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Design

Proposed Tube Transport System Could Travel From New York To Beijing In Two Hours

Futurama’s futuristic mass transit system has some grounding in reality.

Travelling can be a pain in the ass, having to sit for hours while fidgeting and progressively getting more and more bored. It can especially be a drag if it’s a journey you do repeatedly like a commute—if only we had those teleportation devices seen in sci-fi, but alas. So if you can’t teleport what would be the next best thing? Maybe a long tube that shoots 16ft long capsules full of humans at 6,500km/h and is able to travel around the world in just six hours? Yeah, that sounds about right.

This is the idea of the Evacuated Tube Transport from et3.com, which features a range of different sized capsules that can carry cargo and people and uses maglev (magnetic levitation) tracks to whisk the human (and other) cargo along to their destination from speeds of 350mph to 4000mph. In the video they claim the tube system can be built for a tenth of the cost of a high-speed rail system, and can travel from the US’s East to West Coast in just 45 minutes.

Whether it will come to fruition we can but dream, but it would be a great way of travelling about.

[via io9]

@stewart23rd