Vacuum Trains
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- Опубліковано 24 лют 2024
- Vacuum Trains and other low pressure rail & maglev systems offer the possibility of ultra-fast and ultra-cheap transport on and off of Earth.
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Credits:
Vacuum Trains
Episode 435a; February 25, 2024
Written, Produced
& Narrated by:
Isaac Arthur
Editors:
Konstantin Sokerin
Merv Johnson II
Graphics:
Allen DeMoura
Apogii.uk
Ian "LITE" Long
Jarred Eagley
Justin Dixon
Katie Byrne
Ken York
Phil Swan
Real Courte
Sergio Botero
Udo Schroeter
Music Courtesy of:
Epidemic Sound epidemicsound.com/creator - Наука та технологія
"Hyperloop" is what you get when you connect a bunch of those tunnels for cats in a circle.
aka autism
zoomies overload
Hyperloop is what you get when a pampered scumbag billionaire thinks he knows better than millions of experts, and everyone around him is too busy pandering to tell him what a douche he is.
Add vacuum cleaner and hey pesto 😂
Adding the vacuum solves this problem.
Small nitpick: Sometimes I listen to these before bedtime, as your wonderful descriptions help my imagination drift off. Would it be possible for the outro music to be kept at the same level as the rest of the audio? Other than that, excellent episode as ever! ❤
I second this recommendation!!!
I've been turning it down a bit more recently, I think I tend not to notice as much since like most ex-military folks, I'm half deaf :)
@@isaacarthurSFIA thanks again for everything you do. Your videos have helped me get through some bumpy years. 🙏
Yeah. I often wake up too. But yes, one of the best things to fall asleep on, that's why I've "watched" some ep's a dozen time, also old ones are often refreshingly different when re-re-rewatching after new ones :)
@@isaacarthurSFIA You might be surprised how many people listen to your videos while drifting to sleep! I do too! I would appreciate normalized volume across the video...
I'm not confident on the economics of vacuum trains here on Earth, but they'll undoubtedly be a mainstay of transportation off Earth. The easiest way to build a vacuum tube is to build a tube in vacuum, after all.
Undoubtedly, without the need to maintain a vacuum chamber, they become viable. on earth the only way Im seeing them is as part of mature low orbit infrastructure.
Human ingenuity/creativity = equal (anthropogenic) risk of planetary catastrophes.
THINK about a single 'vacuum tube' str8 up into even LEO (Low-Earth Orbit). It goes thru ALL the atmosphere and 'pumps' added would force neg pressure (in tube) to remove atmosphere.
GET ONE crack/break in it: and you could be (depending on neg atmos') suck a decent % of earth's atmosphere out into space.
Sure you'd try to design safety around this, and the air could just 'stay in tube' as tho tehre wasn't a vacuum (cuz gravity does this now)...
But its a huge amount of risk.
I don't see it as viable without significantly overbuilding the system. Because lets assume that the track utilization is very high and something goes wrong, forcing a domino effect of trains breaking. Now imagine a collision inside the tube. That could weaken it enough to rupture and subsequently get severely damaged by all the air rushing in. Never mind protecting the passengers. I'm just talking about the vehicles and segments of track.
Faster comuting not just saves time in terms of oportunity costs but also increases the distance over which people would and could comute
Light in fiber travels at, well, the speed of light. It's pretty hard to beat that.
@@fat4eyes yeah, but i have to physically be at my job and many other people do, too.
@@fat4eyes
Actually, light travels like 50% faster in vacuum than fiber, so at long distances Starlink beats fiber.
Good POINT
The one that blows my mind is light speed relative to computing. At 1 GHz, light can only travel 1 foot in vacuum per clock cycle. Consumer CPUs are hitting 5-6ghz now, GPUs and Memory are about half that clock speed, so your motherboard represents a couple of clock cycles of light speed delay.
They have to fit the entire processor and cache memory into a postage stamp sized die or else the speed of light would further limit speed.
I feel like fast transit like this is really a dream of the last century. Now that we have wifi everywhere why not just save the money and use a slower train but make it nice enough to enjoy the journey?
Did… did you just describe how SSTs failed?
@@Ag3nt0fCha0s Single state to orbit? No. But maybe you meant Super Sonic transport? Yes.
@@petergerdes1094Pretty sure SST is for super-sonic transport, yeah.
People would still rather spend more time at their destination
@@justinbeath5169 Sure and if vacuum trains were free of course we'd build them. The question is whether they'll ever be worth the cost. I mean sure, it's plausible that aspects of construction prices will be reduced by automation but that also means increasing labor costs and that has to happen faster than advances in communication technology reduce the desire to travel **and** advances in the comfort of traveling.
For instance, just getting self-driving cars (potentially ones which can hook themselves to a non-vacuum train) reduces a great deal of the appeal since you can now do virtually all travel while you sleep or relax in your smaller mobile bedroom.
Sure, maybe eventually we have sufficient automation that we can just tell our robot servants -- go build a vacuum train and it would require very little human labor. However, at that point we likely don't have the same need to commute for work.
I kind of love how Isaac always says "only engineering problem". Reminds me in uni, people who knew only comp sci said other problems are only []. I mean, hard sciences are easy to calc, eng is hard. I bet american colleges don't have mandatory eng laboratory classes for physics/chemistry learners.
It's not that it's easy.
it's that it's simply a problem that needs to be solved. It's not something that's actually impossible.
@@SangoProductions213 It's not even an engineering problem, it's an economics problem.
Vacuum trains are just not economically viable, even if we solved all the engineering hurdles.
The problem t one that needs solving. It is solved. It is simply inefficient. Its not worth it, much like its not worth it to go on vacation via suborbital rocket flight, even though it is absolutely technically achievable.
Yup. After some physicist determines something is theoretically possible? It never ever happens, because nobody wants to put in the engineering effort that would actually make it possible
@@egoalter1276I didn't see thermal expansion joints (near vacuum) able to work through atlantic ocean floor. I mean, yes, theoretically not impossible to empty ocean, keep pipe in fridge - only an engineering job.
It was impossible for anything to escape from black hole, until it wasn't.
underground you could not only exclude weather but also atmosphere. Above ground, we should stick to trains.
Trains are only viable underground. Above ground they are huge source of hazard and disruption of environment. Hopefully in the future we get rid of above ground trains all together
Problem is, building them underground is a lot harder. Even if you just cut a shallow groove into the surface, lay the tube and then pile the dug out material back on top, so vegetation can grow on it again, that would still be a lot easier than digging tunnels.
Probably easier to maintain, too, due to ease of access to the outside surface.
Edit: Jinx. You are buying. ^.^
Underground makes inspection and maintenance a pain in the ass. Nevermind being orders of magnitude more expensive to build. Unless there's a really good reason, it's better to build above ground than under.
Underground trains, where have I heard that before?
Oh that's right, the subway! XD
@@bergonius I'm not sure if "viable" is the correct term to use given the number of trains being used on the surface at this moment. Above-ground trains seem to be quite viable and have been for over a century. They would work better underground, but they are still viable above.
"The idea has a lot of momentum" - Uh-huh.
this comment is off the rails
Sir I'd like to thank you not only for your content. But the the way you speak of the impossible of today's facts as only a stepping stone of tomorrow's possibility's that change with time and knowledge. It's quite enjoyable to hear positive thoughts for the future problems that we will have to face if we're going to succeed in surviving all the problems that will come to us. Now I've only watched a few, but have not yet been disappointed. Your on to something that may build to a great future for yourself. In this day and age when it's so hard to find positive views in such negative World when real thoughts of the end of this world in front of our faces, it is a good thing.
Thanks again.
Something to consider about metal expansion and contraction on Earth is we have continuously welded rails now. How this works is expansion and contraction is countered by compressive and tensile strength. Usually tensile strength as the tracks are usually laid on hot days so that the track doesn't buckle on a hot day. Tensile strength is usually enough and a small break in the track is generally considered better than a buckle in the track.
They aren’t under intense pressure. And if you didn’t know they shift. Over the length of the track it looks small but they still expand and contract
Yes, there's the problem, those joints (air-gaps) don't have seal that moves and vacuum on other side. Yes, theoretically only engineering problem, practically I don't think anyone has done serious attempts, and for a good reason.
There's a reason vacuum chambers look like diving bells, aren't expandable. Piping seals are interesting - and those don't move, have same temperature too.
Id be much more concerned about fatigue in a pressure vessel than on a rail though. A cracked rail isn't catastrophic and can be detected via inspection. A cracked pressure vessel is catastrophic and is unlikely to be detected before it causes issues.
@@Erowens98Yeah good point. Defects in rails are usually aren't detected until well after they start having effects. Usually they're detected by a driver having a "rough ride" on a section of track and calling it in, then other drivers can also check that section and concur and crews get sent out properly inspect and fix. Sometimes passengers report it but I think that might be a UK rail only thing.
Love the transition from ordinary ''right of way issue" to cutting a hole through the center of the earth in only a few seconds (16:02). Maybe those two challenges are not entirely at the same level... For starters if you dig a hole of 12000 km towards the center of the earth, then you have to deal with high pressures thousands if not hundred thousands of bars and temperatures in the thousands of degrees. Oh, and maybe things get a bit fluid as soon as you crossed the mantle. ;-).
Standard. I mean, we have easy e=mc2, it's just simple math to make theory of everything ! (like: we already have thermal joints, now let's make them on every pipe joint 10m apart across atlantic on vacuum tube, simple eng prob) :)
@@tondekoddar7837 wut?
@@jdot5974Just making a comparison of physics vs engineering. The less one knows about a subject the more it seems possible, if one knows physics that thing is hard, if one knows engineering that thing is hard. Viewpoint issue...
Making vacuum thermal joints about as easy as, something like quantized theory of graphics or such. Cool things to fall asleep on though :)
Audiobooks, or regular books. I've had two times 45 minutes of commute every day for more than a decade and I like reading if I don't feel sleepy enough to nap.
Then again I guess that presupposes that you don't have issues with motion sickness...
First appearance on screen is the 1940 Buck Rogers serial.
so basically as soon as screens
My issue with vac trains is just that they combine the risks of regular trains, supersonic planes and space travel, with a speed increase that's not all that great once you factor in acceleration times. A self-contained space ship zipping through a narrow tunnel, with as little emergency exits as possible to minimize leakage, and a trip through what for all intents and purposes is an absence of air to reach them, if it ever becomes necessary.
I don't see it getting used for something like commuting, at least if more mundane means are available, like here on earth. Also because you'd have to make sure the landscape you cut through is not geologically active at all, and your foundations are great enough to not shift at any point. Even if the tube itself stays intact, at those speeds any unexpected bend or kink will subject the train to serious forces.
I see it more as a part of space infrastructure, where the tube is more of a "dust guard" for the system than a containment. The risks still exist there, but you weigh them against equally risky methods that don't have the same benefits. Having a guiding rail that also supplies the needed power for example doesn't have as many points of failure as a free-floating space craft with its own propulsion, or a standalone planetary rover that has to crunch through regolith.
I guess we are back to calling them „Vacuum Trains“ now that „Hyperloop“ is more or less dead.
It seems you failed to comprehend even first 5 minutes of the video
Elon had relatively little to do with Hyperloop beyond hyping it up to overshadow more practical high speed rail projects that would have had a better chance to compete with his meme cars.
The man is a con artist, through and through.
The fact that the US has been giving him vast sums of tax payer dollars to privatize the space industry is a horror story.
@@bergonius
Or they're criticizing the fact that people as a whole tend to get caught on brand names that can be dropped and pivoted away from the moment they don't work out.
Acknowledging that the term Hyperloop overshadowed the more generic term of Vacuum Train in the public consciousness is more useful than taking the opportunity for pedantic condescension.
It opens up room for conversations about how and why that happened, and what is wrong with that, and what we might do to prevent it in the future.
Or you could fire off a snappy comment that will get likes.
I'm sure the algorithm likes that engagement more, it's faster and can be done more often.
Sometimes I feel like social media is just AIs training humans to be mad at each other.
Thank God. Maybe enough people are starting to realize musks grifts
@@alexanderpetrow8668Interesting how Musk was put on a pedestal, hooray EVs, hooray going to Mars, yeah Hyperloop, then he purchased Twitter and ANY technology he ever worked with is badmouthed since then.
My only issue with the modern "Hyperloop" attention is how it derailed (no pun intended) the investment into real, proven, improvements to our nation's (US) rail system. Private companies can research all they want, but when it impacts my life, tax dollars, etc, I start to get a bit opinionated.
For me the major issue with Hyperloop is less the "Is it physically possible?" and more the "functionally plausible." Like, if its below ground and it breaks down, how do you get the people out? Since its a near vacuum they can't stay in there too long. Also, most images of the loop suggest its the pod fits perfectly within the tube, with little to no extra space, which means no room to exit, even if it is pressurized in an emergency. But also the pressure. You mention pipes in the ocean and such, but I believe those still change size due to pressure and if a "pod" is the perfect fit for the tube how it could adapt to the change in radius. Although a differential of 1psi would be minor I'm sure.
I think this method of transportation would be more viable in a large space station, like an Oneil cylinder, since there would be much less difficulty keeping the pressure low than on a planet. You'd also have more control of the climate around it.
Overall the total cost of such a system on Earth would make it very unappealing. Even at the suggested speed it would be slower than air travel. So as long as air is still viable (which could change due to fuel costs) I don't see any real value in it. Shipping would be good but, since shipping rarely requires speed as much as simply planning, it wouldn't value the increase cost as associated with speed.
Ironically, the main focus of the "Hyperloop" is to reduce traffic but the best way to do that is to improve home based working, which a lot of companies seem hesitant to do (at least in the US).
Intend your puns, don't be a coward :)
Love the use of the Czech class 754 locomotive, at 15:36, one of the most beautiful train engines ever conceived.
Another sci-fi Sunday! Hype!!!
ISAAC! Hell yes. Great episode. Thank you.
One of the bigger objections to the original Hyperloop white paper was two large, obvious engineering commissions. It was argued that the proposed San Francisco to L.A. loop could be run mostly above the surface on towers and without any expansion joints. This had two problems: I calculate that at about 400 miles long, if you could somehow make the steel tube rigid enough to not just buckle from thermal expansion, it should visibly change length shortly after dawn and shortly after dusk. There was also no discussion o how to build the foundations of such towers or how much that would cost, which is a huge consideration in California, where the soil just about dances and most soil deposits are a maze of old slip planes that make building anything on soil a further nightmare because those old slip planes are permanent weakness surfaces that prevent th soil from bearing large weights.
Great video, Isaac...👍
A wild Sabin appears to suplex the thumbnail!
drag is such a drag
One issue with the Lostrom loop / space cannon systems, is the issue of how to prevent air entry into the opening at the front. I would like to suggest using a compressed air thruster as a means to solve this. By using this kind of system, you could have a series of nozzles ejecting supersonic air outwards, allowing you to use the ventury/steam ejector style system which would maintain the vacuum, at the cost of a significant energy usage. The thrust needed should be roughly the area of the tube times the air pressure. For a high altitude opening, this becomes an acceptable energy draw.
Don't we also have 'plasma windows', which allow a magnetically-confined 'flame' of higher pressure than the ambient gas to be 'restrained' from leaking either down into the vacuum or out into the ambient gas? It would be disrupted by the train passing through, but shouldn't be harmful to it, it would just be a puff of slightly higher pressure hot gas. After the train goes through, you'd have to pump out whatever gas leaked in in the period before the plasma window was re-established, though.
this is the type of videos that I really like.. I;m 62 not to much in to the technology of some of your videos like this out ward bound series are my favorites
Great video as always!
If you want an idea for a future topic, I'd like to see a video on black hole computers
That would be an interesting one to do
I thought all public transport was vacuumed and cleaned routinely since the pandemic lol
Sure doesn't look so in Europe. Rather the other way around.
USA public transportation also seems at least as neglected as before the pandemic.
Maybe we could soap companies to sponsor train cars and buses, 'this car sponsored by lysol' :)
LOL not in America
@@isaacarthurSFIA send them to Cleveland ASAP, the RTA is gross AF
The Starchild Trilogy's 1st book - The Reefs of Space (1964) uses these. They're in vacuum, & dug straight thru the Earth, like a cord cutting a circle. Magnetic hoops keep them open, & the 'cars' are spherical like ball bearings.
tavi.
1:35 You mentioned hyperloop after you showed this. I thought of Tex Johnson putting the 707/Dash 80 in a form of a loop and wondered how to change course keeping away from the hot and pressurized lower levels without losing too much time to get to a distant destination.
I really want the future to be good, even if I’m not in it.
You never know. Nobody can seriously debunk reincarnation.
@@MichaelWinter-ss6lxDoesn't matter when you lose your memory every time.
I want to be in it, even if it's bad
People already pay good money to fly or take high speed rail to various destinations. People will pay good money to get to places like Los Vegas, San Francisco, etc if they can make it there more quickly than they are now between going through security, waiting on the tarmac + the actual flight time - That makes LA to SF viable once you can do the 600 km trip in one hour.
Coment for recomend thing, thas for video man, you good man
Thanks for coming
Harry Harrison (of Soylent Green fame) wrote the novel 'A Transatlantic Tunnel Harah!' in 1972 which dealt with the engineering of an air evacuated transit tunnel from the USA to the UK. It was a good read.
I've been thinking about this one on and off for years since I first heard of the vac train idea.
There is a much more practical idea to overcome air resistance at a fraction of the cost and it is much safer/easier.
You pump the air down the sections of tube along with the train to significantly reduce the wind resistance.Not to force the train along like an air rifle but just to more or less keep up with the train.
The air effectively runs in a semi-closed loop system a bit like the reload mech in an automatic rifle so the airspeed is effectively controlled locally to match pod speed.
A system with modular sections,compressed air,mag-lev ,regen braking,solar and wind power assist for the compressors and propulsion,cleverly re-using most of the kinetic energy and airflow.
Braking either by magnets in emergency as a failsafe or usually by progressively shutting down a valve/bulkhead several sections behind the pod (not in front!) creating a partial vacuum to slow the pods and recycle the compressors,recharge the capacitors for the maglev,etc.
Potentially a much better system - infinitely adaptable to terrain,pod types and sizes,local energy supplies.
Much easier to deal with branches and convergences in the line,merging traffic etc.
The vacuum train idea definitely has it's place where practical e.g. Luna (which we still quaintly call "THE moon"!) and Mars.
The airflow train system would also work well 'underwater' and in many cases would be much cheaper than building bridges or tunnels eg where ocean depth is somewhat prohibitive e.g. Italy to Sicily and we'd kill a lot less whales than shipping does!
It could conceivably even be a sustainable alternative to shipping for routes which follow coastlines/where ocean depth isn't too great i.e. anywhere that oil rigs are possible.
It wouldn't even need to be on the seabed as it could easily float at a certain fixed depth,tethered to the seabed with tidal energy/wind turbines/solar cells on the surface to provide all the necessary energy and buoyancy.
For me the problem with Hyperloop was not that it could not ever be done. It was that several companies and start-up were raising large quantities of capital based selling the unrealistic idea that it was something that was going to come to market within a couple of decades not centuries if ever. You could argue that it is on the investors to due better due diligence, but that is no different that blame an old person for losing money to a phone scam. Not everyone who invested in these ideas are billionaires that have money to waste. There are lots of middle class people that loss money buying into hyped up projects that are little more than 3d rendered dreams. In the case of Hyperloop there were also municipalities and states around the world that lost taxpayer money to it. It is great to do real research and try to advance science, but when companies are little more than Ponzi schemes there needs to be greater consequences.
You could never insure it either. They're death traps, compared to say, an airplane
Municipalities and states are not uninformed actors. They should be expected to actually do basic research and not be treated like old fogeys in a retirement home. (I know the comment you want to make: suppress your power levels) The argument for retail investors is better, though the amount of projects that can be seen as obviously not worth it with high school math and science classes is astounding.
@OaksAs long as you remember that high school math and science can also be used to 'prove' that relativity and quantum physics are 'obviously not true'.
It can be used as a litmus test, but not much more than that. And if anyone tries to tell you otherewise, they're probably trying to shill you something.
I think everyone should read the white paper that SpaceX and Tesla engineers wrote for it. They did the math to show that it could be cheaper than the Cal-trans "high speed rail" which topped out at 150 mph. Significantly cheaper than maglev as well. The science, engineering and manufacturing are things that can be done now. not in a century, but it take a certain kind of business that wont try to rake municipalities over the coals on cost+ contracts. I think Musk has his hands full with highly regulated industries (in SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink even Twitter) to go after another. I'd include the link to the whitepaper but it would be blocked.
Elon musk IS a genius.
Problem is, his genius is aimed at convincing governments and investors to give him money.
I'm still hopeful for a time when we can travel on these trains. If the vacuum is near enough to perfect, there is no speed limit. Another benefit is that the energy used to accelerate the train can be re-captured on deceleration , making the energy cost per trip near net zero.
Maglev is the best option for future transportation . It has the potential to go far faster than High speed rail and that's without a vacuum. It's also an already proven and feasible technology.
Maglev is fine by itself. Evacuated transport tubes have a LOT of issues.
@@Vastin agreed 100%
Honestly, you don't even _always_ need maglev, some designs for wheeled high-speed trains seem a perfectly decent substitute, if not _quite_ as well-performing.
In fact who else but Japan are building their first long range maglev line and will be extending it even further given enough time, the Chuou Shinkansen intends to reduce a 4 hour and 30 minute drive (or a 2 hour and 30 minute train) from Tokyo to Nagoya down to only 40 MINUTES. The extension that will make it from Tokyo to Osaka meanwhile plan on only taking 67 minutes to do what would take a typical Shinkansen just over three and a half hours or 6 hours and 45 minutes via car.
Maglev is a viable technology and honestly I do not believe the future will ever require anything better than it. For context presuming they can hit their estimated maximum speed for most of this journey, and went through with extending it to this level they could make it from Kagoshima to Sapporo, effectively on the opposite sides of Japan (Over 2,500km away) within only a third of the time it currently takes their usual trains. Or over six times faster than a car, and that's presuming they have four drivers rotating in eight hour shifts which is just not likely.
Maglev trains can do this within a similar efficiency gradient to conventional HSR as well, they won't sacrifice comfort or safety or elegance or security. They are more expensive than normal HSR but in the end we don't need to go much faster, a five hour train journey over a similar plane ride or a road trip would be preferable to so many people. From tourists to people on business trips to locals visiting their parents the city over.
@@RhelrahneTheIdiot Absolutely. Maglev is far superior to HSR in terms of speed, efficiency and safety; and if 600kmh (370mph) isn't fast enough, maglev has the genuine potential to be upgraded and go faster. If and when engineers can find a way to cut maglev costs significantly through major advancements in material science and magnetic technology, maglev will be the dominant mode of intercity and - in many cases - international transport; blowing HSR right out of the water and rendering them obsolete.
I'm surprised that maglev hasn't received the recognition that it deserves. It should have its rightful place in the 21st century as it has earned it. I sincerely hope that China atleast steps up to adopt maglev on a mass-scale like they've done with HSR; becoming the poster child for 21st century transportation and will set a precedent for the rest of world.
Would you ever consider doing a video where you go into detail on a the specific type(s) of vacuum train that we are talking about here on earth? I'm talking about more of an engineering video.
sure is a lot cheaper and requires less money, material and time to dig underground tunnels than build suspended track tubes 30 feet above ground.
You point that Hyperloop is going to work at low pressure, rather than Full Vacuum. How do you even define full vacuum? I'm a former employee of Virgin Hyperloop (or Hyperloop One, the one that imploded), and what we were considering in our design was pretty much vacuum (something similar to 60km altitude). Why that low? because in our calculations, it showed that the overall costs would go down by a lot.
It is relative, even the intergalactic void isn't empty, but 60 km is very not a vacuum in space contexts, the drag on a satellite at that altitude is crazy high, and if we want to contemplate velocities that move you around a continent or planet in under an hour, degrees of vacuum matter
@@isaacarthurSFIA correct. But from engineering perspective, that's still vacuum.
I would remind you that at least in US...IF you own land, its recognized as (and has been been district/SCOTUS) up to min of 5k feet of airspace overhead...
AND ALL THE LAND below (no limit): IE your land is a 3D 'pie slice' of planet from surface to the very center of the core.
==Try and create 1 'vacuum train' thru core of the planet...and you'd be dealing with 50mil + easements. IF you were to go thru any of those properties, they have right to ALL minerals/materials excavated (potentially) from their 'pie slice' piece.
...AND the moment we have access to mantle/core, you can bet $1bil that your land (no matter where, how crappy the surface is) would be valued based on its mantle/core materials (IE the known or calc'd amount of iron/uranium/gold/etc)...and that would BREAK the world's economy in short term: because even somebody with 20-40acres now has potentially $millions in transition/actinide/lanthinides, and every property has a built-in, default 'inner earth' mineral claim.
Good point, so we’ll probably see a change to the law where only the crust (60-100 km)n is considered owned. That would dramatically lower the number of easements to a few thousand.
@@TraditionalAnglican It would be interesting change. Quite possible, but the fallout would be interesting...even now a big % of land is privately owned in US: you change it, but do you grandfather it in?
IF they didn't grandfather, that'd be a hell of an abstract legal battle.
Still, think about it: IF we could not just drill but perform construction in mantle, think of all the inherent 'possibilities'...terror-ism of somebody introducing a train that is carrying a tsar bomba: may not destroy the planet...but detonating in the core = serious earthquakes/possible magnetic field issues.
IF we can mind the mantle, well that's where like 95% of the transition/actinide/lanthanide elements are (sunk when planet was molten). Global elites would have to pull a De Beers and have monopoly on gold etc: cuz it'd become worth pennies overnight.
I like these more technically/engineering focused episodes, as opposed to the more speculative/sociology based ones. Arthur's expertise clearly lies more in the former.
Do another one on in Vivo gene editing
16:15 to drop through the earth's core certainly is a hot ride- and a bumpy one too! Did you calculate the Coriolis acceleration?
One of the problems for a system that passes through the centre of the earth for Australia, is that for all its size, there is no part of mainland Australia that is opposite land on the far side of the planet. It's all underwater!
and you'd have to find people who actually want to go there
In regards to a hole through the center of the planet for travel... imagine one through a birch world.
Good Video
11:53 Helium is an asphixiant, as it displaces oxygen , although provided the leak is slow it would never be a problem, besides the trains maybe needing to carry oxygen masks like planes do
The bigger problem, is that it is also a sedative.
Isaac you are awesome. This sounds like a particle accelerator. Now think - big magnets. Big. Would this create a magnetic shield? So we are safer on the way to Mars?
You seem to read my mind. I’m writing a teen novel set in the future, and I’m about to write a fast train scene.
I am confused, shouldn’t hyperloop be called LoopX?
I heard they call it bankrupt
I have an idea for a video: Faster than light communication and if it can be useful for software updates in a spacecraft far from its home. I heard that even if we tried to communicate we won't be able to decifer the data sent from home due to uncertainty within the quantum level or something of that sort? (I don't fully know about this ftl communications relationship with quantum mechanics).So i thought we could use it like a morse code
Unfortunately, I think you're thinking of quantum entanglement, which can make the same data 'appear' in two places at once, but the data is always _completely random._ Because of this, you can't use it to transfer data FTL, but you CAN use it for interesting, likely unbreakable forms of encryption, by scrambling your data in some way using the random data you know exists in two and only two places (and then sending your scrambled data in some other, more conventional way, so that your communication partner uses their copy of the random quantum-entanglement data to unscramble it).
could you do videos on The Future of Medical Technology and The Future of Food/Cuisine please?
The food/medical/health complex should not be missing an explanation on how the food industry feeds us with partly pure trash. And since this works so well, they put a lot of effort on expanding their trash sortiment.
In the future, everything will come in a cup so you can sip it. ^^
You’d probably like the episode on synthetic meat if you haven’t seen it.
Watched this earlier on Nebula, a most informative video on a simple yet complex and recently controversial topic.
Splendid work, Isaac.
Back in the 90s I was always thinking about this concept but mostly for cargo.
I tihnk in a lot of contexts, like space launches, it's an easier lift with cargo as you can using high acceleration rates, shorter tubes, and less worries about damage/safety. But I wouldn't expect it to get popular for ground-to-ground freight until passenger services were common
@@isaacarthurSFIA I just want to send something from New York to LA at 10,000 Gs
Thunderf00t incoming 🤣🤣🤣
😂 ain’t seen one of his videos is YEARS
😂 TF doesn’t debunk Futurists, just con-men scammers.
Thunderf00t is a clown 🤡 He makes his money through YT adcents, aka you following him on any step/ wasting time on entertainment. Tbh, always easy to criticize sth than actually do IRL. I am not defending Musk or other scam artists!
Thunderf00t is just plain boring.
thunderpoop
@@NukeGaza2024 if you have one, you have seen them all.
I always loved the idea of a train in a vacuum tunnel, accelerated to orbital speed magnetically and then just allowed to orbit the earth *underground*.
Also, I think an inventor in the midwest in February will some day invent the world's first hydronic robot.
Nothing beats Roddenberry's Sub Shuttle.
The modell train variant has the air removed with an vacuum cleaner
Am I the only one who was expecting the audiobook section to lead to an Audible sponsor segment?
Sadly they stopped sponsoring youtube vids by anyone when they switched marketing firms a couple years back, I miss doing the audiobook of the month segments but I still try to give shoutouts to good books and narrations when the topic fits the tale.
Video idea tunneling machines
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri... 😏
Preach brother!… Lal
@@Ag3nt0fCha0s
Sure !
So that old anime Galaxy Express 999 could be a reality?
You don't need any airlocks in these tubes at all at the stations if you make the doorways at each end of each of the train cars and have the train dock with the mating mechanism at each station at one end of the train. You only have the vestibule between the train and the station door to pressurize and depressurize. The downside of this is that you need to enter and exit only at one end of the train and have to walk the full length of the train to get to the other end when boarding. But an advantage is that you can couple/dock a rescue train and-to-end to a disabled train so that people can easily pass from one train to the other in atmosphere without having to pressurize the tunnel to let people exit the train and go to an exit.
Ok now think about the throughput of a station and how you manage to orient the train to the platform without breaking the vacuum. For it to be even close to efficient and preserve vacuum, it could only realistically connect two stations and never turn the cars around.
@@taxirob2248 You never heard of track switches, wyes, and stub stations?
@@fredashayhow do you do ANY of that when everything is inside a vacuum chamber, smartass?
I was 29 years old when Elon Musk announced his "revolutionary" vacuum train concept, and I was already old enough to remember multiple previously-existing vacuum train concepts. It is weird to me that someone could have been my age or older and not have already been familiar with the concept.
Me thinks you are now 39 years old and still have not actually read the paper Musk released in which he first mused about the hyperloop. The paper does reference, by name, several other individuals and organizations that have proposed similar concepts. The paper references how ideas similar to the hyperloop have long existed. The paper then goes on to make it clear that he is not advocating for a vacuum or even a near vacuum train, but a low pressure train.
You should probably read the paper.
@@seanlarabee6300we already have.
Musk is still a liar.
@@seanlarabee6300 Ah yes, the "okay it's not technically my idea but I totally have things to add to it" cope. You're just coping his cope.
@@TheReaverOfDarkness Christ on a crutch, I pointed out that the actual paper he first released on the topic flat out factually contradicts what you said. Period.
In fact, your followup even references that point but somehow tries to twist that into being a negative. So was Musk ignorant of what came before or not in your world view?
@@seanlarabee6300 He was ignorant of what came before. At least, that's the objective answer based on what he presented to the public. If you want to dig deeper, it is pretty easy to say that his awareness of what came before had always been unimportant because he was paying people to sift through other people's ideas and glean bits for him to steal all along. If you try to give credit to Musk's honesty, then he's a flunk-out failure hack who has absolutely nothing of value to contribute to the engineering and business world. But I'm not going to give any credit to his honesty. I know better than that.
Noone can hear you scream in space........... how about in a tunnel ? When the wheels fall off or the maglev shuts down there will be a big shower of sparks and no chance of rescue. And I cannot even imagine a rupture allowing atmospheric pressure into this tube.
This makes more sense on the moon or space station.
last time people developed pneumatic train, arab petrol dislike it since how green it is (aeromovel). vacuum train still at doubt since most people still doubt the safety
never trust media. our tech beyond what we have right now but not everyone profit from it
About dropping an object "through the core", wouldn't the Coriolis Effect make the object shift in the vertical as well, making it impossible to drop something straight through the planet?
A straight vertical shaft isn't spinning at the same speed from different heights/radius of the planet, so you already need to put a guide on to make sure it keeps falling straight
Oh, okay that makes sense now. So you would need a super strong cable of some sort as a guide wire of sorts thanks, haven't worked my brain like that in a while :) @isaacarthurSFIA
Topopolis to the stars?
I like
why is airdrag worse after the sound barrier? Is there a limit that is hit our something?
Air drag is weird. It increases quadratically with speed up till the sound barrier for a give cross section, at which point the majority of the drag startscoming from the supersonjc shockwave flattening out the drag to velocity curve for a while, with some specific designs even slightly lowering above mach 1. But for something as long as a train, a large part of aerodynamic drag would always come from having to drag around a lare volume of boundry layer air along its entire long body. Think of cross sectional drag as having to push air out of the way, with it getting harder to do as you are doinfg it faster, to the point, where it almost hardens into a solid at mach1, whilst boundry layer drag is like the rolling resistance of the wheels, but for the body on the air.
i literally just searched for the new episode 30 seconds ago and here it is
Seen
Inb4 all the memes about the infamous Hyperloop! The company declared bankruptcy last year btw.
*one of the companies
At least watch the video you're commenting on
@@iliketrains0pwned pretty much all hyperloop companies and projects are kaput
@@v0ldy54 No, they're not, China just reported they reached 623 km/h in a 2 km tube.
You know how many rocket companies went bankrupt before SpaceX? Or how many car companies failed before Tesla? A startup going bankrupt doesn't invalidate the idea, especially in times when funding suddenly becomes very scarce.
👌
If we build have a transport that passes through the centre of the earth, do we still have to deal with Bryan Cranston?
Any bets on the first country that will successfully build a track between cities?
Helium as a medium of travel makes me wonder what the performance of a propeller would look like.
Would the speed of sound remain 3 times higher if it's put under pressure to simulate a single earth atmosphere? I can imagine a matryoshka world with one or two layers dedicated to holding pure helium as a medium of travel for propeller driven aircraft, who's propellers can spin much faster than they can on a normal atmosphere without the performance losses from the blade tips cracking the sound barrier.
where do you get all that helium?
Oh yea, by all means!
Immediately thought of Galaxy Express 999
It won't work, or it would have already. The energy cost of evacuation on Earth is better spent on other things, as is the time needed to do it. Just electrify the trains we already have, and do it with fission.
What in the Beach Pneumatic Hyperloop is this?!
So rarely first, so perfectly timed while I do dishes! ❤
I swear when I do dishes UA-cam picks up the running water on my mic and gives me extra ads thinking I won’t get my phone wet to skip an ad
@@NukeGaza2024omg you just gave me flashbacks to before I got UA-cam premium.
Terrible feeling.
Thunderf00t ripped the concept a new one years ago. The technology is a future tech project we're not ready for now.
And shanedk has ripped thunderf00t that analysis of the concept years ago.
Particle physicists are the best engineers, apparently.
@@Djarms67 Ah. That's why it's rusting away ofcoarse.
At least, the part that hasn't been demolished to make way for an actual functional train.
It's not a future tech project, we've already got all the required tech. The concept isn't bad either, but what Musk was trying to sell was dubious at best.
If we actually do it, it will be difficult, expensive, and slow to build.
It's only a mag-lev train in a 50 ft diameter tunnel that's at -1 differential pressure. Of course, that's still a mag-lev in a 50 ft diameter tunnel running ~10 meters underwater.... We can do both relatively easily (for the engineering, neither is new tech, just new applications), but it's going to be expensive and slow to build. (Interstate highway times transcontinental railroad levels of cost & labor)
P.S. Musk can't afford to fund it, he'd barely be able to afford the amount of design work it would take to get it to "ready to build" blue-prints. (That's with using existing Tesla & SpaceX engineers for those parts where their experience is relevant.)
@@Djarms67no, he did not.
He did try.
2:22 second biggest. the biggest is the friction with the ground. Levitation comes before vacuum.
Pretty sure you're wrong
I think you're right. Check out my comment just below.
@ius ask Japan, or the Germans for that matter.
they didn't do levitation first because it reduced the most friction, but because it's much easier to do then vacuum tunnels.
@@owenbelezos8369 rolling on the ground provides a lower practical speedlimit, than the air we move through. otherwise Maglev trains would not be faster than normal trains.
Let's go🎉🎉🎉
I wonder if vacuum tubes ever will gain popularity with humans. For sci-fi yes absolutly there is a lots of logical pathways.
But for humans, on earth. In atmosphere. It might work out better to have of all things, low friction walls and positive air pressure tubes filled with very fasy moving air. If the airs moving 200 km/hr then you just need to get your train moving as fast with more robust gating. If you even need any special gates, having just an opening might make for a suction that helps accelerate the trains onto the main loop!
You're just invented the Hyperloop
Friction between the air and the walls will be an issue.
Could the vacuum actually not be a red herring for this quest of faster trains? Why not scale up the length of the train while keeping the cross-section invariant: the relative air friction should scale down regardless of the ambient pressure (I just revisited the wikipedia page on the Sears-Haack body to get some confidence on this statement). Combine this with electromagnetic levitation and you should have a recipe for ultra-high-speed mass transit without vacua.
I guess if you would really go supersonic with this type of arrangement, you'd get environmental problems regarding the acoustics (the bang of the shockwave). But what's wrong with 950 km / h here on earth? Does one really need 1500 km / h for anything?
I'd want to add: I guess your train will have to have the shape of a cylinder, enclosing the rail that provides for the levitation. In such an arrangement the air in the annular region between the rail and the train could be sucked out while the train is passing (by a decompressor system on the rail or on the train) so that the zero velocity air boundary layer around the supporting rail doesn't ruin a favorable drag scaling.
Because longer trains are less useful and more disruptive
@@bergonius Musk fan?
In my 2nd subcomment I guess I forgot about the support columns that have to hold such a rail (that are then in the way of the moving train)
Here I am thinking how to make a Time machine
When I went through speech therapy I ended up over pronouncing my S's. Having a slight lisp is easier on the ears.
12:26 typo. You have "MArs" not "Mars".
In most parts of the universe, a vacuum train is just a train.
On earth, a vacuum train is an idiotic idea billionaires like, because maybe they could scam a lot of money off it.
Getting some Galaxy Express 999 vibes
Adam something response video incomming
Yay! Isaac addresses Hyperloops!
I've seen so many dubious arguments against it.
Hyperloop isn't a terrible idea long-term, the problem right now is that jumping to a Hyperloop bleeds support from building up rail infrastructure (which was Musk's plan). We're much better off expanding rail short-term.
It all boils down to ROI
the problem i have with hyperloop, maglev, monorail and all these... is not the billionaire behind it, that's sometimes only the icing on the top, it's the problem a few people think Traffic and Trains must be invented from scratch, whole infrastructure has to be build for some specific system (even with different track widths) and the vacuum theme also, a hell of energy consumption for what, being in 15 min earlier from a to c...and what gets me real, some ideas came from a country that is struggling to build a decent standard railroad... no offense to america, please... it's the idea hyperloop in its whole i think no, thank you but no... would be different in an orbital ring (no need for Vacuum pumps) or on the Moon or Mercury.. but i think money, energy and workforce is better used for a worldwide transport system, not depending on fossil energy, cheap for users, an alternative for fuel burners or EV and for economical competition standardised, so local companies can also thrive...
As often said in the USA
The problem is not the train lines, they work fine. How ya gonna get from the station to your destination?
@@AnonymousAnarchist2suburbia is the best place not to build public transport...especially hyperloops...
Also, the blind faith and pre-hype about completely unproven prototypes.
I remember when every news channel would talk about Hyperloop as if it was practically certain that it would be built within years.
It convinces a lot of our local government officials to pause before supporting other proven methods of public transport.
@@AnonymousAnarchist2Include a public taxi ride to your destination with a price based on distance, that would be nice. They'd know in advance how many rides would be needed, which would really help with logistics compared to having a whole row of taxis running trying to find customers like we have now
@@samus598
What blind fate? Nobody even started to do it seriously. A few startups played around with the concept. Apart from that it was just a short media frenzy, from the time when Elon was popular in left-wing media.
And the Vegas Loop, which is already transporting passengers, didn't get any government funding, it's all private.
Hyperloop will come later, but have to scale up the tech first.
@8:10 Great job addressing the “we can’t build the evacuated tube” concern of Hyperloop skeptics!
No one ever said it was impossible. Just about nothing is impossible if you are willing to throw enough money at it. The problem with vac trains is that they are stupidly expensive relative to their advantages. All they have is speed… that’s it. They are more expensive to build. More expensive to maintain. Imagine the costs of maintaining the vacuums. Even a partial vacuum is stupidly expensive. And now think about the vibrations and just how ridiculously precise you’ll have to build the tunnel and track. Have you ever felt the amount of vibrations a big chunky train has when passing by. And you might try to counter with maglev. Go to Japan or Shanghai and you’ll still feel it. It’s stupid.
@@TheWizardGamez The "just pump the air out, duh!" folk have never actually tried pumping air our of something.
No it doesn't. "Just build it in space where it's already a vacuum" isn't a solution. Yeah, lets build a Hyperloop in Clarke orbit, easy peasy, right?
Holy shit why is the outro so LOUD