To Everywhere in 42 Minutes

by mariorz on 4/21/2009, 4:24 AM with 42 comments
  • by anigbrowl on 4/21/2009, 5:35 AM

    It sounds like great fun until your rapid transit pod plunges into a bath of superheated magma. Vomitous fellow passengers would not be my primary anxiety about this mode of travel.

  • by te_platt on 4/21/2009, 5:05 AM

    Fun idea, but didn't everyone here have to work this out in their college physics class?

  • by d1rge on 4/21/2009, 6:55 AM

    Putting practical considerations aside, what might the effect on society be if we could be at any other place on earth in less than an hour?

    Would tourism explode? What would that mean for the environment?

    What about international business?

    Would it be the end of remote workers? Or would it encourage even more distributed workplace?

  • by lisper on 4/21/2009, 7:25 AM

    There's no such thing as a free lunch. Most of the energy required to go from A to B is needed to overcome friction, not provide kinetic energy. That remains true whether you are above or below the surface. So burrowing down buys you virtually nothing. The amount of energy you'd need to pull yourself up the other side of the tunnel would be almost exactly the same as you would need to make the same trip at (almost) the same speed on the surface.

  • by patrickg-zill on 4/21/2009, 10:30 AM

    There was work done on similar things to this in the 1970s, however it all went classified. The term is "subterrene" - a tunnel boring machine that keeps the drill tip at high temperature, melting the rock and allowing a smooth glassy tunnel to be made.

  • by david927 on 4/21/2009, 9:41 AM

    Silly. It took us 24 years to get 12km straight down, and that's the best we've ever done.

    http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=567

  • by jws on 4/21/2009, 5:24 AM

    This and atmosphere hopping space planes both have the same drawback: a significant number of people vomit on their first weightless trips. Do you really want to ride packed into coach in that kind of environment?

    I guess with enough frequent zero-g points you could upgrade to the "no hurling" section.

    (The not-quite-straight-through tunnels wouldn't be fully weightless, maybe we should concentrate on those. Then we just have to solve the insurmountable temperature, pressure, and vacuum problems.)

  • by kokofoo on 4/21/2009, 3:17 PM

    I would guess somebody or something need to catch the passengers from the other side of the hole; otherwise, it would fall back and forth forever like gigantic pendulums..

  • by on 4/21/2009, 6:20 AM

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  • by viggity on 4/21/2009, 10:12 PM

    I think Douglas Adams would be happy to hear this.

  • by fgraham on 5/13/2009, 4:14 PM

    Does anyone know where Paul W Cooper, the author of Anywhere in 42 Minutes, is today?

    fgraham@kent.edu

  • by lewis on 4/21/2009, 6:22 AM

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