Daryl Oster wants to change the world by making it smaller.

He wants you to “Imagine living in warm sunny Los Angeles and commuting daily to New York City with only a forty-five minute commute.” Or to “Imagine ordering Chinese food – from China.”

And he doesn’t need a spaceship to do it because, in a way, he’s bringing space travel to Earth. I got a chance to pick Oster’s brain about his revolutionary transport system. I learned very quickly, first and foremost, that it “is NOT a train!!!”

What it is is Evacuated Tube Transport, or ETT. ETT combines the efficiency of maglev trains, already in use in Europe and Asia, with the efficiency of moving through an airless environment. Maglev is short for magnetic levitation. It takes advantage of physical properties that we all learned in grade school: that opposite poles of a magnet attract, like poles repel. For maglev trains, a magnetic field is generated by.......