People have largely missed the salient points of Elon's proposal:
1) If America cannot understand the potential and purpose of innovative technology, it is doomed to slide into socio-economic, scientific, and technological poverty. The point is that building a slow and expensive HSR is stupid, and people have approved it solely because they are, similarly, too stupid to envision what is possible. The primary point of building the Hyperloop is not to move people physically, but to move them intellectually.
2) the Hyperloop, as designed by Elon, has zero emissions. We should do it for that reason alone, otherwise we are genuinely too stupid to exist, which fact says more about us than any debate. If we do not begin building zero-emissions systems, the debate will not matter because we will be gone.
3) Capacity problems are not an issue. Elon has intelligently anticipated a diminishing requirement to physically move people because of the improvement of telepresence technology. If you still need to travel as much as you did ten years ago, you are an idiot. This trend will only increase. Elon is too savvy to mention this explicitly, but he no doubt understands that the need to move people physically is declining. The HSR will be mostly empty if it opens in 2024 with the capacity required in 2014.
4) Our entrenched institutions have failed us, not because of anything specific that they have done wrong, but simply because they are entrenched. We should build the Hyperloop for no other reason than a little revolution being a good thing, now and again.
1) If America cannot understand the potential and purpose of innovative technology, it is doomed to slide into socio-economic, scientific, and technological poverty. The point is that building a slow and expensive HSR is stupid, and people have approved it solely because they are, similarly, too stupid to envision what is possible. The primary point of building the Hyperloop is not to move people physically, but to move them intellectually.
2) the Hyperloop, as designed by Elon, has zero emissions. We should do it for that reason alone, otherwise we are genuinely too stupid to exist, which fact says more about us than any debate. If we do not begin building zero-emissions systems, the debate will not matter because we will be gone.
3) Capacity problems are not an issue. Elon has intelligently anticipated a diminishing requirement to physically move people because of the improvement of telepresence technology. If you still need to travel as much as you did ten years ago, you are an idiot. This trend will only increase. Elon is too savvy to mention this explicitly, but he no doubt understands that the need to move people physically is declining. The HSR will be mostly empty if it opens in 2024 with the capacity required in 2014.
4) Our entrenched institutions have failed us, not because of anything specific that they have done wrong, but simply because they are entrenched. We should build the Hyperloop for no other reason than a little revolution being a good thing, now and again.