Elon Musk’s Boring Company is the Key to His Mars Colony! This month, Elon Musk announced his new boring machine called Godot.
In order to complete his vision of a subterranean tunnel system known as The Boring Company. For those unfamiliar with Musk’s plan, it’s basically an underground city where people will live and work as they commute on high-speed trains between their homes and work areas that are connected to the city above ground via elevator shafts.
What is the Boring Company?
While Elon has not been forthcoming with details, the Boring Company appears to be a tunnel-digging venture. The official website states that The Boring Company is developing advanced tunnelling technology that will help solve the problem of soul-destroying traffic. The first project mentioned on the site involves building tunnels underneath Los Angeles in order to avoid traffic congestion. These tunnels will transport cars on an electric skate, allowing them to bypass congestion as they are driven at high speeds through the tunnels.
However, Elon recently announced that his tunnel-digging venture would be instrumental in his plan to build a colony on Mars. During a TED conference, Elon explained that he wants to create an inexpensive method of transportation between Earth and Mars. As such, he plans on reducing costs by building enormous underground tunnels on Earth that can be used for space travel. By connecting these tunnels with those being built underneath Los Angeles, it will be possible for rockets and other vehicles to travel at high speeds from city to city and planet to planet. These superfast transportation systems will help Elon cut down costs of travelling through space, making it possible for humans to colonize Mars without bankrupting themselves in the process.
How will Elon get us to Mars?
Elon Musk has a plan for an ambitious new colony on Mars. But first, he needs to solve Earth’s traffic problem. That’s where The Boring Company comes in. Elon was recently quoted as saying that if we don’t solve urban congestion then we will not have a positive future. If you think of accelerating [the transition] by 5 years, 10 years, whatever things look really crazy—in 10 years it will seem normal. Because it’s exponential growth.
He’s also very concerned about local traffic congestion and has been spending his time trying to figure out how to solve that problem. And we need a solution soon because urban congestion will only get worse as our cities grow at an exponential rate. The same issue exists in countries around the world, not just in places like Los Angeles, London, Paris and New York, but even in developing nations like Brazil, Russia and India that are seeing huge rates of urbanization.
Elon’s Mars Colony: An obvious solution for solving both these problems is some sort of underground transit system that can transport people quickly through cities without contributing as much traffic on surface streets.
Why Boring is the key
The competition in the aerospace industry is fierce. Although there are many options for space travel, no major company has quite figured out how to make it cheaper and more efficient. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk believes he can change that with his latest venture, The Boring Company, and a step-by-step plan for establishing a Martian colony. Think of The Boring Company as similar to an underground highway system designed specifically for high-speed travel between cities; except instead of high-speed transportation on land, it’s about high-speed transport through tunnels below ground. He plans on making these holes at least 30 feet wide so electric vehicles can be easily transported from the city centre to the city centre beneath Earth’s surface.
This is all possible thanks to SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s latest company, The Boring Company. When he announced plans for his newest venture, it sounded like a joke or even an April Fool’s prank at first—not many people thought there was actually any truth behind it. But as more details have come out about his underground transportation system and its capabilities, it’s clear that he’s serious about getting started on building a new mode of transportation here on Earth before he sets his sights on space travel. And because no one knows how many different uses there are for high-speed tunnels beneath our surface already, Elon will be able to further innovate along with his other companies, making progress in multiple fields.
Elon Musk’s plan involves digging a system of tunnels deep underground and equipping them with electric sledges that can zip through at speeds of up to 124 miles per hour. The initial focus of The Boring Company will be creating tunnels beneath major cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle. Because tunnelling is already a widespread practice in these areas—to build underground train stations, for example—it would not take much for Elon’s company to get started on its building project. This is likely what led him to name his new venture The Boring Company; after all, boring things tend to happen without people realizing how important they are until it’s too late.
So how does a tunnelling company help with colonizing other planets?
The key, according to Elon Musk, is building a large city on Mars.
So what we want to do here really is make it possible for anyone to move to Mars, he said at SXSW.
And while he did not reveal any details about how exactly he plans on doing that, there were two hints given: one of which was his plan for a mass transit system called Hyperloop; and a second was The Boring Company.
The Boring Company’s main goal right now is to dig tunnels. That would obviously come in handy when digging a mass transit system or digging a foundation for Martian buildings, but so far it’s been focused on getting its first tunnel built – which just happens to run under Los Angeles and Culver City.
So why LA? Well, Elon Musk says that he chose LA because it’s close enough that he can go from his office at SpaceX down to The Boring Company HQ in Hawthorne and meet with everyone there on a regular basis.
This brings us back to The Boring Company
The inter-planetary species that Elon Musk wants to help establish on Mars won’t just need housing, food, and energy; they’ll also need a transportation system. Luckily for these future Martian colonists, The Boring Company has solved that problem, too. You have tunnels in cities — tunnels are great — it’s just a hole in the ground…what if you didn’t have a hole in the ground because you could go down and be lighthearted about it? That’s what we want to do.
We think we can put people into hyperloop tunnels with electric skates, said Elon Musk.
The hyperloop tunnels that Elon and his team are working on are called Loop trains. These trains consist of a pod that can hold between 8 and 16 people, depending on their size. The pods will travel through vacuum tubes at speeds of up to 760 miles per hour or around 1,220 km/h. At those speeds, The Boring Company says it could reduce a trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco – which normally takes 6 hours – down to just 30 minutes. This means you could live in LA and work in SF as your commute would only take 2 hours! That seems too good to be true…doesn’t it?
In order for Elon’s Mars colony to be sustainable and self-sustaining, it must be able to produce its own food, generate its own power, and recycle whatever resources it can. The Boring Company has solved these problems in one fell swoop by adding one more element to their transportation system: underground farms. Because Loop trains will not just transport people from city centre A to city centre B; they’ll also transport food, water and other supplies from outside sources like nearby farms directly into city centres C through E. This means that every person in these cities will essentially have a full life support system at their fingertips.
Can you dig it?
Starting a business in space might seem like an incredibly difficult endeavour, but it turns out that digging holes on Earth is actually the key. The eccentric billionaire and founder of SpaceX (and Tesla) Elon Musk has been working on a new venture called The Boring Company which aims to drill tunnels below our cities that are big enough for cars. If successful, these tunnels could serve as a basis for Hyperloop transit systems or even serve as an escape route if society collapses. Also, let’s be honest: This makes digging holes more exciting.
It has been announced that The Boring Company will build a tunnel in LA as a proof of concept. After that, they’ll set their sights on two hyperloop projects – one between New York and Washington DC, and another between LA and San Francisco. It remains to be seen whether or not The Boring Company’s ambitious ventures will pan out but what we do know is that Elon Musk is hell-bent on making his Mars colony a reality by 2028 so there’s at least that motivation. It might not seem like it now, but digging holes for tunnels could be incredibly important when it comes to colonizing other planets.
What we don’t know yet is whether or not he will bring his boring company with him to Mars or if he will leave it behind. Will our boring machines and drills be used for resource extraction on other planets? We might not know for sure for quite some time, but Elon Musk seems pretty serious about his Martian plans so we’ll probably find out soon enough.
With every great undertaking comes important questions – and there are certainly many when it comes to colonizing other planets. We have no idea how exactly we will get people and supplies into space, where they’ll live once they get there, how they will survive in a hostile environment, etc.
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