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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."
That was Ted Stevens, not George W. Bush.
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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.
You could have an above ground solution which would be much easier to maintain. You could call them "TRAINS".
But if it's internet-like, the cannisters will re-route and still get to the destination.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
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.
Citizens of Washington: barrels are no more!
Enter the age of pork-tube politics!
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Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
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.
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