Slashdot Mirror
Elon Musk Posts New Video of 'Boring' Equipment and Company's First Tunnel (cnbc.com)
Elon Musk has posted a new video and several pictures of equipment that will be used to start digging tunnels beneath Los Angeles. There's a picture of boring machine segments that are being lowered into the start tunnel at SpaceX, a front view of the tunnel, an inside view of the tunnel, and a picture of the front of the boring machine that will cut through underground rock. Additionally, the video shows a version of the "skate" that will cary cars through the tunnel at a speed of 125 mph. CNBC reports: The project is one of Musk's latest ventures, which was inspired by a desire to alleviate "out of control" traffic in Los Angeles. He aims to first dig a tunnel from SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, to the nearby Los Angeles airport. Musk frequently flies from Los Angeles to the San Francisco area, where he runs Tesla. Eventually, he envisions a deep, multilayered network of underground tunnels spanning the city.
Until he actually digs a tunnel that leaves his property, all this is just fun and games with out much point. Not to mention, where is the exit to this billion dollar boondoggle and where are all those permits you require sir? This IS California you know....
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Put it where the sun don't shine!
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Solutions like this are classic examples of tech-rich people thinking they have all the answers when there's a whole bank of qualified specialist people already working in that field who know what's really needed to fix the problem but have only been stymied by politics.
If traffic is driving Musk nuts then the solution is not to find innovative new ways to handle more traffic. The solution is to ask why is traffic so bad in the first place.
Recommended reading: The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jacobs
Or if that's too heavy, try Suburban Nation: The rise of sprawl and the decline of the American dream.
Only then will you come to see the culprit: Single Use Zoning, aka the BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything) rules. Single-use zoning forces everybody to make several car journeys just to get through a typical day. Going to work? Car. Going out for lunch? Car. Going home form work? Car. Need to go out for a bottle of milk and postage stamp? Car. Going to a movie? Car.
No bloody wonder the place is flooded with traffic. You try to build a city around the automobile and it becomes a hostile environment for pedestrians and cyclists. You try to widen roads to accommodate more cars and the laws of induced demand kick in, resulting in even more traffic and roads as choked as they were before.
Learn a few things about urban planning, Elon. Don't arrogantly assume that you're the first person to want to address this problem. Smart growth and sustainable, walkable, transit-oriented development is a far better solution than drilling holes in the ground and cracking puns about the word "boring." It requires years of tedious work and politicking to build support for smart growth. A city is not a private company with which you can do what you like. There are elected councils, public advisory committees, public hearings, tax implications, and all manner of complex bureaucratic hoops that you have to jump through to fix these things.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
is it boring you?
I'm just bored with it.
If it weren't for the quotes around the word boring it would be a perfectly straight headline, but the quotes make me want to punch the writer.....
That was awesome.
I'm sure Elon has a plan for that as well.
Amd yet they just keep digging it out.
What happens when an earthquake collapses or changes the course of a tunnel, so people travelling in it abruptly reach a dead end?
The article says: "Eventually, he envisions a deep, multilayered network of underground tunnels spanning the city." I can't believe we call someone who takes this long to envision something an innovator! Why can't he have envisioned this already? It seems like the CNBC reporter beat him to it. Or, perhaps, the CNBC reporter doesn't worry about grammar.
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
Since we're not going to knock down and rebuild Los Angeles then the option is to find a solution for the city as it exists.
You post also ignores one key fact: the focus is on inter-city travel, not inner city travel.
From Phoenix to Los Angeles there is a good 300+ miles of I-10 that takes up a good 4-5 hours of driving.
Putting in a tunnel between the two cities avoids the most important problems of putting solutions on land:
You have to own the land
You have to work around existing infrastructure.
300 miles at 125 miles per hours is less than 3 hours of travel time. And since it's automated, you can do something productive during that time.
Work Safe Porn
That CNBC link has 14 trackers and about the same number of scripts. I don't bother counting cookies or ads any more. Is that the best link we can find? No slashdotter, properly equipped with malware protection, will be able to see the pics or videos. And if you do see the pics & vids, be aware that you are not alone as you cruise the web.
...omphaloskepsis often...
What I want to know is what happens when someone gets into this high speed tunnel, rolls their window down, and jumps out?
What about people throwing their trash out of their window?
What about pickup trucks, do those fit in this sled? What about the stupid fuckers that have shit in their bed that flies out at speed, potentially impacting the vehicle in the sled behind?
The only way I see this working is if a car that has wirelessly controllable features where they can lock your windows and only allow approved vehicles to travel. Even after all of those potential conflict points, you still have the inevitable problem of traffic at the end of this tunnel. Did anything think about how that was supposed to be handled?
Voting dumb on this idea.
best way to build a moon base is to bore into the side of a crater that is perpetually sunlit at on of the poles of the moon. Solar panels + boring machine = moon base. For those of you who think this is just to alleviate los angeles traffic -- this is why you are not a billionaire like elon musk.
Hey. Don't mess wif my musk hole you surface dweller. Took elon time to dig it. Great place for spay sex with pa-pal blessing from pope Gregory.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
I actually like the idea of a lot of tunnels under a city. Since it's basically a subway what is not to like?
The only thing Im not as sure about, are tunnels in California where earthquakes are not totally uncommon. I'd be interested to know what mitigation they have for that...
But apart from that, keep digging!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This brings to mind the Caldecott Tunnel fire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I am not particularly claustrophobic but I'd hate to be in a tunnel in CA during an earthquake, or in case of the inevitable car crash and subsequent vehicle fire. I've always had bad feelings in the BART Transbay tube. That would be a bad place to be stuck in an emergency no matter what platitudes and assurances they post about emergency exits and safety procedures. I was living in the bay area during the Northridge quake, and the Loma Prieta quake as well.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
and (might be a shock to some) not batting 1000 still gets shit done
He wants to retire on Mars, so he's building rockets to get there.
Mars has no fossil fuels, so everything's going to be electric and the source will be solar or nuclear. So he's got Tesla working on solar power and storage.
Mars has a nasty surface, so underground is the place to be. Either you build and heap surface material over you... or you bore tunnels. Enter the Boring Company.
Mars has no communications infrastructure... at all. Enter SpaceX worldwide Internet. You think those same satellites couldn't orbit Mars? Probably with less worry of orbital impact or atmospheric drag, too.
Mars has no transportation infrastructure... and the surface (as previously mentioned) is not human-friendly. Mars ALSO has very little atmosphere, and Elon has a boring machine. Enter the Hyperloop. With less gravity and less atmosphere to deal with, the Hyperloop concept seems like it's a perfect fit for a well-bored tunnel.
Each of the things he's working on is part of a future Mars colony, and they all have the potential to make him money here (which helps him get there).
Not sure why you were down oted. Pretty sure 99% on the planet agree with you.
then he better invest in a soylent green processing plant otherwise he's going to starve in the first month
Who is going to pay for the repairs when the next earthquake happens and all these 'multilayered criss-crossing tunnels' under Los Angeles collapse, causing the foundations of all those 'earthquake reinforced' buildings/overpasses in LA to collapse, leading to a repeat of the 90s era LA Earthquake disaster?
Just because we haven't had a big one in a couple decades doesn't mean another isn't on the way, and trying to clean up after dozens or hundreds of interwoven collapsed concrete tunnels sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.
But that is the problem with smart people who have had more than an ounce of success: They get cocky and forget about 'minor' details that are a reason something 'obvious' wasn't implemented years or decades before. Sure LA has a few tunnels here and there, but the reason the majority of it is build aboveground is because earthquakes are common and ground shifting under you is slightly less dangerous than ground shifting ALL AROUND YOU.
But maybe he knows something I don't. I am not a geologist after all. Of course neither is he, but I assume he has the best money can buy :)
Seriously, have you ever been to a costco car wash? Have you ever seen how much trouble many of the people have just driving into the track?
How the hell are these morons supposed to drive their cars onto some "sled" that will drop down into a tunnel?
Not to mention the fact that it would like 5 fucking minutes for ONE car to get down there and cycle the next sled to be moved up to the deck. It would take hours before it was actually your turn to go down.
Google Maps says that if he leaves right now, the trip from his HQ to LA airport takes 12 to 16 minutes, by road. Going by his tunnel, maybe half that, if the car elevators at each end are really quick or if he leaves his cars pre-positioned at the tunnel level. If we assume he uses the tunnel twice a week, say 100 times a year, for the next 10 years, that's 2,000 trips, or about 14,000 minutes, or about 200 hours. If he can built it at 1/20th the cost per mile of the chunnel, that would be right around $1 billion. So it's going to cost him $5 million dollars for every saved hour. Is Elon's time worth $5 million an hour? Oh, he's going to open the tunnel to general use? How many cars an hour can the elevators position? Even if you figure one car per minute, that's still a very underutilized and uneconomical tunnel!
Anything I can do to facilitate that goal will be done.
Why 125 mph? Why not faster, twice or three times as fast.
And I don't mean rocks. Rather, it will be (underground) water. And different kinds of terrain. And seismic movements. And other tunnels (they are everywhere in modern cities). And building's basements. And on, and on.
Boring is only the beginning.
What happens if/when a significant earthquake hits?
(Which, I believe is unpredictably overdue.)
Is it safer to be in a tunnel, or on a surface road?
(I know - bridges/overpasses aren't any safer!)
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
Who will pay for the damage from this tunneling? If you believe that fracking is causing earthquakes then you are TOTALLY in tune with this. lol.
Imagine how many buildings and other structures can be damaged by this. I can wait for a good laugh.
If he lives to basically the maximum human lifespan, for 75 more years, he will need 17 tons of food. For that time span, he'll need 23 tons of oxygen. That can be recovered via electrolysis from 26 tons of water. Alternately, it can come from 85 tons of sodium chlorate and iron powder (ingredients for oxygen candles). The water is obviously more compact (and less potentially dangerous than oxygen candles if you handle them improperly), but it requires energy input (approximately 133 KW/H or 479 mJ for a days worth of oxygen, or 5.5 kW continuously, or .038 to .075 acres of solar cells on Mars). Basically though, even without using in situ resources and without needing energy input, all the food and oxygen that he would need for the rest of his life could fit into about 102 tons. That's about $675 million worth of cargo to Mars at current spaceX launch costs. So, basically, even without any in situ resource usage or power generation, Musk could take enough supplies with him to eat and breathe for the rest of his life.
If you allow for some in situ resource gathering, and energy generation then you could eliminate a lot of the weight. For example, you could eliminate the iron and just use the sodium chlorate and use solar heating to release oxygen, cutting about 40 tons. I think there are lithium based compounds that you could use to store even more oxygen. You could also gather materials to heat or process in various ways to extract oxygen. It turns out that there are lots of perchlorates on Mars, which isn't great news for growing crops in unprocessed soil, but leaves lots of possibilities for oxygen generation. Water is also obviously available on Mars. With processing, there's no reason that the soil couldn't be conditioned to grow crops in greenhouses. The lower general levels of insolation aren't really a problem as there are crops that grow in similar light levels on Earth, and there's no reason you couldn't boost that with grow lights or solar concentrators.
Anyway, basically, it's absolutely ridiculous to believe that a billionaire would starve on Mars in a month, let alone a year or a decad