 The fastest anyone has ever traveled in a vacuum-tube train is only 172 kilometers per hour, while standard high-speed rail trains exceed 250 kilometers per hour. I mean, call me crazy, but it sure sounds like these vacuum trains suck. In order to satisfy a creative writing assignment, a freshman physics student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute named Robert H. Goddard composed a short story titled The High-Speed Bet about a futuristic train, a rapid transit tube. In the story, a brilliant engineer, inventor, and entrepreneur named Mr. Sibley explains the operation of the train to a wrapped audience before the first trip. A 10-foot diameter tube is evacuated of air, then a cylindrical train car is levitated and catapulted forward on a electromagnets, achieving a peak velocity three times faster than the speed of sound and completing the trip from Boston to New York in under 10 minutes. Goddard passed his creative writing class and received his degree in physics four years later, in 1908. The vac train has become a frequent fixture of science fiction stories since then, so much so that it's now used as a sort of visual shorthand for futuristic transit. The Jetsons, Jurassic World, Doc Smith's, Skylark series, Futurama, Portal, Meet the Robinsons, all sorts of media has portrayed technologically advanced societies traveling by getting in pods and launching themselves down shiny, depressurized tubes. It's gotten to the point that we can totally skip any exposition for that tack in the story. When we see tubes, we know what's up. The concept of a vac train is so easy to understand and illustrate that it's prompted numerous individuals and organizations to try to make it a reality over the past century and change. Robert M. Salter proposed the Planetrain Initiative, a laser-aligned subterranean vac train tube that would allow travel from New York City to Los Angeles in an hour. Swiss Metro floated the idea of something similar in the late 70s, while Japanese engineer Yoshihiro Kiotani drew up a proposal for a vac train tube anchored 300 meters below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. Gerard O'Neill of O'Neill Cylinder fame founded a company called VSE International in 1991 to develop the technology, followed by billionaire James R. Powell, E.T.3, Franco Cortana, the North University of China, and until recently Hyperloop One. A company that has, after a decade of work and $500 million of investment announced that they're closing up shop and selling off assets. To date, not one of these efforts has resulted in a successful transit system. With so many historic failures on the scoreboard, it's worth reflecting on the fact that while there is a precedent for sci-fi inspiring real tech, and while stories about vac trains sure seem plausible, they may turn out to be totally impractical to build in reality. I mean, yes, the physics makes sense, but there's a long list of details and implementation that might be dealbreakers. The economic or ecological costs of mass producing kilometers of giant airtight cylinders, the maintenance costs of keeping both train and tube in good working order, the challenges posed by passenger emergencies or loading times or weather damage, any of these factors could make the technology a pipe dream. But it sure doesn't feel that way, with all these companies and resources being thrown at making it happen. There's some interesting resonance between the real world and fiction here, a phenomenon detailed by media and technology theorist Sun Ha Ha. Because back trains are a convenient trope for sci-fi stories, appearing over and over whenever an author needs a futuristic vibe, they've started to seem feasible, desirable, inevitable maybe, as if on a long enough timeline, the universe will eventually produce a civilization advance enough to do this tube train thing. Psychologists have found that repeating a statement over and over can increase its perceived validity. Maybe something similar is happening here. Because of that tantalizing just out of reach feeling prompted by all these stories, people with the means to launch massive R&D projects try again and again and again to overcome the barriers necessary to make vac trains real, even if those barriers are actually pretty difficult, maybe in ways that make the entire project a losing proposition. Even if on balance, most people think a futuristic tube train would be less valuable to the world than another basic run-of-the-mill bullet train. In episode 237, we investigated the peculiar way an imaginary distinction can gain a sort of physical reality over time, if people treat it as if it were real, something like a self-fulfilling prophecy, what philosophers call reification. There's no law of physics or geology that you could use to explain a phenomenon like borders. None of the particles in the Earth's crusts behave differently if this or that person or country claims ownership over them. But the ways humans behave around the idea of borders can shape the land itself. A mining pit abruptly stops at an arbitrary latitude. The hillside in the right zip code gets reinforced, while the one right next door gradually erodes. Similarly, the recurring depiction of vac train-like technology in both fiction and the real world can help pave the way for still more vac train stuff, regardless of whether it's possible or a good idea. For example, starting around 2013, the much-maligned California high-speed rail project has been repeatedly delayed by an alternate proposal. Maybe instead of a run-of-the-mill 350 km per hour bullet train, we could develop and build a vac train instead. Maybe it would be faster, maybe it would be quicker to build, maybe it would be cheaper, maybe it would take up less space, if it ever worked. At all. Despite general skepticism among the project's handlers, just humoring the Hyperloop One proposal and its supporters has chewed up resources, soured public opinion, installed construction. Of course, the glacial pace of the California HSR project will eventually be used as evidence that conventional high-speed train lines simply can't be built in a reasonable timeframe. If only there was something that would maybe be faster and cheaper to build, maybe even something that took up less space. Guys, I just had a brilliant idea. So, we have this mechanism where a conveniently legible science fiction technology appears over and over in stories, leading to an unwarranted sense of plausibility. That feeling prompts technologists to throw resources into overcoming the final hurdle to making it a reality. And even though their efforts may be foiled by inconvenient things like maintenance, they still end up shaping the world in ways that might not make the technology more feasible, but can certainly make alternatives less so. That dynamic can get really nasty when you add the imperative to market these ideas. Philosopher and frequent thunk consultant Stefan Kellenbach has highlighted the way tech companies will casually pitch two mutually inconsistent stories about their new products to take full advantage of the science fiction plausibility pipeline. On the one hand, we're told the glorious techno utopia is right around the corner. If we can just have a little patience while the bugs are ironed out, if we stick with the program for just a bit longer, the results will be miraculous, transformative, revolutionary, more than worth all the growing pains. On the other hand, we're told that we're already living in the future. The technology is here today. Pandora's box is open, and it would be inconceivable to reverse or change course at this stage. The trick is to blur the distinction between an exciting sci-fi vision of some future version of the technology and the technology as it exists right now, with all its flaws, trade-offs, and potential for failure. The cherry-pick bits from each narrative to make a product feel both worth tolerating in the short term and unavoidable in the long term, urging their audience to surrender to its inevitability, regardless of their enthusiasm for the idea. You can see that contradiction playing out in those bizarre disconnects between hyperbolic marketing copy and the reality of the products being sold. NFTs are, were, decidedly done, but if you listen to the way their fanatical devotees talk about them, it's pretty clear we're not supposed to judge them by what they are, ugly digital art with a specious claim to artificial scarcity. We're supposed to judge them as if they were the harbingers of a totally new model of property ownership that's sure to arrive any day now. Bitcoin is slow, annoying to use, and has created all sorts of problems for its users, and the rest of us, while ultimately failing to address the issues it was created to solve. But it's still breathlessly trumpeted as the inevitable future of currency, whether or not anyone wants it to be. The advocates for these products are telling a fantastic story about what the world will look like when their tech really takes off, and repeating that story over and over to shape the world in a way that's conducive to its continued development. Sound familiar? What's telling about these sorts of sci-fi stories slash marketing copy is how constrained they are in their visions of the future. At its best, science fiction interrogates what really makes us human by proposing a world utterly transformed by technology. Where would we find meaning if our material needs were guaranteed and we could simulate anything our hearts desired? What would humanity look like if sex and gender were only temporary conditions? These stories force us to reconsider seemingly fundamental pillars of our lives, and whether we'd recognize what remained if technology came along and kicked them out from underneath us. But when tech companies try to harness those exciting vibes of profound transformation of the human condition to drum up sales, they often try to sanitize them of anything truly profound or transformative, probably because legitimately transforming society would be bad for business. When Facebook met a...Macebook named its VR chat engine after the immersive simulation described in Snow Crash, it's pretty clear we weren't supposed to link that name with the book's dystopian setting, a gritty, violent hellscape run entirely by corporations, mercenaries, and crime syndicates. In the story, the metaverse is really cast as a sort of escapist fantasy for increasingly desperate people, the last vestige of comfort, structure, and security in a crumbling, embattled society. Despite its flashy advertising, Facebook's story about the future is much more pedestrian. Imagine a world where you wear a VR headset for meetings instead of staring into a webcam, and your boss also rents a virtual office space. Presumably, we're supposed to hear the name metaverse and remember the exciting cyberpunk feeling of Snow Crash while conveniently forgetting the setting and the dire warnings and all that other stuff, then project that excitement onto a sweaty headset displaying family cartoon avatars of your coworkers. It's a pretty schizophrenic pile of messaging, but it fits right in alongside the paradoxical, the future is now dance that tech companies sometimes use to sell their products. Our VR technology will be just like the metaverse, but not any of the bad bits. Or hackers, please god no hackers. All things considered, storytelling can be a powerful tool to motivate and direct human energies towards certain events. If we can picture how we want the world to be, we can organize and strategize around how to make that vision come to pass. But there are material facts about how our world works that can't be overcome by evocative imagery, no matter how many times we're treated to stories about how cool it would be if some technology did exist. For every cell phone inspired by Star Trek communicators, or submarines copied straight out of 20,000 leagues under the sea, there are dozens of perpetual motion machines, curals, and philosopher stones littering the historical record. Zombie ideas that lurch to life again and again to chew through more of humanity's collective time, effort, and other resources. Despite the best efforts of authors and futurists to call shots, or in the case of tech companies, coax miraculous ideas into being, the interface between reality and science fiction is volatile, unpredictable. Even when some new technology does manage to capture the magic of a good sci-fi story, it often arrives with complications that not even the most astute authors might have guessed. Nobody on Star Trek ever had to deal with spam collars, addictive mobile games, or intrusive surveillance on the communicators. Goddard himself is a great example of the duality of what science fiction storytelling can achieve. Deeply inspired by the descriptions of space travel in H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, he went on to play an instrumental role in developing the liquid-fueled multi-stage rockets necessary to achieve orbit. But it's worth noting that, unlike the Vaktrain, he actually built a few rockets that worked. Maybe there's a lesson in that. Shoot for the moon. But if the prototypes don't look like they're working as well as you might like, maybe aim for something a little closer instead. Does science fiction cast an oversized shadow on the direction of technological development? Are we encouraged to connect particular visions of a wondrous techno future to the buggy techno present to prevent us from exploring any techno alternatives? What sci-fi stories posit truly revolutionary ideas about the future, instead of a slightly more convenient status quo? Please, leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah, blah, subscribe, blah, share, and don't stop fucking.