Summary: <br> Kellie Armstrong an Alliance party MLA for the Strangford constituency.<br> <br> <br> <br> <a href="https://blog.hereshow.ie/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Kellie-Armstrong-scaled.jpg" data-wpel-link="internal"></a><br> <br> <br> *****<br> <br> <br> <br> I saw a load of comments from commentators online, from talking heads on radio and TV, from people on Twitter, that the mobilisation ordered by Putin last week to try to shore up his invasion of Ukraine was stupid. It was stupid to try to mobilise people with no military experience, it was stupid to think they could have any effect against high-precision, long-range weapons that the Ukrainians are now getting.<br> <br> <br> <br> It was stupid not to consider that they would have no experienced officers, it was stupid to not understand that this lack of leadership is a key reason why Russia is losing, it was stupid not to consider the destabilising effect that this order would have in the population in Russia, it was stupid to have all the skilled young men fleeing over the closest border, it was stupid, stupid, stupid.<br> <br> <br> <br> I’m not convinced.<br> <br> <br> <br> This made me think of Elon Musk’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener external" data-wpel-link="external">Hyperloop</a>. In case you don’t know, Elon Musk, the boss of Tesla, who is listed as the world’s richest man, has proposed and apparently started working on a high-speed mass transport system that would involve a sort of train inside a vacuum tube. With all the air evacuated from the tube and no wind resistance, people could be transported at over a thousand km per hour, as fast a jet liner. This has gained him huge publicity, and quite a bit of political traction.<br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> Musk has also proposed <a href="https://www.boringcompany.com/hyperloop" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener external" data-wpel-link="external">underground tunnels and rail systems</a> that would move cars around with huge efficiency, and argued that he could construct tunnels and tubes like these to connect major American and world cities, and would begin by connecting San Francisco to Los Angeles, with travel times that seem fantastic compared to the driving times in car-choked southern California.<br> <br> <br> <br> Fantastic, in that it is a fantasy. There have been no shortage of people pointing out that this project is impossible. It will never happen. The cost of tunnelling is hugely expensive, very time-consuming and a legal nightmare in densely-populated areas like California with disputes about title, risk of subsidence, not to mention the safety risks of having accidents and fires in inaccessible tunnels, and the potential for huge congestion at entry and exit points.<br> <br> <br> <br> The idea of a train in a vacuum tunnel is even more hot nonsense. There doesn’t even exist a proposal for how air might be evacuated from such a vast space as an intercity tunnel, let alone any equipment that could do it. And even if that could be achieved, there is no design proposal, there isn’t even any material known to humanity that could withstand the gigantic stresses of the outside atmosphere bearing down on the vacuum, and even if you could propose a design and materials, it would be certain to include internal struts, which would make it impossible to run a train through the space.<br> <br> <br> <br> If you’re interested, there’s no shortage of YouTube videos on this, ridiculing Musk’s plans, and they make a good education on the physics, the engineering and the logistics that show that this proposal is just totally impossible for a whole host of reasons – and along the way, you can have a good chuckle at just how stupid Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, was to propose this in the first place. Check out the channels of Thunderfoot or Kurtzgesagt if you are want to laugh along.<br> <br> <br> <br> But here’s the thing.
