Welcome to Day 1478 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to WisdomFaster Transportation – Ask GrampsWisdom - the final frontier to true knowledge. Welcome to Wisdom-Trek! Where our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before. Hello, my friend, I am Guthrie Chamberlain, your captain on our journey to increase Wisdom and Create a Living Legacy. Thank you for joining us today as we explore wisdom on our 2nd millennium of podcasts. Today is Day 1478 of our Trek, and our focus on Fridays is the future technological and societal advances, so we call it Futuristic Fridays. My personality is one that has always been very future-oriented. Since my childhood, I have yearned for the exploration and discovery of new technologies and advancements for the future. I grew up with the original Star Trek series, and even today, as I am now on my 65th revolution around the sun, I still dream of traveling in space. Each week we will explore rapidly converging technologies and advancements, which will radically change our lives. At times, the topics may sound like something out of a science fiction novel, but each area that we explore is already well on its way of becoming a reality over the next couple of decades.
To keep with our theme of “Ask Gramps,” I will put our weekly topics in the form of a question to get us on track. This week’s question is, Hey Gramps, In addition to autonomous and flying vehicles, what are some other modes of transportation that will be part of our future?
 Faster TransporationLast week we learned how AI, Robots, and Drones could assist during natural or human-made disasters. This week our focus will be on super-fast transportation.   I am using some of the information mentioned in Peter Diamandis’s blogs and book “The Future is Faster Than You Think.”
What’s faster than autonomous vehicles and flying cars?
Try Hyperloop, rocket travel, and robotic avatars.
Hyperloop is currently working towards 670 mph (1080 kph)passenger pods, capable of zipping us from Los Angeles to downtown Las Vegas in under 30 minutes.
Low Orbit Rocket Travel (think SpaceX’s Starship) promises to deliver you almost anywhere on the planet in under an hour. Think New York to Shanghai in 39 minutes.
But wait, it gets even better…
As 5G connectivity, hyper-realistic VR, and next-gen robotics continue their exponential progress, the emergence of “Robotic Avatars” will all but nullify the concept of distance, replacing human travel with immediate remote telepresence.
Let’s dive in.
Hyperloop One: Los Angeles to San Francisco in 35 Minutes
Did you know that Hyperloop was the brainchild of Elon Musk? It is just one in a series of transportation innovations from a man determined to leave his mark on the industry.
In 2013, in an attempt to shorten the long commute between Los Angeles and San Francisco, the California state legislature proposed a $68 billion budget allocation for what appeared to be the slowest and most expensive bullet train in history.
Musk was outraged. The cost was too high, the train too sluggish. Teaming up with a group of engineers from Tesla and SpaceX, he published a 58-page concept paper for “The Hyperloop,” a high-speed transportation network that used magnetic levitation to propel passenger pods down vacuum tubes at speeds of up to 670 mph.
If successful, it would zip you across California in 35 minutes—just enough time to watch your favorite sitcom. In January 2013, venture capitalist Shervin Pishevar, with Musk’s blessing, started Hyperloop One with Peter Diamandis, Jim Messina (former White House Deputy Chief of Staff for President Obama), and tech entrepreneurs Joe Lonsdale and David Sacks, as founding board members.
A couple of years after that, the Virgin Group invested in this idea,...