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Are you looking at a different world than me? The current rate of technological process in the relevant areas - railways, tunnelling, bridges etc - is incredibl

Are you looking at a different world than me? The current rate of technological process in the relevant areas - railways, tunnelling, bridges etc - is incredibly slow. Building a 10 mile tunnel under a city is still a multi-decade affair. The fundamental components of trains haven't changed since the 60s. Sure, there's more automation - but it's hardly revolutionary. A lot of US commuter railways are still using electronics installed in the 1930s!! https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/23/nyregion/nyc-mta-subway-signals.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/23/nyregion/nyc-mta-subway-s... The enduring theme over the last few decades has been infrastructure costs going up. The complete reversal of that required to build a completely new tunnel around the entire planet seems unlikely. That's before you get to the political aspect.

jcranmer 6y ago
> Building a 10 mile tunnel under a city is still a multi-decade affair. That is almost purely a function of political ill-will for infrastructure, and not any issues regarding construction itself. Actual construction times tend to be pretty short: it takes decades to get the politicians to agree to fund construction, but only a few years to actually build it. > A lot of US commuter railways are still using electronics installed in the 1930s!! US commuter railways, you may be shocked to discover, are not at the cutting edge of railway technology. Or railway operations. Of course, the US has a reluctance to admit that it's not the best at something and to actually look at foreign countries for innovations that occurred in the past 100 years that it might have missed out on.
yellowapple 6y ago
> Are you looking at a different world than me? I mean, yes? You seem to be focusing on what's happening today, whereas I was pretty deliberate in my framing of my idea as something "within the next century". And no, just because people are slow to adopt new technologies doesn't mean those new technologies never were developed. We have the technology today to connect every major city - and probably most minor cities - throughout the Americas or throughout Europe/Asia/Africa with high speed rail, and we probably have the resources, too. Hell, both were arguably true 50 years ago. Our reasons for not doing so are political, not technological.

jcranmer 6y ago

> Building a 10 mile tunnel under a city is still a multi-decade affair. That is almost purely a function of political ill-will for infrastructure, and not any issues regarding construction itself. Actual construction times tend to be pretty short: it takes decades to get the politicians to agree to fund construction, but only a few years to actually build it. > A lot of US commuter railways are still using electronics installed in the 1930s!! US commuter railways, you may be shocked to discover, are not at the cutting edge of railway technology. Or railway operations. Of course, the US has a reluctance to admit that it's not the best at something and to actually look at foreign countries for innovations that occurred in the past 100 years that it might have missed out on.

yellowapple 6y ago

> Are you looking at a different world than me? I mean, yes? You seem to be focusing on what's happening today, whereas I was pretty deliberate in my framing of my idea as something "within the next century". And no, just because people are slow to adopt new technologies doesn't mean those new technologies never were developed. We have the technology today to connect every major city - and probably most minor cities - throughout the Americas or throughout Europe/Asia/Africa with high speed rail, and we probably have the resources, too. Hell, both were arguably true 50 years ago. Our reasons for not doing so are political, not technological.