A story in the Club of Amsterdam Journal predicts that Evacuated Tube Technologies—think interoffice mail systems of a bygone era—will take earthbound travellers faster than ever before.
New York to L.A. in 45 minutes and New York to China in two hours are feasible travel times according to the article “ETT Skyrocketing speed trains and cars.” T
The story reports that the technology, invented and directed by Daryl Oyster, an American scientist who graduated in mechanical engineering and worked on aeronautical and marine design and certifications, will use a 50th of the energy of current transportation technologies.
The evacuated tube transport system consists of using travel tubes eliminating all possible frictions due to speed thus permitting the means of transportation to travel faster and safer once it is set in motion.
The airless vacuum tubes could be made of any one of several possible materials and would be one quarter the cost per mile of a freeway and one tenth the cost of a high-speed railway. Capsules containing four to six persons would zip along a tube’s magnetic tracks at speeds up to 6,400 kilometers per hour but with only 1g acceleration.
Of course, stopping at the other end might be a very different matter.