TransPod: It'll probably never happen, buuut..

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Canada could use something like this. Air travel within Canada is rather expensive. I don't really have any desire to go to Toronto, ever, anyways.. but it would be kinda neat if a 1,000 kmh train linked all the major Canadian cities and we had the option to visit them vs. it being cost prohibitive to fly or drive. Of all the places in Canada I've never been, the only one I Might consider venturing to for a visit is Montreal sometime.. maybe during their ridiculously over the top Pride celebration of sex & debauchery in the streets. It'd be an easier decision to attend sometime if it was a couple train stops away vs. expensive flights.

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/flux ... index.html

There'll eventually be faster, better, cheaper ways to travel.. but humans have been daydreaming about them for decades. I think I read some futurism article from over 50 years ago that dreamt of underwater trains connecting continents. We still don't have anything even close - just China saying they want to build a train tunnel to the USA. So I'm not going to hold my breath on this thing, or anything else like it, coming to fruition soon enough for me to ride it. If I ever go to Montreal, I'll probably just have to bit the bullet and pay for airfare.

Canada IS a potential candidate for some damned fast rail, though.. huge country, need speedy trains to traverse it in a reasonable amount of time at a reasonable cost of travel. But I just don't see it coming together unless maybe China pays for it as part of their belt & road initiative to steal resources all over the world.. if this thing is projected to cost $18 Billski to travel between Alberta's two cities, then it'll actually cost closer to $50B for the same track, which means it'd end up costing Trillion Dollar Bills to plop these things down across the country.. ain't nobody got $ for that.

Sorry to be Mikah, destroyer of dreams again, but 99% of these fanciful new ways of travel never amount to anything except these excitable articles. The companies that push them are led by lunatics or con artists (Hello Elon) at best and you should already know how smart the average journalist is - but - they are especially cretinous when it comes to reporting on technology and engineering. Literally all they would have to do is find any semi-respectable engineer and ask for an opinion, be laughed at down the phone for 30 minutes, then scrap the article, but they never do. Engineers even have a word for this kind of thing "The Gadgetbahn."

The article talks about yet-another-"hyperloop". The pods are magnetically levitated and the vacuum tubes allow them to travel at great speed. A very old idea in itself and as impossible then as it is now - it's just an engineering nightmare to create vacuums or near-vacuums inside so large a structure, let alone a structure with a bullet train whizzing through it. Even if they somehow pulled it off, there is no way in 100 years that they could ever make it safe enough for human transport.

Nightmare again. Whether you are thinking of building on the sea floor (which has almost insurmountable problems of its own, even on a continental shelf) or underneath it - the plan is DOA by the unfortunate reality of continental drift - forever putting strain on and eventually breaking and flooding whatever you construct down there.

Back in the Seventies I cracked a sci fi novel, forget which one, I believe it was by Phillip K Dick. A sci fi big name. Anyway at the start of the novel it described a transport system in which you could just walk through a door ...and instantly be in a city on another continent. Start in Paris, and walk through a door and be in Bejing. New York and be Cairo. etc.

The first thought that popped in my head when I read that was "if that tech came true then...the world would swamped in disease pandemics in no time!".

I think that we should turn the clock back to slower paced transportation. Maybe not all of the back to sailing ships. But back to ocean liners, and flying boats. Put a break on global travel until we figure out how control pandemics better.

@Mikah.. so, all I have to do is write one of these fanciful stories of future transpo and do a little financial engineering to release an IPO on some wild west venture board & *presto retire-o* ?

Hehe, maybe. If you don't get done for securities fraud. Having said that, the amount of money, public and private that has been wasted on things like this is staggering, and I don't often hear of prosecution. The modern way of doing this techno-con is crowdfunding - which seems to have much looser rules compared to conning stupid venture capitalists out of money.

Getting from one location to another instantly simply requires glitching the Matrix.