Comment by astrodust
9 years ago
And concrete production? And underground hazard detection? And coordination with city infrastructure? And...
9 years ago
And concrete production? And underground hazard detection? And coordination with city infrastructure? And...
You could change...
> And concrete production? And underground hazard detection? And coordination with city infrastructure? And...
to...
> And battery production, and driving hazard detection, and coordinating with the FAA and NASA, and rockets, and...
It's not guaranteed success (not even remotely) but if I had to bet on anyone...
You act like Musk does all the work himself. If he wanted to he could hire the best and brightest in each of those areas and they can work in parallel.
I don't even know if the guy is a good engineer. But I'm pretty sure to have the success he has had he knows how to inspire them.
I think he's gone one step too far on this project. Concrete is something that's necessarily expensive to produce, there's inescapable costs in the production cycle, so while he could probably make it 80% cheaper, he can't make it 99.9% cheaper.
I agree that video goes WAY too far. The tunnels in that video are absurd. I give way better odds of him actually sending people to Mars than building that absurd tunnel system.
But he might succeed at something somewhere in between the tunnel he is boring in his parking lot and the video.
Context: I lived in Boston during much of the Big Dig. Large tunnel projects scare the heck out of me as a tax payer.
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>Concrete is something that's necessarily expensive to produce
That's true. But techniques like compressed stabilized earth blocks can reduce the required percentage of concrete from ~30% to 4%.[1] For example, recently a 4% concrete and 8% ash CSEB was shown to be as strong as class 30 concrete.[2] Fly ash can also be used. Obviously considerations like longevity and manufacturability need to be validated, but the strength is there.
Essentially you're mechanically squeezing all the air out of the concrete, thus reducing the cement requirement. Since TBM tunnels are made from precast formed concrete currently, it seems like a natural cost (and CO2) saving improvement.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267637559_Effect_Of...
[2] https://www.hindawi.com/journals/je/2016/7940239/
Honestly though these same sentences came up around Teslas too.
And battery production? And crash test safety? And coordination with NHTSA?
People made electric cars before Tesla and they'll make cars after. People made rockets before SpaceX and they'll make them after.
He's cut component costs on the Tesla by maybe 70%. On the SpaceX project it's more like 80% compared to the highest cost competitor. Both of these are huge achievements.
The problem with tunnels is they're not cars, not rockets, not anything like he's ever done before. If he had a functioning Hyperloop system, if he'd proven he can build out infrastructure on a geographic scale and not just product from a factory I'd be more likely to agree with you.
This is a bad idea, a bad project, and a total waste of time.
I really, really hope I get to see you eat your words in 30 years.
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