Is Elon Musk an earthling?

[kandrathe]

I often suspect he is "The Man who fell to Earth".

I'm enamored with the Hyperloop. He says, "Short of figuring out real teleportation, which would of course be awesome (someone please do this), the only option for super fast travel is to build a tube over or under the ground that contains a special environment. This is where things get tricky. "

I love this guy. I think while he's pushing this hyperloop idea, we'll go work on the teleportation problem. :-)

[Jester]

I often suspect he is "The Man who fell to Earth".

I'm enamored with the Hyperloop. He says, "Short of figuring out real teleportation, which would of course be awesome (someone please do this), the only option for super fast travel is to build a tube over or under the ground that contains a special environment. This is where things get tricky. "

I love this guy. I think while he's pushing this hyperloop idea, we'll go work on the teleportation problem. :-)

Maybe I'm doubting the next Brunel here, but I'm not holding my breath on viable low-pressure tube travel.

Teleportation, that's just suicide, as far as I'm concerned. Suicide plus replication. Which is not much more attractive.

-Jester

[Lissa]

Personally, I'm more interested in some of the other things he and his team have done. There's a couple things out there that his team has pulled together that's kind of down low, but incredible impressive. Remember Minority Report where Tom Cruise is manipulating the computer through complete hand gestures, Musk's team has done this with a combination of a camera software that has been integrated into a CAD/CAM software. He can manipulate any CAD/CAM drawing with hand gestures, zooming in/out, rotating, spinning, you name it and his team even went the extra mile and was able to project the images on to normal pane glass (nothing special about the glass at all, just like what you would see in a window) and have the image treat the glass as if it was opaque without it being opaque (ala Tony Stark's monitors in Iron Man).

One could probably compare him to Tesla on some of the ideas he comes up with and what can be done with them.

[kandrathe]

Maybe I'm doubting the next Brunel here, but I'm not holding my breath on viable low-pressure tube travel.

Jordan Brandt, technology futurist at Autodesk has proposed using a carbon fiber weaving machine to make the tube, reducing it's weight, and reducing its cost by many billions.

The design of high speed intercity tubes, to move vehicles, removes the largest issue I've had with fully electric cars -- which is energy density. We'd need to streamline the queues for loading and unloading, and possibly have multiple transport "lanes" but it's a viable alternative to gasoline based engines needing to chug along interstates, and should also vastly increase safety.

[kandrathe]

Personally, I'm more interested in some of the other things he and his team have done. There's a couple things out there that his team has pulled together that's kind of down low, but incredible impressive. Remember Minority Report where Tom Cruise is manipulating the computer through complete hand gestures, Musk's team has done this with a combination of a camera software that has been integrated into a CAD/CAM software. He can manipulate any CAD/CAM drawing with hand gestures, zooming in/out, rotating, spinning, you name it and his team even went the extra mile and was able to project the images on to normal pane glass (nothing special about the glass at all, just like what you would see in a window) and have the image treat the glass as if it was opaque without it being opaque (ala Tony Stark's monitors in Iron Man).

I just saw this on the news this morning. The US Army is soliciting bids for building Iron Man suits. That 3D gesture cad/cam stuff is really very impressive. It's a clear game changer for user interface design for technology products, and before we can launch gesture input kiosks for everyday people, we'll need to establish a "standard" for a gesture vocabulary. Otherwise, it would be very confusing to do one thing to pump gas, another to get money, and yet another to pay for groceries, or operate your car.

One could probably compare him to Tesla on some of the ideas he comes up with and what can be done with them.

Yes, although I believe Tesla's ideas were considered closer to lunatic than Musk's.

[Jester]

Jordan Brandt, technology futurist at Autodesk has proposed using a carbon fiber weaving machine to make the tube, reducing it's weight, and reducing its cost by many billions.

This is starting to sound like a Ray Kurtzweil lecture. How many untested technologies can we lash together to make one super-project?

We'll probably learn some interesting things from trying this, and so it's probably worthwhile to explore. But anyone saying "oh, I can shave a few billion off this by doing something nobody has ever done before" is almost certainly dreaming. Or living in Silicon Valley for too long. Visionary, first-run projects are never cheap, and they're certainly never as cheap as their boosters' back-of-the-envelope calculations. Innovation creates neat things, but it doesn't tend to save money until it can be mass produced, and rolled out over a large scale.

-Jester

---

One could probably compare him to Tesla on some of the ideas he comes up with and what can be done with them.

Nothing Elon Musk has done so far comes within a country mile of Tesla for sheer brilliance. He is taking on impressive, but well-known engineering challenges, and taking the next step forward with a combination of moxie and expertise. But it's not like we couldn't make an electric car, or send someone into space, or settle accounts electronically before Elon Musk. He's more Brunel than Tesla.

Tesla did entirely unique, ground-breaking primary and engineering research on electricity. (Also some crankish stuff, but genius is as genius does.) He didn't just make some shiny things, he had penetrating insight into the nature of the next generation of technology.

-Jester

[kandrathe]

We'll probably learn some interesting things from trying this, and so it's probably worthwhile to explore.

Yes. I agree completely. Were it my millions, I'd want to start with scaled research in traversing a vast stretch of flat California desert getting up to the speeds of near 700 mph, and decelerating safely. Then do that many, many thousand of times -- learning about the vehicles / tubes properties and engineering. I'd see thousands of design and material tweaks needed before say we jump in and fund a real world implementation.

If this thing fails going 700mph, penetrating the tube wall, we'd be hard pressed to find any remains of the occupants. It must be pretty fail safe. That is, if power fails, it needs to glide to a safe full stop landing -- and not have the car behind careen into it at 700 mph either. Which then begs the question of what happens if it does stop in the middle, being possibly hundreds of miles from anywhere. So thinking through those worst case "never going to happen" scenarios would be a very important test (and design) consideration.

But, if it is theoretically, a safer, faster, more efficient means of transport, then I'd say we should get into it. I was thinking about how handy it would be to create a series of short hop segments, like for here it would be Minneapolis to Chicago, with a possible intermediate stop in Madison, Wisconsin. Within the US, I'm sure the entire east coast would benefit. When I was consulting, I'd do many trips for just the day, and if you could reduce the unproductive travel time it's well worth it. In any business really, it's all about productivity, so the more hours of productive time you can squeeze into the work week, the better.

[Jester]

But, if it is theoretically, a safer, faster, more efficient means of transport, then I'd say we should get into it.

Let a thousand flowers bloom, and all that. There's no reason not to explore possible new technologies, and at some point, we will have to take the plunge and build something sizeable with it.

What I don't think is a good idea, is sinking billions into it without having first checked whether it's even seriously feasible, let alone cheaper and better than the alternatives.

After all, monorail was once the future.

-Jester

[kandrathe]

After all, monorail was once the future.

I still want my own autogyro.

[shoju]

Elon Musk is a fantastic innovator. I've been a huge fan of his since he replied to a letter my son wrote him. It wasn't much, but very cool nonetheless. My son aspires to watch and study global weather patterns from space.

Back when the first Space X mission to the ISS was in the news, My son wrote him a letter, and told him about his aspirations, and that it was exciting to see people besides NASA getting involved in space exporation / travel.

The response was short, just a couple of sentences about how young people like my son are the key to furthering humanity's endeavors in space. It was a typed, probably form letter, but it was signed, in ink. (Could have been autopen) It's one of his prize possessions, sitting in a frame next to his letter from his favorite meteorologist, Jim Cantore.

If anyone can make tube tech work for transportation, I'd bet on Musk.

[Kevin]

The hyperloop doesn't really excite me that much. Space X and Tesla Motors do though. I also like some of the other stuff that he has done that Lissa mentioned.

But the hyperloop doesn't get rid of the issues that any other fixed route and mass transit system has. Yes, cars are most efficient on fixed routes too, but the nature of the vehicle means it's much simpler and cheaper to create the routes and you have much more control of when and where you travel.

Hyperloop is essentially really really high speed rail but using smaller trains. So it mitigates some of it, but you have to be cognizant of other capsules on the route you want, etc. It can buy you some time savings as a subway replacement system but I don't think it will be as much as some folks things. It still won't be completely free travel, it will provide more options on arrival departure, but it won't get rid of it all. It should allow better direct to destination with fewer stops travel, but again I don't anticipate it having single passenger capsules. In practice you'll still likely have standard routes, standard arrival and departure times stuff.

I'm much more interested in self driving cars. Sadly to really reap the benefits you need all the cars with some level of the self driving ability, but many of our interstates and major highways would be fine to travel at 100 - 120 MPH (some even more) if every car on the road was capable of being aware of all the other vehicles around it, the safety concerns that higher speeds create are mostly eliminated. Also if the car can drive itself you have the ability to limit a lot of the waste of travel time, and still let you move relatively quickly for "short trip" stuff within a populated area. Google of course has some pretty good working prototypes of this already that work with or without GPS systems (and you would have to be able to work without GPS for safety reasons). Safely eating while "driving" to work, or heck safely being able to sleep on the 200+ mile trip to visit family. You need to make a cross country trip that takes 8+ hours? Start out at 10pm and go to bed as the car drives, you'll probably have to wake up to put fuel in since range is still likely to be in the 300 - 600 miles that must vehicles fall in for a full tank of fuel. Sure it takes vehicle interior redesign for some of that to work, but it has big pay offs and lets people have full freedom of choice on travel times and routes.

[kandrathe]

But the hyperloop doesn't get rid of the issues that any other fixed route and mass transit system has.

In the bigger picture, I think of it as modal. Europe benefits from having more modes of transport that have costs and benefits, but still generally compete for customers. Whenever I plan trips there, I make use of automobiles, planes, trains, buses, and even ships. The US is crippled by having few modes of transport, mostly plane, or auto. Some cities in the US have local subway for transport within the city, or localized buses. All in all, though, it is dismally inadequate, and probably economically restrictive.

Pre-911, it was common, that I'd get up, drive to the airport at 7am, hop on a plane at 7:45 and arrive in Chicago at 8:45 or earlier, pick up a rental car, or make other local transport arrangements, and arrive at "Work" by 9:30. Then reverse it all at the end of the day, and arrive home near Minneapolis by 8pm. Post 9-11, you need to add 1-2 hours to both sides, and the whole air travel as short transport fails, it's too expensive to stay overnight for short trips, and driving is also too time consuming.

The goal for any mode of transport needs to be to minimize cost, in terms of fuel, risks and time. What I appreciate about Musk's vision of transport is that it does not try to be all things. The niche for the hyperloop is where it would be conducive to hop into your Tesla, drive to the hyperloop station, and be 1000 miles away in less than an hour, do your business locally, then return home an hour later. With a gasoline engine, you could drive to Chicago, but it takes many hours, and you might only do it with a stay over night. If all you had were an electric car, to drive to Chicago and back may take many days and much logistics planning for hours of recharging, and be very frustrating, not to mention highly unproductive.

This is at least one vision of a potentially feasible hydrocarbon free mode of long transport, depending on how the energy for the hyperloop's batteries are generated.

[Kevin]

Sure.

I don't think the hyperloop idea is a bad thing, I just don't find it all that exciting. If it becomes feasible (something that I'm still not sure is the case), it will have good uses. Sadly the 1000 mile stretch is actually something that I don't think it will ever be built to do. I'm also not sure it will avoid the 1-2 extra hours that the airports give you now either. A bomb in the tube could be pretty deadly depending on where it goes off, etc. Even the few long haul commuter trains that still operate have suffered from the post 9/11 over paranoia.

I do agree that the US is crippled by lack of choices, I actually this is an area where private industry has failed us. Transportation is infrastructure and I feel that is an area that government should have it's hands, that's how a lot of this stuff got built in Europe where as you point out, it works quite well. Private industry while interested in infrastructure is not always capable of creating or maintaining it.

But my main point is that I'm personally more excited about the privatization of low earth orbit. History has a lot of lessons that show that government backed exploration makes sense and works, and then after that is done, risks are better known and assessed you let private industry do what it does. Ferrying people and cargo to and from low earth orbit, that's a pretty well known area and I'm excited to see that no longer the domain of governments. That should help push government funded science and exploration farther out, send humans to Mars, do more tests with landing on or altering orbits of asteroids. Build that 3 Lagrange point telescope array to provide even more detailed images and data of whatever we want to look at. Get more solar observatories out there, because space weather is becoming more and more important and what we have has already been helpful in saving billions of dollars worth of damage, but we could do better.

So Space-X which is oh so close to being cleared to put humans in their vehicles makes me happy because while it's not anything radical, and it's a slim possibility that they won't even be first, it's opening doors that need to be opened. By extension it will eventually help with the push I just got done rambling about. That door they helped opened has already lead to ventures that should be successful in mining asteroids, which are very likely to make some of the important elements that are hard to get at on earth more available. Without Space-X some of those ventures might be 5 - 20 years away still. Heck they are currently contracted to launch one of the asteroid search and tag probes for the mining operations. Consider that pretty much all the gold, cobalt, iron, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, osmium, palladium, platinum, rhenium, rhodium, ruthenium, and tungsten that has ever been mined is from impact deposits, very little has come from surface flow. There are tons of all of that in the Earth, but the Earth was molten for a long time, and most of that stuff is locked up so deep we can't use it.

Getting off this planet in a repeatable fashion will be huge for the species. Zero G manufacturing, increasing available resources, hopefully getting better at harnessing more of the energy the sun is just dumping out every day, etc. Increase energy, and increase resources and lot of other problems become easier to solve. My visions and hopes are decades, perhaps centuries, away but the sooner we get started the sooner we get there.

Tesla is just another electric car company, but again, they started from the ground up and have been successful. They are helping test and push battery technologies, they are working on hydrogen fuel cells (I still think this is the way that smaller faster transit is going to end up going), etc.

Sure maybe it takes an Elon Musk to actually make these ventures work, but I'm with Jester, he isn't Tesla, he's actually closer to a Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. Those are rare people, but they aren't Einstein or Tesla rare.

So yes the hyperloop can help solve an issue and, again, I hope it does work because there are some tangential benefits to it as well, and unforseen benefits I'm sure too. But I don't think it helps all that much for what I feel will be bigger improvements and changes to the species.