In an announcement of things that will definitely, for sure someday happen, Musk and the UAE’s AI minister Omar Al Olama unveiled this week plans for a new underground tunnel built by the Boring Company underneath Dubai. I guess they saw the Vegas Loop serving as a completely useful piece of infrastructure and wanted in.
The announcement came on the last day of this week’s World Governments Summit in Dubai, the National reports:
“Once people try it out they’re going to say wow, it’s really cool. It’s going to seem so obvious in retrospect,” Mr Musk said.
“It’s going to be like a wormhole, from one part of the city, boom, and you’re at another part of the city, and it’s great. We look forward to his partnership.”
I mean, it is very much like a wormhole in that it is dark, narrow tube underground. Something tells me the traditional, Earth-based wormhole is not the wormhole he means, however.
Dubai’s Loop is set to be much longer than the one in Vegas, though the Vegas Loop as a purposed 68-mile expansion in the works. While the Vegas Loop is just 1.5 miles of tunnels that run under the Las Vegas Convention Center, the Dubai Loop will supposedly run ten and a half miles with 11 stations with the ability to handle 20,000 passengers a day. Just don’t ask how many people an actual train could move in the same distance and time (it’s a lot more. A lot.)
Musk made some totally off the wall comments about the Dubai system being ideal because it’s better than flying cars (which, much like full self-driving Teslas, don’t exist) and the Loop will provide a safe spot to be in case of thermonuclear attack or bad weather:
Mr Musk added that underground travel is a safer option than travel by flying cars, and is less likely to be disrupted by poor weather or other external factors.
“Underground is a good place to be in a worst-case scenario for global thermonuclear warfare,” he said.
“If you have bad weather, like let’s say there’s a blizzard or a sandstorm or something, well, now nobody can fly. None of these problems exist with underground travel.”
If you’re worried about attacks, maybe building some infrastructure what provides more space for more people—like a real train station—rather than a narrow tube only capable of handling one driver-controlled car at a time?
But this is Dubai, home of the canceled and delayed mega project, so I wouldn’t hold my breath on that new tunnel. Dubai is also no stranger to Musk ‘s particular brand of snake oil projects. Back in 2016, Musk’s Hyperloop One transportation tube company signed a deal with the UAE to build a Hyperloop network in Dubai. Despite raising nearly half a billion dollars in funding, not a single project came out of the company before it shut down in 2023. There’s currently no planned construction date for the Dubai Loop, which says a lot.