Oh cmon, like he doesn't already have his own Tracy Island somewhere.
Elon Musk wants to get into the boring business, literally
Elon Musk has fired off a series of Tweets suggesting he wants to get into the boring business. As in boring tunnels. The serial entrepreneur seems to have been stuck in traffic and decided the best way to get out of it, in the long term, is to do what he does best: start a company to dig into the problem from a different …
COMMENTS
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Wednesday 21st December 2016 18:28 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Umm
"Not if it's electric cars only. I wonder who would sell me one of those."
1. Create supply...
2. Create demand for that supply...
3. Profit.
On the other hand, every single tunnel meant for road purpose has miles and miles of ventilation shafts pumping fresh air through them. Even the smallest tunnels have massive turbine-encased fans inside, and are bored a bit taller than the traffic they carry, when they don't have ventilation shafts per se.
I wonder how you can't enter some mines with ICE cars... but you could with an electric vehicle.
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Monday 19th December 2016 08:25 GMT Anonymous Coward
Yeah because its so easy
To tunnel under major cities like SF, NYC and London. Not like there isn't already a network of tunnels for subways, sewers, utilities and who knows what else - some not on any map, deep foundation piers for skyscrapers, and layers of fill since most older cities were literally built on the debris of older versions.
Even if you say "hey if you go deep enough, its not a problem"....well, that's true, but you still have to get yourself to/from ground level. Good luck with that.
Musk seems to be one of those guys who thinks up cool things and thinks he's so smart for coming up with something no one else ever did. People did, but decided it was too hard because of all the problems he doesn't consider until he really tries to do it. Kudos to him to try his hand at hard problems like spaceflight and starting a car company from scratch, but I think he'll meet his match with Hyperloop and definitely would if he pursues this Boring idea!
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Monday 19th December 2016 11:05 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Yeah because its so easy
Even if you say "hey if you go deep enough, its not a problem"....well, that's true, but you still have to get yourself to/from ground level. Good luck with that.
For somebody prizing himself as the lateral thinker and innovator, this "build more tunnels" idea is fairly run of the mill, merely treating the symptom. The cause of congestion is almost always a bad case of megacity, putting far too many people in close proximity, and then compounding that by centralising the work and cultural life a fair way from any accomodation, and a long way from anything affordable. If you're a top City lawyer, great, you can afford the country des-res, and a nice flat a short tube ride away. If you're more of an office prole, or the salt of the earth unskilled worker keeping the City running, then you're looking at a one hour plus commute.
Changing the mess that we have now isn't going to happen quickly, but the key problem is that centralisation of work and culture, and a simple start would be to stop the endless building of ever higher density office in metropolitan centres - planners and developers are actively making the situation worse. Even with "mixed use" claims, the reality of (say) the Shard is that you've got perhaps 7,000 jobs on a ground space that the preceding building only had a couple of thousand, and of the 7,000, I'd imagine the number living and working in the Shard is in single digits. With London's transport network already over-capacity, it wasn't exactly a brainwave to add circa 5,000 jobs at one of the busiest transport And wherever you look, the story is the same - the Heron Tower off Bishopsgate is 46 floors, and that replaced a previous building of nine floors.
If cities want to solve their hideous mobility challenges, then they need to start off trying to be smaller and more decentralised. How many cities are both saying and doing either?
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Tuesday 20th December 2016 00:39 GMT Long John Brass
Re: Yeah because its so easy
@Ledswinger
If cities want to solve their hideous mobility challenges, then they need to start off trying to be smaller and more decentralised
Sorry mate; But having lived in both London and a "smaller and more decentralised" city I can tell you first hand that they both suck. In London there is the ever present crush of people on the trains and the underground + the high costs for transport and living; In Auckland there is the ever present crush of people on the roads who should be in charge of anything more complicated than a pencil eraser and even present a chocking hazard for most of them, then there is the costs associated with fuel, parking on road costs etc.
There is no Utopia I'm afraid :(
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Monday 19th December 2016 15:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Yeah because its so easy
A tunnel that went all the way from south to North London would be brilliant. Skip the M25 & London traffic and deep enough to skip all the other tunnels.
The estimates for the proposed Lower Thames (road) Crossing, or for Crossrail suggest to me that your solution has an indicative cost of c£40 billion. Unless you can invoke some causative effect on climate change or claim "northern powerhouse" benefits then government won't find this sort of money.
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Monday 19th December 2016 20:49 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Yeah because its so easy
This is London we are talking about. Money for transport is no problem
Money for shit public transport is no problem. FTFY.
I appreciate the rest of the country might think London has it good with public transport, those who routinely endure the dystopian conditions of the underground, or even the overground in many place would beg to differ.
The nearest it has ever managed to investment in car sector transport was when Red Ken re-phased the traffic lights to slow cars down before the bearded tw@t introduced the "congestion charge".
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Monday 19th December 2016 08:45 GMT Norman Nescio
Easy.
Just use sufficiently powerful lasers to melt the rockface, and spray-deposit the resulting lava onto the tunnel walls to a sufficient depth to assure structural integrity.
Problem solved, just a few minor engineering issues to deal with, like heat dissipation, where to put the excess lava (spoil), and the details of the lava-spray guns. Getting the portable power source to operate the lasers might be a bit tricky, too. I'm sure Elon can buy in the expertise needed.
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Monday 19th December 2016 12:42 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Easy.
"Just use sufficiently powerful lasers to melt the rockface,.."
Although I don't have any numbers, I think you'll find that relatively few tunnels are through solid rock; most long tunnels seem to encounter a variety of soils, clays and unconsolidated, or broken/fractured rock. Breaking in to underground springs and rivers is also fairly common in tunnelling.
I'm not confident that your lasers will be able to seal and thereby support tunnels in these ground conditions.
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Monday 19th December 2016 10:47 GMT Muscleguy
Take a look at the land movements laterally and in terms of uplift during the recent Kaikoura earthquake in NZ. Musk had better build his tunnels well away from the San Andreas fault. Do you want to be in a tunnel or on a road when the Big One hits?
In NZ when an earthquake of sufficient magnitude hits NZ rail has to suspend services whilst they send min on jiggers to check the integrity of the tunnels. NZ is a very hilly place and there are a lot of tunnels, so they have quite a lot of jigger stations dotted about.
I suppose eventually the tunnels will have a drone dock and when the earthquake hits a bored tech will brush crumbs from his protruding belly and watch the feeds in a disinterested way. It will be 'progress'.
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Monday 19th December 2016 16:10 GMT John Styles
Why is this delusional wank being reported by anyone, accept to mock (which the Reg wins many points for essentially doing (*))?
We are very much in Dunning-Kruger territory. Perhaps we should rename Silicon Valley Dunning-Kruger Valley, currency the Dunning-Krugerrand (aka bitco(i)n).
(*) Talking of which, given that The Independent an online news site seems to get free publicity on the BBC New Channel's newspaper round-ups by virtue of knocking up a fake tabloid front page, can't you just mock one up, send the PDF to the BBC and have it featured?
Or is it necessary to have rented a printing press once? What are the criteria? We have an office A1 printer if it is necessary to have used one at least once, I will gladly video the filming process and send you the A1 sheet if this is a necessary criteria.
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Tuesday 20th December 2016 01:18 GMT Anonymous Coward
“It is just a hole in the ground,” he says. “It is not that hard.”
For values of "my other profitable business involves sending people to Mars", no, it's definitely not that hard. No arguing with that.
I wish I could come up with a company name, motto, and business plan while stuck in a traffic jam though. :'(