Elon Musk’s Hyperloop: Explained

By Joshua Smith Published October 19, 2015

For most of modern history, trains, planes, automobiles, and boats have been humanity’s four main modes of transportation. However, while these vehicles help get us from point A to point B, they’re also costly, harmful to the environment, and generally don’t move quite as fast we’d like. Just recently California moved forward on a $67 billion high-speed rail system in hopes of creating an innovative new way to move large groups of people in significantly less time. Though the project has moved forward, engineer, inventor and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has shared his disapproval alongside his own concept, the Hyperloop, which he claims will be faster and more efficient.

In this episode of Explained, Joshua Smith breaks down what exactly the Hyperloop is, what it means for the future of transportation, and more. Could Hyperloop end up changing the way we get around forever? Check out the video to find out!

Joshua Smith

Former Video Contributor

Just another not so ordinary kid living this thing we like to call life.

Topics

Emerging Tech

Amazon is full of copycats and shady brands. This Chrome extension lets you avoid them.

Shopping on Amazon used to be simple. You searched for a product, compared a few familiar brands, and checked out. These days, it often feels like you're scrolling through an endless parade of names that look like someone leaned on a keyboard before hitting publish. That's exactly the problem Knockoff is trying to solve.

Created by developer Josh Pigford, the Chrome extension doesn't promise to expose counterfeit products or magically tell you what's good. Instead, it tackles something arguably more annoying: the flood of unfamiliar, mass-produced brands that dominate Amazon search results.

Emerging Tech

AI agent reportedly carried out an entire ransomware attack on its own

AI didn't just write malware. It apparently clocked in for work.

Cybersecurity researchers say they have documented what could be the first ransomware attack carried out almost entirely by an autonomous AI agent, marking a significant shift in how cyberattacks could be conducted in the future. According to cloud security firm Sysdig, they have uncovered a ransomware operation dubbed JadePuffer that appears to have relied on a large language model (LLM) agent to perform nearly every stage of the attack without continuous human intervention.

If confirmed, the incident suggests AI is moving beyond writing malicious code and into actively planning, adapting, and executing cyberattacks in real time.

Emerging Tech

The Washington Post predicted how tech will advance 50 years ago and the success rate is humbling

The Washington Post predicted 2026 tech in 1976. It got a lot right.

Fifty years ago, when floppy disks were cutting-edge and the personal computer revolution had barely begun, The Washington Post attempted a remarkably ambitious exercise: predict what life in 2026 would look like. Some of those predictions now read like science fiction. Others feel surprisingly ordinary because they have become part of everyday life.

In a retrospective published for America's 250th anniversary, the newspaper revisited science editor Thomas O'Toole's 1976 article Inventing the Future, comparing its forecasts with today's technological reality. The results reveal that while predicting exact timelines is nearly impossible, identifying long-term scientific trends can be remarkably accurate.