Dear Mr. Elon Musk,
Hey bro! What’s up man? How’s SpaceX workin’ out? I mean your rockets keep crashing, but you seem to just keep finding more rockets to crash. That’s impressive. I don’t even have one rocket to smash into the ocean or a landing pad.
But never mind all that; it’s time to get serious Elon. I’m writing you this letter, first of all because we’re BEST friends, but second of all because your penchant for crashing really expensive high-tech future-shit is gonna get people killed…eventually. Further, those people are going to die in what is essentially a giant floating people-filled suppository. Your name is going to be on the news attached to the story I’m about to paint for you. Here’s the deal:
If you build a Hyperloop, eventually it is going to crash.
Trains crash. Airplanes crash. Cars crash. Space-ships crash (wink wink). Little kids on tricycles crash. Everything crashes when stuff moves. Obviously different things crash at different frequencies. Car crashes occur far more often than train crashes, and airplanes crash only very rarely. That said, Airplanes DO crash, and when airplanes crash, the story is plastered across global headlines in gory detail.
“But the Hyperloop has safety mechanisms like BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH” you might say. “There are airlocks every mile that would stop the depressurization of the rest of the circuit!” “We have super-fancy future sensors that like automatically fix the pressure super-fast if the tube depressurizes!” “Magnets!” you might say.
No Elon Musk. No.
I’ll pose a hypothetical: there’s a major hurricane in southern California for the first time in a century and the power, as well as your backup and backup-backup power go out (sorry, no magnets.) Then, it being a hurricane and all, the Hyperloop gets hit with half of a building, and a nice big fat hole gets punched in it. Imagine the power goes out and the hole gets made at almost exactly the same time.
Now, whether or not this would actually defeat your fancy-schmancy safety procedures is inconsequential. The point here is that there is a total depressurization of your big tube, and your safety mechanisms fail. This happens while people are in transit, hurtling at 750mph in giant steel capsules which were, until a few seconds ago, each suspended on a dreamy 4 foot cushion of pressurized air. Now they are not. It would be fair to say that all of the capsules would slow down rather abruptly. Time for some theoretical mechanics. This will be fun! You love science!
Let’s ballpark it, and say that each hyper-suppository has a mass of 1900kg. We’ll convert our 750mph to 335m/s, and with the formula p=mv, we’ll find that we have a momentum of 636,500 kgm/s. We now need to use the formula ∆p=F*t. Now since the capsule is moving laterally and not dropping vertically, that t might not be instantaneous, but it would be safe to guess that friction would keep it under 10 seconds. ∆p is going to be equal to our p from before, because the difference between 636,500 and 0 is 636,500. This leaves us with 63,650 N or 7.15 tons of force applied to our previously floating suppository each second, over that 10 second period.
Yes Elon, that’s a drastic oversimplification of this particular momentum problem. I know that. Writing physics is hard, and I don’t want to put a diagram with x and y axes in a letter. If anything I think I’m being generous with the 10 seconds, and frankly the 7.15 tons of force/second sounds conservative.
If the pod (along with its human contents) doesn’t disintegrate due to the friction and STUPID large forces involved, the people inside will die from whiplash or blunt force trauma when they are all pancaked into one end of the capsule. It will likely be a near-instant death, and I would be INCREDIBLY surprised if there were any survivors. So, you probably won’t have to worry about any lawsuits…and the thing will go really fast. Those are two cool things about the Hyperloop.
I know I probably haven’t talked you out of building the damn thing. You didn’t listen to me when I told you Tesla was a stupid idea BECAUSE WE GET ELECTRICITY FROM COAL IN THE UNITED STATES YOU MORON. But now you’re a billionaire Elon, and Jimmy from work has a Tesla, so I’m buying a newer Tesla later this month because Jimmy is not allowed to win at life. But please forget about me being wrong about Tesla! I’m right about this!
Don’t disacknowledge the fact that your machine is eventually going to break, or when it does, you’re going to look like an ass in front of everyone.
Sincerely your BEST friend,
-Rob ElonMusk’sbestfriend Truxal
