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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
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That was Ted Stevens, not George W. Bush.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
... 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.
You could have an above ground solution which would be much easier to maintain. You could call them "TRAINS".
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
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
But if it's internet-like, the cannisters will re-route and still get to the destination.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
Same as if a router goes down. Cannisters/data is rerouted, send in an engineer to fix the problem.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
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.
True, but destroyed trucks do not get re-sent either.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
Digging tunnels is expensive
Digging tunnels large enough for cars and trucks and safe enough to carry people is expensive.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dropping packages is a significantly worse failure mode than dropping packets.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Never mind corn syrup, what if somebody starts sending spam?
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
Actually, you have a good idea.
We have a nationwide electricity grid, sending much-needed electrons everywhere.
Why don't we do the same for water? It can be even not-so-clean water & the treatment can be left to the last mile to deal with. Floods in one area? Drought in another? Let them work together to solve the problem. A nationwide water grid would be interesting. Surely it's already implemented to lesser extents somewhere in the world.
guess that depends on the packets.
the sms message sent to 911 asking for help: I'd assume to be one that would REALLY suck if it were to get dropped. even though the MS MAY be able to resend it at a later time, it could still make the difference between life and death.
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?
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."
Same thing as what happens today when a truck hits a large bump and smashes a few cases of corn syrup, or someone at a factory or distribution center drops a couple of cases, or they slide off a conveyor, etc etc. Shipping damage happens no matter what the transport method.
The containers would no doubt be sealed, so any sticky gooeyness would be discovered after the tube is removed from the system.
Collisions are less likely than with a truck, because the cargo tubes are not independently powered and independently operated, there's a central computer managing traffic routing. Trains don't collide all that often any more, and most train accidents are some asshole in a car who tried to beat the gate so he didn't have to wait 5 minutes for the train to pass. A tube network would not have that problem - all traffic anywhere in or around the network would be under the control of the computer grid running it.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
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.........
Ugh this has been discussed to death, it's called Personal Rapid Transit. The only potentially cost-effective way to build it is as a monorail. Replacing roads with it is expensive, but it's actually cheaper for a given capacity than a road on basically any terrain but salt flats (where you just dump some gravel along the borders and call it a road.)
It would be great to do the whole thing as a vac/pneumatic system, but then you have to massively increase the price of the track. The most credible solutions suggested so far involve an electric car which is powerful enough to push another car so that if one should break down, the next one can shove it along to a siding.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You obviously don't drive the 401 :)
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
I tried to but it said I was unauthorized, so I decided to take the 404 instead, but I couldn't find it...
Collisions are less likely than with a truck, because the cargo tubes are not independently powered and independently operated, there's a central computer managing traffic routing.
They're also virtually impossible inside the tubes due to the physics of the situation. Pistons blown through cylinders by air have an inherent buffer of air between them. If something stops one, the air between it and any following it compresses and decelerates the follower. Worst case is a slightly leaky stuck cylinder letting a second one ease up against it - to continue on as a double load.
If the tube is used two-way, it has to be cleared before reversing. If it's not, any capsules forgotten and left midway in the tube will just be blown back the other way.
Different story at the terminal, of course, where exhaust venting lets capsules pile into each other (in a reasonably gentle and controlled fashion) and stack up.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
From what I've read, the Denver Airport luggage system could have worked fabulously well. The problem was the morons working there constantly did things to screw it up, either through incompetence, or sabotage (because it requires far fewer people to operate than a regular airport's mostly-manual system). Because of all the morons, the system was deactivated and abandoned. Technically, it was a great system.
It's basically the same reason unionized American auto plants have been a disaster, and auto companies have been moving production to other countries where there are no unions. Interestingly, many foreign automakers (like Honda and BMW) have opened up auto factories in the USA, but in states and locations with no unions, and those factories have been marvels of efficiency, totally unlike the unionized American plants.
Actually, the real story of Denver's baggage handling system was that poor design and insufficient technology can kill a good idea. Here's a good retrospective analysis of the situation. The actual design of the system was done as an afterthought, in restricted geometry, unrealistic timeframe, and unrealistic budget, without any kind of meaningful backup system. Just learning how to manage the queues right is something that should have had a pilot study before design was even begun. Also, due to the then-high cost of RFID tags, individual bags were tagged with bar codes, and only the carts were RFID tagged. While RFID-reading of the bags would have been easy, bar-code reading of them was a disaster. And lastly, they simply scaled up way too fast from existing systems. All of the Denver components previously existed and were used elsewhere, but Denver greatly increased the speed and throughput, directly interlinked everything, and without a backup, every snag held everything else up. And without a study on how to deal with these contingencies, the whole system was a disaster.
There are many lessons to be learned from Denver, but "central control = bad" is not one of them. The main lessons are "don't rush or underfund leaps in technology" and "walk before you run."
Trump's plan to get rid of Mueller appears to be 'be so guilty of so many things that Mueller works himself to death.'
Well, actually, they are talking about using linear induction, not vacuum/pressure. However, the argument still holds partly at least.
A direct collision is still possible if you hire programmers as incompetent as Denver's (though not if you hire programmers like those responsible for the other 99% of similar projects like most major train systems).
However, two capsules headed directly at each other would be significantly slowed by the increase in air pressure between them as they approach, assuming the capsules both come close to filling the tube. The resulting collision would be at well-below peak speeds.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
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.
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)
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