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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.
You could have an above ground solution which would be much easier to maintain. You could call them "TRAINS".
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.
I agree. Let's never do anything that's a good idea if it somehow impacts existing infrastructure.
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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.
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.
Tunneling really isn't that hard in most places. All you need is a deep hole on each side to assemble tunnel boring machines. You might run into problems with pipelines, wires and other tunnels, but you can always go deeper.
I'd rather you rationally disagree than irrationally agree.
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.
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?
step 3) might I kindly request we put the air back in first?
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.
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?
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."
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...
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.'