Welcome to the Hyperl∞p!
So Elon Musk (Tesla Motors, SpaceX) wants to make a supersonic pneumatic tube transport system that could get you from San Francisco to LA in 30 minutes.
http://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/hyperloop_alpha-20130812.pdf
So What is Hyperloop Anyway?
Short of figuring out real teleportation, which would of course be awesome
(someone please do this), the only option for super fast travel is to build a tube
over or under the ground that contains a special environment. This is where
things get tricky.
At one extreme of the potential solutions is some enlarged version of the old
pneumatic tubes used to send mail and packages within and between buildings.
You could, in principle, use very powerful fans to push air at high speed
through a tube and propel people-sized pods all the way from LA to San
Francisco. However, the friction of a 350 mile long column of air moving at
anywhere near sonic velocity against the inside of the tube is so stupendously
high that this is impossible for all practical purposes.
Another extreme is the approach, advocated by Rand and ET3, of drawing a
hard or near hard vacuum in the tube and then using an electromagnetic
suspension. The problem with this approach is that it is incredibly hard to
maintain a near vacuum in a room, let alone 700 miles (round trip) of large
tube with dozens of station gateways and thousands of pods entering and
exiting every day. All it takes is one leaky seal or a small crack somewhere in
the hundreds of miles of tube and the whole system stops working.
However, a low pressure (vs. almost no pressure) system set to a level where
standard commercial pumps could easily overcome an air leak and the
transport pods could handle variable air density would be inherently robust.
Unfortunately, this means that there is a non-trivial amount of air in the tube
and leads us straight into another problem.
How does it work?
Somehow! There's an air cushion, and a seat, and you can put your car in it. This diagram might also help:
Will this turn into a real thing? Ehh, maybe? Elon Musk is already saying he's already too involved with Tesla Motors and SpaceX to devote a lot of time to it.
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OTHER FUTURE THINGS:
Looking like a complete tool while wearing AR goggles is the future.
https://www.spaceglasses.com/
I'm actually really excited about augmented reality glasses, and I think this kind of tech is going to blow up really quickly, particularly with parallel technology coming along in VR headsets via the Oculus Rift. Take a Rift, strap two high-res webcams on it for stereoscopic vision, and you've got everything you need for augmented reality right there.
While the marketing is targeting videogames, and the real market is of course for porn, I think there could be some really amazing applications for this in terms of hands-on learning tutorials, where having a wearable HUD and a computer system that could recognize and highlight images from the built-in camera could be really helpful for things like fixing engines, building structures or preparing particularly complicated sandwiches.
Anyway let's bitch about how we still don't have flying cars/rocket skateboards.