Q&A: Hyperloop and the Future of Transport Technology – with Anita Sengupta

47 thoughts on “Q&A: Hyperloop and the Future of Transport Technology – with Anita Sengupta”

1. How to dissipate heat (like from air conditioning etc.) in a vacuum tube?

2. the beauty of an intelligent woman….. she nailed it….

3. Jesus what are a pack of Luddites doing watching a science channel? The comments on here remind me of the people that said that trains couldn't travel at more than 5 miles per hour, that driving a car would cause women to have hysteria attacks, that heavier than air flight was impossible, that space travel was impossible, that we couldn't put men on the moon, that the Personal Computer might be useful for 50 people, that Television, then video, then the internet would wreck our children's minds. Scepticism is fine, but dogmatic disbelief is not.

4. @ the royal institution…. damn .. i see why you have just 47k subscribed… your following are full of nay shortsighted people .. just look at your comment section … its bullshit…. its an old technology…. and so what…..its science there are always risks invovled….. go decades back.. no man in his right senses would seat on a continous exploding tank all in the name of going to space… but today we have astronauts ….. the planet is going green so… get the strap…. Peace… namaste

5. Ri…. very disappointing

6. How do you in any "green" way produce and maintain the largest vacuum chamber on earth? The amount of power consumed by that alone would consume far more energy than any existing rail system. This is very sad to see this being platformed by the RI.

7. expected more from RI very disappointing

8. Why would you go full Hyperloop! You never go full Hyperloop! Ri, Why?

9. With only 20 passengers per pod that makes it an expensive little bus , to move the kind of crowds required for a mass transit system will require a huge capital investment

10. Unscientific propaganda. Many words, little facts.

11. So the Royal Institution doesn't understand the laws of physics that makes the Hype-erloop impossible to do safely? Next they will be telling us Hydrogen cars are environmentally friendly and no Co2 emissions. (please ignore the power stations that are needed to make hydrogen in the first place. Nothing to see here etc.)

12. Why are you giving time to this utter bollocks? The hyper loop has been well busted! Failure of vacuum and everyone dies!

13. I'll just leave this here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNFesa01llk

14. RI – why are you giving oxygen to this obviously flawed train? I understand that you want to present a contentious project and have it open to debate, but all it does is lend it a credibility it doesn't deserve – and detract from yours.

15. A lot of people in the comment's that think they have a better grasp on something that all these phds missed.

16. BOO!

17. This is a big diversion from systems that will actually work, like light rail. And a big waste of time and money. Pure fantasy.

18. So many experts in comments section by just watching one video by thunderf00t.

19. She sounds like Victoria Wood with an American accent 😀

20. Please have more speakers like her in the future. ignore the salty comments.

21. Time will tell, but the talk around Hyperloop reminds me of the talk around Theranos. They start with a cool concept that has some major technical risks and then spend all their time and money on everything but those addressing those risks.
    I know there are a lot of smart people working on Hyperloop but social pressure to conform is a powerful thing and, as long as you are getting paid to work on something, you will want to believe it's a good idea. Look up the story on how Theranos finally fell. When people in the company tried to raise doubts, they were silenced and their professional reputations were threatened.
    The advocates for it sound like all those scam kickstarter where instead of convincing you it will work with hard numbers, they spend all their time talking about all the nice stuff it will enable (if it works). Most science and engineering talks start with an explanation of why we should try something but then they move on to how to do it, and they don't keep going back to why.
    She totally punts when asked about the danger by conflating the danger of pressurized pipelines with depressurized vacuum chambers. It's much harder to hold pressure out than in, and when a vacuum chamber fails it can do so quite explosively with speed of sound overpressure wave. Talking about it only being a partial vacuum is also a dodge. A 10% atmosphere chamber isn't that different from a 1% or .1% chamber in terms of safety and vessel needed to hold it.
    Cost estimates seem similarly detached from hard facts. It is not going to be cheaper to build a Hyperloop line than a high speed rail line. It has all of the same requirements and many more including periodic high speed pressure blocks and complicated thermal expansion joints (since pipeline style joints won't work). If someone puts out an cost per mile estimate less than a modern high-speed maglev than they aren't being honest.
    Do a talk where they focus on these things directly and I'll get excited, but all the positive talks and demonstrations I've seen are focused on the idea of it all or the low risk technical aspects like the track and drive mechanisms, and the loading and unloading of pods.

22. Looks like RI just gets its info from other news sources

23. I like how everyone in the comments is so opinionated against hyperloop yet i bet no one has done any credible research or knows how the technology works in detail …. ah the stupidity

24. The amount of self-appointed experts in the comment section is just staggering. ~300 engineers are working on Hyperloop using proper science, yet they are criticized by luddites who don't even care to elaborate their objections. No actual calculations, no references to any papers etc. Who needs them anyway, yeah? I'm watching RI, so I'm educated much better than ~300 finest engineers, here's my comment: "This won't work because this and that. What a bunch of idiots!"

25. I though she was going to crush the packet-system question, and I was about 70% wrong. (She did well considering the purported ignorance of the terminology)
    If you don’t plan for 50 years out, and only 20, you’re approach is fundamentally flawed, and as a result, your revolutionary system will need to be revolutionized when the time comes to accommodate smaller and smaller outward nodes; which will be integral to expansion and sustainability of the overall system as it expands.
    She was doing great up until she demonstrated they’re thinking of everything which will cause them regulatory or financial problems, but not long term expansion of the paradigm this would create.

26. !9:00 min, and has now lied twice. Notice the tells.

27. I still think that Hyperloop will not fly
    future transport beyond skyway string transport

28. alot of "we're designing" and not alot of actual solutions. hmm

29. Thousands of kilometres of vacuum tubes placed just above the ground, where one bullet hole through it would cause a catastrophic disaster, likely killing anyone within the tube and shutting down the entire system…in a country with more than 300 million guns and no shortage of crazy idiots.

    Yeah, totally safe.

    She is worried about a truck running into it. She Never addressed the far easier and likely threat of bullets.

30. How long would passengers have to wait to be rescued when their pod breaks down?

31. Wait, is it April 1st again?

32. Question: How many idiots with (a) gun(s) to shoot at one part of the loop from outside to cause a system-wide disruption?
    If the answer is 1 then this is no way practical.

33. I watched the entire presentation and the entire Q&A. It seems a lot more plausible now then when I started watching. I'm sure it's technically possible, but I still wonder if the eventual efficiency is worth the monumental infrastructure effort and cost. I'm sure a mile of traditional highway is very expensive in terms of materials and construction. My layman's hunch is that a similar length of hyperloop would be many, many times more expensive. Would the payback time be measured in centuries?

34. scam

35. It seems the commentary section is full of square-heads armchair engineers who confuse their destructive irrational incredulity with sane skepticism.

36. Face recognition on a daily transport system? No thanks.
    These security esoterics should be sent to George Orwell's 1984.
    All statistics show that the world (generally) is in fact getting safer (except perhaps in the US). Germany for example shown crime statistics that show we live in a country as safe as in 1992. What is different is the media coverage of crime and terror.

37. 2:00 she is LITERALLY LYING

    there is no proof of concept whatsoever

38. It's OK to be skeptical, but how the hell can so many people be so sure that they are a lot smarter than a former NASA rocket scientist? And even if you had good reasons to be sure that it will not work, how is hyperloop something to get mad at? What's the problem with you guys?

39. In the case of accident whom will the hyperloop blame? Or is it going to be the first perfect transport system in the universe !!

40. Why is it so difficult for some people to understand this, from an engineering point, fairly simple concept? Much bigger engineering challenges have been solved in the past.

41. At 1/4g acceleration it takes 2 minutes to get to 1000km/h. Not that long time.

42. These are Dr Sengupta's credentials. Still youtube amateurs think they know better without actually having worked with these type of systems!

    Dr Anita Sengupta is a rocket scientist and aerospace engineer who for over 20 years has been developing technologies that have enabled the exploration of Mars, Asteroids, and Deep Space. She started her career working on the Delta IV launch vehicle at Boeing Space Systems. Her doctoral research at NASA focused on the development of the ion engine technology that powered the Dawn spacecraft to reach Vesta and Ceres in the main asteroid belt. She was then responsible for the supersonic parachute system that was integral to the landing of NASA's Curiosity Rover on Mars in 2012.

43. Why everyone tripping about??

44. Were is the full video or is this just it?

45. 100% that autonomy will be a let down at some point. Its going to be the weak link.

46. This seems like another sales pitch. That concept while a weird idea is a very dangerous idea that is full of holes. Any increase of pressure would kill everyone in those pods if moving at speed. The expansion joints of long tubes adds up makes it a accident waiting to happen. I'd never get into one of those pods. Plus if there was a accident far way from anyone getting to them is a real trouble. This is just a pipe cream that is going to kill a lot of people.

47. I Didn't understand the talk very well. but i loved the enthusiasm ad fluency she talks with. Love from INDIA .Dr.

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