NOW THIS IS MORE LIKE THE 21ST CENTURY I WAS HOPING FOR: I Went to the Opening of Elon Musk’s First Boring Company Tunnel and Here Is What I Found. “Turns out, the ride in Musk’s new tunnel is actually pretty damn cool. A group of us climb into a Tesla X, buckle up, and our driver rolls us into the surprisingly narrow tunnel. We won’t go more than 40 mph, but as the overhead line of lights changes from red to green, and we pick up speed…it becomes obvious that going 150 mph will be, um, awesome. Even at this clip, even with the bumps, the tight tunnel is mesmerizing, almost calming. It feels natural to be zipping in this discrete pod.”

Plus: “Here’s the thing about Musk: The flamethrowers, tweets, the suggestions that our reality might be a simulation—they all garner a ton of attention. But if you want to learn anything from the guy, learn to appreciate his eye for the absurd. Current tunneling technology runs about $2 billion a mile, and even at such cost, you can expect to dig that measly mile in a year. The state of this art is horrendous. So The Boring Company is doing the opposite of rocket science. Digging faster. Digging cheaper. Their newest modified machines tackle the costs of digging with almost ridiculously simple solutions. The engineers buffed the drill. The dirt the machines remove makes the concrete tunnel segments. And by boring and reinforcing the tunnel simultaneously, Musk thinks their custom machine can work 15 times faster than existing boring machines. And do it much cheaper—the 1.14-mile Hawthorne test tunnel cost $10 million.”