this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2024
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Going around the earth in 3 hours would require you to travel at 11 times the speed of sound, and that is without including the time it would take to accelerate or slow down.
The concorde flew at a maximum speed of twice the speed of sound. It would take the concorde 18h30m to fly around the world if it had enough fuel to do it.
Supersonic travel has some major issues. It takes a huge amount of energy to go that fast. Concorde could only cross the atlantic ocean, because it didn't have enough fuel to cross the pacific. The other issue is sonic booms, which means you can't fly supersonic over populated areas, like land.
Maglevs have the same issue as all other high-speed overland transport, it requires expensive infrastructure to be built the entire route. The faster you want to go, the flatter, smoother and more expensive the track will be to build.
Supersonic air is more plausible as it only requires a faster airplane. With wealth inequality, there are rich people who can afford their own supersonic plane, but an infrastructure project to build a global maglev network is far more expensive than that.
Yes, and going over or under the ocean is a bit of a pipe dream right now. It should be possible in principle, but nobody has the details worked out, let alone the economics.
Also, supersonic air travel already exists. It's not a technical hurdle anymore and the Concorde was even profitable in her later years.
There's a lot of research addressing the very real problems you pointed out and it seems plausible that they'll at least be mitigated to a degree in the near future.
Hyperloop is a (vacuum) pipe dream. It sounds super cool, but the more you think about it, the less realistic it gets.
I said hypersonic not supersonic
I've always heard that seismic activity makes hyperloop-style transit effectively impossible.*
โ Impossible given the constraints of current materials science. From what I've read (which may be garbage, but it seemed well researched), making a vacuum chamber that's hundreds of thousands of miles long on top of a big wiggly molten goo ball isn't something we can even see a way to realistically achieve right now.