这主意可不是异想天开.docVIP

这主意可不是异想天开 　　动汽车企业家及火星私人殖民的拥护者埃隆?马斯克现在打算重塑铁路运输。马斯克提出重现一种叫做真空列车的老式科幻概念，列车将以超过1 200千米的时速带着旅客横穿加州――比喷气客机还要快。他的想法至少在理论上是可行的，如果付诸实践会如何呢？ 　　California is home to many clever people. One of them is Elon Musk， the hyperactive boss of Tesla Motors， an electric-car company， and SpaceX， a rocketry business （he also sits on the board of a solar-energy firm）. There is nothing Mr. Musk likes more than revolutionizing high-tech industries. And he thinks he has come up with a better way to get California moving than a standard high-speedtrain―Hyperloop， prompting excited speculation about what he might have had in mind. 　　Mr. Musk’s Atmospheric Caper 　　Essentially， Mr. Musk proposes to revive an old science-fiction idea called the vac-train （short for “vacuum train”）， albeit with a few important tweaks. The Hyperloop would carry passengers across California at more than 1，200 kph―faster than a jet airliner―allowing them to zoom between San Francisco and Los Angeles in little over half an hour， compared with more than two-and-a-half hours for California High Speed Rail project. Mr. Musk’s notional budget is around $6 billion， less than a tenth of what the high-speed train is supposed to cost. 　　Vac-trains， as first described in the 1910s by Robert Goddard， would send rolling stock （or hovering stock， perhaps） hurtling through hermetically sealed tubes from which the air has been evacuated. The trains would thus encounter no drag， and be able to reach immense speeds. Goddard reckoned his design―which also proposed magnetic levitation instead of wheels―was good for about 1，600 kph. 　　This and other designs for transporter tubes inspired much futuristic art， but none was ever built because maintaining a vacuum in a long tunnel is difficult. Even a small leak would scupper a full-fledged vac-train， which relies on no air at all being able to build up in front of it， and thus slow it down. For that reason， the Hyperloop is not actually a true vac-train. Instead， Mr. Musk plans to