Pseudoscience-Buster Destroys Musk’s Boring Company Tunnel Idea
The name “Thunderf00t” is the alias of Phil Mason, (pictured) a British chemist and video blogger who has become well-known for posting YouTube videos that criticize, among other things, pseudoscience.
His day job is as a scientist in the field of chemistry and biochemistry at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. His tongue in cheek, yet starkly accurate criticisms, have earned him nearly 850,000 subscribers on YouTube and an aggregate total of more than 220 million views.
With a penchant for outing nonsense, it was only a matter of time before he criticized Elon Musk’s Boring Company tunnel reveal in a scathing and satirical video posted to YouTube just days ago.
In the video, Mason begins by laying out the long and storied history of humans in history not only creating tunnels like Musk has pitched – but also creating self landing reusable rockets, another claim to Musk’s fame. In the video, Mason lays out the case that underground tunnels, similar to the one that Musk has pitched as the future, have actually been around for nearly 100 years.
From there, he goes on to point out that reusable self-landing rockets have also been around for decades. Musk’s contributions to rocketry, Mason says, have been overstated by about “a factor of 100 times”.
Amidst comparisons to the Simpsons “monorail guy”, Mason takes a deeper dive at the proclaimed cost savings of Musk‘s tunnel – said to be built for just $10 million a mile – versus “normal” tunnels, which Musk has said repeatedly can cost up to $1 billion per mile.
Of course, some tunnels do cost up to $1 billion per mile, Mason points out – when they include fully functional metro lines and state-of-the-art metro stations. These tunnels are larger than Boring Company tunnels and contain significantly more infrastructure. Mason then goes on to note that the type of tunnel Musk is digging, 12 feet around with no infrastructure in it, can easily be made for about $15 million to $20 million per mile. This is a far cry from the nearly 99% cost savings that Musk seems to be trying to pitch to the public.
From there, Mason goes on to compare the cost of these tunnels to the cost of laying six lanes of freeway per mile, which comes in well under $10 million, displaying the cost efficiencies that likely make freeways the more obvious choice. He also goes on to explore the inefficiencies of the elevators that are proposed to be used moving cars underground, and then back above ground, for Musk’s tunnels.
“Blow me!” Mason exclaims at one point in the video, before continuing “Elon Musk’s revolutionary tunnel is comparable to the average cost of digging a tunnel. So much for making tunnelling 100 times more efficient.”
“There is no revolution here,” he concludes. “Let’s be honest here: he’s driving a car through a sewer pipe.”
The video above is a must watch for any skeptic or anybody that badly needs a dose of reality. In that respect, we recommend Musk himself give it a watch.
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Joseph A Olson
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Wiki/Isambard_Kingdom_Brunel (b 1806, D 1859)
Brunel began the 1300 foot long, Thames Tunnel in 1825 and completed in 1843, which is 75 feet below the river, and in use today. He began the 2.9 km London/Bristol Box Tunnel in 1838 and completed in 1841.
Musk is a robber baron selected, taxpayer funded charlatan with no place among the great Inventors of history.
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Squidly
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I loved that video .. very funny. Shows just what a con artist Elon Musk really is.
But as for “Thunderf00t” .. give me a break, the guy is a freaking moron. Case in point, go watch this video –> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRkUMlj3Os8
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4TimesAYear
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Exactly. I started watching that and got nauseous. Someone who sees Musk as a fraud should certainly be able to see the climate change craze as another fraud.
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Physicist
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John O’S continually rejects the correct physics in favour of nonsense.
Readers can confirm that PSI authors like Postma are wrong in assuming radiation is the primary determinant of global mean surface temperatures. It is not and data from planets including Venus, Uranus and Neptune all confirm that it is gravity which leads to the base of the troposphere being warmer, not solar radiaton, or backradiation, let alone both, such as climatologists assume because they don’t understand that the Stefan Boltzmann Law does not work for a combination of atmospheric and solar radiation.
It’s time that you and I John had a proper scientific discussion, and you are welcome to invite any other physics author to participate. In 2013 I presented you with the correct physics that does indeed explain the surface temperatures and the necessary downward heat transfers required to explain those temperatures and balance on the sunlit side the energy lost on the dark side.
Your pet authors Postma and Latour merely read the Conclusion in my paper and assumed, or at least asserted to you, that I must be wrong. After all, the paper refuted their own writings about radiation. Their writings were already refuted by Prof Claes Johnson anyway, and yet you still publish articles by people like Stephen Wells and Herb Rose that are way out in their physics and sometimes implicitly agree that the false physics of climatology is right, at least in its claims that radiation causes heat transfer from the cold atmosphere to the warmer surface. Of course, Prof Johnson proved that wrong years ago.
Many times I have suggested you get someone to write an article attempting to refute my 2013 “Planetary Core and Surface Temperatures” paper*, giving me right of reply. But instead, you John O’S have kept on deleting my comments all these last five years or more.
DJC
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4TimesAYear
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Nice critique of Musk, now if he would just do the same for climate change. Apparently he thinks CO2 and climate change are a serious problem. Some of those “hottest years on record” he holds in such high esteem were within the +/- margin of error, but he fails to note that. Too bad. We could use him on our side.
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James McGinn
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Thunderf00t is a global warming whackjob:
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