I've been designing in my head for a long time - on multiple scales)
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
What if we had a similar system, but that went to general areas instead of individual houses? Could reduce the costs of freight massively I'm thinking. Just have humans do the last mile or two the ol' fashion way, but the core of the journey could be done through the tubes. Of course it wouldn't be suitable for fresh food produce but it would be suitable for anything that is currently sent via the current Postal system.
We also need legislation to stop these DDOSnack attacks...call it The 'Canned-Spam Act'
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I know I've proposed something similiar, though I certainly didn't get as specific. 2 meters sounds a bit long for 'tubes', but I suppose if the tunnels are a meter in diameter they'd be about proportional to the old pneumatic systems.
Of course, I also proposed to dual-purpose PRT systems for this - the idea being that package delivery companies could design vehicles to make deliveries, saving the expense of a driver, oversized vehicles, even the need for as many transfer stations. Instead you have smaller local stations that you release cars from as soon as they're full or a certain delay is reached. Eliminate a couple unpack/sort/pack cycles and you can get ground to be nearly as fast as air.
And before anybody screams about how air is more profitable - well, it's also more expensive. Saving them a sorting cycle could save them a couple thousand a day, per team per facility. Not needing drivers? There's mid hundreds to low thousands per day.
I don't read AC A human right
But if it's internet-like, the cannisters will re-route and still get to the destination.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
Sounds like it's going to have absurdly high up-front costs. Digging tunnels is expensive, and these guys want to run hundreds of miles of them? Who's going to put up the trillion or so dollars you would need to get the system up to a useful size? How long will it take for the energy savings to overcome the startup costs? Especially if you compare it to simple trains or trucks?
I read the internet for the articles.
This system isn't like a truck you can dump food on. It's more like a series of tubes.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Sign me up as a beta tester. I can vision a delivery tube in the basement.
"... is a series of tubes"
This "group of academics" sounds to me more like they're just trying to get some play in the press, or maybe get some government grant money. It's an absurb idea if you ask me. We already have a huge amount of infrastructure built in the form of highways and a rail system, and they want to build a completely different infrastructure to do the same thing? Maybe these big-brained "academics" should employ their considerable imaginations towards improving on the infrastructure we already have.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
...Sam Lowry
built underground and intended to be used similarly to this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tunnel_Company
and London had a narrow gauge railway for a moving mail between sorting stations:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Post_Office_Railway
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
If this new transport system works for goods, why not use it for people as well as long as you can provide adequate ventilation and reasonable comfort?
I write sci-fi for metalheads
Not kidding.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tunnel_Company
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Unfortunately this will be more like UDP, and the destroyed canisters won't get resent.
Why are the calling them food tubes? We already have Pneumatic tubes. This just a scaled up version. I had a similar idea once for big cities. It might make a lot of sense, especially if it's general purpose, like for the post office.
But "food tubes"... really?!!? That just sounds gross. You brits are weird. How about the "megmatic tube system" that happens to also ship food?
So we can push button, receive bacon?
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
In the '90s, a feasibility study was done in the Netherlands for an Underground Logistics System. It involved little carts that could drive themselves, and carry a variety of cargo pallets. The idea was to connect Amsterdam's Schiphol airport to a nearby train station and a flower market. They never built it because the financial risks were too big.
More recently, a Belgian engineering firm proposed an Underground Container Mover for the port of Antwerp, which is basically a large underground conveyor belt for containers. It would run in a circle connecting container terminals with other terminals and highways on the other side of the river. This could remove a lot of trucks from the busy highways, especially the tunnels.
The basic idea is that as ground is becoming more and more rare, we shouldn't waste it on cargo transport. Moving most of it underground makes a lot of sense. And we've actually managed to move a lot of it (up to 90% in some areas) underground already, in terms of tonne-miles of goods transported. Just think of drinkable water, gas and sewage, but also oil and a lot of chemicals in industrial zones. Pipelines are transporting more than most people can imagine, and they're great. Trying to move boxed goods in a similar fashion is the logical next step, there are just a few problems we haven't figured out yet.
I'd rather you rationally disagree than irrationally agree.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that if this were really implemented in a major way, it would create the ideal system for a terrorist group to discretely deliver several hundred bombs simultaneously all cross a major city.
Seriously, this idea is so dumb it belongs in idle. You know you're in trouble when the article starts with, "a group of academics". Sure, we all have creative brainstorms like this, but we have the courtesy of keeping them to ourselves until we have considered a few of the obvious issues. Like the existence of highly efficient freight trains, the difficulty of adding physical tubes alongside an existing infrastructure (including securing easements), and the high initial cost once again placed on the backs of taxpayers as no profit could be made from such a system. Sure, we all love socialism, but the fact of the universe is that we all need to eat so capitalism once again rears its ugly head when there's no food to shoot down our awesome PVC tubes. I can only assume either willful ignorance or flat out evil intentions when I read how such a system's efficiency is compared to a lorry when freight trains are the analogue to this type of system.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
True, but destroyed trucks do not get re-sent either.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
Slashdot, look - Jeff Goldblum just about has the matter transporter worked out, then we won't need tubes.
He just has a few... bugs... to work out.
Many UK supermarkets have tubes that transport pods full of money from the tills up into the offices above without the cashier having to leave their checkout. Though I think they work by operating a vacuum cleaner like device at the other end, so I guess the routing side of things is manual!
To just use the domestic pipelines we have to deliver gasoline instead? The infrastructure is already there. I see two ways this could work: We could use slugs (like the kind used to clean the pipelines, but hallow) as canisters, or, even better (since this is the US), just replace the gasoline with high-fructose corn syrup and then it could just be processed into whatever fab crap the plebes are eating at the time when it comes out the other end?
Step 1) Why only 60mph? Once you have evacuated the air in the tubes I don't see why there would be a speed limit, how about 600mph? Or 6000 mph?
Step 2) Now use it for general cargo.
Step 3) Now put humans in it. I can't help but think they are already thinking of this because a 2m (6 ft 6 inches) capsule is enough to fit most people. Unfortunately, squishy humans are limited to a around 1G of acceleration, but I love the idea of a 15 minute trip from New York to Washington DC.
Do not feed the C.H.U.D.s!
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
A system like this already exists on Roosevelt Island, but it's for moving trash instead of food.
without risk.
Yay! This brings us one step closer to "The Feed" in The Diamond Age - just make it send a string of organic molecules (no arsenic though) and your 3D printer will make whatever food you need on your end.
Several cities once had sizable pneumatic tube systems. London, Paris, Berlin, Prague, and New York City all had extensive systems. Tube diameters were small, though, in the 2" to 3" range. The Prague system was the last to shut down, in 2002. Prague is repairing their system, and it may come back up.
The London system had the ability to automatically transfer carriers to and from from public tubes to "house systems" within a building. So it could provide end to end service. Most of the other systems were post office to post office only.
The Chicago tunnel system had almost full coverage of downtown Chicago a century ago, with small electric trains in freight tunnels under most of the downtown streets. Goods were transferred from full-sized rail cars to tunnel cars, which were then delivered to buildings in the city and carried upward in special elevators. That system ran until 1959.
Maintaining the infrastructure for such systems is expensive for the amount of traffic, though.
I did start typing a long and detailed comment, but FF crashed and lost it. Fantastic.
Anyway, as others here have pointed out, the setup and construction costs would be immense, and the system would need to carry very large amounts of freight to be economically sensible. The only way for this to be achieved would be for it to have a monopoly over a certain area, either by mandate or practical necessity.
Various cities worldwide have had underground freight railways (Chicago and london, to name two) but they both ran up against the fact that it is much cheaper to put freight on trucks/vans running on the existing road network. I think that will always be the case, with road transport continuing to provide the most economical transport of relatively small amounts of stuff (up to 30 tonnes) over short distances (less than say 200 miles). Quite probably the 'trucks' in the future may be driverless, and will almost certainly not be fuelled by petrodiesel, but they will still be trucks and will run on a relatively cheap to build and maintain multipurpose road network (which is essentially just a web of hard flat surfaces).
Railways are fantastic for moving large quantities (tens to hundreds of tonnes) of freight from the same 'A' to the same 'B' a long distance away (say over 200 miles); but having to stop the entire train to load/unload along the way kills effeciency for multidrop or smaller loads. Having small rail vehicles achieves similar effeciencies to road, but you still have the problem of the running surface (the rails) needing to direct traffic and be controlled somehow. Road vehicles (whether human driven or not) direct themselves on an unchanging surface. It's true that roads with anything above a low level of traffic often need traffic control of some kind (eg lights) but railways do too.
In conclusion; very cool, but pointless IMO
This is a substitute for a clever sig that fits within the maximum number of characters.
Well since they've already got a veritable terror cornucopia of choice targets, what's the harm in adding one more? Sewage treatment, food distribution centers, your kids' schools, the security line at the airport, hospitals, etc etc.
Sounds like this was tried before
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Why build all that infrastructure? Surely there have been enough developments in accuracy to deliver things ballistically? Caveat: It might suit some goods more than others.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Terrorists can kill trade infinitely more easily by blowing up ocean-going freighters in international waters, taking out big dams, placing some explosives at the foot of mainline power line runs, or even UPS/Fedex/postal centers.
The terrorists have won in my opinion, if the first thing you can think of is only how it could be a potential weakness.
We have hundreds of nerve centers that are already weak.
Wouldn't be cheaper to install the tubes above ground?
No, TCP-like! Once the first canister gets diverted, or destroyed, and I send a N-ACK, a second one with my reprovisioned Garlic Triscuts, Peperoni sticks, and egg nog will be resent. This is more like Brazil than the Jetsons (food dispenser in-house) but I'll take it. When does my crap get here?
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
So? If you want to hurt trade by truck, you don't blow up the individual trucks any more than you blow up individual canisters moving through the foodtubes. Instead, you blow up critical bridges and tunnels.
Or, critical facilities involved with the production, delivery, and refinement of fuel for the trucks.
Or you just work to destabilize regimes in countries where the fuel for the trucks is produced.
Is a series of tubes.
Really?
Blow the hell out of I80 and you significantly disrupted Amercian commerce.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
This sounds like the automated baggage handling system installed in Denver a while back.
Hundreds of millions of dollars later, it was a complete failure, and they resorted to hand carts.
http://wiggling.wordpress.com/2008/03/17/pneumatic-tubes-for-transport/
Pneumatic Tubes for Transport
Posted on March 17, 2008 by 3speed
As reported March 11 in the Economist: Dietrich Stein, of the Ruhr-University of Bochum, wants to free the roads by diverting freight underground. If his plan succeeds, the road network at the surface will be duplicated by a system of tubes below inhabited by small vehicles that steer themselves automatically from factories to shops or even to individual homes. Actually, this is rather an old-fashioned idea. There was a time, in many places, when letters and parcels could indeed be put in capsules and sent through pipelines direct to people’s houses. The capsules were propelled by air and steered themselves from sender to receiver. Pneumatic delivery, as it was known, was commonplace from about 1850 to 1950. The largest system was in Paris—it was more than 400km long. Berlin and London had extensive pneumatic systems too. After 1950, however, the networks gradually closed down,
and today only Prague still clings to this Victorian technology.
I seem to recall (but can not google) a tube system in Los Angeles in the early 1900's (?) interconnecting some post offices (and other sites?).
Yes, these things are costly and hard to maintain, but then so are water/sewer/natural gas lines and our civilization takes them for granted.
Perhaps, as we evolve towards a more advanced civilization the ideas of transporting physical matter should also be reviewed.
The system is incompatible with modern container systems (it can't fit "twenty foot equivalents" or TEUs) unlike TRAINS which already perform the same role and don't require you to dig an expensive tunnel system. That means one would have to unload cargo from a container and put it into one of these capsules.
Did anyone else think of Futurama when they read that? Granted the tubes are underground not above but still...
Apparently they are not aware of a lot of real world facts like soil shift, plate shift, earthquake shear, the tremendous cost of building such tunnels, etc. This is fine for a building. Maybe a city (doubtful) but not beyond.
http://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda-weehawken_burrito_tunnel.htm
Road and rail systems are also fixed, undefended infrastructure, yet they aren't terrorist magnets, nor does damaging them "kill trade". Terrorists do occasionally hit the rail system, though they prefer passenger rail (subways being the really obvious example).
I think you need to re-examine the word "terrorist". A terrorist does not seek to blow stuff up for shits and giggles, he seeks to kill or terrorize people, usually people the terrorist has some beef with (politically, religiously, racially, whatever). The damage to infrastructure is incidental. If you give a terrorist a bomb and free reign to choose a target, they'll choose somewhere crowded with whatever group they want to hurt.
Deliberate infrastructure damage is more a military way of thinking, i.e. crippling supply lines. A spy or saboteur working for an enemy power in wartime would target fixed infrastructure in the hopes of damaging the war effort. And, in fact, that does happen; railways were one such target once upon a time. The solution in the past was redundancy and not over-relying on single points of failure. An internet-like transport system would actually be a step forward for redundancy.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
My first thought was this sounds idiotic...but after reading about it a bit more I guess it could work. I wonder how it deals with jams...you can't just ask the sender to retransmit after dumping all the "data" in the event of some sort of failure event. But it sounds like it involves building a whole lot of infrastructure. The United States doesn't really do that kind of stuff anymore so it wouldn't work here. But maybe somewhere else they do.
Watch out for corrupted (dropped) packets.
Seriously though, get the motive / switching right and this should be the next generation car. Perhaps not in an enclosed tube though in case of failure but then again, what's a plane?
Food for thought... Clark
Publicly, sure. Private, who knows. I'm not confident Bush had a good understanding of the internet beyond "It brings me funny kitty pictures."
I only support this if it can eventually make Maciej Ceglowski's awesome Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel a reality, so that we can finally get decent burritos on the East Coast:
Sounds like the dystopian future is slowly coming, I seem to remember seeing these in Terry Gilliam's Brazil. Spooky!
We're one step closer to people tubes....
"Runaway ham capsule explodes through floorboards of local church, injuring 6"
Good people go to bed earlier.
... then why not just build a fleet of small electric delivery vans to do the job (ala milk floats)
Google around for Chicago tunnels. From time-to-time, tunnel systems have appeared to ship goods. They only make economic sense in certain special conditions. A general-purpose tunnel system isn't something that makes business sense in most cases.
Add the modern threat of bomb delivery, and the idea is DOA most places.
Even the once fairly common pneumatic tube is no longer found in very many places. It was used mostly for documents, which are sent over the Internet "tubes" now.
We plainly aren't getting rid of trains, trucks, roads, etc. The tube system would be redundant, costly, unnecessary. Next!
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
http://weburbanist.com/2009/04/11/a-series-of-tubes-pneumatic-networks-past-present-futurama/
Most people don't.
I thought we had this already... http://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda-weehawken_burrito_tunnel.htm
This system sounds like it was half-baked by a bunch of turkeys who don't think about the inevitable mechanical failures. At some point, one of these containers will jam in their conduits. Collision with another container will leave an unfortunately inedible buffet strewn around in the tunnels, except for the rats that live there. Then people will go hungry and find themselves having to eat the engineers who designed this monstrosity.
I'm all for progress, but we've seen systems like this before, on New York's Roosevelt island, where they use a pneumatic garbage disposal system. It's worked reasonably well for a long time but requires significant constant maintenance, and it's seriously showing its age, with an accelerating rate of breakdowns that will only be solved with a complete overhaul that won't happen in the foreseeable future. The same thing will happen to this food subway. It may work okay for a few decades, and then it'll fall apart.
This already exists to some extent, just working in the other direction.
When you drop a 'physical package' off in the toilet, it's routed to a specific location which in many places is miles away from where it originated. I could see something like this working (and perhaps even utilizing part of the same infrastructure) in many cities in the US.
"Powers. I have them."
So, what if a can carrying red paint crashes into a can carrying blue paint? Would both cans be marooned?
As opposed to blowing up, say important parts of our highway system, thus preventing trucks from taking the optimum route? After all that's essentially what the tubes would be in this scenario.
When their is a CSMA/CD issue?
Who waits a random time to re-send the item?
And, what if multiple carrier tubes are encoded with the same MAC address?
First, I independently had a similar idea (although significantly differing in details, tbh I would trust the experts over me). Also, people have posted links to previous ideas above, and there is already the classic pneumatic canister system. The idea is as old as the hills, so we should judge it purely on the implementation, which sounds pretty smart.
However, I think they should take it much further...
Clearly, this would have to be implemented in along publicly owned routes i.e. roads. Its already pretty crowded down there, so they would have to go pretty deep I guess. However, you have just build a network designed to power vehicles and placed it under a road. If you wire it up to an induction system on the surface (presumably with some kind of wireless point of sale too) then as well as killing 92% of the carbon emissions of haulage, you've also just solved the range issue for electric cars in that same area.
If the goal is to get maximum quality of life for unit energy, such a scheme is going to pay for itself rapidly.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
There's so much highway (federal and state) that it would be pretty tough I'd think to be able to blow up enough of it to make a big difference.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Wikipedia has a good article:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube
Historical use
* 1853: linking the London Stock Exchange to the city's main telegraph station (a distance of 220 yards)
* 1865: in Berlin (until 1976), the Rohrpost, a system 400 kilometers in total length at its peak in 1940
* 1866: in Paris (until 1984, 467 kilometers in total length from 1934)
* 1875: in Vienna (until 1956)
* 1887: in Prague (until 2002 due to flooding), the Prague pneumatic post[6]
* 1897: in New York City (until 1953)
* other cities: Munich, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Hamburg, Rome, Naples, Milan, Marseilles, Melbourne, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis[citation needed]
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Chicago already tried shipping good underground a hundred years ago underground and failed... http://users.ameritech.net/chicagotunnel/tunnel1.html
Once trucking became popular the underground shipping lines died out. It costs less to build a truck than it does to dig a tunnel.
"...An expansive spiderweb of tubes running through San Francisco’s Mission district as far south as the “Burrito Bordeaux” region of Palo Alto and Mountain View. Electronic displays in each taqueria light up in real time with orders placed on the East Coast, and within minutes a fresh burrito has been assembled, rolled in foil, marked and dropped down one of the small vertical tubes that rise like organ pipes in restaurant kitchens throughout the city."
"Propelled by powerful bursts of compressed air, the burritos speed along the same tunnel as the BART commuter train, whose passengers remain oblivious to the hundreds of delicious cylinders whizzing along overhead. Within twelve minutes, even the remotest burrito has arrived at its final destination, the Alameda Transfer Station, where it will be prepared for its transcontinental journey."
"Every four seconds a ‘slug’ of ten burritos, white with frost, ratchets into the breech. A moment later it flies into the tunnel with a loud hiss of compressed gas, and the lights dim briefly as banks of powerful electromagnets accelerate the burritos to over two hundred miles an hour. By the time they pass Stockton three minutes later the burritos will be traveling faster than the Concorde."
http://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda-weehawken_burrito_tunnel.htm
If only it were true.
This kind of network would be very valuable. But there's little need to create a whole new network to deliver goods. Instead, robot submarines could run through the existing sewers. Upgrading it to deliver food and other stuff would require only fitting the sewers with a kind of "airlock" that the delivery sub fits into, separating the sewer outside the sub from the inside of the sub opening into the surface world.
And in case you think that's too disgusting, even if it's actually completely separated, you shouldn't look into just how most of this food is produced. You're already eating it every day, and knowing how sausages are made would push you to starve instead. Let's just say "chicken lips", and leave it at that.
--
make install -not war
Hey, guys...
Listen, guys, listen....
Guys, I'll...
Guy's listen....
I'll make some tracks....
Listen....
I'll make some tracks and I'll put these engines on them. And then I'll attach some really big "canisters" to them and have the engines pull them down the track. We could even put people in 'em. It would be perfect.
Somali pirates attack container ships off the East coast of Africa. They do it for financial rather than political reasons which is why they are called pirates and not terrorists, but nevertheless it does happen.
Two meter long capsules entering your house through appropriately sized tubes at up to 60 miles an hour represent a serious "last mile problem", (with the obvious solution of a smaller tube system connecting to a Tube Service Provider). So, we're back to an analog of the current model, where not everyone has a direct connection to the physical net. Just be glad you won't get 'ping' flooded with empty 2 meter capsules, or a 200,000 capsule DDOS attack.
Who is John Cabal?
It doesn't really add one. Less surface shipping by truck/plane/rail would reduce the risks there, so it's a +1 + -1 = 0 situation at worst. Since the tubes don't have to run close to highways, power grid, or places with lots of people/civilian targets, it could be designed to minimize human risks, for a net negative terror threat potential.
Who is John Cabal?
Ship to: Grandmas house
Contents: 2 children
How long until someone takes a ride in a cannister?
Requiem for the American Dream
So like he said there really will be "Internets"!!
So, this time the plan is to design a capsule-switched network with 2m capsules that, undoubtedly, will have a maximum weight. How long until someone realizes that efficiency would be improved if each packet, I mean capsule, could carry six times the cargo....
Most people don't.
Gore does. He %#*€ing invented the thing.
About 3 minutes if I have my way.
Wheeeeeeeeee!
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
How many pounds of PETN do you think these 2m long food tubes will hold?
No, it would be very easy to blow up enough of it to make a big difference. As it stands right now, there is one main supply line, for example, into the State of Maine - Interstate 95. There are two bridges that cross into the state near that interstate, and one of them is falling apart on its own and needs little help to complete the journey. The other bridge, if closed, would force all traffic entering or leaving the state to the South to drive 20 miles out of their way, a good chunk of it on back roads that aren't designed to handle the 6 lanes each way of traffic that the current two bridges provide the capacity for (and quite often use to the point of backups).
During the summer, the I95 corridor regularly has toll backups of well over ten miles. One car bomb set off at one of those toll booths would inconvenience two lines of cars ten miles long and four cars wide, and any trucks that happen to be mixed in.
And that's for a rural state with under 2 million residents. It gets worse when you go urban. A lot worse. Three car bombs could take out the Calahan Tunnel, the I-90 Mass Pike Bridge, and the bridge at the William F., McLellan Highway. A couple more could take out the offramps off I95 in that area, and isolate Boston into two unconnected cities for quite some time.
Look at New York. Take out the Holland and Brooklyn Battery tunnels and a half-dozen bridges and New York City will come to a standstill that made the WTC bombings look like "business as usual".
The highway system is deeply vulnerable to attack, as is the electrical system, the sewer and water systems in many major cities, and lots of infrastructure. The important distinction is that these would be excellent military targets but poor terrorism targets. Terrorists want a large immediate and direct body count.
If anything, a tube network like this will have distinct advantages from a national security standpoint. It will allow food supplies to continue to flow in the event of an attack on the highway system, or if this system is attacked we can still use the highway system for critical supplies (we just need to commandeer the trucks currently used for less-critical supplies). It provides redundancy.
Infrastructure for this will be cheaper and easier to build than a highway, so you can build a lot more redundancy into a system like this at lower cost.
A system like this would be less accessible and therefore harder to target. Any asshole can rent a Ryder truck, load it with some Diesel fuel and ammonium nitrate fertilizer, and "McVeigh" a significant bridge or section of highway for a very long time. Attacking a sealed tube (particularly underground) where cars don't normally go is harder. And the tube, being smaller, can be repaired more quickly and we can use the highways as a backup or reroute until it is fixed. Probably faster than you could design some way of getting the goods from the tubes to a truck.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
No, TCP-like! Once the first canister gets diverted, or destroyed, and I send a N-ACK, a second one with my reprovisioned Garlic Triscuts, Peperoni sticks, and egg nog will be resent. When does my crap get here?
Your crap arrives after insertion of your provisions into your personal tubes. With what you're ordering, expect a quick and spicy delivery.
So, after Ted Stevens gets made fun of basically non-stop for years for comparing the Internet to a Series of Tubes, we get this Slashdot story.
"Automatically routed canisters could replace trucks with an Internet of things, says Foodtubes"
>Forehead Slap
Just big enough to use this system to dispose of bodies! Methinks they have some other uses in mind besides food distribution...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
There are a number of basic logistical concerns. It would be nice to have a freight tunnel system, but it is fraught with a number of issues.
With slight re-wording, ALL of the issues you mentioned apply to the Internet. Yet in spite of 'basic logistical concerns' and 'fraught with a number of issues', we're still using it to carry on this discussion.
Never underestimate man's ingenuity, tenacity, and persistence. If it's a worthwhile concept, it will probably be built, and (eventually) it will probably work just fine, TYVM.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Just be glad you won't get 'ping' flooded with empty 2 meter capsules, or a 200,000 capsule DDOS attack.
Whatever you do, just don't order any Spam! :)
Just be glad you won't get 'ping' flooded with empty 2 meter capsules, or a 200,000 capsule DDOS attack.
Would that be a Distributed Denial of Sustinance Attack?
Life is a Game. Play to Win.
When a tunnel collapses we can send chilean miners to the trapped food. Instead of sending food to trapped chilean miners.
A vicious cycle has begun...mark my words.
Sounds kind of like the railroad system...except underground. Maybe we could call it the subway.
Subways have multiple defects, some of which I will list below:
I write sci-fi for metalheads
Roll!
And just wait until there's a worker's strike!
I drank what? -- Socrates
Lol when i left school I was offered a research assistants job and had the choice of nuclear and mathematical modeling or solids transport - including capsule pipelines we had a full size test track.
One of the guys in my physics class at school worked in solids transport and when he told be about having to crawl into the test circuit we had - to unstuck stuck loaded containers i decided to go into the math and nuke department.
But I did miss out on driving the baby JCB/ Backhoe we had to load one of the rigs
With the exception of New Orleans, I've never been in a place that had such a limited number of access points. In this city, it is 3 of them...I-10E, I-10W and the Causeway bridge (N) across Lake Pontchartrain...all are bridges.
But other than this, I've not known or seen many states that have cities locked off by only 1-2 access points over bridges. I'm not really used to seeing toll roads. Do they have a lot of them up there or something?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Wasn't this already tried once?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
In montreal, they are doing this for garbage disposal:
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/06/st_trashsucker_canada/
Or you just make everybody so afraid of the terrists that they won't leave their homes^H^H^H^H^Hbunkers. Then there won't be anybody to drive the trucks.
Safe and secure from hawks and planes.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
There was something like this proposed at the 1962 Worlds Fair in Seattle. The containers were almost the same size.
by Philip Jose Farmer in his "Dayworld" series.
8. Cities like New Orleans, Houston, most of Florida, and keeping the underground tubes free of water.
or, more importantly, alligators
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The article leads to believe these tubes will suck, literally. These tubes are not really anything new.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube
One destroyed truck doesn't plug up a huge chunk of the system though.
What happens the "intelligent software", segfaults? Who's going to clean up the mess?
Works for Mexican Drug Lords...
Hardly a novel concept
So not only did I miss out on making the joke, but the guy who made it screwed it up?
GP gets -1 Internet and -1 FoodTube.
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
He "took the initiative in creating the Internet", to accurately quote him. Which is exactly what he did while in Congress. He deserves a lot of credit.
You obviously don't drive the 401 :)
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
Well, it can, it crashes and loses it's load all over a freeway.
I take it you're not familiar with Denver's automated baggage system, then. It was centrally controlled by a computer, too. Now it's used as an example (along with the Therac-25 radiation machine that killed people and the Ariane 5 that exploded) in ethics/computers in society classes for massive failures and the real-world consequences of bad/unsafe designs. Whenever dealing with a gigantic, complicated, interconnected engineering challenge like what these guys are proposing, the fact that there will be a "central computer managing traffic routing" should concern--not reassure--you.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
It's called the subway. But instead of goods being routed by an intelligent network, they're routed by minimum wage delivery workers.
I tried to but it said I was unauthorized, so I decided to take the 404 instead, but I couldn't find it...
I've been dreaming about such a system for years. In cities, those underground tubes would also connect to apartment buildings and would be used to deliver goods and for inner-city travel.
This would allow us to get rid of inner-city car traffic and significantly reduce the amount of space that is dedicated to streets and parking.
We would finally reclaim the streets. Kids could play outside again without parents fearing that they get run over, it could be powered by green tech (snow would be white once again without all those car exhausts) and if intelligent routing is used, it would cut down on traffic time (no more traffic jams).
Free Manning, jail Obama.
Wouldn't this pose major security concerns?
I had this idea years ago too, it just seemed the like the logical evolution from shipping things in trucks, fedex/ups/usps/dhl/etc
LIM is a proven technology already as it's used in the ART systems in Vancouver and JFK. This is just the scaled down version.
Put them inside vacuum tubes and you remove the air friction.
The second decree: no more pollution, no more car exhaust,
Or ocean dumpage. From now on, we will travel in tubes!
Get the scientists working on the tube technology
I like the general idea quite a bit, but I can also see some serious issues to resolve.
You would have to design it so that if a pod became stuck somehow(pod malfunction, tube malfunction, system malfunction), there would be a quick solution to recover it.
I also think that a pressurized air system adds too much complexity. Airlocks or something at the destination/exits/entrances, pressure seals and seal maintenance, maintaining and generating pressure, speed regulation and timing/routing the pods, etc.
It may be easier to use something like electric rails or some type of mag-lev system, I don't know.
Some of the issues to be worked out would apply to 'pod in a tube' systems in general, no matter the propulsion type.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
So? If you want to hurt trade by truck, you don't blow up the individual trucks any more than you blow up individual canisters moving through the foodtubes. Instead, you blow up critical bridges and tunnels.
I'll grant you the production facilities and fuel, but the redundancy in the US road system is really impressive I think. While they wouldn't hold up long, there are states where you could drive all the way across and never touch a Federal Highway or Interstate. Granted Manhattan is probably screwed, but we should just build a wall around it and make it a prison, anyway.
in the early 20th century, little underground freight subways using electric trams shunted cargo around small diameter tubes beneath downtown Chicago, and also below the London Post Office.
A better idea is to use little robotic trucks that drive on existing roads, IMO.
They're not much bigger than two meters
activestudios web design
Attempts have been made at this for years with pnuematic tubes, with varying success. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube#In_public_transportation
This is essentially an update on the old steam-era (shall I venture "steam-punk"?) tech
I actually worked in logistics for a while. Trucks are actually rather inflexible, when you think about it.
To ship product to multiple locations, a truck would need to drive to location A, unload, drive to location B, unload, etc. This also requires that a human being be engaged for the entire duration. A truck can only be at one location at once. Its size is also fixed, meaning that if there is slightly more product than the truck will fit you need another truck. On the other hand, if there isn't enough product to fill the truck the cost of the delivered goods increases relative to a full vehicle. This last one was a major problem for my company.
With an automated tube-based system, the same human could place product into transit at their base of operations and simultaneously have product move to locations A, B, etc while they would be free to prepare more shipments in the time they previously spent driving a vehicle.
Trucks will certainly still be useful, but a system like this would be absolutely phenomenal for small-scale shipping.
1. Support to create a *global* network of these tubes
2. Become a manager and learn the protocols
3. Readress & reroute traffic to Africa
4. FEED AND CLOTHE THE AFRICANS FOR PETE'S SAKES ALREADY!
Geez. In comparison to the "third world", it's as we to are living a few millenia in the future.
I can't allow myself to feel as if we've advanced until there are people die of starvation here.
If this would get rid of the trucks on the road even partially, I'm up for it.
Put it above ground and use it for everything from cargo to moving people.
Cargo wants to be free; arrrrr.
Requiem for the American Dream
As somebody else has pointed out about trains, they're a lousy solution over short distances when it comes to efficiency. It also is actually a rather poor solution now, since many rail lines cannot be put back into use and of those which could be, many have survived because nobody wants to go there anyway--a lot of them have been turned into roads. Moreover, building new aboveground tracks would suffer from prohibitive costs, due to the fact that, well, people kinda live there.
Unless, of course, you want to make a lot of people suddenly homeless by exercising eminent domain, which itself has the problem of the state insisting on having the valuation be done by somebody whose paycheck they sign. This might not be a particular problem if they also used the same value they use for calculating your property taxes, except strangely, when they want to buy your land, they discover it's worth extremely less than they've been taxing you for. (That McMansion turns out to have a market value of a plywood shack on the upwind side of the sewage plant. Y'see, it's the plywood shack's reclaimed antique tin roof and utter greenness due to no electricity that makes it worth so much...the plywood shack, I mean. Not the McMansion.)
Surprisingly, nobody thinks to inform the tax office of this quite important discovery in case your property taxes come due before you sell.
Yeah, as much as I like trains, let's not.
Underground tubes--especially if you don't have to dig a large-diameter tunnel--are flat-out less of a logistical nightmare to build, now.
If this was kept as simple as possible it could work really well. Just goods (food and dry goods), nothing alive, no chemicals- nothing reactive or toxic. Air and water tight tube and canisters. Follow major existing routes. Allow for last mile deliveries so more than just major chains could use it. Last mile branches are funded by the receiver but they can sublet their line for local smaller businesses to offset cost.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Found this a while ago on wired http://www.wired.com/autopia/2009/07/robot-delivers-packages-through-sewers/?intcid=postnav; it uses the sewerage system already there to deliver smaller parcels seems to be a better idea han digging new tunnels all over the place.
In Google we trust.
A similiar, already about 30 year old concept is already in testing in germany. The project is called "CargoCap" and initiated by the "Ruhr University".
Check http://www.cargocap.com/ for more Information
Surely the risk of DDOS attack has always existing in the real world. We have all heard the one about the guy who books every pizza delivery, every courier pick-up, every builder, every plumber, every skip for hire, ever mail order catalogue etc. to be delivered Friday morning to their enemies house. Thanks to disposable cell phones there is little risk of being caught.
The real problems are mechanical. The tubes would need to be pretty wide and have some way of being accessed and repaired. The system would have be incredibly robust to avoid constant blockages and failures. Regulating the content of the packages would be pretty damn difficult too, and the potential for mischeif pretty high.
What we really need is a better way for people to receive packages too big to go through the letter box when they are out. You can get lockable bins but not all couriers will accept them and they are fairly rare. As more stuff needs to be delivered the services are improving thanks to economies of scale and demands for service. In London you can get a delivery within a 1 hour window now and I expect in another 5 years most places will offer smaller windows than that. Supermarkets already deliver shopping in the evenings when people are home from work.
You could spend billions building a series of tubes and it would be worthless in 5-10 years tops.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC