It is a matter if physics. Humans have to much mass. You might successfully freeze the outside but the organs will be destroyed by ice crystals. There also is the issue of if we should but that is a discussion to another day.
The most obvious way around that would be some kind of cryoprotectant, but those have all proven very toxic so far. The next frontier would be trihalose, which we've figured out how to produce in quantity recently, so watch out for news on that. To get something hot evenly and quickly, RF heating works great, but it's not obvious there's any equivalent for cooling, unless you're dealing with a few already-cryogenic atoms. One thing I've wondered about is using high pressures that depress the freezing point of water, but those kinds of pressures are sometimes biochemically toxic on their own. No research on short exposure in animals seems to exists, unfortunately.
It's so close to working, I feel like we'll solve it eventually, but I don't know when or how.
If I remember correctly the issue has to do with the water in your bodies you can only cool water so fast. If I am recalling correctly you couldn't even do it with absolute zero temperatures as the water takes to much time to lose energy.
Well, no. Reductionism still holds. If you could magically make the water everywhere inside super cold, it would behave locally just like water in a smaller creature. Unfortunately, it seems impossible to do that. Even pumping coolant through the circulatory system, which is a thing I know at least happens in some related procedures.
That looks horrible. Cramped, the giant windows means it's hot and the sun is always in your eyes.... Any reason they need to only use one rail? We already have road & rail buses, trucks, etc...just use those.
This is a prototype so it has the mechanism so it doesn't fall over if the prototype fails. The actual production version won't have that. It's also running at low speed for the same reason.
I think "Draisy" is faster on the track and a much more realistic project. But "Monocab" is a University project, so it's ok for me that a few millions are invested there.
Yes, this looks much better. My other thought would be road-rail buses, but getting on/off the tracks might be too much work to be worth the extra flexibility.
I've seen one of those in Japan. Even they admit that the only reason they continue to run it is for the novelty factor, it's apparently quite expensive to keep going and not really that efficient.
It takes a good while to convert between the two modes since you have to be really careful you don't misalign the thing and result in a derail. So it's done, very, very, slowly.
Read the article, that's literally the first thing they explain
Besides which, it's very obviously a train if you just look at it. It's a small monorail train specifically designed for this purpose using existing infrastructure.
These pods are only used on rails with very low ridership. They would switch to a train if ridership increased.
Look at it this way: you can have a train that has a capacity of 100 people, but it only runs once a day due to the low demand, and only 2 people want to ride it at that time of day..Or you can have 10 pods, which do not require as much railway maintenance, and they can carry the 10 people who actually want to use this railway, completely on demand.
Yeah, a train is better if you want to move ten thousand people a day at peak hour. But this is a cheaper way to move ten people at different times across a day. And it's a cheaper way of inducing the demand that would justify the more efficient kind of expansion.
Isn't it better to have a train that runs when you want rather than having to wait potentially hours for the scheduled commuter train. Isn't this better?
FUCKING DOING OUR JOB AS TRANSPORT MODELLERS AND DOING A FUCKING COST BENEFIT ANALYSIS THAT SHOWS YOU'RE NEVER GOING TO GET FUCKING MODE SHIFT FROM RURAL USERS UNLESS YOU RUN A FUCKING METRO STYLE 10 MINUTELY SERVICE WHICH IS FUCKING UNFEASIBLE WITH THE FUCKING RESOURCES WE HAVE AVAILABLE.
IN THE FUCKING UK WE HAVE A LARGE NUMBER OF FUCKING ABANDONED RAILWAYS FROM THE PERIOD OF FUCKING COAL MINING THAT WOULDN'T HAVE ANYWHERE NEAR THE FUCKING DEMAND NECESSARY TO JUSTIFY SETTING UP AN EXPENSIVE AS FUCK SIGNALLING SYSTEM TO BRING THEM UP TO MODERN FUCKING SAFETY STANDARDS, ALONGSIDE REPLACING THE FUCKING RAILS, SLEEPERS AND BEDS.
IF INSTEAD YOU CAN HAVE A FUCKING PUBLICALLY OWNED FLEET OF FUCKING ELECTRIC 'MINI TRAINS' THAT PEOPLE COULD USE FOR INFREQUENT BUT NECESSARY TRIPS, THAT COULD REMOVE A FUCKING SIGNIFICANT BARRIER TO MODE SHIFT, WHICH WOULD BE PRETTY FUCKING RAD
Trains suck if you don't have frequency, and because of the population density with a good frequency more than half of the trains will be completely empty and the rest almost empty.
If you out half the funding from car infrastructure instead into train and bus infrastructure this would not be a problem. Induced demand works both ways.
Look up "interurban railways". Most towns east of the Mississippi used to have frequent rail service with whistle stops at every farm and crossroads. In addition to passengers these railroads also transported the harvest, Sears purchases, kit houses, even hearses!
This almost certainly wouldn't work in the United States but it does in Europe because Europe has loads of these tiny abandoned rail lines (often single track) that were built in the 1800s and then abandoned. They don't go anywhere particularly densely populated, you know because of the industrial Revolution causing everyone to move to the cities, so there isn't the demand for a full rail service. Meaning they're not going to spend the money upgrading the infrastructure to modern standards.
This means they can be used at relatively cheap cost. As long as the tracks are still physically present all they need to do is cut some weeds down and put these things on the line and they're good to go. It's a cheap project that a local municipal authority can handle without having to involve wider government.
Even with unlimited funding, you want to scale the size of the train to the population that could potentially ride on it.
A P42 locomotive pulling 7 Amtrak superliner cars is 700 tons of steel getting 0.4 miles per gallon of diesel. That's a crapton of mining and drilling and CO2, and it would be incredibly wasteful if it ended up carrying, like, two people at a time.
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