It would be a darned shame if, after having established a permanent human population on Mars, having built a space elevator that will transport new solar panels up into space at a rate of hundreds per week until we have all the power we need, which will take up all the parts for a gravity-free shipyard supplying the new mining colonies springing up on the moons of Saturn and Jupiter and throughout the asteroid belt, after having done all that, if we on Earth are still driving gas burning cars around, mucking up the air, crashing into each other, stressing out over parking spaces, and paying through the nose for the privilege.
It Would Tie the Whole World Together
Fortunately for all of us, the age of the automobile is almost at an end, and a new golden age of trains is upon us. The Chinese are planning (this is not official yet) to build a train line from Beijing to Seattle! Of course, construction on the North American side would probably be the responsibility of the Canadian and American governments (Seattle was not specified by the Chinese, but it strikes me as the logical terminus), but the Chinese think they can pull off the hard part, which is that 200 kilometer tunnel under the Bering Strait. That’s about 4 times as long as the Chunnel, which is already a major miracle of modernity.
The comments that followed this article, and the one over at Yahoo, were mostly from Americans. They were filled with cheap Chinese jokes, actual paranoia about a Chinese invasion, and lots and lots of people saying it couldn’t be done.
Fuck all y’all. This is wicked cool. The trains will be slick looking bullet trains and the tunnel will also connect to the Trans-Siberian railway making it possible to travel by train from New York (for instance) to Paris, even though it’s the long way round and the hard part would be getting across the U.S.
Sure, it will take more time than air travel but that’s O.K. Getting there is half the fun, you can meet people on a train, there is a restaurant car on the train. And, just as trains pollute less than automobiles, they also pollute less than airplanes. So, there’s that.
As for those questioning whether it can be done or not, I would like to point out that China has been doing a lot of ‘impossible’ stuff lately. Longest bridges, fastest trains, biggest dams, airports on artificial islands, and a truly impressive Olympics in 2008.
If China does, by this act, establish itself as the world’s economic center, so be it. If other countries are worried about that, they’d better start laying track.
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