You might remember that a couple of weeks ago, Elon Musk made otherwise random guy John Gardi Twitter-famous by proclaiming that Gardi had a pretty good guess at how Musk’s crazy-sounding Hyperloop transit concept was going to work. Now, Gardi has come up with so, so much more information. Or at least, speculation.
Over at Motherboard, Gardi has written a lengthy explanation of his theory about what the plan Musk is going to announce on August 12th will look like. The long and the short of the tome is this:
I believe that Hyperloop is merely a modern day version of the pneumatic tubes used in banks, stores, and industry to move money and small items over long distances or to other floors of a building. They’ve been around for over a century, though not so much these days. There is only one in my town that I know of, and it has fallen into disuse. One reason I think Hyperloop is simpler than folks think is that Elon Musk has resurrected another technology from the depths of time, one that was a contender once, too: the electric car!
In other words, Gardi thinks we’re going to be placed in pods and blasted across large distances in pneumatic pipelines, a bit like the fictional future public transit used in Futurama:
Scary! Dangerous! Exciting!
In the write-up, Gardi unpacks a lot of the seemingly outlandish claims that Musk has made about the hyperloop, and tries to explain why the transit system might actually be possible. The whole thing is really worth a read, especially if you’re interested in knowing why simple warehouse technology could be used for ultra-fast transport at the fraction of the cost of high-speed rail. The craziest part? It just might work. [Motherboard]
Top image via fotomak/Shutterstock.com. Hyperloop schematic by Brent Couchman.