Most of you probably know that I love researching things, particularly gadgets of some sort. One of my favorite books as a younger child (and still one of my favorites) was David Macualay's The New Way Things Work. Gadgets and inventions have always fascinated me.
Some of you also probably know that California voted to build a $118 billion high-speed rail, which, since it is all coming out of taxpayer's pockets (and is ridiculously expensive), is not something I like. Though I think high-speed trains and maglev (magnetic levitation) trains are interesting and handy, spending $118 billion on ANY project is a little on the "too much" side.
Now, as much as those two paragraphs seem disconnected, they really aren't. Yesterday, Elon Musk, the billionare CEO of Tesla Motors (electric cars) and SpaceX (private spacecraft - really worth looking up), proposed an alternative to the high-speed rail. His idea is totally new and incredibly cool. While I would prefer the state didn't spend ANY money (we're hopelessly broke as it is), Musk's Hyperloop idea is very fascinating and would theoretically only cost $6 billion (which, though still a lot of money, is $112 billion cheaper than the rail).
I won't tell you too much about the idea - I'm going to link to his plans (all 50 pages of them), but if it worked as he planned, the Hyperloop would take passengers from L.A. to San Francisco in 35 short minutes, going an average of 700 mph. As an additional bonus, the energy costs of the Hyperloop would be very minimal - if you look at Musk's plans, the energy consumed per mile for the Hyperloop is around 10 times less than the energy consumed per mile by a car or train.
I think it would be really neat to have a Hyperloop - but I would like to have it privately built and operated, not state built and poorly operated. What do you think?
Link to plans: http://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/hyperloop_alpha-20130812.pdf
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