The future we're building -- and boring
Elon Musk discusses his new project digging tunnels under LA, the latest from Tesla and SpaceX and his motivation for building a future on Mars in conversation with TED's Head Curator, Chris Anderson.
30,423,303 views | Elon Musk • TED2017 ~~ July 2022
Elon Musk
Serial entrepreneur
Elon Musk co-founded and leads Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink and The Boring Company
Chris Anderson: Elon, hey, welcome back to TED. It's great to have you here.
00:04
Elon Musk: Thanks for having me.
00:06
CA: So, in the next half hour or so, we're going to spend some time exploring your vision for what an exciting future might look like, which I guess makes the first question a little ironic: Why are you boring?
00:21
EM: Yeah. I ask myself that frequently. We're trying to dig a hole under LA, and this is to create the beginning of what will hopefully be a 3D network of tunnels to alleviate congestion. So right now, one of the most soul-destroying things is traffic. It affects people in every part of the world. It takes away so much of your life. It's horrible. It's particularly horrible in LA.
00:57
(Laughter)
01:00
CA: I think you've brought with you the first visualization that's been shown of this. Can I show this?
01:06
EM: Yeah, absolutely. So this is the first time -- Just to show what we're talking about. So a couple of key things that are important in having a 3D tunnel network. First of all, you have to be able to integrate the entrance and exit of the tunnel seamlessly into the fabric of the city. So by having an elevator, sort of a car skate, that's on an elevator, you can integrate the entrance and exits to the tunnel network just by using two parking spaces. And then the car gets on a skate. There's no speed limit here, so we're designing this to be able to operate at 200 kilometers an hour.
01:47
CA: How much?
01:48
EM: 200 kilometers an hour, or about 130 miles per hour. So you should be able to get from, say, Westwood to LAX in six minutes -- five, six minutes.
02:01
(Applause)
02:05
CA: So possibly, initially done, it's like on a sort of toll road-type basis.
02:09
EM: Yeah.
02:10
CA: Which, I guess, alleviates some traffic from the surface streets as well.
02:14
EM: So, I don't know if people noticed it in the video, but there's no real limit to how many levels of tunnel you can have. You can go much further deep than you can go up. The deepest mines are much deeper than the tallest buildings are tall, so you can alleviate any arbitrary level of urban congestion with a 3D tunnel network. This is a very important point. So a key rebuttal to the tunnels is that if you add one layer of tunnels, that will simply alleviate congestion, it will get used up, and then you'll be back where you started, back with congestion. But you can go to any arbitrary number of tunnels, any number of levels.
02:53
CA: But people -- seen traditionally, it's incredibly expensive to dig, and that would block this idea.
02:59
EM: Yeah. Well, they're right. To give you an example, the LA subway extension, which is -- I think it's a two-and-a-half mile extension that was just completed for two billion dollars. So it's roughly a billion dollars a mile to do the subway extension in LA. And this is not the highest utility subway in the world. So yeah, it's quite difficult to dig tunnels normally. I think we need to have at least a tenfold improvement in the cost per mile of tunneling.
03:32
CA: And how could you achieve that?
03:36
EM: Actually, if you just do two things, you can get to approximately an order of magnitude improvement, and I think you can go beyond that. So the first thing to do is to cut the tunnel diameter by a factor of two or more. So a single road lane tunn