Startup wants you to fund Hyperloop, and help design it too

http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57600528-76/startup-wants-you-to-fund-hyperloop-and-help-design-it-too/

by ph0rque • 13 years ago

36 21 13 years ago

news.cnet.com

I like the idea, but have my doubts that 'design by commitee' is going to work better here than it usually does.

Also, the required funding is enormous - not sure if they mean financing the whole project? That would be outside anything JumpStartFund / Kickstarter / whatever could collect.

retube• 13 years ago

Well you'd initially fund a scaled-down prototype, not try to build the whole thing immediately from scratch.

danielweber4• 13 years ago

Having a bunch of people working on a prototype, with responsibility spread over all of them, seems a good way to have the prototype fail.

Musk is busy and can't help, but you need someone like a Musk who has the attention and energy to be in charge and make sure you have useful goals and you are moving towards them.

simonebrunozzi• 13 years ago

I think this is a good thing. Let me explain.

1) You can think that there are hundreds of OTHER things worth pursuing, instead of spending time on a project that is very hard to complete, expensive, and benefits (initially) only a small fraction of the world's population. Myself, I'd rather improve public trasportation in both SF and LA, instead of focusing on the Hyperloop. But there are people willing to spend some time to tinker with the idea. Let them do it.

2) They might not be successful, but they are sparking a discussion on transportation, technology, and government. Having a discussion is healthy, and needed.

Good luck!

wavesounds• 13 years ago

It's more important then that. Hyperloop is our best bet to stop California from wasting 60 to 100 Billion (60,000-100,000 Million) dollars on a "High Speed" train that is going to be the 2nd slowest in the world.

melling2• 13 years ago

It's so costly because the land in California is so expensive. The Hyperloop is going to avoid much of this by taking an indirect route and making up for it with the extra speed. Wait other couple of decades and you'll have more people to move out of the way of the Hyperloop too.

Maybe we should have a little better urban planning and start preparing for low-speed and high-speed maglevs now?

pstack• 13 years ago

Yes, but can we be assured that Hyperloop will involve the same level of payola and corporate/government corruption that building a bullet-train (which American's have someone been convinced is a necessity) would?

logicallee2• 13 years ago

There are 9 million millionaires in America. If each of them commmitted just $67,000 it would exceed Musk's budget...by a factor of 100!

iow each millionaire would have to commit just $670. Wow.

We need a kickstarter for millionaires, and oh btw everyone could join even without being a millionaire. And it could be open world-wide.

Why not do this?

It seems somehow more reasonable than a $6B Indiegogo project.... (Which would be hilarious.)

svmegatron• 13 years ago

Kickstarter for millionaires, but you don't have to be a millionaire. I think that's what kickstarter already is.

danielweber4• 13 years ago

There are an infinite number of things that could be super-awesome if only everyone just donated $X to them.

tehwalrus• 13 years ago

Umm... If you have a way to get 9 million people to agree on something, why aren't you president of a small European country yet?

Also, if you think it's easy to get $6,700 out of a millionaire, perhaps you aren't understanding why they're millionaires.

danielweber4• 13 years ago

But think of all the cool tings I could do if they just gave me their money.

logicallee2• 13 years ago

Oh, man, President of a small European country! Think of all the fun I could have micromanaging infrastructural decisions, educational expenditures of a developing economy, etc.

It's like a Sim game, only it's all day every day for years.

Why would I want to do this again?

smacktoward• 13 years ago

Meh, depending on the whims of billionaires doesn't scale. What we need is some kind of system to collect tiny amounts of money from everybody, aggregate it, and use it to build important infrastructure that would benefit all but is too expensive for any one of us (even billionaires!) to afford on our own.

We could call it "government."

jdmitch• 13 years ago

to vote for the hyperloop on jumpstartfund, go to http://www.jumpstartfund.com/index.php/hyperloop.html

harimau• 13 years ago

The HSR is a boondoggle in its current state because of politics and land value in this state. Hyperloop will run into similar problems w/ NIMBYs, local governments, etc. Whereas Hyperloop can transport only 7.4 million people a year, HSR has the potential to transport 117 million. The Hyperloop is a neat concept and it's great that there's greater discussion on transportation issues but it won't solve the major outstanding issues with bringing quality mass-transit to California, and the US in general, which is people and political will.

alcari• 13 years ago

How many of those 117 million people will HSR be transporting from LA to SF?

Startup wants you to fund Hyperloop, and help design it too

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