The Internet is a series of tubes that connected the world virtually, while the Hyperloop would like to do so physically. At its grandest, the new mode of transportation proposed by Martian hopeful Elon Musk would complete the Global Village, heaven help us. 

Like an incredibly fast elevator that goes forward rather than up, the transport system would deliver people and goods to their destinations in a much safer and cleaner and cheaper fashion, seemingly equally helpful for medium- or long-distance trips. For all the logistical and technological hurdles to be cleared, the future is wide open, though no one can yet say how much the Hypelroop will be a part of it.

The team at Hyperloop One, currently leading the pack in this burgeoning sector, just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

Question:

Where are the efficiency gains over traditional rail or HSR, considering that the Hyperloop needs to maintain pressure, and has more safety concerns? What problem is the Hyperloop trying to solve?

Josh Giegel (Co-founder and President of Engineering):

Efficiency gains come from the fact that this is an on demand system that doesn’t require you to wait and travels at high speeds – think elevator experience. Hyperloop is solving the on demand, high speed, packetized, weather-proof, autonomous system, ultra-safe transport system problem. Low magnetic and aerodynamic drag mean substantially reduced power usage.

Question:

What problems do you foresee, when it comes to convincing the public about the safety of the Hyperloop?

Andrea Vaccaro (Director of Safety Engineering):

We are designing Hyperloop to be the safest mode of transportation on Earth. We will run extensive tests on all the safety features, involving third party safety assessors. As for the public, it will be like the first passenger airplanes: excitement for a new futuristic mode of transportation, together with the extensive safety test that we will run before passenger operation will make people eager to jump on Hyperloop!

Question:

I believe it was philosopher Michel Foucault who suggested that with the introduction of the car, by necessity man had invented the car accident. Likewise, the plane crash wouldn’t have been a thing if there had never been a plane.

If Hyperloop succeeds in creating a new form of transportation, isn’t it inevitable that a new kind of tragedy, heretofore unimaginable to most people, will eventually come to pass?

Andrea Vaccaro:

OK, let’s get a little bit more technical here. First of all by having a fully autonomous mode of transportation, where we are able to fully control the environment, we design-out a lot of common hazards: no human error (by far the most common cause for an accident), at-grade crossing, weather related hazards, etc. Then, we are looking at various statistics (failures per trip, per mile traveled, per departures, etc.) and we are specifying our system to be better than what is currently available from any of these point of view. We are performing top-down hazard analysis and bottom-up failure mode simulations to make sure that we hit our safety targets. Soon we will be start testing our safety functions full-scale in Nevada, with real hardware.

Question:

How do you think your solution will compete with driverless cars since they’re probably gonna hit the market at the same time?

Casey Handmer (Levitation Engineer):

Driverless cars and Hyperloop are complementary mass transportation systems. Cars work on existing transportation infrastructure, while Hyperloop helps integrate larger cities and networks of cities, with new infrastructure development.

Question:

Riding on the Hyperloop – even if its just a test track – is on my bucket list.

What do you think where and when will it be possible to do that without any kind of “special connection” to someone of the team, just by buying a ticket?

Casey Handmer:

We don’t anticipate putting humans on the test track any time soon. Unfortunately, just knowing someone doesn’t mean that we’re any more willing to break our safety protocols ;). But if you come and work here you can probably move stuff in the tube, which is more interesting and has better selfie opportunities. And yes, there are whole varieties of supersonic vacuum tube Pokemon that were previously unknown to science.

Question:

Can you describe how Hyperloop will have an effect on the daily lives of people in 10, 20 and 30 years?

Diana Zhou (Business Analyst):

We’re hoping to transform the way people live, the way they work and play. The idea is that people could hop into a Hyperloop in LA and get to SF for work half an hour later, less than the amount of time it would take to travel from Santa Monica to downtown LA during rush hour right now. This has tremendous implications from a real estate and housing perspective, from a work-life perspective, reduced congestion, not to mention improvement on pollution, emissions, and quality of environment!•