I have been fascinated this week with Elon Musk and his
futuristic companies. You may know that he is the founder of Telsa (high end
electric cards and a solar company that he recently merged into it) and SpaceX,
the current darling of the space community as it launches spaceships every
couple of weeks (or at least that is the plan going forward).
But these companies won’t make him a trillionaire. Building
rockets and luxury sports cars might make you a lot of money, but not that
much. For one thing, competition will eventually make the margins too small.
Right now, he is one of the only names in private rockets and high end electric
cars, but this won’t be the case in a decade. And once more people enter the
market, his profit margins will go down.
I do think, however, that he will become fabulously wealthy,
but not for his futuristic companies. I think, instead, that he will make his
real fortune (even though he is already fabulously wealthy), doing what man has
been doing for thousands of years – digging tunnels.
He recently created a new company, The Boring Company, whose
goal is to tunnel deep under the ground at incredible speeds. He wants to make
roads underground for cars, trains, and his hyperloop. Current boring machines
can dig about 300 feet a week underground (basically 2-3 miles a year), he
wants to do a mile a week. And current
tunneling costs are prohibitive - it can cost upwards of a billion dollars a
mile at current prices.
In short, he wants to be able to build a machine that could
build an underground version of the DC Beltway in a year (at least lengthwise).
Assuming he can do this (and since there hasn’t been a major
advancement in tunnel construction for 50 years, I don’t see why he couldn’t),
the applications for this kind of technology are incredible.
First the cost savings would be huge. If he could increase
the speed as much as he hopes, cutting the cost in half or more would not be
unreasonable. Instead of widening roads
one lane at a time, you could create whole new freeways underground, without
having to buy additional land, interfere with current traffic, or worry about
environment impacts (except for additional cars on the roads of course!).
Even the environment impacts could be offset – the tunnels
will need air pumped into and out of them, so you could theoretically filter
the air when you pump it out, making these tunnels even more attractive to
cities trying to keep their air ‘clean.’
Tunnels would never have issues with rain or snow. And the
road surface would last much longer because it wouldn’t have to deal with those
elements or the sun beating down on it. So they could save governments money by
decreasing how often they repave roads and eliminating the needs for plow
trucks in the winter.
You would have more space and more access control, so even
for city traffic, you could eliminate stop lights, pedestrians, etc., making
driving safer, easier, and faster. And as driving cars start rolling out, speeds
could be significantly increased since the only obstacle would be other cars!
And these are just the benefits from the driving point of
view. Since you have these tunnels, you likely don’t need all the head space
for cars, so you could fill that with underground electric wiring, water
piping, fiber optic cables, etc. Think of an airplane, but instead of overhead
bins holding your luggage, they could hold these public and private utilities.
Right now, adding new piping and cabling to current cities is prohibitively
expensive and sometimes impossible. With these new tunnels, you can just tack
it on the roof and you are good to go.
I was also reminded of the mining possibilities, but on
earth and in space. With these machines, you could mine tons of dirt very
quickly and process it above ground. You could also go deeper, and since you
can process so much so quickly (likely with fewer workers), marginally
productive mines would once again become profitable.
In space (Moon, asteroids, and maybe Mars), not only could
you mine some of the precious metals there very quickly, but you could also
quickly build massive underground habitats. These habitats would easily be big
enough not only for large colonies of humans to live, but also provide them the
space to be self-sufficient through growing their own food and having somewhere
to store it, having space for their own factories, etc. It would also be
radiation free (a big plus in space travel). They might even be able to have
enough space to grown enough food for some level of livestock.
This technology could also be used for oil and gas
pipelines. Instead of digging from the surface, or putting the pipe above
ground where it is at risk of random damage (e.g. a bullet like what happened
to the Alaska pipeline a few years ago), accidental damage (such as during
nearby construction), or terrorism, it would be buried safely deep underground.
The pipe would also be in a tunnel, so repairs and inspections would be much
easier, and if there was a leak, it would still be contained within the tunnel
itself!
And then there are the numerous military applications of
being able to be that deep with that much space.
So basically, and I know there are lots of ifs here, but
this technology Musk is taking about creating could allow for the first fully
self-sufficient colony on another planet, eliminate traffic congestion, and
reduce pollution.
If this isn’t a trillion dollar idea, I don’t know what is!
