The Jetsons and Futurama have a number of themes in common. They’re both comedy cartoons set in futuristic utopias. They both visualise elaborate robotic contraptions, aliens, holograms and imaginative inventions. They are both written by 20th century writers who are trying to envisage the future. There are many clichés – ray guns, space-ships, clones, teleportation, and time machines. Currently mankind is far away from any of these developments. However, in both cartoons they foresee high-speed transportation tubes which fire people from A to B at high-speed. They weren’t wrong about this.
It’s been named the ‘Hyperloop’, and is being developed by two companies; Hyperloop One and their rivalHyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT). They plan to have it up and running in 2020 – 42 years before the time the Jetsons is set in.
The Hyperloop will enable speeds of over 700-mph – faster than an average commercial airplane. This would mean the journey from London to Edinburgh would be about half an hour.
It is essentially a long tube that has had the air removed to create a vacuum. Hyperloop pods will travel in tubes above the ground, removing air resistance and enabling passenger and freight transportation at high speeds with low energy consumption. The tube is suspended off the ground to protect against weather and earthquakes. Passengers would sit in either individual or group pods, which would then be accelerated with magnets.
Elon Musk, Tesla and Space X CEO and futurist extraordinaire, is the virtuoso behind this project. Similarly to the writers of Futurama and the Jetsons, Musk has a plan for humanity that covers clean energy, electric cars and space exploration. He also wants to cut down time spent commuting, and creating a better connected planet – hence the Hyperloop vision.
Musk was disillusioned with the amount of money thrown at California’s high-speed railway project, which he feels is outdated and inefficient technology. He has proposed an alternative, which he describes as “a cross between a Concorde, a railgun and an air hockey table.”
However, as the CEO of two companies, he is understandably a pretty busy man and doesn’t have time to develop the product himself, so he challenged numerous teams of boffins to create a conceptual design for the Hyperloop.
The Massachusetts Institute of technology (MIT) won this contest, and as a result, was able to test their design in the Nevada desert in May with Hyperloop One. The concept reached 0-116mph in two seconds along a 1 kilometre track before disappearing into a cloud. The demonstration was focused on one piece of the very challenging design, and there is still a long way to go before building the necessary full scale system.
HTT, the rivals of Hyperloop One, plan to build a test track in Quay Valley, California later this year, and have spoken about a desire to build the Hyperloop in Europe rather than the USA – to link Vienna with Bratislava and Budapest.
Finances could be an obstacle for the Hyperloop – Musk estimated that the cost of the project could cost $7.5 billion to implement in the USA – but this figure has been received with much scepticism – nobody is yet able to put a price tag on a real life Hyperloop system. The project is being privately funded by a large number of serious investors.
The 2020 launch date has also raised a few eyebrows. There is still much to work out with Hyperloop technology and doing so can take years, even decades. The Maglev train was first demonstrated in 1971, but due to cost and engineering complexity it wasn’t until 2004 that the first large scale Maglev transportation system was built.
It is questionable whether the Hyperloop will ever actually become the norm of mid-distance travel, but as Musk says, it would be cool if they could just build one fully functional track – and they are very much planning to. It poses the question – what else has Futurama correctly predicted? Let’s hope they were wrong about Santa Claus…
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