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The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

citylab.com

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Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

#181

Post by bluGill »

r3bl wrote: post #101
michaelleslie wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a less-scalable metro system, a technology that predates this "innovation" by a century or so.

Musk seems to really dislike the idea of public transport. There's an appeal in moving a large number of people from one side of the city to the other really fast, but with their cars!? The amount of trouble people in the US are willing to through to avoid the solution every other developed country enjoys is really mind-blowing to me. Dig a tunnel, put some rails in it, and add some sort of a vehicle on top of those…

Every city I've ever seen has a large amount of personal cars on the road. Sure some people in some cities ride in shared public transit, but don't try to pretend that there are not large amounts of people that for whatever reason don't. You might want to look closer to home and solving your own problems instead of attacking the US.

Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

#182

Post by ambicapter »

not_real_acct wrote: post #136
kelnos wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a series of posts on WaitButWhy[0] about Elon Musk and his various companies and strategies. The level of Musk worship there generally rubs me the wrong way, but I think the conclusions are valid: the author also interviewed Musk one-on-one in 2015 and took a deep-dive into his businesses, so I would trust the author's conclusions. Essentially, Musk expects/worries that an extinction event (whether as a resul…

Over a decade ago, when Amazon wasn't the powerhouse it is today, I dated someone who routinely interacted with Jeff Bezos. According to them, Bezos feels the same way. Amazon is basically a means-to-an-end, and that "end" is to get humanity into outer space, as an insurance policy in the event of a catastrophe on earth.

How come Bezos has never brought this up, ever?

Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

#183

Post by aeternus »

bunderbunder wrote: post #170
toephu2 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musk has said Mars is the backup plan for earth. What if one day there is a disease or meteor that wipes out the entire human population on Earth? (e.g., see the dinosaurs) Even if the only appeal was the wild wild west and uncharted territory, what's wrong with that? Look at what exploring the Moon has brought us, many unexpected innovations and inventions useful for life on earth.

The meteor strike wiped out the dinosaurs, but not all life. Mars currently has no life. The strong implication is that, Earth post meteor strike would still be far, far, far more habitable for humans than Mars ever will be. As far as why describing Mars as Earth's backup plan rubs people the wrong way, I think it's a bit like Noah's Ark. While there is absolutely the cute story about the boat full of animals, and it…

What is the actual goal of environmentalism on earth?

If it is to preserve diverse species, then it absolutely makes sense to colonize other planets and spread the wide variety of plants, animals, and other organisms. The earth will eventually be burned up by the sun.

Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

#184

Post by smileysteve »

NullPrefix wrote: post #175
chepaslaaa wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you're just making the single point bigger

This could be said for any expansion, until your single point becomes "everything that is".

It so happens, that the Sun's expansion will eventually consume most of the planets in the galaxy; of course, it will also be so cold long before that point humans won't be alive.

Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

#185

Post by jcranmer »

skywhopper wrote: post #162

The math on this is highly questionable: The contract posted on the LVCVA website projects an operating capacity of 4,400 passengers per hour using “autonomous electric vehicles at high speeds,” which might include a Tesla Model X or Model 3, or another Tesla chassis converted into a 16-passenger shuttle. There are two tunnels involved, so to manage to get 2,200 passengers through in one direction per hour, you're go…

Put another way: if you assume 16-passenger shuttles, you have to have 26 second headways between cars in order to meet capacity.

If you don't split the track to allow unloading, you have 26 seconds to disembark 16 passengers, embark 16 more passengers, and then clear the platform in enough time to allow sufficient safety margin for the car immediately behind you. Station dwell times (essentially the time from train is fully stopped to time it starts accelerating, and therefore not including the last bit) are upwards of 30 seconds and much likelier to be close to a minute, which can't be done in sufficient time. Especially because full capacity cars generally require more time at stations, and I have to imagine that modified Teslas that can fit 16 people aren't going to be quick to navigate.

If you have multiple platforms at each station to accomodate the long station dwell time, maybe it could be done, but I suspect that it'd blow out their construction budget because of the extra space needed.

Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

#186

Post by F_r_k »

jobseeker990 wrote: post #177
spraak wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal of Mars to me is silly. Mars is already worse off in terms of climate than Earth. Why not work to improve what we have? The only appeal I see is "uncharted territory" / wild west

Why am I not allowed to downvote this nonsense?

That's exactly why: because you cannot (yet) discern nonsense from something you don't agree on

Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

#187

Post by petschge »

munk-a wrote: post #158
ryanbrunner wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you accept the great filter hypothesis to explain Fermi's paradox, wouldn't that make interplanetary exploration a bit pointless? Presumably many other civilisations would have been able to achieve the same thing, and they were still wiped out by the filter event.

Not really, it could be that the great filter is apathy and single world habitation for instance - maybe we've been really lucky in terms of asteroid collisions so far and putting our eggs in two baskets is the necessary step for survival. We don't know what the filter is, so it's sensible to reject pessimism and just keep on trucking.

The alt text on https://xkcd.com/893/ fits really well here:

“The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space - each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.” -- Randall Munroe

Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

#188

Post by ncallaway »

jcranmer wrote: post #140
ncallaway wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Boring Company's main plans, as can be evidenced by their communications (such as their FAQ) and their commitments and attempted commitments to build actual projects Agree that this evidences their short-term plans (1-5 years), but I actually think it's a poor-proxy of evidence of their long-term (5+ years) plans. I mostly agree with you about their short-term plans, but my understanding (which could be wrong!)…

I mostly follow mass transit and railway projects, so that's where my numbers are derived from. Considering that Loop is pitched as a new mass transit system, it makes sense to compare it to costs. Especially because Musk loves comparing it to the obscenely overpriced NYC Second Avenue Subway extension, so it helps to understand how much it actually cost. The Boring Company claims in its FAQ that the Second Avenue Su…

> Considering that Loop is pitched as a new mass transit system

Is this a different loop from the LVCC Loop mentioned in the article? The LVCC Loop seems pretty clearly to fall fairly far outside the "mass transit" system, so it must be a different project you're referring to.

> The Boring Company claims in its FAQ that the Second Avenue Subway cost "more than $1 billion per mile"

Definitely agree that one of the hallmarks of Elon Musk's companies are exaggerated claims about their own abilities and about the competition. I've been impressed by his ability to deliver on some of the bold claims that he has made (even if he fails to do so on a claimed timeline), but also disappointed by his readiness to exaggerate faults in other products / solutions.

Still, if the end-result is to be to reduce tunneling costs from $415M for 2 miles down to $200M for 2 miles, that's a pretty significant result. It wouldn't be nearly as dramatic as the original goal, but still a huge improvement that would make tunneling more viable in a larger number of cases.

Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

#189

Post by bunderbunder »

aeternus wrote: post #183
bunderbunder wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The meteor strike wiped out the dinosaurs, but not all life. Mars currently has no life. The strong implication is that, Earth post meteor strike would still be far, far, far more habitable for humans than Mars ever will be. As far as why describing Mars as Earth's backup plan rubs people the wrong way, I think it's a bit like Noah's Ark. While there is absolutely the cute story about the boat full of animals, and it…

What is the actual goal of environmentalism on earth? If it is to preserve diverse species, then it absolutely makes sense to colonize other planets and spread the wide variety of plants, animals, and other organisms. The earth will eventually be burned up by the sun.

Let's keep a sense of perspective here. What the sun's going to be doing a billion or so years from now seems like a rather remote concern compared to entire countries being underwater in a few decades.

If interstellar space travel is ever practically attainable - and, FWIW, that is still a controversial subject - then humans absolutely will figure it out. Or rather, they will just so long as they manage to extend both their existential and economic trajectories far enough for it to matter. Ain't nobody gonna be able to develop that kind of technology from Mars; they'll be way too busy on more prosaic tasks, like repeatedly checking their domes for leaks.

Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

#190

Post by r3bl »

rayiner wrote: post #139
r3bl wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musk seems to really dislike the idea of public transport. There's an appeal in moving a large number of people from one side of the city to the other really fast, but with their cars!? The amount of trouble people in the US are willing to through to avoid the solution every other developed country enjoys is really mind-blowing to me. Dig a tunnel, put some rails in it, and add some sort of a vehicle on top of those…

We try to avoid it in the US because it costs us 5-10x as much money to do it. If it cost Madrid $4.5 billion to build a two mile subway extension they wouldn’t do it either.

So the solution is to still build a tunnel... but smaller... and move hundreds of people through it really fast in separate, quite heavy vehicles with no possible way of escaping the tunnel when something goes wrong? And something will go wrong.

I'm rooting for Elon with all my heart to cut down the costs of digging tunnels, but everything else about this is just ludicrous.

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