It was just last December that Elon Musk, frustrated by being stuck in traffic, tweeted this:
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Listen beautiful relax classics on our Youtube channel.
Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging…
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 17, 2016
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Just four months later, he’s made actual progress. Last week he tweeted this:
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Boring https://t.co/TBnhgPYWud
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 28, 2017
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Musk’s Boring Company starting to come to life in front of #SpaceX. DM us with photos! https://t.co/ZHEKAhZybe pic.twitter.com/vAboz3pm2V
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 28, 2017
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And now, following a TED Talk, he’s released a video showing how the fruits of the Boring Company’s machine would yield the following fantastical underground network:
Unsurprisingly, Musk’s wild idea has drawn criticism, with Popular Science chiming in on why the system would never work. But that hasn’t stopped Musk; he’s already used the machine in the photo above to dig a vertical shaft in the SpaceX parking lot in Hawthorne, California, and The Daily Breeze reports that he’s now planning to dig a 500-foot-tunnel leading away from it.
Said Musk: “We’re going to try to figure out what it takes to improve tunneling speed between 500 and 1,000 percent. So we’re just sort of muddling along. We have no idea what we’re doing. We’re going to get this (tunnel-boring) machine, take it apart (and) figure out how to make it go faster while still being safe and not affecting people on the surface.”
As observers have noted, if Musk masters tunneling technology, it could also prove a good fit for his Hyperloop concept.
Source: core77