Elon Musk reads Nextbigfuture. This was revealed when he referenced a 2018 article on Nextbigfuture which described the $1 billion per mile cost of subways. Boring Company is tunneling and building underground transportation in Las Vegas for $10-15 million per mile.
US subways and tunnels costs of $600M to $4B per mile and most cost $1B/mile.
Europe/Japan subway and tunnels cost $200M-$1B/mile.
Phase 1 of the New York 2nd Ave line, [96th Street, 86th Street and 72nd Street stations and 1.8 miles (2.9 km) of tunnel], cost $4.45 billion. A 1.5-mile (2.4 km), $6 billion second phase from 96th to 125th Streets is in planning as of 2023.
Elon Musks Boring company has its Prufrock-2 tunneling machine. It can dig up to 1 mile/week.
A tunnel the length of the Las Vegas strip (approximately 4 miles) can be completed in a month.
Prufrock-3 is faster, with the medium term goal of 1/10 human walking speed, or 7 miles/day.
If TBC produces 1 new Prufrock machine per month, then TBC will be introducing 600 miles/year of capacity.
Less than 20 miles of underground subway tunnel has been constructed in the US in the last 20 yrs.
One Prufrock-3 machine per month is twelve- 4200 miles/year of capacity. Forty Prufrock-3 machines by 2028 for 10,000 miles of tunnel per year even with some machine downtime.
In thge video, I also talk about the improvements to the SpaceX rocket engines, which will enable a larger Super Heavy Starship. A Starship could increase internal volume from 1000 cubic meters like the International Space Station up to nearly 2000 cubic meters. The Super Heavy Starship will also be able to launch 250 tons in fully reusable mode.
The International space Station weighs 450 tons. A reconfigured new version of the Space station could be launched in two trips of a stretched Super Heavy Starship with better engines. It took more than 50 flights of the Space Shuttle to bring up all of the parts for the Space Station.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
Nice to read that… It just shows great minds think alike.
You have to understand that the cost in NYC is also probably 10-15 million per mile the extra 985 million covers the environmental review, graft, corruption and other payoffs.
These advances in robotics are why I don’t believe the impact of population aging would be so bad, at least for a few more decades.
We will be soon getting robots that can do a lot of the things required for a civilization.
Building, plumbing, security, domestic care, nursing, repair work all will be impacted and mostly taken over by bots.
There will be bot varieties (soldier and builders will be stronger and tougher than domestic ones) and thousands of specialized NN models for the many jobs out there, but the overall humanoid form will reign supreme. Because Tesla bots are showing that having a lot of input data with a humanoid body imitating the data source, is much better than having an optimized shape for which you don’t have that much training data.
Humans will teach robots to work and do everything that defines a profession, and they will repeat it ad infinitum.
And the west is best set up to take advantage of technology, including life extension and anti-aging medicines, whereas countries like china aren’t nearly as ready.
My previous comment still stands, I believe:
Here are the top 10 boring machines in terms of size: https://youtu.be/MU5-XqMyLzo?si=SylrqcHCro_rwEn4
The smallest is 7.1 meters in diameter or 23.29 feet, already about twice Musk’s current largest boring tunnel. The largest is 17.6 meters in diameter, is over 100 meters long and weighs 1,000s of tons. Literally no one but Musk is drilling single lane car tunnels. Think what would happen if a car got stuck at any kind of speed, or there was a fire – which would be a death trap even if in a relatively less flammable ICE car. There’s a good reason only very carefully selected drivers are allowed to drive very slowly at very spaced out distances in the Las Vegas tunnel.
It took an average of 3-5 minutes to complete the current station to station tunnel trip, according to Techcrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/12/early-data-from-elon-musks-las-vegas-loop-shows-a-slower-yet-popular-service/ but this is a vast underestimate since it only includes actual travel time, not the time spent going from street to station, waiting for a car, getting into the car with up to (3? 4?) people at a time, and reversing the whole thing at the other end. Even the glossy inescapable Boring company promos and press releases that displace any real – or recent – actual tests in any Bing search (I didn’t try Google) can’t obscure that: https://www.boringcompany.com/lvcc.
In this test, the car went 40mph: https://www.autoweek.com/news/technology/a38195296/a-ride-in-the-tesla-tunnel-under-las-vegas/ One commenter said a Tesla once broke down and had to be manually pushed out of the tunnel. Seriously? If true, this is far from ready for mass use and dangerous too.
And this won’t get any better, like the promised 2-minute travel time, with more stations; it will probably get worse, and an accident is inevitable if it’s sped up. A train, even a small one of a single car barely wider than a Tesla model X with seat along the walls, would be FAR safer since the track would keep everything in place. Musk has chosen not to do that since the tunnel opened in 2021.
No one drills multiple narrow tunnels to make one larger one. Underground is far too unstable, and all tunnel boring machines lay concrete slabs as they progress, typically at 20-30 meters per day. This is why tunnel borers tend to be around 100 meters long. I don’t see anything that indicates a scaled up Boring company borer could do any better.
Frankly, Musk is WAY over-extended and his competitors offer better products in every category except cars and spaceships, for now, and with spaceships, none of them can get out of Earth orbit without refueling there. With cars, most of the world has access to microcars for $10k-20k.
Sorta dystopian, but tunnels under cities could also be a cheap supply of building square footage.
A mile of tunnel with a 10′ wide flat floor is 56,280 square feet. If tunnels can be made for $1M/mile, that’s $18/square ft. About 100x less than the cost of existing real estate in some cities.
Hopefully more for storage rather than for residents…
Congratulations! I have posted a few of your articles to the Facebook Space groups. They are always insightful and give the Big Picture overview.
The starship does not launch the space station. It IS the space station
Would these make tunnels under the Bering Strait and under the Strait of Gibraltar economically practical?
I think it is best to combine this:
https://www.wired.com/story/new-tech-cuts-rock-without-grinding-it/
—with this:
https://www.boringcompany.com/prufrock
Heat then eat.
You should write more articles about Elon Musk then. Elon is really attracted to diagrams, maybe you should learn how to make some!
I would think the Petra gas-heated rock-bore would appeal to him.
Buffett wants natural gas stores…maybe work together?