(California High Speed Rail. Imaginary photo by California High-Speed Rail and Unicorn Authority.)
Sorry I am late this morning. I have been trading polemics with the usual suspects and Rhonda at the front desk called to ask if I had a woman in the unit, since there was a car parked with a guest pass under the tree that Management wants to cut down, and the sponsoring unit number was written as “901” and the building only has eight floors. She thought it might have been transposed.
I looked around the unit and could not find any stray females, and responded that I was not responsible. There are enough tree guys out there that they could probably just pick up the car and move it themselves if they felt like it. I am watching with interest, either on the off chance that a woman will appear, breathless, or the guys will just get to work on the trees and bounce things off the roof.
Being a man of leisure these days, I have had more time to trade email with under-employed buddies (there are a lot of us these days, as the Great Recession and the budget chaos snags the War Industry) and that means more time for more messages to fly around.
I am not going to start a rant this morning- I am ranted out, anyway, and I don’t know what to think about anything, except advance the proposition that if the Government doesn’t have to follow its own laws, why on earth should we? Just saying…
I don’t know if you have been following the saga of High Speed Rail out in California- part of that “shovel ready” thing that allowed the government to “invest” billions of stimulus cash in unicorns and the UAW and electric cars that have cruising ranges of like 36 miles.
There was nothing that wasn’t half-baked enough to get funded. The High Speed Rail thing was a corker. It was sold to the taxpayers with a loss-leader price- the PR effort in 2008 claimed the project could be done for about $33 Billion, while the current estimate for what it will really cost has ballooned to something over $90 Billion, and estimates for ridership in the dim and distant future (2030, or about my personal self-life) are about a third of what boosters claimed it was going to be.
In the meantime, there are problems with condemning private property along the proposed rights-of–way, the proposed speed and safety goals are unachievable by any current technology, it won’t be able to go nearly aas fast as advertised due to the fact that the rail network will still rely on freight tracks unless a lot more money is spent, and the reduction in CO2 emissions will be inconsequential.
Other than that, things are going great for the project, except for the fact that a Sacramento County judge ruled last Friday that the California High-Speed Rail Authority failed to comply with the financial and environmental promises it made to get the project approved by 52.5% of the voters, and “abused its discretion by approving a funding plan that did not comply with the requirements of the law” by failing to identify “sources of funds that were more than merely theoretically possible.”
That was the problem with the wind farms and the electric cars and the solar panels and all the rest of the industries that were ballyhooed as the solution to a problem that arguably does not exist- fossil fuel scarcity- the use of which is to be prohibited because of a much over-hyped crisis that may be cooling all by itself.
Don’t ask me. Surface temperatures have not increased in over sixteen years even though the PPM of CO2 has continued to increase, the number of tornedos and tropical storms has declined, and the smart money is starting to worry about how cold it is going to get as the Sun goes quiescent.
But I am not going to go down that road this morning. Reasonable people can differ on the matter, though I have not seen many of them around lately. I was talking to Argo about it the other day, and he expressed an honest belief based on what has been said and taught by the alarmists over the last couple decades. He thinks it is only prudent to be cautious since the stakes are so high.
“You have a point,” I said, “but by that standard we have to start building really powerful radars to look for comets just in case one hits us. The stakes are really high. Think of the dinosaurs.”
(A sketch of the Hyperloop capsule approaching Hollywood and Vine with passengers onboard. AP Photo/Tesla Motors.)
That was when I started to think about alternatives to reality as it is, just like the wild man Elon Musk, the technology entrepreneur who is going to commercialize space travel. Maybe it is the trouble with the high-speed rail program, I don’t know, but he has a plan to leap-frog the train. He has the coolest proposal I have seen: a transport system he says would make the nearly 400-mile trip between San Francisco and LA in half the time it takes an airplane. His “Hyperloop” system would use a large tube with capsules inside that would float on air, traveling at over 700 miles per hour.
To deal with the right-of-way issue, he plans to run it down the middle of I-5, and pull it off for a tenth the cost of high-speed rail.
Forgive me if I am skeptical of the whole thing. I think we have bought quite enough unicorns for this crisis, and even if he could pull it off, the idea of some terrorist putting a Rocket Propelled Grenade into the side of the tube just when I happen to be passing by is quite more than I could bear- at least at 700 MPH. A learned colleague claims it is all Bullshit, at least as far as the initial cost estimates go, but you never know.
With the right government funding, maybe it can work as well as the Volt.
Anyway, that got me to thinking about fantasies that were actually real. Back in the days when satellite imagery was a pretty big deal there was a target we identified on the Caspian Sea in the former USSR. It appeared to be a giant flying boat of some sort. The smart guys back in Washington determined that it was probably a wing-in-ground (WIG) effect airplane that was intended to fly fast and low over the surface of the ocean and deliver troops and material in large quantities mucho pronto.
We called it “The Caspian Sea Monster.”
(The Monster underway. Photo MoD.)
It was a wonder to the world outside our own- a sort of Howard Hughes Spruce Goose of technology (though the two have much in common) and the speculation was that a fleet of these could very well provide the high-speed capability Governor Moonbeam desires and no tracks or land-based insfrastructure to deal with- just the terminals and the platform itself.
The Soviets called the monster the “KM.” It was designed in the mid-sixties and was unique in terms of size and payload. It had a wingspan of 37.6 m, a length of 92 m, and a maximum take-off weight of 544 tons with all ten Dobrynin VD-7 Turbojets thundering. Cruising speed may not be as much as Mr. Musk’s 700mph Hyperloop, but could provide at least something faster than the high-speed train, no right of way required, and the entire West Coast open to service.
The Monster never actually got into service, but it struck me that if I contacted one of my pals who has pals in the MoD in Moscow, I might be able to pick up the plans and maybe the remaining hull.
If I made the right donations to the right party, and got the ear of Governor Moonbeam, I might be able to whisper that this is an idea whose time has come again.
It is a proven technology, I thought. We can do this, and serve all the people of California. I could do this for a billion or so. What could go wrong? Even if I had to give a chunk of it to the right politicians, I would still be way ahead.
Do you think I could borrow your cell phone and make some calls?
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303