Hyperloop Explained
Billed as the fastest way to cross the surface of the earth, hyperloop represents the greatest leap in transport infrastructure for generations. With passengers sitting in pods that travel at airline speed through pressurised tubes using electric propulsion and magnetic levitation, the concept promises to slash journey times between major cities from several hours to a matter of minutes. Whilst it may feel like science fiction, hyperloop is now on the cusp of becoming a reality. This, is the story behind the concept that’s about to revolutionise our world. Hyperloop was first conceived in 2012 by Tesla and SpaceX founder, Elon Musk. In a white paper released the following year, Musk set out his vision for a futuristic, super high-speed transportation system that would see passenger pods move through a partial vacuum in steel tubes - addressing the two key factors that slow down conventional vehicles: friction and air resistance. Exploring a potential route between Los Angeles and San Francisco, Musk believed that his concept could slash the eight hour bus ride, four hour train journey and convoluted three hour air travel experience between the two cities to just 30 minutes. Under Musk’s first hyperloop proposal, he suggested that compression fans would move air around the passenger pods to minimise drag and create “air bearings” beneath them, floating them off the surface of the tubes. It should be noted that Musk’s early hyperloop concept is not a million miles away from Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s atmospheric railway that ran between Exeter and Plymouth in the UK from 1847 to 1848. That system, moved carriages with pressurised air. The air was extracted from a pipe that ran between the rails by pumping stations situated roughly every three miles along the route, creating a vacuum. A piston contained within this pipe was connected to the train, which pulled it forward. Despite its initial success, the leather flaps that made the vacuum pipes airtight soon began to fail causing air to leak from the system and Brunel’s railway was abandoned. With an estimated price tag close to USD $6BN, Musk’s first hyperloop concept never came to fruition - but the impressive idea and potential to link cities in such a direct way sparked intense interest. From inception, Musk had always stated that the concept of Hyperloop would be “open source” - and he actively encouraged others to come together and develop the necessary technology, independently from his involvement. This led to the formation of several startups and student teams developing various aspects of hyperloop technology with varying degrees of success. Now, several fully fledged companies are making significant strides to bring hyperloop systems into reality. Hyperloop Transportation Technologies or HTT are making aggressive advancements and recently constructed a full scale test track in France, however the clear leaders of the pack in the current standings, are Virgin Hyperloop One.
Virgin Hyperloop One are on track to achieve their bold ambition of bringing a hyperloop system into operation by 2021. Originally formed in 2014 as Hyperloop One, the company was rebranded following a significant investment from Sir Richard Branson in 2017. Deviating slightly from Musk’s original plan, Virgin Hyperloop One’s technology combines two basic principles. The first is magnetic levitation (or MagLev), a technology already used in monorails to lift the passenger pods and move them along their rails. Magnetic levitation uses two sets of magnets; one to repel the train from the track and lift it upwards and the other to move the floating train along the track at considerable speed with reduced friction. The second principle is the use of a low pressure, vacuum sealed environment for the passenger pods to travel through. By removing most of the air from the tubes and having no contact with the ground, the pods face little to no resistance as they move. The air pressures inside the tube are equivalent to flying 200,000 feet above sea level. Such an environment enables the pods to reach speeds of over 760 mph using very little energy. By virtue of being in a tube, the system is protected from the weather and can operate in almost any climatic conditions. Virgin Hyperloop One’s system is controlled by advanced software that ensures acceleration and deceleration occurs gradually, going relatively unnoticed by those travelling inside. Having built a 500 metre track in the Nevada desert, Virgin Hyperloop One have carried out several tests focusing on individual aspects of the system and a complete full-scale systems test in May 2017. The propulsion, braking, levitation and vacuum systems are all performing well and the team have achieved a top speed of over 240mph to date. To inform their plans for developing a fully operational network that is affordable for all, Virgin Hyperloop One launched a global challenge to find the routes best placed to benefit from hyperloop technology. With over 2,600 entries, the field was reduced to just 35 potential locations - with each entry enjoying with strong support from governments and urban planners. With 10 winners across five countries, Virgin Hyperloop One are now working in partnership with each of the locations on how to best deliver the hyperloop technologies in live networks. In February 2018, the firm unveiled their first prototype passenger pods for the Dubai-Abu Dhabi Hyperloop route, a network that would drastically slash the car travel time between the two cities from two hours to just 12 minutes. The advantages of Hyperloop are considerable. Like train stations, Hyperloop stations, called portals, are planned to be located within inner city areas with easy links to existing transport infrastructure.
This gives hyperloop systems a distinct advantage over air travel, where airports tend to be located beyond city limits with fewer accessibility options. Additionally, the system is being developed to function on a “turn up and go” principle without a lengthy check-in process and with accelerated, advanced security checks. Another clear benefit is its speed. If hyperloop could significantly reduce the travel time between cities, it could be possible to live in a completely different city or part of the country from where you work, with a commute no dissimilar in length to the one you perhaps take today. This opens up a wide range of housing and employment opportunities with people no longer restricted to have living close to where they work. It could also take pressure off our cities where infrastructure is often still catching up with development, and where house prices have become unattainable for most. With speeds rivalling aircraft, and nine of the top 10 busiest air routes in the world being domestic, hyperloop has the potential to completely revolutionise the way we live, work and travel. A hyperloop system requires very little energy to propel pods through its tubes as the vacuum environment poses little resistance.
As such, the systems could be powered by renewable technologies such as solar and wind, offering a considerably cleaner alternative to air travel. When you consider the prospect of people being propelled in tubes across the earth’s surface at near supersonic speeds, there are a number of questions that instinctively jump to mind. Perhaps the first is the impact of a potential break or breach in one of the tubes - possibly as the result of an earthquake or external impact. Virgin Hyperloop One explain that they have addressed this by constructing thick steel tubes that are extremely difficult to puncture or break. Additionally the tubes are engineered to withstand changes in pressure and air leaks while maintaining their structural integrity. Theoretically a sudden influx of air into one of the tubes would simply slow the pods down due to the increased air resistance. The pods could then be directed to the next portal via an auxiliary power boost. There is also the ability to section off parts of the route and to re-pressurise sections where significant emergencies occur and all pods are expected to be fitted with emergency exits. Externally, hyperloop systems will largely travel on elevated seismically designed pylons that are able to move and flex independently of one another minimising damage in the event of a major ground shift. Sensors along the route would instantly report issues to the systems control centre. In answering the natural safety concerns raised, Virgin Hyperloop One also point out that millions of people already travel at high speeds in metal tubes every time they take a flight, and that numerous concerns surrounded the use of jet aircraft when that mode of transportation first came to prevalence. While the idea of hyperloop may seem far-fetched, when you consider the industrial progress made in the past 200 years, the current rate of technology adoption in our societies and the significant advances being made by hyperloop companies around the world, this incredible new transportation system looks set to become a part of our everyday lives in the very near future.
Elon Musk's Future City
According to Forbes Elon Musk, the CEO and founder of Tesla and SpaceX is the most innovative person in the world for the consecutive second time this year. And that is very clear of the unbelievable success he has achieved in business. Ten years ago, people considered him a reckless man with extravagant ideas. In 2008, his company Tesla collapsed during the financial crisis. Now Tesla is one of the most successful niche car companies in producing electric cars, all due to the fact that Elon Musk persevered and was determined. He has done what was thought to be impossible 10 years ago. But he has no plans of stopping soon. He has many innovative and wild plans for the future of mankind which would improve the quality of our lives. Elon Musk believes that day by day the technology is only getting better and better. Things are developing so fast that the future might be filled with Exponential tech advances that would change the world. In the future, we will have video games so realistic that it would be difficult for us to tell the difference between games and reality. From self driving tunnel networks to brain controlled computers, we’re going to look at how Elon Musk and his technology will take us forward and creating the city of the future. Elon says that we always want the future to be better than the past. A future that is exciting and one that the people would want to live in. A few decades ago a lot of technological advances seemed unimaginable but today they are our new normal, life without them is unimaginable. So let’s look at what would Elon Musk’s city of future look like. So how will we get from one city to another in Elon’s future city? It’s hard to imagine being able to fly from New York City to Shanghai in 39 minutes or from Sydney to London in an hour. But this is something that Elon and SpaceX are working on. Elon compares Space Rockets to airplanes saying that if you do not reuse a plane, it would cost up to 250 million dollars to fly one way but because we can reuse them tens of thousand of times, it becomes affordable.
The same is true for Space Rockets. A SpaceX rocket costs about 57 million dollars and if the rocket is reused a thousand times it nearly costs 57 thousand dollars per flight and by carrying people, we can get the price of a rocket flight down to the price of an economy flight ticket. The starship rocket is being developed to take people to mars, it can also transport people from city to city. In a 2017 interview Elon said that he is working for this to become a reality in the next 10 years and if you can carry people, you can also carry cargo which means a super fast delivery for people. Another way of getting packages fast from one part of the country to another will be by Electric semi trucks being developed by Tesla. These semi trucks require a driver but in the future we will see entirely driverless version of these and making deliveries and making the transportation cheaper. Also these trucks will be good for environment because 25% of greenhouse gases come from the trucking industry. Though these ideas seem far fetched and Elon has planned to make them possible in the next 10 to 12 years. There is yet another way that Elon plans to develop, and that is transportation via hyper loop. Elon Musk asks that when you think about a new transportation system, what would you want ideally? You will want something that would cost half the price to travel, would be twice as fast, cannot crash and immune to weather. To make this possible Elon is working on the idea of Hyperloop, which will take about 12 minutes to travel from Dubai to Abu Dhabi and will also be powered by solar panels. There will be Hyperloop stations inside cities, making it easier and faster to travel. There are several Hyperloop routes being planned and in the Elon’s future they will be a major subject of attraction. Elon is constantly coming up with new ideas and innovative technologies that are astonishing. Apart from the ideas discussed above, lets inspect Elon’s futuristic city. Most people would imagine a future city to be full of flying cars and drones with state-of-the-art technology. But Elon differs with this vision. In a TED interview when he was asked about his vision for an exciting future he rejected the idea of flying cars and drones saying no one would like to see cars flying over us and creating all kinds of disturbances. Elon is right in many ways, he said that one of the most soul-destroying thing is the traffic and if there is traffic in air or cars that would block the view of sky, would be affected by weather and many other factors, that would not be an ideal future city you would want.
To counter this traffic problem that takes away so much of our lives, he has planned to build a 3-D network of tunnels. For this he has founded a company named The Boring Company that would carry on the construction of tunnels. He believes the solution to the urban traffic is the network of tunnels that go deeper under the cities. He says, “since you can always go deeper than you can go upwards, that the deepest minds are deeper than the tallest buildings. SO we can have a network of tunnels that could go 20, 30 or 40 levels deep where cars could go up to 200 kilometres an hour as railings guide the car and your autopilot takes over when you enter the tunnel. But creating a tunnel is a slow and expensive process and will require the process of digging tunnels to be cheap than they are currently. The Boring company is working on to make this a possibility with a new tunnel digger. Elon says that the first thing that needs to be done is to cut down the tunnel size. Tunnels today need to be large allowing for crashes emergency and ventilation for gas powered vehicles. Using self driving electric cars that will shrink the size of tunnels can eliminate this. To make the digging process efficient, we need to build a faster digger, one that can dig and reinforce the tunnel at the same time. This idea of building tunnels is safe and also a one that is would allow people to live peacefully. A trip from Westwood to LAX Airport which takes 30 minutes and can increase because of traffic will only take 5 to 6 minutes in a boring company tunnel. Elon says that in the coming 10 to 12 years it will be unusual for cars to be built that are not fully self-driving as they are getting close to being 100 to 200 percent safer than a human driver. He says getting into a car would be just like get into an elevator today and pushing a button. Electric cars all possible today today because of the falling prices of the lithium-ion batteries . Batteries are what Tesla’s main expertise is in! Tesla is building Giga-factories which make lithium ion batteries along with other parts for Tesla cars. Elon believes it would take a total of 100 Giga factories to give humanity enough battery capacity to go fully renewable. Currently there are two Giga factories in the United States and one in China. Tesla has announced plans for another Giga factory in Germany.
As our cities and lives would become electrified, everything will also be connected. This will be made possible by StarLink, a project by SpaceX which aims to launch nearly 12000 satellites in the orbit which will provide internet all across the world and even in places where people don’t have internet today! SpaceX launched the first batch of these satellites in May 2019, which Elon in his very ELON MUSK announced by posting a tweet using these satellites. As of when this article is out SpaceX has launched about 750 StarLink satellites into orbit and planning to deploy even more of them in a long term vision of providing connectivity and internet to all.
They will not only be deployed on Earth but also will be deployed as a communication system around Mars. So far we have discussed a lot of projects and visions of Elon musk for his future city. Now let’s look at how our lives would be like in one of Elon’s future city. The things will be a lot different in the future even where we get our food from. Elon’s brother Kimball musk who is a board member of Tesla and SpaceX is also the co-founder of Square roots, a company that is building shipping container vertical farms in towns and cities, as this is a more feasible way of growing food. We would get our greens from farm to table in merely 4 hours and Kimball says that the tech being used today to farm food in climate-controlled city spaces will also be used on Mars! Imagine when you are dropped off at your office by your self-driving car. You will have more time to go to meetings and events because of time saved from driverless cars. So in a future city which would be a completely mind-boggling, what is going to be taught in school? How is the education going to be? Elon Musk believes the way children are taught in regular schools does not adhere to their needs. It is completely outdated in this new era of technology. For that he started his own school for his children and a few children of employees at SpaceX and is also on the SpaceX campus.
It’s called Ad Astra, which means to the stars! The founder of SpaceX and NeuraLink believes that there is a fundamental element that the modern education system lacks and that is: problem-solving. He explains this with an example: “It’s important to teach problem-solving. Let’s say you’re trying to teach how engines work. Now, a traditional way is to teach all about screwdrivers and wrenches, which is a tough way to do it. A good approach would be like: Here’s an engine, let’s take it apart, and how are we gonna do that? We need a screwdriver or a wrench for that. When we teach like this, something important happens, the relevance of the tools becomes apparent.” And he is correct, the education of our new generation should be compatible with the advanced technology and scientific knowledge today. He breaks down education as downloading of data and algorithms into your brain. He wants to gamify the learning. If the learning is like a game, the more interesting, it is to children. He also focuses on to explain why things are being taught as it makes an enormous difference in a Child’s motivation. At Ad Astra they don’t make kids go through grades like an assembly line, which is being done in many schools today As every child is unique and has their own capabilities and interests.
The children should explore the non-traditional topics such as robotics and artificial intelligence, even studying the ethics of AI and also studying physics because its best way of understanding our future and also Physics instills a skill of problem solving in you and especially the harnesses the shining process. In this future city children and adults will spend their free rime playing crazy and fascinating video games that are unimaginable today. Elon points this out that only 40 years ago the most advanced game was pong, which comprised two rectangle and a small ball, but today we have games with high graphics which very much resemble reality. People can play these multi-player games from across the world, and in future it will be even more advanced. We would have VR sets and force-feedback gloves, in the future we’ll be playing inside games that will be indistinguishable from reality. Elon says that we are building progressively greater intelligence and that the percentage of intelligence that is not human is increasing. Elon says we can think of human as a biological boot loader for starting a digital super-intelligence, so there need to be some merger which links biological intelligence with machine intelligence, since in the future we will be too slow to keep up with AI and so we would have to develop or there will be a crisis in the future. To fix this problem, Elon Musk has come up with a technology of future- NeuraLink. He founded this company in 2016, and the company is making a chip that will be implanted in the brain allowing you to be linked with the computer. So far, a monkey has been able to control a computer with its brain. NeuraLink is now petitioning to different authorities to start a human trial of this in the coming 2 years which would give us superhuman powers of thinking and gaining information.
Elon musks future city would differ greatly from the one we live in today, many things will change many would not, but one thing is sure we are in a golden age of technology and with the help of this technology we could improve our way of lives even more in the future. In a future where we could travel to any other city in the world within an hour where everything would run on batteries, not fossil fuels. A thousand satellites which would connect every part of the world and people. The rate of change of technology is incredibly fast, and every new decade is one that no one had imagined in the previous decade. Elon musk is very much motivated to work for long-term well being of humans and to inspire many others of the new generation so that we could all advance as a civilisation become a type 3 civilisation. So what do you think about the amazing technology sand ideas we talked about? What do you think our future would be like? Let us know what you think and your ideas in the comment section below. And don’t forget to rate us and share the article and subscribe to our blog and stay tuned for more interesting article on Science and technology robots etc.
Thanks for reading: Hyperloop Explained | how does hyperloop work | Elon Musk's Future City - poruk, Sorry, my English is bad:)