Hyperloop: The Future of Travel |

The founder of PayPal, SpaceX and Tesla Motors is at it again. Elon Musk is set to release the design plans as open source on August 12, 2013 for a new method of travel called the Hyperloop. Elon Musk describes this as a mix between “a Concorde, a rail gun and an air hockey table”. With this new method you could travel from New York to LA in just 45 minutes. It would be a network of airless vacuum tubes. People and packages ride in capsules sent through the tubes. Sorta similar to the tubes they use at the banks when using the drive through but more complex and with people.

The price to ride in one of these capsules, about $100. Compared to an Airline ticket that is around 200-300 and takes 6 or 7 hours, this is much cheaper and way faster than flying. I would assume as this gets more popular and goes more mainstream ride prices would drop even more. Imagine you could live in Ohio and work at a company in San Francisco with around a two hour commute each day.

I assume once this is built there would be different Hyperloop stations set up all over the country. When first hearing about this, one of the things I said to my self is “This is the closest thing to teleporting we’ll get to in my lifetime”. I’m into sci-fi and virtual worlds were you can teleport to places or friends can send you teleport requests that are instant. 45 mins isn’t instant but its way better than a plane.

Say I was talking to a friend on Skype and we both were board and wanted to go hang out at cool rave clubs in LA or a cool theme park. Planning on going to LA and hanging out, and doing it both on the same day would be impossible with a plane. With the Hyperloop, we both would drive to our local Hyperloop stations and be in LA together within an hour. We could then hang out and have fun. Then at the end of the night, we go back to our separate houses so we can be ready for work or whatever in the morning.

Not everyone can afford travel, have obligations with family or work in their city, or just wish they could travel more. With a Hyperloop, I could see myself traveling the world, seeing new places, meeting more people happening much more often.

This would be a really disruptive technology. Airlines would go out of business. Package shipping companies could move large amounts of packages across the country from hub to hub way quicker than planes. This technology would make the world a much better place, letting people travel to different places within the same hour and faster packages. It would be awesome and I really hope the Hyperloop becomes reality ASAP.

I guess the major Airlines would try to stop this from happening, similar to how the oil companies try to stop electric cars, by buying up patents and end up not doing anything with them.

Where would you want to visit to on the Hyperloop?

Source: Wired, TechSpot