As Elon Musk sat in Los Angeles traffic, an idea came to him. What if he built giant machines to drill underground and create layers of tunnels? The answer, he thought to himself, was implicit. It would alleviate traffic and, so, that is what he will do.
“The Boring Company,” is the planned company name and its modus operandi, “Boring, it’s what we do.”
“Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging…” he Tweeted, followed up, shortly after, by “I am actually going to do this.”
Apparently, the idea has been on his mind since early 2016. He mentioned it during SpaceX’s Hyperloop pod design competition:
“It’s a really simple and obvious idea and I wish more people would do it: build more tunnels. Tunnels are great. It’s just a hole in the ground, it’s not that hard. But if you have tunnels in cities you would massively alleviate congestion and you could have tunnels at all different levels – you could probably have 30 layers of tunnels and completely fix the congestion problem in high-density cities. So I strongly recommend tunnels.”
The machine that he is talking about is called a “mole” and is already in existence. They are used to drill through solid rock and sand and it looks like we may be getting more familiar with them very soon.
Amazingly, the technology could be implemented on Mars as we begin to colonize. Musk is also on president-elect Trump’s Strategic and Policy team, so hopefully we’ll see a national tunnel initiative and actually make the cities a breeze to drive in.
*Article originally appeared at Minds.
