6 ms·

Robert Goddard designed a vacuum train in the 1910s, why did Elon think it was going to work a century later?

by vorticalbox 3y ago

paulddraper 3y ago
Because the tech had advanced in 110 years? Apparently not, I suppose is your point.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- stephen_g 3y ago
  There's no reason for it to advance - we have good alternatives, and there's no benefit that this kind of system brings that is worth the massive extra cost (which mostly can't be solved - it's the massive amount of material required for the vacuum chamber and the massive amount of energy required to pump down and maintain the pressure. High-speed rail would be extremely cheap in comparison).
Syonyk 3y ago
Because the arrogance of modern Silicon Valley thinking is that "We are better, in every possible way, than older engineers, because we know code." And Elon Musk seems very, very prone to this sort of thinking (or, at least, his companies do, and I think it comes from him). One example of many is the weird conversations he was having about sonic velocity robots and "lights out dreadnaught" sort of auto factories, which just about every other automaker has been trying on and off since the 80s, and has worked out that it doesn't work. So Tesla's modern lines, after quite a bit of fooling around with that sort of rubbish, look just like everyone else's lines, because as soon as you have humans in the loop for the things robots can't do well, you may as well run the line at human speeds.
- drcross 3y ago
  What you call arrogance I call enthusiasm, industrialism and hope for a better future. Your attitude, quite frankly, sucks.
  - Syonyk 3y ago
    I mean, I'll admit I've watched the tech industry promise the moon and deliver a user-surveilling mud pie a few too many times to particularly care for their hype anymore. It's 2023. I'd like to buy a car, TV, phone, or computer that isn't, by default, "slurping as much behavioral data as it thinks it can possibly get away with, routed out whatever connection it can find, to be sold to others who want to influence my thinking." It's hard to find.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  Yeah, and because of that, today we have mainstream electric cars, an Earth blanketed with Internet from space, and the cheapest spacelift cost ever achieved. Any one of these would have cemented him as a premier industrialist. In the end, there's legions of Internet commenters who complain about Elon Musk in between complaining about their bosses or complain about Google and Facebook or what have you. And then there's this guy doing things successfully. The Silicon Valley attitude that I love is that when someone tells you "that's not going to work", you just go ahead and do it if you have conviction. After all, you're only sacrificing your own self.
  - Syonyk 3y ago
    Musk was not instrumental in mainstream EVs. He was on the early wave of it, yes, but other companies had EVs out at the same time or before, and the price drop in lithium was obvious to everyone who was paying attention at the time. It would have happened one way or another. Yes, we've ruined astronomy with a ton of LEO satellites, but we've got some internet in exchange (I'm rural, I have it, I'm quite honestly not impressed with what it delivers for how much I pay, and how inconsistent it is - on some days, it's quite good, on other days it's more or less dialup grade). And we'll see how that lift capacity works. Everyone will continue insisting that Kessler Syndrome Won't Possibly Happen until about a year after it's happened, at which point, welp. It was fun while it lasted! I've done computer security a bit too long, I think.
    - jibe 3y ago
      other companies had EVs out at the same time Who? And how did they mainstream EVs more than Tesla? Fisker was in the market early, but didn’t mainstream EVs. GM was in way early, but probably held the market back.
      - bombcar 3y ago
        Honestly, Musk’s innovation with Tesla has nothing to do with the damn cars. He made sure they build a supercharging network to answer the main complaint. That worked.
- samtho 3y ago
  I don’t personally agree with a lot of what Musk says or does, but I do commend him for his propensity towards (literal and figurative) moonshots in the name of innovation. This is a refreshing take when most startups have a goal to exit in X number of years and the previously agile, lean, and innovative company becomes beholden to showing quarterly returns the moment they have the capital available to them to drive something truly innovative.
  - api 3y ago
    Musk succeeded where his companies tried to disrupt extremely moribund or set in their ways industries. SpaceX disrupted the space launch industry, which had not advanced at all since the 1970s. SpaceX really just picked up and ran with the idea of vertical landing reusable rockets, which was not new. Werner von Braun was exploring it for Saturn V back in the 60s, and Lockheed finally did it at prototype scale with the DC-X in the 90s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv9n9Casp1o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv9n9Casp1o (You can see at the end that the DC-X even does the same "hover slam" maneuver as Falcon 9 to land with maximum propellant efficiency.) Tesla was similar. Auto manufacture itself isn't moribund, but old school auto makers always hated EVs and resisted doing anything serious with them. Tesla's rise was a classic exploitation of the innovators' dilemma by calling them on this and forcing their hand. Now that some are embracing EVs, Tesla is facing increasingly stiff competition but has at least carved out a brand. Musk has not been particularly successful competing in less moribund industries. The Boring Company is kind of a flop. Neuralink seems questionable so far, to say the least. The Hyperloop, even if it worked, wouldn't be competitive at all with high speed rail on cost. It'd be faster and in theory more energy efficient but nowhere near enough to compensate for the added capital cost or complexity. Now if Musk had created, say, a rail transport division of Tesla he could have absolutely disrupted rail transport which is another fairly sluggish moribund industry. Imagine modern unmanned trains (FSD on rails is WAY easier than on roads) with batteries to allow them to span un-powered sections of track and recharge on sections with third rail or overhead catenary wires. But that would have been a threat to the car market. Innovators' dilemma anyone? My point is that Musk isn't superman... he just picked industries that were ripe for disruption and built teams that executed well enough to succeed. Of his companies SpaceX is by far the most impressive in its own right. What Tesla did could have been done much much better by a "legacy" car maker if they'd been willing to disrupt their ICE business. Nissan actually beat Tesla to market with an affordable mass market electric (the Leaf) but didn't put as much heart into it. The result was okay but not nearly as cool as what Tesla did, especially in Tesla's glory days. (I own a Leaf and have no complaints, but it's not sexy.)
- TalkalotDragon 3y ago
  There are advantages to not trusting the prevailing industry wisdom and trying things out on your own. like with Tesla they're ahead of other companies in multiple ways, but still behind in some aspects as well.
  - Syonyk 3y ago
    They've got a somewhat unreliable EV platform (the battery and drivetrain are fine, the rest of the car is fiddly at best), and have been instrumental in driving the auto industry away from "interfaces that work while driving" to "interfaces that assume self driving will happen any year now" in the past decade (I cannot stand touch screens while driving - they're an awful, awful interface for anything involving cars or airplanes). And it's fine to not trust prevailing wisdom, but when you don't even bother trying to learn from them because "they're dumb dinosaur companies that don't even know code" (which has utterly nothing to do with reality), re-learning the same lessons yourself isn't some amazing foresight. It's simply a stupid waste of resources.
_ea1k 3y ago
I'm going to guess that he didn't expect it to work. He never invested significantly, and there must be a reason. The simplest reason seems to be that he expected it not to work, at least with current technology.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  I always wondered just how bad an idea must have been. If Musk didn't go after it. Specially considering that he is the one who published it...
  - Seanambers 3y ago
    Elon Musk said from the outset that he was not gonna build it, he thought the idea was good and published a whitepaper on it which basically started the conversation. He also talks about a supersonic electrical passenger jet from time to time, but he says he don't have the time to do that either.
    - jasonwatkinspdx 3y ago
      Perhaps we should apply a bit more of a critical standard to Elon's various statements: https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/ https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/
      - sidibe 3y ago
        Argh those pesky regulators stopping Tesla from delivering robotaxis to their customers since 2018
  - qsdf38100 3y ago
    He did it to divert investment into high speed trains, which have the potential to significantly reduce the number of Teslas he could hope to sell. He successfully made investors waste hundreds of millions into these hyperloop startups, which are like real life parody of high-tech scam startups. On the other hand, one must be quite illiterate scientifically to buy into Musks grand sci-fi projects. Should only work on 5 years old. But you don’t have to believe, you just have to pretend and take these easy millions from rich but dumb VCs.
ForkMeOnTinder 3y ago
fwiw electric cars date back to the late 1800s. There's no reason old ideas can't work well with new tech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car#Early_developments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car#Early_development...
- Moomoomoo309 3y ago
  If there's been innovation on the fundamental problem, sure. We haven't really improved vacuum pumps that much, nor can we really fix the whole "one high-caliber bullet could implode the entire tunnel" problem yet.
  - chrisco255 3y ago
    These aren't powered by explosives. The tech was not the problem.
  - GuB-42 3y ago
    I hear the "catastrophic implosion" argument a lot but it doesn't sound right to me. I never shot at a vacuum chamber but my guess is that it will just create a leak, which is bad, will probably stop traffic for a while before it is repaired and the vacuum reestablished, but nothing catastrophic. A bomb would be a serious threat, the shockwave from both the explosion and rapid decompression, but I believe it can be mitagated. Bombs are bad for pretty much everything anyways. The other problem is if the walls don't break but the pipe crumples. But this is more likely to have a self-sealing effect, and with enough overbuilding, it shouldn't cause a chain reaction. I don't believe in hyperloop, but I think catastrophic implosions are rather low in the list of reasons why it won't happen. It doesn't even make it at the top of safety related reasons.
    - GuB-42 3y ago
      I am fine with the downvotes but if that because I am wrong, please tell me how. I have yet to see a convincing simulation of how a would be hyperloop would behave of one were to poke a hole in it. And by convincing situations, I mean one with an appropriate model, that is a very long tube engineered to hold a vacuum. An then you can downvote this post too, a good explanation is well worth a few karma points :)
addicted 3y ago
Well the most likely theory is that he did not expect it to work, which is precisely why he proposed it. The point wasn’t to work. The point was to kill/delay CAHSR.
- helf 3y ago
  [dead]
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > The point was to kill/delay CAHSR. Can't think of why a car company owner/CEO would want to do that...
panick21_ 3y ago
Have you actually read the bluepaper on it? Its really quite a different system. I think the idea was wrong and wouldn't actually work. But the assertion that its simply exactly the same isn't the case. That said, even if an idea is old, that doesn't mean a new take isn't warranted. They considered rocket re-usability in the 1960 and tried in the 1970. EV are 100+ years old.
melling 3y ago
Didn’t Musk come clean and say he was trying to stop the California HSR? He didn’t intend to build it.
- Veedrac 3y ago
  No, this is manufactured.
  - FireBeyond 3y ago
    By his biographer?
    - Veedrac 3y ago
      Well, more from the social media process that selects for whatever interpretation of evidence best matches the narrative they want, rather than the narrative that best matches the sum of evidence. The biography did not in fact say he did this, or even argue for it, or even evidence it. It was just the easiest source to interpret that way, and the sources where Musk said* “it doesn't have to be hyperloop, we should just do anything that is even incrementally ahead of what China and Japan are doing, rather than something that's the worst in the world” get ignored, because the actual truth is rarely viral. *paraphrasing from memory from the last time I had this argument and found an interview from the time
- qsdf38100 3y ago
  Not even trying to hide his disgusting business tactics. Casually, openly admitting it was to waste hundred of millions of investments. And people are still going to defend him because, rockets, and cars from the future, and success! He’s like trump, he knows people will follow regardless of what he does.
alangibson 3y ago
Much respect to an innovator, but Goddard also didn't understand gravity.
- hex4def6 3y ago
  How so?
  - alangibson 3y ago
    He fell victim to (discovered/invented?) the pendulum rocket fallacy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket#Pendulum_rocket_fallacy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket#Pendulum_rocket_falla...
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
qingcharles 3y ago
The Channel Tunnel was attempted in the 1800s and failed. A hundred years later they tried again and succeeded. So...
- mynameisnoone 3y ago
  Apples and oranges false equivocation of vastly different engineering problems. The problem with vacuum trains is they aren't workable with current materials, are impractical, and are too damn expensive. https://youtu.be/RNFesa01llk https://youtu.be/RNFesa01llk
  - diebeforei485 3y ago
    I didn't watch the entire 28 minute video, but I did watch the first part and the creator has a misconception that you share. It's key to understand that the Hyperloop concept uses low pressure (around 100 Pa), not a vacuum.
    - stephen_g 3y ago
      To anyone who works with vacuum systems, there is no "full vacuum", it's always some level of partial vacuum. The challenges are very similar, just the incredible amount of energy that would be required to pump down and maintain that partial vacuum such a huge volume would be slightly less massive.
      - diebeforei485 3y ago
        I don't think energy for air pumps is anywhere near the biggest problem for Hyperloop. There are other far hairier engineering challenges. That said, the efficiency of pumps is not at all linear with air pressure - 100 Pa is significantly better than near vacuum. The other misconception here is the assumption that the entire length needs to be maintained at 100 Pa. This is not necessary. Having a pressure gradient is fine because it isn't going fast near the terminals anyway.
    - himinlomax 3y ago
wrsh07 3y ago
I've always thought that his ideas like the boring company and the hyperloop make a lot more sense when you remember that he spends a lot of time wondering how someone should build a moon base or Mars base If you don't have an atmosphere, the near vacuum conditions are free You need robots to dig tunnels if you want sizeable bases. Figuring that out on earth just gives you a headstart. What should transit look like on the moon? On Mars? Can you use those tunnels? What will be different with lower gravity? This is the most charitable interpretation I can make, fwiw
jrflowers 3y ago
He lied intentionally, for the lulz https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1167410460125097990 https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1167410460125097990

Robert Goddard designed a vacuum train in the 1910s, why did Elon think it was going to work a century later?

paulddraper 3y ago

Because the tech had advanced in 110 years? Apparently not, I suppose is your point.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
stephen_g 3y ago
There's no reason for it to advance - we have good alternatives, and there's no benefit that this kind of system brings that is worth the massive extra cost (which mostly can't be solved - it's the massive amount of material required for the vacuum chamber and the massive amount of energy required to pump down and maintain the pressure. High-speed rail would be extremely cheap in comparison).

Syonyk 3y ago

Because the arrogance of modern Silicon Valley thinking is that "We are better, in every possible way, than older engineers, because we know code." And Elon Musk seems very, very prone to this sort of thinking (or, at least, his companies do, and I think it comes from him). One example of many is the weird conversations he was having about sonic velocity robots and "lights out dreadnaught" sort of auto factories, which just about every other automaker has been trying on and off since the 80s, and has worked out that it doesn't work. So Tesla's modern lines, after quite a bit of fooling around with that sort of rubbish, look just like everyone else's lines, because as soon as you have humans in the loop for the things robots can't do well, you may as well run the line at human speeds.

drcross 3y ago
What you call arrogance I call enthusiasm, industrialism and hope for a better future. Your attitude, quite frankly, sucks.
- Syonyk 3y ago
  I mean, I'll admit I've watched the tech industry promise the moon and deliver a user-surveilling mud pie a few too many times to particularly care for their hype anymore. It's 2023. I'd like to buy a car, TV, phone, or computer that isn't, by default, "slurping as much behavioral data as it thinks it can possibly get away with, routed out whatever connection it can find, to be sold to others who want to influence my thinking." It's hard to find.
renewiltord 3y ago
Yeah, and because of that, today we have mainstream electric cars, an Earth blanketed with Internet from space, and the cheapest spacelift cost ever achieved. Any one of these would have cemented him as a premier industrialist. In the end, there's legions of Internet commenters who complain about Elon Musk in between complaining about their bosses or complain about Google and Facebook or what have you. And then there's this guy doing things successfully. The Silicon Valley attitude that I love is that when someone tells you "that's not going to work", you just go ahead and do it if you have conviction. After all, you're only sacrificing your own self.
- Syonyk 3y ago
  Musk was not instrumental in mainstream EVs. He was on the early wave of it, yes, but other companies had EVs out at the same time or before, and the price drop in lithium was obvious to everyone who was paying attention at the time. It would have happened one way or another. Yes, we've ruined astronomy with a ton of LEO satellites, but we've got some internet in exchange (I'm rural, I have it, I'm quite honestly not impressed with what it delivers for how much I pay, and how inconsistent it is - on some days, it's quite good, on other days it's more or less dialup grade). And we'll see how that lift capacity works. Everyone will continue insisting that Kessler Syndrome Won't Possibly Happen until about a year after it's happened, at which point, welp. It was fun while it lasted! I've done computer security a bit too long, I think.
  - jibe 3y ago
    other companies had EVs out at the same time Who? And how did they mainstream EVs more than Tesla? Fisker was in the market early, but didn’t mainstream EVs. GM was in way early, but probably held the market back.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      Honestly, Musk’s innovation with Tesla has nothing to do with the damn cars. He made sure they build a supercharging network to answer the main complaint. That worked.
samtho 3y ago
I don’t personally agree with a lot of what Musk says or does, but I do commend him for his propensity towards (literal and figurative) moonshots in the name of innovation. This is a refreshing take when most startups have a goal to exit in X number of years and the previously agile, lean, and innovative company becomes beholden to showing quarterly returns the moment they have the capital available to them to drive something truly innovative.
- api 3y ago
  Musk succeeded where his companies tried to disrupt extremely moribund or set in their ways industries. SpaceX disrupted the space launch industry, which had not advanced at all since the 1970s. SpaceX really just picked up and ran with the idea of vertical landing reusable rockets, which was not new. Werner von Braun was exploring it for Saturn V back in the 60s, and Lockheed finally did it at prototype scale with the DC-X in the 90s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv9n9Casp1o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv9n9Casp1o (You can see at the end that the DC-X even does the same "hover slam" maneuver as Falcon 9 to land with maximum propellant efficiency.) Tesla was similar. Auto manufacture itself isn't moribund, but old school auto makers always hated EVs and resisted doing anything serious with them. Tesla's rise was a classic exploitation of the innovators' dilemma by calling them on this and forcing their hand. Now that some are embracing EVs, Tesla is facing increasingly stiff competition but has at least carved out a brand. Musk has not been particularly successful competing in less moribund industries. The Boring Company is kind of a flop. Neuralink seems questionable so far, to say the least. The Hyperloop, even if it worked, wouldn't be competitive at all with high speed rail on cost. It'd be faster and in theory more energy efficient but nowhere near enough to compensate for the added capital cost or complexity. Now if Musk had created, say, a rail transport division of Tesla he could have absolutely disrupted rail transport which is another fairly sluggish moribund industry. Imagine modern unmanned trains (FSD on rails is WAY easier than on roads) with batteries to allow them to span un-powered sections of track and recharge on sections with third rail or overhead catenary wires. But that would have been a threat to the car market. Innovators' dilemma anyone? My point is that Musk isn't superman... he just picked industries that were ripe for disruption and built teams that executed well enough to succeed. Of his companies SpaceX is by far the most impressive in its own right. What Tesla did could have been done much much better by a "legacy" car maker if they'd been willing to disrupt their ICE business. Nissan actually beat Tesla to market with an affordable mass market electric (the Leaf) but didn't put as much heart into it. The result was okay but not nearly as cool as what Tesla did, especially in Tesla's glory days. (I own a Leaf and have no complaints, but it's not sexy.)
TalkalotDragon 3y ago
There are advantages to not trusting the prevailing industry wisdom and trying things out on your own. like with Tesla they're ahead of other companies in multiple ways, but still behind in some aspects as well.
- Syonyk 3y ago
  They've got a somewhat unreliable EV platform (the battery and drivetrain are fine, the rest of the car is fiddly at best), and have been instrumental in driving the auto industry away from "interfaces that work while driving" to "interfaces that assume self driving will happen any year now" in the past decade (I cannot stand touch screens while driving - they're an awful, awful interface for anything involving cars or airplanes). And it's fine to not trust prevailing wisdom, but when you don't even bother trying to learn from them because "they're dumb dinosaur companies that don't even know code" (which has utterly nothing to do with reality), re-learning the same lessons yourself isn't some amazing foresight. It's simply a stupid waste of resources.

_ea1k 3y ago

I'm going to guess that he didn't expect it to work. He never invested significantly, and there must be a reason. The simplest reason seems to be that he expected it not to work, at least with current technology.

Ekaros 3y ago
I always wondered just how bad an idea must have been. If Musk didn't go after it. Specially considering that he is the one who published it...
- Seanambers 3y ago
  Elon Musk said from the outset that he was not gonna build it, he thought the idea was good and published a whitepaper on it which basically started the conversation. He also talks about a supersonic electrical passenger jet from time to time, but he says he don't have the time to do that either.
  - jasonwatkinspdx 3y ago
    Perhaps we should apply a bit more of a critical standard to Elon's various statements: https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/ https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/
    - sidibe 3y ago
      Argh those pesky regulators stopping Tesla from delivering robotaxis to their customers since 2018
- qsdf38100 3y ago
  He did it to divert investment into high speed trains, which have the potential to significantly reduce the number of Teslas he could hope to sell. He successfully made investors waste hundreds of millions into these hyperloop startups, which are like real life parody of high-tech scam startups. On the other hand, one must be quite illiterate scientifically to buy into Musks grand sci-fi projects. Should only work on 5 years old. But you don’t have to believe, you just have to pretend and take these easy millions from rich but dumb VCs.

ForkMeOnTinder 3y ago

fwiw electric cars date back to the late 1800s. There's no reason old ideas can't work well with new tech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car#Early_developments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car#Early_development...

Moomoomoo309 3y ago
If there's been innovation on the fundamental problem, sure. We haven't really improved vacuum pumps that much, nor can we really fix the whole "one high-caliber bullet could implode the entire tunnel" problem yet.
- chrisco255 3y ago
  These aren't powered by explosives. The tech was not the problem.
- GuB-42 3y ago
  I hear the "catastrophic implosion" argument a lot but it doesn't sound right to me. I never shot at a vacuum chamber but my guess is that it will just create a leak, which is bad, will probably stop traffic for a while before it is repaired and the vacuum reestablished, but nothing catastrophic. A bomb would be a serious threat, the shockwave from both the explosion and rapid decompression, but I believe it can be mitagated. Bombs are bad for pretty much everything anyways. The other problem is if the walls don't break but the pipe crumples. But this is more likely to have a self-sealing effect, and with enough overbuilding, it shouldn't cause a chain reaction. I don't believe in hyperloop, but I think catastrophic implosions are rather low in the list of reasons why it won't happen. It doesn't even make it at the top of safety related reasons.
  - GuB-42 3y ago
    I am fine with the downvotes but if that because I am wrong, please tell me how. I have yet to see a convincing simulation of how a would be hyperloop would behave of one were to poke a hole in it. And by convincing situations, I mean one with an appropriate model, that is a very long tube engineered to hold a vacuum. An then you can downvote this post too, a good explanation is well worth a few karma points :)

addicted 3y ago

Well the most likely theory is that he did not expect it to work, which is precisely why he proposed it. The point wasn’t to work. The point was to kill/delay CAHSR.

helf 3y ago
[dead]
dragonwriter 3y ago
> The point was to kill/delay CAHSR. Can't think of why a car company owner/CEO would want to do that...

panick21_ 3y ago

Have you actually read the bluepaper on it? Its really quite a different system. I think the idea was wrong and wouldn't actually work. But the assertion that its simply exactly the same isn't the case. That said, even if an idea is old, that doesn't mean a new take isn't warranted. They considered rocket re-usability in the 1960 and tried in the 1970. EV are 100+ years old.

melling 3y ago

Didn’t Musk come clean and say he was trying to stop the California HSR? He didn’t intend to build it.

Veedrac 3y ago
No, this is manufactured.
- FireBeyond 3y ago
  By his biographer?
  - Veedrac 3y ago
    Well, more from the social media process that selects for whatever interpretation of evidence best matches the narrative they want, rather than the narrative that best matches the sum of evidence. The biography did not in fact say he did this, or even argue for it, or even evidence it. It was just the easiest source to interpret that way, and the sources where Musk said* “it doesn't have to be hyperloop, we should just do anything that is even incrementally ahead of what China and Japan are doing, rather than something that's the worst in the world” get ignored, because the actual truth is rarely viral. *paraphrasing from memory from the last time I had this argument and found an interview from the time
qsdf38100 3y ago
Not even trying to hide his disgusting business tactics. Casually, openly admitting it was to waste hundred of millions of investments. And people are still going to defend him because, rockets, and cars from the future, and success! He’s like trump, he knows people will follow regardless of what he does.

alangibson 3y ago

Much respect to an innovator, but Goddard also didn't understand gravity.

hex4def6 3y ago
How so?
- alangibson 3y ago
  He fell victim to (discovered/invented?) the pendulum rocket fallacy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket#Pendulum_rocket_fallacy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket#Pendulum_rocket_falla...

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

qingcharles 3y ago

The Channel Tunnel was attempted in the 1800s and failed. A hundred years later they tried again and succeeded. So...

mynameisnoone 3y ago
Apples and oranges false equivocation of vastly different engineering problems. The problem with vacuum trains is they aren't workable with current materials, are impractical, and are too damn expensive. https://youtu.be/RNFesa01llk https://youtu.be/RNFesa01llk
- diebeforei485 3y ago
  I didn't watch the entire 28 minute video, but I did watch the first part and the creator has a misconception that you share. It's key to understand that the Hyperloop concept uses low pressure (around 100 Pa), not a vacuum.
  - stephen_g 3y ago
    To anyone who works with vacuum systems, there is no "full vacuum", it's always some level of partial vacuum. The challenges are very similar, just the incredible amount of energy that would be required to pump down and maintain that partial vacuum such a huge volume would be slightly less massive.
    - diebeforei485 3y ago
      I don't think energy for air pumps is anywhere near the biggest problem for Hyperloop. There are other far hairier engineering challenges. That said, the efficiency of pumps is not at all linear with air pressure - 100 Pa is significantly better than near vacuum. The other misconception here is the assumption that the entire length needs to be maintained at 100 Pa. This is not necessary. Having a pressure gradient is fine because it isn't going fast near the terminals anyway.
  - himinlomax 3y ago

wrsh07 3y ago

I've always thought that his ideas like the boring company and the hyperloop make a lot more sense when you remember that he spends a lot of time wondering how someone should build a moon base or Mars base If you don't have an atmosphere, the near vacuum conditions are free You need robots to dig tunnels if you want sizeable bases. Figuring that out on earth just gives you a headstart. What should transit look like on the moon? On Mars? Can you use those tunnels? What will be different with lower gravity? This is the most charitable interpretation I can make, fwiw

jrflowers 3y ago

He lied intentionally, for the lulz https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1167410460125097990 https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1167410460125097990