REGISTER NOW Musk also entertained the possibility of starting a new engineering competition around The Boring Co.’s main mission: Tunneling. “We could maybe do a tunneling competition, that might be good,” Musk said. “We’ll consider a tunneling competition,” he concluded after a few seconds of thought. “I think a tunneling thing would be pretty exciting,” Musk said later in response to a follow-up question by one of the student team members on site. “Because as I just articulated the primary challenge is how do you tunnel effectively, especially how do you put in the reinforcing segments and get the dirt out effectively — it’s harder than it seems.” Current digging technology can only manage a near-glacial pace, and Musk said that if we could get up to about one-tenth the speed of walking, or around a mile every three hours, it would be a huge change in the feasibility of building a 3D network of underground transportation. Based on his tweet later on Sunday evening, Musk has come up with a way to greatly increase the distance of the test tunnel, but based on his earlier comments about when we can expect to see a subterranean tunnel dug far and straight enough, it seems unlikely that the answer will be an underground tunnel just yet. Topics