It's time to be honest about Musk's vacuum tube to nowhere

It’s time to be honest about Musk’s vacuum tube to nowhere

  • blazera@kbin.social
    3·
    11 months ago

    Earthquakes keep getting brought up as if they’re not devastating to absolutely everything we already use. What if an earthquake hits a regular train? Or a bridge, or a house. only a vacuum tube is susceptible to earthquakes.

    • prime_number_314159@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      If any part of the hundreds of miles of tube suddenly stops being a vacuum chamber, every train all along the tube is going to be hit by air rushing in, at the speed of sound, with all the turbulence that implies, while its already moving at full speed. It might be possible to engineer a capsule that will keep the people inside alive when that happens, but it is not at all the same as e.g. rail, where “stop moving fowards” depletes essentially all the energy in the system.