Travel used to be mundane — something you couldn’t wait to be done with. However, advances in science and technology promise to make it exciting to the point where it looks something straight out of science fiction. From Hyperloop Tunnels to flying cars, travel is on the path to become awesome. The latest mode of transportation is brought to us by Elon Musk, who is starting a new venture called The Boring Company. As can be surmised, the company will facilitate travel by boring — tunnels.
The idea took shape when Musk was stuck in a traffic jam while going somewhere. This happened in December, and Musk Tweeted:
Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging…
Everyone though it was a joke or something. However, a little while later, another tweet from the SpaceX and Tesla founder confirmed that he was actually going to do it.
It shall be called ‘The Boring Company. Boring, it’s what we do.
I am actually going to do this.
And that is how a 15 feet deep and over 50 feet wide hole came into existence in SpaceX’s parking lot. Musk shared the first pictures from the dig recently on Twitter. The folks working on the dig — the “boring folks?” — are now attempting to widen the hole further until it can accommodate a tunnel boring machine. Once that happens, the machine will dig vertically downwards until it reaches a depth of 50 feet and then shift its focus in the horizontal direction. Musk wants the tunnel to be at least wide enough to accommodate cars.
As per the SpaceX CEO, this will just be the beginning of a huge network of Tunnels that will connect all sort of places in the future. Musk is not envisioning a single tunnel either. No sir, what he is thinking about is a 3-Dimensional network that can include as many as 30 levels. You can have cars, trains, Hyperloop pods — basically whatever you want — traveling inside these tunnels.
Travel has received a lot of attention of late. And some of the other options out there — flying cars for instance — could appear to be more viable than Musk’s tunnels. However, that could be merely because they have had something of a headstart. Flying cars for instance, were the stuff of novels a few years ago. It was only after companies like Uber and Airbus got involved that we started talking about prototypes and regulatory permissions.
What’s more, we have already been tunneling for hundreds of years. From the basic tunnels that connected forts, to drilling for oil — humans are expert at boring, sometimes in both the senses of the word. Musk now wants to bring about a mini-revolution by pushing the creation of better hardware to ultimately power his underground ambitions. He has already appointed Steve Davis, a senior SpaceX engineer who is known for designing the guidance systems for the first rockets, to lead TBC. And yes, The Boring Company will be an independent venture.
Well, they may appear the stuff of dreams, however, Elon Musk is known for taking up seemingly impossible challenges and then powering through them. I mean, who would have thought of a private company taking NASA’s satellites to space? There you have it though. And tunnels sound altogether tame when compared to the establishment of a human civilization on Mars.
