Hyperloops

Perhaps you want a more efficient payment method so you develop “Paypal” ® which apparently far exceeds the clunky exchange of paper and metal for goods or services.  Perhaps you want to travel to space without riding the NASA train, so you develop “Space X.”  Perhaps you want to reduce humanity’s carbon footprint and create fully electric vehicles, so you develop the “Tesla.”  Perhaps you are one person who has all of these ambitions.  If you have answered yes to all of the above, you are Elon Musk, or Tony Stark incarnate (“Iron Man” suit will not be marketed for another twenty years, even though he probably has one in his basement – just see MIT’s biomechatronics projects or Raytheon’s XOS Exoskeleton and add some Hendo ® hoverboard features and, voila…sort of).  Nonetheless, perhaps you are Elon Musk now and you want a global scale travel mechanism twice as fast as a peregrine falcon.  You toss some Bitcons (or Paypal transactions) to your research and development team to start work on the Hyperloop.  To envision a hyperloop, think of the pneumatic tubes at the drive-up windows at banks on the scale of an intercontinental subway – somewhat fancifully imagined in the elves’ ride in the “Polar Express” animated movie.  Why should oil be the only medium that gets to shoot the curl on the pipeline?  While I would fancy a ride on vacuum tube in a Plexiglas capsule, I do have one reservation.   I’m afraid that in moving faster, we will begin to move slower.  That is, in propelling ourselves from continent to continent, which we already do to some degree with air travel, we will fully actualized our experiential age.  The concept of a ‘place’ will diminish, or at least become premium, as the world becomes smaller and other ‘spaces’ are made more accessible.  We will chase travel and more and more experiences to the detriment of squelching the pursuit of the beauty of staying put in order to drown out the noise of distraction that suffocates the pursuit of higher things.  Not in the Buddhist monk sense, that we must run to the top of a mountain so we can chant ‘ohms’ to obtain inner peace, but in the sense that perpetual travel disavows one from getting to actually know others and be in a community.  Perpetual travel, especially at lightning speed, extracts one from probing their conscience.  Many great letters and tomes have been written from a jail cell.  See Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” or the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, for example.  Few great books have been written on a jet plane or subway, however.