Magnetic levitation or Maglev technologies and theories have been around for some time, in the ancient and classical era all throughout the medieval times, with Pliny the Elder of Rome drawing up architectural plans to suspend a statue in the Temple of Alexandria using lodestone, a type of naturally occurring magnetic minerals being among the first documented cases of it’s planned use, and with more modern theories heading into the industrial age such as Earnshaw’s theorem appearing in 1839. Since then, there has been different approaches to making magnetic levitation a reality, some more stable than others.
The applications for this technology are various, but the two most common uses tend to be for transportation purposes, such as with Maglev trains which are high speed trains that use this technology and are able to reduce traction and wear and tear on materials due to being contactless as well as having the potential to reach speeds of 6,400 km / h, or about 6x the speed of a commercial jetliner in the year 2020, if the train was to travel through a evacuated tube or vacuum, as well as in addition to for display purposes, in which case the example of the levitating flower pot is an example of a futuristic technology being made a reality in the present. Another application could potentially lie in construction, or the transportation of supplies and materials, as electromagnetic coils were used in 1923 by Muck in Germany. This would require a network of coils to be elevated themselves, however, and the exposure of electromagnetic current could be potentially dangerous in our modern, digitized world.
The Shanghai Maglev train currently reaches speeds of 431 kilometers per hour, and a line is planned to go from Shanghai to Hangzhou. StarTram is another Maglev projected intended to be a launch pad propulsion system for spacecraft. The most ambitious would probably have to be the Vactrain, initially developed in the 1960’s at a cost of $12 trillion, a Maglev tunnel that would link New York City and London, with a train traveling at a speed of 8,000 kilometers per hour, in an underwater tube comprised of 54,000 prefabricated pieces held to the seabed by 100,000 tethering cables. Modern versions of this idea are geared around the $88 billion to $175 billion mark, making it much more feasible for an investment.
The only problem with this idea, together with that of a Bering Strait bridge, is geopolitical bickering and national borders. In order for a $175 billion tunnel to pay off, it would need to economically surpass the costs, by transporting people between the two countries. There would need to be greater incentive for other great powers, other than the UK and US, to have it’s wealthy classes use the tube. For that, the citizens of some countries would either need their passports to be on a visa free list, or to abolish any form of border control at all, as it would clog up the stations at both ends of the tube.
Robert H. Goddard, considered the father of rocketry, is also credited with having contributed towards this idea. This idea has not yet arrived, but as time goes on, we get closer and closer to projects like this as they become more feasible, and the costs to build them go down as well. Strong economies have become a bridging gap between cultures, and as long as xenophobia slowly becomes eradicated, we might see an interatlantic Maglev train line before the end of the 21st century.
