You might have caught wind of the wild excitement that some tech blogs and news sites have been making about Elon Musk‘s latest amazing scheme to create our future, now. If you’re asking “Who the hell is Elon Musk?”, a sidenote: he’s the incredibly bright South African-American inventor and entrepreneur who has brought the world a number of revolutionary products, among them none other than online payment system PayPal, space transport company SpaceX and electric car manufacturer Tesla Motors. Not satisfied with making massive advancements on road, in space and online, Musk’s latest venture is a super-high-speed mode of transport named Hyperloop. Welcome to the future.     So, what is this Hyperloop, and what can it actually do? Well, at this stage, with Musk having released the alpha design online, what we know so far is that Musk estimates his system would make it possible to get from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 30 minutes. That’s a distance of 615 kilometres, or 382 miles, in half an hour? You’d be right to go ‘WHAAAT?’ but let’s bear in mind that things are in their early stages still.     That said, if Musk’s track record is anything to go by, this could very well become a reality. In the online pdf, in which there’s a whole lot of detail and schematic info (it’s a very well-thought out plan) Musk outlines the purpose of the Hyperloop as “the right solution for the specific case of high traffic city pairs that are less than about 1500 km or 900 miles apart.” So, being based in California, his aim is to link LA and San Fran with the first Hyperloop.     But what is it, exactly? Good question - the easiest way to describe it would be Musk’s own statement of “a cross between a rail gun, the Concord, and an air hockey table.” So, essentially, it’s a system which makes use of pods that are “supported on a cushion of air, featuring pressurized air and aerodynamic lift.The capsules are accelerated via a magnetic linear accelerator affixed at various stations on the low pressure tube with rotors contained in each capsule”. OK, so in layman’s terms, these are pods that are basically shot along a very long tube, at ridiculous speeds.     So what speeds will the Hyperloop travel, to get from LA to SF in 30minutes? There’s the kicker - Musk puts the top speed of this amazing hypertrain at a hair-raising 760mph (which is 1223 kilometres per hour!). Compare that to standard top speeds of jet airliners which come in at around 560mp, and you get some idea of why this is such a revolutionary concept. Ladies and gents, welcome to the future - please tighten your seat belts. We’re in for a very interesting journey.   all images © Tesla Motors