Elon Musk Hyperloop Just Latest Far-Out Tech Idea

Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk's Hyperloop idea may never advance beyond the sketches Musk famously shared with the world in August. But the theoretical high-speed transportation system has taken its place amid a steady stream of pie-in-the-sky ideas floated by tech innovators.
Silicon Valley has a long history of generating such far-out ideas, some of which have gone nowhere and others of which are still in play.

From Hyperloop's personal high-speed transport systems via pressurized capsules to offshore visa-free software incubators to asteroid mining to methods for slowing global warming, tech minds have attempted to tackle some of mankind's biggest problems with a combination of brilliance, wealth and a complete lack of fear.

Take SkyTran, a personal transport system that would shuttle passengers in ultra-fuel-efficient two-person pods suspended from elevated magnetic-levitation tracks at speeds up to 150 miles per hour. Inventor Douglas Malewicki's idea has been germinating for more than 20 years, the past several at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif.

It's been slowed by one obstacle after another. For one: The first track designs called for a power converter "the size of a Humvee," said SkyTran CEO Jerry Sanders via email.
But SkyTran might be nearing reality. Prototype systems are only a couple of years from running in Tel Aviv, Israel, and Kottayam, India, Sanders says.

Whether SkyTran progresses from prototype to revolutionary transportation method, the idea embodies the robust innovation that characterizes the outside-the-box approaches of Silicon Valley's wildest ideas.

"People in the Valley don't just create newer and better versions of old things," said Sanders, who joined SkyTran in 2010. "People in the Valley create things that never before existed, and never before were thought possible."

That's likely because of a now-famous Silicon Valley trait.

"The real difference in Silicon Valley is that it's OK to fail," said John McLaughlin, president of the Silicon Valley Historical Association. This fearless can-do attitude has been exported to other tech-centric regions, such as Seattle.

And fail some of these outside-of-the-box ideas do.

One example is Teledesic, a venture that, at the dawn of the public Internet in 1995, proposed to establish a constellation of hundreds of low-orbit satellites that would provide global connectivity. The idea, which was backed by Microsoft (MSFT) and its co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen, as well as Seattle cellular phone pioneer Craig McCaw, was scaled back dramatically a couple of years later, and was eventually abandoned in 2002 amid tepid demand.