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Next Big Thing From Elon Musk? It Could Be 'Boring' (usatoday.com)
A string of tweets put out by serial tech entrepreneur Elon Musk on Saturday hints that his entrepreneurial future may be a little "boring." USA Today reports: The Tesla and SpaceX founder got on Twitter on Saturday morning to rant about an issue he seems to find irksome -- traffic. Musk has also been working on resolving his frustration with traffic issues through above-ground means with his Hyperloop venture, which proposes a plan for mass-transit pods moving through above-ground tubes. But that doesn't appear to be enough, commenting: "Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging..." He even offered up a name for the venture, calling it "The Boring Company," and began branding it with a slogan: "Boring, it's what we do." Then capped it off by tweeting, "I am actually going to do this."
Or both.....
Poor guy. What he really needs is a helicopter.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
There is already a company called the boring company that does drilling and boring. Hes late by 20 years.
Because it was debunked by Thunderf00t
The US government is good at paying people to dig holes and fill them in again, so why shouldn't Musk get in on the action?
All he'd be doing is shifting it underground. Gridlock would still be there.
Otherwise he'll get run into massive amounts of cost and delays due to existing underground infrastructure - of which some old elements may not be marked accurately (or even at all) on any map.
I can only guess that he feels he has some alternative design for a tunnel boring machine that could be cheaper than today's designs and more tolerant to problematic geology. A thought that may or may not be accurate.
"... even though he sins so much that people cast him out of demons."
I'm sure it will work, and not completely be supported by govt handouts and investor money. I'm sure it will turn a real profit.
This has existed in Europe for quite a while now.
In order for the hyperloop to work it's going to need tunnels... and lots of them.
They're called Metro systems. There's even one in LA though he may not know that since he probably hasn't been on public transport since he was in his mothers womb. Amazingly they travel through tunnels underground and bypass road traffic! Who knew?
just start digging will not be Boring when they hit sometime up till the court part.
Has he by any chance purchased an island with an active volcano? Seems like he has all the tools for an underground lair that launches rockets.
This guy has gone completely off his rocket. Who Tweets stuff like that? Him and Trump.
Isn't running:
- A car design and manufacturing company
- A rocket launcher and capsule design and manufacturing company
- A lithium batter design and manufacturing company
- Managing a very high speed mass transportation concept
enough for one person?
It's not like Tesla cars are perfect or that SpaceX launcher's aren't blowing up on the pad and I don't think battery one has come out of SolarCity yet.
Mr. Musk has come up with some great ideas, but I think he needs to keep his (business) interests limited to ensure that they are all successful and outstanding products.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Mr. Musk,
Sir, I apologise for disturbing your inane self-narration, but I must kindly request that you shut up.
Sincerely,
Some internet loser who doesn't even own a yacht.
I personally have thought up half a dozen cheap ways to give drivers who are approaching traffic lights enough information that they don't have to hit it red and stop --- things that work like the countdowns provided by pedestrian walk lights. And it doesn't have to be mandatory. If maybe 30% of drivers use the inforrmation to coast through, then the other 70% will have no choice. A lot of gas could probably be saved.
This sort of thing has probably been patented many times but I've never see any mention of it anywhere. Take it and run, Elon.
In terms of depth, that's what I thought - how deep do you have to tunnel to make sure you don't hit anything man-made? I'm also thinking of geo-thermal heating/cooling piping that can do down a couple of hundred feet.
Regardless of how deep, it will also have to be fast. I believe current borers (correct term?) drill at the rate of 1-2 metres per day. To be fair, a big part of what they do is mould concrete and rebar into a completed tunnel which is a big, complicated job, but for anything else to come about, it would have to be at least 10x faster - at that rate, you would do a kilometer every three months. This would be pretty good for the central city, but barely acceptable for going out to the burbs and not acceptable at all when anything beyond that is required - then you would want to have 100+ metres per day.
In "Oath of Fealty", Niven and Pournelle had a borer that seemed to reach this speed by melting rock rather than cutting it and making the rock cool to form the walls and ceiling of the tunnel.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
I do understand that very high speed transport can be created in tubes. I'm not so certain that it is such a great idea. I do have hope that autonomous cars can actually eliminate a great deal of traffic congestion. For example, imagine a driverless, grocery delivery vehicle that carries groceries to four homes. Normally we would see four cars making round trips to the store. But the store can deliver to four homes with only one vehicle. A drug store could deliver to quite a few homes with one autonomous vehicle. Pizza delivery is an issue as the cost of the driver is a factor. But with an electric, autonomous pizza delivery system the cost of the driver vanishes and the need to buy gasoline also vanishes. I suppose one could even have a pizza cooking system on board as well. The idea being that the vehicle could deliver to several homes in one run rather than having numerous people driving to pick up their dinner. It does seem to me that machinery that could get the poisonous materials out of rivers and streams would be a better way to go than just putting more tubes in the earth. Many states have big trouble with toxins in the river bottoms and so far there is no efficient or reasonable way to fix that issue.
He was clearly joking. Get a sense of humour.
If you know anything about the science behind colonization of Mars, you'd realize that people will need to live underground (at least at first) because of the high radiation striking the surface. When terraforming occurs that bulks up the atmosphere and some kind of planetary magnetic shielding can be implemented, only then will people walk unprotected on the surface. Until that point, the most effective way of building underground cities would be to have some kind of boring technology that can hollow out and reinforce underground spaces for people to live in.
The technology can also be used here on Earth to exponentially increase the total volume of cities by going underground. Brilliant.
Maybe he is preparing to run for president.
"Shares of Boeing spiked momentarily as a tweet from Elon Musk hinted at buying the Aerospace giant. When asked, stock pickers universally believed that 'boring' was an autocorrect artifact."
#fakenews #autocorrupt #dyac
Maybe he is preparing to run for president
-no sig today-
Your $90K car not being able to move through your $1M/mi highways at a speed that will not make you frowny. As much as I still think Bill Gates might be the Bob Dylan of tech (talent factor roughly equivalent to right place/right time factor) I think Bill has done the right thing with Being A Wealthy Person in giving money to projects that will solve the "we're dying here" problems. There's the old bit about Bill Gates makes so much money that it would be a net loss for him to stop and pick up a $100 bill. Musk seems to think that such time-saving for productive people is an actual plan to make money and that the majority cares about such kewl solutions. Also, people who think that everyone would rather spend time in a driverless car or a tube pod rather than with their hands on the wheel and their foot on the accelerator are mis-judging up to a third of the travel population.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
What was the last Big Thing?
Links to some thoughts of other content.
http://www.projectcamelot.org/underground_bases.html
http://www.stevequayle.com/index.php?s=97
If boring is new, perhaps it is a tech-transfer activity to start (finally) transferring taxpayer/citizen funded research into value to the taxpayer/citizen. Value isn't value unless it is realized.
-EngrStudent
Regardless of how deep, it will also have to be fast. I believe current borers (correct term?) drill at the rate of 1-2 metres per day.
According to Crossrail, the largest distance tunnelled by one of their boring machines in a single day was "72 metres by Ellie on 16 April 2014 between Pudding Mill Lane and Stepney Green". So 1-2 metres seems to be out by quite a bit.
He's a traitor! He wants to end reliance on fossil fuels. In Tumpmerica, he will be arrested, charged with crimes against coal, and thrown in prison!
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Southern California isn't the best place for a subway. There are currently only two underground subway lines, and they came in vastly over budget - the Metro Red line's original cost estimate was $400 million; it was completed for $4.5 billion. It held the record for the most expensive civic construction project until Boston's Big Dig.
The reason is that SoCal is full of oil. If you visit, you'll see functioning oil pumps scattered around in random places. It bubbles out of the ground naturally in the La Brea Tar Pits, and into the surrounding ocean as underwater oil seeps. When they dug the first tunnels for the Red line, the workers returned the next day to find oil and tar seeping in through the walls of the freshly-dug tunnel. They had to stop construction until they could come up with new ways to hold back the seepage and insure it wouldn't become a problem in the future decades of subway operation. (The Big Dig was expensive because of similar problems, except with seawater seepage.)
Oh yeah, the earthquakes tend to be a problem too. Especially if your tunnel crosses over a fault line.
how deep do you have to tunnel to make sure you don't hit anything man-made?
Deeper than the last guy (is what she said, I know, I know). And hey, once you're done, you have made something man-made to hit at the new, previously unoccupied depth.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Thank you for the update - I didn't realize how much the technology had improved over the past few years.
My 1-2metre/day was based on the first generation borers used in Toronto about ten years ago. The five year old models in Toronto worked at around 10metres/day and the latest (3rd generation) ones are doing significantly better (although I don't think they're making the 38metres/day of the Crossrail borers).
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Your tears are delicious
As are yours delicate little Trumpite snowflake.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I've long thought that ultimately roads should be underground. I would absolutely love to live in a subdivision with underground roads. Think how wonderful it would be to walk outside your house and only have walking and bicycle paths! In the winter, you would never have to worry about icy roads or snow plows, which also means you would have vastly fewer potholes in the roads.
We've already learned to put much of our other infrastructure underground. My neighborhood has all the wires buried. The only reason older neighborhoods still have above ground wires is the cost of burying them.
Cost.
Yup, that's the only problem here. I fear that even if the boring of the tunnel were free, the cost of tunnels would be prohibitive in most situations (you have to build a secure wall and ceiling, and you have to install a ventilation system along with lighting). I suppose if your boring machine had a built-in fusion reactor, it could melt what it bores through and create a nice solid shell and even leave a nice road surface. If you only allow electric cars in the tunnels, you can forego the ventilation system.
I think this is still science fiction for now, but if anyone can figure out how to make it work with technology that can be built today, it's Elon Musk.
Well, there's always the Uber approach -- tunnel at whatever depth you want, and if you hit something man-made, just keep drilling right through it and see if anyone ever notices or complains.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Cities forcing businesses to provide free, abundant parking (this is the norm in the USA) and then wondering why they have a traffic problem is like having standing water on your property and wondering why you have a mosquito problem.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Pffft. What's this high pressure gas pipeline sign for? I'm Elon Musk, I'm just gonna start diggi-
Don't know the terrain is like where musk is boring, but cross rail bored through silt and stiff clay. London is a river city and sits on lots of clay. Great for boring through. The channel tunnel got only a couple of meters per day because it was solid rock.
http://www.tunneltalk.com/Cros...
Signature v3.0, now with 42% less memory usage.
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Boring a tunnel, with a nice large aperture.
Can maybe solve the whole tunneling problem if he bypasses the digging altogether and just generates a portal.
Elon Musk will burn your house down - with the lemons!
Ok, back to work. Mondays, yeah?
"Musk has also been working on resolving his frustration with traffic issues through above-ground means with his Hyperloop venture, which proposes a plan for mass-transit pods moving through above-ground tubes."
Like I've said before, this Hyperloop horsecrap is NEVER going to happen. It's classic "pie in the sky" and will never be built due to a variety of issues, not the least of which are the insurmountable engineering problems. Then add stuff like right-of-way issues, safety concerns, fragility, security, production and on-going costs, and you'll see that the Hyperloop "plan" is 100% nonsense. It will never be built.
It's like Boeing's "Sonic Cruiser" project, remember that? Of course you don't remember it, because it was never built. It was also a "pie in the sky" project- an enormously expensive new plane with virtually no user base. It would have required huge expenditures to build and a tremendous investment to operate, all to serve an extremely tiny, theoretical group of potential customers who would be willing to pay a friggin' fortune to get from point A to point B a full 30 minutes faster than existing aircraft services already provide. And it was a complete bust.
I know the Hyperloop fanbois and the Elon Musk-worshipers will shit all over this and mod me down to oblivion, but that won't change the fact that the Hyperloop will never be built. It's just not gonna happen.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Don't fall for it Marvin. He is trying to get you to eat your parents again. The tears are a reference to "Scott Tinnerman must die".
Hey Marvin,
I thought you only got paid to troll climate change articles.
...because I kind of thought he might be going off to Georgia to hunt one of those giant boars they show all the time on Youtube. It seems like something rich people would do.
I for one welcome Elon Musk's genetically engineered tunneling creatures: http://imgur.com/a/lfc9i
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Maybe he watched that movie "Core" (I think) where they were able to build a machine that tunneled through miles of rock very quickly when they threw enough money at the problem.
Then they should at least rename to Unter. Or Ünter, for the sake of consistency.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Obviously there were cost overruns because of things discovered while boring the tunnels, but I wonder how much of that 10x overrun was because of spectacularly bad planning and complete dishonesty on the part of the people who did the planning and the contractors who did the bidding. Mass transit projects have a long history of being over-budget and late, and not by a little. It leads one to think that project approval might be gained by having a dishonest price tag up front, and then the project survives due to the sunk cost fallacy, and nobody in government wanting to own up to what amounts to a complete shit estimate.
But it happens almost every single time.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
If you recall, Musk previous stated that mining would have to be done on Mars. I think it's likely that he's working on automated mining because boring is one facet of mining. It could also be used to make underground tunnels on Mars between modules.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Tunnel boring is actually a perfect match to his other businesses.
Hyperloop requires straight tubes. If Microtunneling costs can be reduced by a magnitude, underground Hyperloop probably is cheaper than overground tubes.
Dedicated tunnels for Autonomous cars match perfectly. Robotic vehicle tunnels can be small-diameter and multi-directional single-tube.
Small tunnels are relatively cheap. Tunneling costs are proportional to the amount of rock removed.
You can't use gas/diesel cars trucks without big ventilation. Large sums of money for implementation, materials and maintenance, Lighting and water pump electric bills. Er, um.. don't they already have these things, called subways?? Earthquake anyone? Yea, this will end well.
Too bad he depends heavily on government funding for all his enterprises
The problem with just "digging" is all the stuff underground you can see. Old pipes, forgotten tunnels, other people/organizations rights - there's a nightmare of obstacles to digging - least of which is the digging machine.
... and your point? The end result is that he is pushing progress forward. Many other areas and industries get subsidies or tax breaks, just the way the world works.
It could also be happening almost every single time on these large projects because every single one is unique, with it's own set of unique and unforeseen problems. There's not always much heritage knowledge that can be used to predictably plan such a project, and issues can balloon into major reworks if they're only discovered late. Yes, there's some dishonesty and some negligence, but also some things that just could not have been foreseen or planned for. Hell, sometimes it's a shit estimate because of the voters: they want it done but they don't want to pay for it, so insufficient planning is done (due to lack of funds for doing so) and the resulting issues are left to be worked out in production.
It's not just a government problem, as it happens in industry as well.
I can't find it right now, but recently read an article about how much costs can balloon depending on where in the project lifecycle unexpected problems are discovered, and it was something like exponential in function of project stage. It was a very reasonable factor 2x if it's discovered early in planning, but if it's near the end of the project then it's significantly larger due to the whole project having to stop, reevaluate, rewind, retool, restart, etc...
Why not electric multi-rotors instead ? Would make a good extension to what Tesla is already doing for cars.
"My 1-2 metre/day was based on the first generation borers used in Toronto about ten years ago. "
Boring machines have gotten more exciting since then.
The London yellow pages used to have an entry "Boring, see: engineers"
It must be nice to have so much money you can say "Fuck it. I'm tired of driving around this mountain and I'm going to have it moved."
...where Elon Musk does not know how much he doesn't know. Believe me, unless he's "boring" down 1 KM or so, he's going to have HUGE problems with existing infrastructure (not pipes, so much as pilings and things that hold up large buildings). And, there's no central compilation of those details that have been installed over the past 50 years!
Boring may be what he bends his pick on :-)
He's resurrecting research from LANL/RAND for a nuclear subterrene, which is basically an extremely hot and wide straw that melts it's way through rock, and breaks up the center rock tube like a deli meat slicer.
I worked in Mary Gates Hall at UW. I don't care if his money is old or new. He's keeping people from dying while Musk is whining about his commute.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Preparing/studying for underground Mars colony most likely reason for this new venture
This one is on the house.
Uggggh... what a troll! Musk has landed four gigantic booster rockets on barges floating at sea... 3-D prints his rocket motors for a tiny fraction of the cost of traditional CNC... is cranking out tens of thousands of EVs a, month with nearly a half-million orders WITH deposits for his Model 3--- makes 7-passenger, FULLY AUTONOMOUS SEDANS that can outrun the world's fastest ICE cars, and do so with nearly 100mpge efficiency--- and you are foolish enough to think he will create a TRAFFIC PROBLEM? You ARE joshing, right?
You know, if they ever dig any tunnels to help a city's water treatment plants, they could say "We bore the shit outta Cleveland".
Build railroads. And in the meantime make all Teslas form convois that block the roads for combustion engine vehicles.
Take LA to the next level. Build new streets above the existing streets. The old streets will be the new tunnels and the city will be flood proof.
First one post about how Zuckerberg "built" an AI assistant for his house. Now Musk is going to "build" a tunnel-boring machine...
I wonder at which point in time did these rich assholes decide they deserve the credit for doing something, when all they did was decide that someone else should be paid for actually doing it...