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"Cyberpunk worked when the Internet was in its hand-wound crystal radio phase, when you had to be a sort of hobbyist to do e-mail, and it all had a very steep learning curve. Those days are over."
- William Gibson
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| Gravity-assisted Subway | ||
| The fastest way between continents (that does not entail leaving the ground). |
This piece of technovelgy gives a great illustration of the fastest way to get from point A on the surface of the earth to another surface point B.
| The car shot forward and down. Corbell was on a roller coaster. He pulled out a chair arm and hung on. The car fell at a slant for what felt like half a minute. Then there was high gravity as car and tunnel curved back to horizontal. Light inside, darkness outside. Corbell was beginning to relax when the car rolled, surged to the left; rolled, surged to the right, steadied. What was that? Changing tunnels? His ears popped. Peerssa spoke. "Your speed is in excess of eight hundred kilometers per hour and still accelerating. A remarkable achievement. "How do they do it?" "At a guess, you are riding a gravity-assisted linear accelerator through an evacuated tunnel. You are about to pass beneath the Pacific Ocean..." |
| Technovelgy from A World Out of Time,
by Larry Niven. Published by Random House in 1976 Additional resources -
|
The ingenious solution is to dig a tunnel from one point to the other, using the force of gravity to provide some of the acceleration. The beauty of this approach is that, in a frictionless environment, you can speed the train on its way without having to apply any energy - and slow it down the same way!
The questions (for you engineers) are: what is the best shape (or curve) for the tunnel, and how can you avoid those pesky underground temperatures and pressures? See this article on the brachistochrone problem, one of the earliest problems posed in the calculus of variations. Newton solved this problem from scratch in one day in 1696; got your pencil? Ready, set ... go!
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Tech news articles related to works by Larry Niven
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'Michel Ardan, as a Frenchman, was declared chief cook, an important function, which raised no rival.'
'Sapiro’s computer just kept dialing at random, hanging up on humans, until it got a fellow computer of the same type as itself.'
'I request that you feed the correlation between those dots and the levers of the panel into my memory banks.'
'... all the feel and appearance of human flesh and epidermis.'
'If you surf over a bump, the spokes contract to roll over it.'
