Oh, how easy it is — and how unfulfilling — to sit in the peanut gallery. In the age of social media, pretty much all of us are sitting there.
That much was clear Monday, when Elon Musk unveiled his long-touted plans for a Hyperloop transport system. This could spirit travelers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in pods that travel at 800 mph. Total travel time would be less than 45 minutes, with one pod leaving every 30 seconds. That certainly beats the rigmarole of airport living.
The Hyperloop has long been technically feasible; it was first proposed as a system called Tubeflight, with NASA funding, back in 1967. It is also wildly unrealistic, and ignores many of the political realities that hampered construction of the $100 billion (and counting) high-speed California rail system that follows the same route Musk is proposing. Musk claims he can build his system for $6 billion; that may be wildly unrealistic too.
Social media fosters snap judgments. It also fosters snark. I'm hardly immune to that myself; my first Hyperloop tweet suggested the movie Speed could be remade aboard one of Musk's pods. But I noticed an interesting thing in my Twitter feed: a number of people stating — in an arch way, of course — that they were fed up with Hyperloop jokes in their feed.
You could paraphrase their reaction as: shut up and let the crazy inventor guy have his moment.
Where's My Jetpack/Flying Car/Personal Pod/Space Elevator?
I think many of us instinctively realize that there's something wrong with the pace of innovation. That while we're still making breakthroughs at the theoretical level, we've made it near impossible to see any kind of new infrastructure come out of it; at least, nothing larger than a laptop.
We've got our finest minds figuring out how to make and market photo-sharing and video-sharing apps that are slightly different from all the other photo-sharing and video-sharing apps. Engineers that might once have gone to work at NASA are now tweaking your Facebook news feed. One or two kids may dream of building fusion reactors to cure all the world's energy ills, but I'm willing to bet many more would rather learn how to animate the robots from Pacific Rim.
The Hyperloop is only getting attention because Musk, a billionaire with a track record, is interested in it. There are plenty more fantastic and wildly unrealistic projects we could be dreaming about, and better yet, funding.
Just sticking with transport ideas, how about a Personal Rapid Transit or "podcar" system — pods like the Hyperloop, but this time they're replacing all city transit? Or a space elevator that could take anyone and anything into orbit for a fraction of the cost? Why is there only one company in America that's even close to giving us a flying car?
We know the answer: because it's not safe. It's certainly not safe for politicians to support government investment in outlandish research and development, which is where most of it came from in the past. It's also not safe for VCs to invest in something with that kind of risk and that kind of price tag; more importantly, perhaps, it's not safe for them to invest in anything that might get them laughed out of Silicon Valley. Better bring in the next kid with a photo-sharing app instead.
And so it goes, on and on for the rest of our jetpack-free lives — unless what? Unless more billionaires like Musk (and like Jeff Bezos, who is funding a secretive spaceflight startup called Blue Origin) step up to the plate. Unless in-house skunkworks like Google X labs become the norm, receive more funding, and increase their pace of innovation.
Unless we accept the truth of what Burt Rutan, the inventor of SpaceShipOne, once told me: "If you don't have a consensus that it's nonsense, you don't have a breakthrough." By definition, the future is going to look weird and unrealistic.
Here's a wild and crazy thought. If government won't step up to the plate for large-scale projects like the Hyperloop, maybe the major VC firms could fund a massive research and infrastructure lab of their own? If they took 10% of their profits, shared equally in whatever profits resulted, and had a team of scientists and inventors decide how to parcel out the cash, the risk would be spread evenly.
Maybe that wouldn't work. But as with all these ideas, it's important to start out with the dream.
Image: Elon Musk via Tesla Motors
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