Actual high speed rail around North America. Every major metropolitan area connected to minimum 150mph speeds.
All of the idiots who joke and make fun of CHSR and Brightline have never truly seen an actual rail system in practice. I read the Facebook comments, they’re all the same. “It would never work here”, “We’re too big”, “Flights would be faster”, “I just like to drive”, blah blah blah. The fact is that they’ve never been outside of the country (and most of them outside of their immediate state area) to ever see what it’s actually like, and have never seen what we’re desperately missing here in America.
Oh and the worst of the complaints, the absolute worst - “It’s a waste of money”. Says Darrel, the guy who has done zero research about rail beyond what conservative pundits have told him, and has absolutely zero idea how much we piss away on highways every year. How much is that new lane on the local freeway costing? No freaking idea do you. But California HSR, they know to the penny how much that’s costing. (You don’t even have to know which freeway I’m talking about, because I know there’s also a freeway near you who is getting yet another lane, everyone in the country has a freeway getting another lane.) Rail though? Oh no… the costs!
I firmly believe this would help ease a lot of the nation’s major problems. Probably not solve, but ease some of them.
- Climate Change (obviously)
- Some of the divide this nation is feeling (because it’d be easier to travel around and actually see)
- for example, I live in Seattle, there are a lot of conservatives living just 200 miles away who never come because it’s “too far” and we’re “constantly having violent protests”. Well come and see for yourself then. Take a day trip.
- Housing Crisis (immediately nearby cities and towns become commutable)
- This would also help with income inequality a bit, because all of a sudden you can again commute much farther
- We waste so much land due to parking and driving, relieving that a bit could revitalize downtowns as people would pick up and leave the train in urban centers, renewing development downtown.
This list goes on
How we move around is such a huge part of our daily lives. Most people spend hours a day in their car, burning gas, driving around getting to work, stores, errands, schools, etc. We have made it so damn difficult on ourselves just to move around, and I’m sick of hearing the regurgitated excuses why it “would never work” here.
A couple good videos if you’re curious.
Alan Fisher, the Armchair Urbanist explains how rail gets such scrutiny while roads get a pass
If I were American this would be my absolute priority too. I don’t like driving too much but love being able to get everywhere I want to by train. I don’t even own a car.
I love driving. HSR is still super nice, because the worst part about driving is long distance trips. Day trip to the hills to drive fun windy roads? Hell yeah. Trip across the US where I spend 9 hours a day driving straight in Kansas/Oklahoma/Texas? Awful. That section of argument never makes any sense to me. “I love driving. Nothing better than sitting in the right lane for 7 hours on a perfectly flat, straight road”. Morons lol
Acela has proven that rail can work in the US. I don’t know the stats but it has made a significant difference in both highway traffic and air traffic, and is a lot more comfortable. It’s also in high demand - people want to use it.
Complaints hear are: not high speed, not frequent enough, too expensive. Victim of its own success (and lack of funding compared to highway and air travel), but never anyone saying it’s not a great choice
This is amazing. I already love the train, this would be my dream mode of transportation.
Find a way to live a productive life with more dignity despite my physical disability that will lead me to an ever darker future. I was hit riding a bicycle to work, by a political refugee that had the cognitive capabilities of a third grader. Surviving is so much worse than death in the USA. It is a terrible place to live like this; an inhumane and pathetic disgrace of a country.
I hear the UK makes an honest effort for accessibility
Free EFI conversion for any carbureted vehicle still on the road.
Space mining.
Giant floating island to stay in temperate zone, of course everyone would suffer sea sickness and it is question how would we keep everything in place.
My list is quite different than the ones currently in the thread.
The boring ones:
Creating a vaccine or other cloaking to make humans invisible to ticks & mosquitoes. A separate project would be to do the same for parasites.
Enacting strict pollution/carbon limits and mandatory circular economy everywhere in the world.
Researching, trialing and Enacting a sustainable post-capitalist system everywhere in the world.
Developing solar energy until covering global energy demands, including a power network that can transport energy from the sunny side and/or orbit everywhere.
The slightly more ambitious:
Establish self-sustainable colonies living on off-earth resources, most probably also situated off-earth.
Create a Dyson swarm with enough energy output for in-system exploration, mining, colonisation, and terraforming.
Perfect matter replicators.
I have some other ideas as well, but those would be a start.
Thinking a lot smaller here… I’ve always wanted to build a custom pinball machine. I already possess most of the necessary skills, but the materials are expensive and I don’t really have the time or space to do it right
I absolutely love this.
A matching pair of show cars, custom built from the ground up to cruise in and turn heads.
Also, build the modern equivalent of the Model T, the Volkswagen Beetle, something like that. The super practical, oddly attractive, easily repairable, energy sipping cheap-mobile. It would be hard to meet all these goals plus modern safety requirements, but that’s where the endless money comes in for R&D.
The obsidian orb
Is there something mystical to this?
Not really, it’s just a regular orb that glows with a dark energy and floats in the air due to a hyperspherical extrusion into 4-dimensional space. Nothing crazy.
Making an MMO
Can I join once you’re done?
Gene edit the particular gnats in my area out of existence
A genophage that cuts their ability to breed down to a point where the species will just barely survive.
Building a gateway to the netherworld.
I did that in Minecraft just a few weeks ago!
Buying a house in Canada
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator
or Bioshock’s Rapture, one of the two
Ocean Sea elevator. Get whales in space
Douglas Adams did this one. It didn’t turn out well for the whale.
My 3d printer could use some 220v 3 phase motors for sure.
No reason for it except that i want to know at what speed linear rails start melting.