In 2014, I wrote a column entitled, “What Industries will produce the First Trillionaires?” and over 40,000 people stopped by to read about the 18 possible industries that, at the time, seemed to be the most likely candidates.

Our perspective sure has changed over the last six years. At this point, it’s not so much what industries will produce the first trillionaire, rather; who’s the greatest multitasking entrepreneur able to run the most businesses simultaneously?

Six years ago, it didn’t seem reasonable to expect that any one person would be able to run multiple billion-dollar enterprises across several industries simultaneously. At this point, though, I’d say that’s probably the only way to generate that kind of mega-wealth.

The Personal Wealth Contest

First things first. Who will be the first trillionaire? It’s turning into a competition between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

As of the day of this writing, Jeff Bezos is in the lead – he’s the richest person in the world with $187 billion. Elon Musk blew past Bill Gates earlier this year to reach the #2 position and he now stands at $142 billion.

Momentum seems to be on Elon Musk’s side given that he’s increased his wealth by $115 billion since the first of the year, compared to Jeff Bezos’ $72 billion.

For daily updates on this horse race be sure to bookmark the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

The Portfolios

From my perspective, I’m betting on Elon Musk, because he’s blazing new trails unlike anyone in all history. Let’s look at his portfolio:

• Aerospace – SpaceX
• Telecom – Starlink
• Transportation – Tesla
• Energy – Tesla Solar Roof
• Liquor – Tesla Tequila
• AI and implantable brain-machine interfaces – Creating the 10 second brain interface
• Mass transit – Hyperloop and tunnel cars
• Tunneling – The Boring Company
• Microgrids – Powerpack Platform
• Flamethrowers – A product of The Boring Company

• Retail – Amazon, Whole Foods, Zappos, Woot, Goodreads, Audible
• Aerospace – Blue Origin
• Smart Devices – Alexa
• Video Streaming – Twitch
• Robotics – Kiva Systems, Rethink Robotics
• Publications – Business Insider, The Washington Post
• Others – Souq, Quidsi, Elemental Tech, Annapurna Labs, IMDB

While Jeff Bezos’ primary focus, Amazon, seems zeroed in on gobbling up retail and even pharmaceutical services, they don’t seem to have quite the explosive potential of Musk’s trailblazing companies.

Elon Musk has a crazy level of urgency surrounding every one of his projects. Virtually all of his leadership team is focused on pushing, pushing, pushing to make things happen in unreasonably short periods of time. In addition, his passion for “moonshots” involving entirely new industries seems to offer a greater upside and better prospects for exponential payback and wealth.

Plus, I can’t help but pull for a visionary futurist entrepreneur like Musk who’s also a capitalist willing to invest in cutting edge ideas related to electric vehicles, space travel, solar power, and smart micro-grids to name just a few.

Everything he touches seems to have billion dollar potential. These include:

Tesla cars

I have no doubt that Tesla will continue to improve battery technology to allow for longer automobile trips without recharging. At the same time, we can expect to see gains in all aspects of electric vehicle technology and battery production to make the cars more affordable. And as all of that evolves, the company will move into related markets, making serious inroads into other vehicle segments like pickup trucks, semi-trucks, microbuses, and micro-taxis.

SpaceX

Now that SpaceX has proven the viability of its Starship transport system, that technology will be further developed for more types of commercial use – retrieving and delivering satellites for example in support of its Starlink Internet access service. Then there’s space tourism – trips around the moon in the very near future and ultimately delivering people to space hotels, the moon, and Mars for incredible experiences.

Starlink

Starlink is a satellite Internet constellation being constructed by SpaceX that is designed to provide Internet access all over the world. It will effectively be the world’s first global telecom company. While Amazon, Samsung, and others will be competing for this space, Starlink’s 12,000 satellites will be the first and most pervasive.

Tesla Solar Roof

Tesla Solar Roofs have been on the market since the first of this year, fulfilling Elon Musk’s promise of an energy-generating roof that’s also attractive and durable. The solar cells are embedded in the roof itself, rather than on mounted panels. They’re pricey, but tax incentives can take away a little of the sting. I see this as another example of a market-busting innovation that will come down in price as technology and production processes improve. The company is partnering with Mississippi Power to install Tesla Solar Roofs throughout a new housing community – work that will begin in 2021.

Tesla Microgrids

While still a bit under the radar, Tesla has already created over 120 operational microgrids around the world. Microgrids are small regional power grids, and in Tesla’s case, they’re being designed to merge Solar Roofs with Tesla’s Powerpack platforms, Powerwalls, and electric cars to form an entirely new ecosystem for power generation, that involves buying, selling, trading, storing, and distributing electricity throughout a community. Using bi-directional charging networks, power flows to where it’s needed, and stored efficiently when it’s not. They expect to have over 1,000 microgrids throughout the world very soon.

Neuralink

Neuralink Corporation is a neurotechnology company to develop implantable brain–machine interfaces. While the company has been aiming to make devices to treat serious brain diseases in the short-term, their eventual goal is to enhance the human mind, sometimes called transhumanism.

To be sure, we’re probably only scratching the surface of all the ventures Musk and Bezos has queued up in their heads, but the entire world will be paying close attention to all their tweets and press releases.

In less than a decade, will Elon Musk be the first trillionaire, and the richest person on earth? There’s a good chance he will. Then again, setbacks and economic and market conditions might wreak havoc with his innovations. But I certainly admire his courage and audacity as he continually strives to deliver giant leaps for mankind.

As a futurist, I’ve become enamored with past visionaries and their gift for imagining the future. While some of their retro-futuristic visions may seem poorly conceived or even laughable, each of them had a gift for opening the door of possibilities into the magical world ahead.

One thing I hope we all share, though, is an imagination and a curiosity about the future. Instead of limiting our focus on the present, I trust there’s a little futurist in all of us as we try to visualize the technology advances that future generations will find commonplace.

I really enjoy seeing those online posts where, for example, Millennials try to explain to Gen Z’ers how different life was “when I was your age.” That’s especially true with technology. The 1980s and 1990s versions of video games, computers, recording devices, music media, and so on, seem ancient today – similar to how young people would view a Victrola!

A friend at Budget Direct shared some insights, as a fun way of looking back on what our parents and grandparents considered “futuristic” modes of transportation.

As part of the project, they commissioned drawings of what these vehicles would look like today. (If you’re like me, you were drawing these kinds of cars in the back of your spiral notebook during middle school Algebra class instead of solving for “x”!)

No doubt these 20th Century futurists with a passion for transportation technology and design hoped their dream vehicles would be on the market within their generation. That hasn’t been the case, but if you look at the original and re-created images, I think you’ll see some things that are very familiar.

Let’s have some fun taking a futuristic look at the past!

I recently returned from a speaking engagement in South Korea, and on my trans-pacific flights between San Francisco and Seoul I tried something new – an air mattress.

I had my doubts at first, but it turned out to be a total game changer!

Since I’m larger than most people, comfort has been an elusive commodity on the 10-14 hour flights I often find myself on. Even though I’m flying business class with seats that lay flat, after a few hours virtually every seat causes unusual pain points to develop.

The air mattress I took along was a Polarmile Ultralight Sleeping Pad that fits into a double-fist sized carrying case, but inflated to fit well on the United 787 that I was a passenger on.

Admittedly, I was rather self-conscious about blowing up an air mattress onboard, thinking the whole world was watching “as I prepared my campsite” on a crowded plane.

But that wasn’t the case. No one noticed, and more importantly, no one cared.

The online description for the Polarmile says it only requires 10-15 breaths to inflate, but I found it to be more in the 75-80-breath range. No, I wasn’t trying to maximize my lung capacity with each breath, but I do think they understated it a bit.

I also didn’t want it to be at full capacity. I wasn’t looking for a firm, rigid air mattress, but something that would mold to the seat as I adjusted it in various states of recline. So, close to full, but not full.

Since United already provided a blanket-like mattress pad for the seat, I placed that over the top of the air mattress to add another layer between the plastic and my skin.

Over the years I’ve tried many things to make the trips easier, and to be honest, very few of them worked. So my expectations were rather low.

I’ve found that when I start with low expectations, virtually any progress seems like a huge victory. But this air mattress experiment, not only was it a radical improvement, it continued to impress me flying both ways over the duration of the entire trip.

So why is this important?

It’s quite simple. Comfort has shifted from a “good enough” item on a checklist to a topic of elite cocktail party discussions and become an essential decider of brand value.

The Future of Comfort

The reason an air mattress adds comfort is because it diffuses natural pressure points over a broader section of the body. Distributed pressure means less chance of developing those annoying points of pain.

As we think through the idea of comfort, the three places where the human body comes into contact with the physical world most are the beds we sleep in, the shoes that we walk in, and the chairs we sit in.

Each of these primary contact areas has long been the center of our attention as we are always looking for a better solution.

Moving forward, we will expand our use of digital products, adding additional sensors to our body, greatly improving our ability to spot problem areas before they develop.

Not only will we have the ability to zero in on the precise location of the problem, but also the tools to uncover the root cause and solutions to remedy them.

Yet, comfort involves far more than physical contact. If our space is too humid, too dry, too noisy, too bright, too dark, filled with vibrations, offensive odors, or changing air pressure, our overall comfort changes significantly.

This becomes an increasingly important topic when we study the evolving landscape of comfort.

Very soon car companies will be competing with airlines for short and medium haul passengers.

Competing for Comfort

Very soon, traveling in an autonomous car will become a viable option. In many cases it will be preferable to flying in a plane to short-range destinations.

Rather than wading through the hassle of scheduling a flight, driving to the airport, dealing with baggage and security, waiting to board, crowding into tiny airline seats, enduring the flight itself, and finding transportation once you arrive, it’ll only take a few minutes to have a driverless car out front and you can ride comfortably for the next 6-10 hours, working on projects, watching movies, playing video games, or just sleeping as you make your way to your destination.

Suddenly airlines will be facing a new form of competition they never saw coming.

As an industry, they will have to eliminate many “layers of discomfort” before they can effectively compete with the cross-country autonomous cars of the future. And seating is only part of the equation.

If we expand our horizons, space tourism and traveling to other planets may not be far off, and the idea of comfort takes on a whole new dimension. Stresses on the human body and duration of travel will extend far beyond anything most of us have confronted so far.

Autonomous Vehicles will take the Lead

Once you are able to summon a vehicle to take you across town, the key differentiators will be comfort, cleanliness, and functionality. The relationship we have with our vehicles becomes a complicated equation, far different for every user:

• Can I wear a suit or fancy dress without worrying about some kid having smeared chocolate on the seats?
• Is it possible to dim the windows so I can sleep?
• Are there spaces for a computer, purse, briefcase, or small tote?
• If I bought a few things at my last stop, will they fit into the trunk? Can I hang onto this car so I don’t have to bring all my bags with me?
• Is there a fold out desk where I can do some serious work?
• When I’m on a Skype or Zoom call, how stable will my connection be, and how much road noise will I hear?
• If I have my kid(s) with me, are there child seats built in? Are there tray tables so they can play with toys, eat food, or just sleep.
• Will the car connect to the music on my smartphone? Can I watch videos or play games?
• Were there dogs, cats, or some other animals that I may be allergic to in this car before me?
• How comfortable will this car be on a 10-12 hour trip?
• Are there extra charges for dropping off the car in a different city?
• Was the last passenger smoking, vaping, sweaty, or suffering from some contagious disease?
• Can I meet with more than one person inside the vehicle as we’re driving around?
• Will it be possible to stand up, do exercises, or engage in some kind of workout while I’m traveling?

Over the coming months our thinking about autonomous cars will dramatically change.

Final Thoughts

Every person views transportation through a different lens. Blowing up an air mattress may have solved one problem, but it only scratches the surface of complex comfort issues that will arise as we move into a future with far more shared use options.

Future contact surfaces will have expansion cells that interact with sensors on our body. We will develop complex interfaces that share vast amounts of information with virtually every surface we come into contact with.

So far we’ve done a poor job of molding the world to mesh with us, the human users. Over the coming years, this will become the primary focus of design thinking.

The examples listed above were intended to spark your imagination, and only represent a drop in the bucket of what’s truly possible. Please let us know other ideas come to mind as you read this. I think we all want to know.

Some of Frey’s predictions include:

• The reunification of North and South Korea will happen by 2020
• By 2030, the largest company on the Internet will be an education-based company that we haven’t heard of yet
• Cryptocurrency is very much here to stay and is going to displace 25% of national currencies by 2030
• By 2030, over 2 billion jobs will disappear
• We will reach the first billion drones in the world by 2030

Thomas, we’re big fans of visiting the future frequently to inform our thinking and planning for today. It seems you visit the future often, and come back with predictions that are sometimes controversial.

Well, the point is not just to be controversial, but definitely to be provocative in terms of expanding our thinking and understanding about the future. Sometimes, the best way to shake us out of our typical thinking patterns is to throw out a very controversial starting point, or premise, or approach existing arguments in a different way. For example, everyone agrees that understanding the future is important.

But what if I said that ignorance is a valuable part of the future—that our greatest motivations in life come from NOT knowing the future. Once a future is known, we quickly lose interest in trying to influence it. If we knew the future, we would have little reason to vote in an election, host a surprise party, or begin a new project. For this reason, our greatest motivations in life come from NOT knowing the future.

Because no one has a totally clear vision of what lies ahead, we are all left with degrees of accuracy. Anyone, any organization, that achieves a higher degree of accuracy, even by only a few percentage points, can achieve a significant competitive advantage. I have said that humanity will change more in the next 20 years than in all of human history. At that rate of change, developing a clear vision of the future becomes not just important, but critical to an organization’s survival.

So is it true that we must be proactive and disrupt ourselves or be disrupted by someone who’s moving faster? Are there only two choices?

You can do the quantum leap thing where you leapfrog forward with a brand new solution that’s better than any current solution—and I would encourage people to stretch their minds and think in those terms. There’s a huge effort in the world today to solve all of our problems, and really these are all the historic problems that have built up to this point. And we haven’t really spent much time looking at the innovations in the future that will actually change the problem sets.

I mean, if we colonize Mars, that’s a whole different set of problems. It gives us a different perspective. Instead of the idea of having an overpopulated Earth, suddenly we’re thinking in terms of an underpopulated universe. It’s the same issue, but it’s looking at it from radically different perspectives.

All of these things change as our technologies change, as our reach changes. Our capabilities change. This technology that we’re creating, it’s giving us additional capabilities. It’s giving us the ability to do things faster, better, cheaper than ever before. And that’s what’s fascinating to me: as we step further, as we step into the next realm of technology, we acquire a different vantage point and things just look different from there. Almost anyone who has ever started a business will tell you that once they get into the business, they start spotting relevant opportunities that they never realized were there.
You’ve also talked about existing technologies that will keep morphing and developing, as opposed to being replaced. What’s an example?

I was thinking about the idea of what technology will replace the photograph, but the photograph itself seems pretty durable. We’re adding more capabilities to that one photograph and how we store it, how we display it, and how we interact with it. The photograph might start out as just a still image from the past, and then we add a timestamp, geolocation, and machine learning is getting a lot better at recognizing people and objects. We can actually go back and sort through the time frame, the people, and possibly where the photo was taken because of objects in the background.

Then we start adding human relationships, like “This is my great uncle, and he was related to this person and that person.” Suddenly, we have a genealogy map that we didn’t know existed. It’s fascinating what might happen as people start digging away into all the attributes every photograph has. 2D photos can become 3D photos. Still images can become animated. With AI we’ll soon be able to “fill in the blanks” between photos. Photography has been around since 1839, and I think that we’re going to be reinventing the photograph 50 years from now, still. It has that much potential.

You also effectively step back into the past to imagine the future of transportation.

It’s a good example of the cascading effect. The transportation industry affects so many other industries. The cars that we drive today have been in development for over 120 years, primarily around the assumption of a human driver. Through most of the incremental advances in auto technology, we’ve haven’t planned for autonomous vehicles. Now designers are more focused on electric vehicles, and not focused on the human’s relationship with the steering wheel, the dashboard, gas pedals, and so on.

So then there’s this growing idea that we’ll no longer have to own vehicles. We have 273 million registered vehicles in the United States—a lot of hardware that’s just sitting idle 96% of the day, on average. We have built garages for our houses in which to store our cars, we have parking garages in town, parking spaces all over. And you start asking the question, “Well, what if we didn’t need all that? What if one car could actually take the place of 30 cars?”

The implications are huge when you start looking at the cascading effect that this shift could have. It’s beyond the future of transportation to the future of work, finance, real estate, travel, and all these aspects of our lives. If I don’t have to own my own car, the people making the car loans are out of a job. The car insurance people, suddenly they’re selling fewer and fewer policies and a lot of them are out of jobs.

And we can start using that real estate for other purposes. Over 10% of retail space in cities is car-related. That’s not only car dealerships, but car washes, the auto parts stores, the brake shops, tire shops. All of these things start to dwindle over time, and how does that change our lifestyle?

Could I actually have a mobile platform where I go to work and my office is mobile and it drives around town all day and picks up people that I’m meeting with? That’s a different type of lifestyle for some business executives. If I want to go to Chicago, Miami, or Dallas, rather than go through all the security hassle at the airport I can just jump in a vehicle and take off, and I’m watching movies and playing video games for the next 12, 15, or 18 hours. Imagine if you don’t have to deal with feeling like you’re packed in like cattle on an airplane. Soon, you may be able to forget about airport security or crowds, and watch the sights roll by as you cruise cross-country in an autonomous vehicle.

Technology will have a massive impact on the travel and transportation industries. What will happen to airlines and airports? What about those massive parking garages that surround our airports? About 41% of income for the average airport in the United States comes from parking and transportation fees. All the limo drivers, the shuttle bus drivers, tow-truck drivers, all of those jobs start to go away. So the cascading effect of all of this is just staggering. And all of the income from traffic violations, traffic courts, the highway patrol—all of that starts to go away, too.

It sounds like the future of transportation is closely tied to the future of work.

There are connections wherever you look. In 2012, I was giving a TEDx talk in Istanbul, and I made the prediction that by 2030 over two billion jobs will disappear. Now I am quoted about this in newspapers, magazines, and TV stations all over the world. That was never intended to be a doom-and-gloom statement. I never intended it to mean we’re going to have two billion people unemployed in the world. Rather, it was intended to be a wakeup call that we must create new jobs at a faster rate than ever before.

We’re going to baby-step our way into the future and we will have a lot of failures along the way. And as long as we have these failures, and all the problems that come with failure, we’re always going to have jobs—certainly not the same jobs we have today, but we’re always going to have a lot of work to do to fix all these things that we’ve created.

So, you must ask the question, “Is it the same job?” That’s very important because 20 years from now, we’re still going to have teachers, accountants, lawyers, and nurses, but the tools, techniques, and strategies they use are going to be radically different. Teachers are in the education profession, and they may be in the same profession in 20 years—but their roles will look very different than they do today. I think the idea of a profession evolving with new tools and technology is more realistic than a scenario in which a new job comes along and it eliminates that old job. It’s not that simple. It’s much messier than that; it’s much blurrier. So yes, we should just assume that our jobs will get redefined again, and again, and again.

So what’s the takeaway for those who are concerned about remaining relevant in this messy, blurry future?

Virtually everybody I run into today has this nagging anxiety, wondering “Am I still going to have a job five years from now? If not, what new skills do I need to learn to remain relevant?” We all have to replace that anxiety with action. Learn from what’s known, and extend that out into the unknown future. Whatever your profession, what can you learn from its historical context? How will the future be different as exponential technologies emerge and converge? We can’t just read about these technologies. We need to touch them, experiment, and figure out how to apply them to the problems we’ll face in the future.

I like to say we shape our future, and our future shapes us. The more time you spend visiting the future and thinking about potential scenarios, the more comfortable you will feel in preparing for it. Think on a global scale, and pay attention to the accelerating rate of change driven by technologies. One common mistake people make is underestimating just how quickly our lives, business, and every industry are changing.

Finally, I would say that there’s never been a better time to find your tribe. Join future-focused communities. Attend events, mastermind groups, hackathons, and professional associations. None of us can know the future, but all of us can empower ourselves to know what’s coming and to create our own fulfilling futures.

This post was originally published on the Singularity University Blog on June 27th, 2019.

Opening day for the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge on October 23, 2018.

On October 24, 2018 the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge was opened to the public. This 34-mile long bridge-tunnel system, consisting of a series of three cable-stayed bridges, an undersea tunnel, and four artificial islands is currently the longest open-sea crossing on earth.

Started in 2009, the Hong Kong Zhuhai Macao Bridge cost $18.8 billion and is designed to last 120 years. The bridge also comes with a few unusual hi-tech capabilities to monitor drivers:

• It’s designed to survive an 8.0 earthquake and a collision with a super cargo ship
• It will slash the drive time from Hong Kong and Zhuhai from 3 hours to just 30 minutes
• As drivers cross the bridge their heart rate and blood pressure will be monitored. This information is sent to the bridge’s command center
• If a driver yawns more than three times in 20 seconds, the ‘yawn cam’ will raise an alert
• The entire bridge-tunnel system will soon have 5G capabilities

This nine-year construction project not only raises the bar of human capabilities, it sets the stage for a series of even more challenging megaprojects that will both redefine humanity and the world as we know it.

Why Megaprojects?

Gone are the days where people were impressed by projects costing $50-$100 million. We are witnessing an explosion in the number of $1 billion+ projects with some, like the Qiddiya, Al-Ula, Neom, and the Red Sea Projects in Saudi Arabia, likely to exceed $1 trillion.

But the ones we hear about today are merely scratching the surface of tomorrow’s super megaprojects and the massive undertakings that will happen over the coming decades.

There are several important reasons why this is happening.

1. Megacities

As people relocate from rural to urban communities and population clusters grow, so does the demand for major infrastructure improvements to help manage the traffic, water, sewage, power, and living strains of these growing economies. Leaders of megacities will be exercising their newfound clout in unusual ways.

2. Economic Growth

Wages paid to workers building infrastructure projects will improve the local economy to a point where other megaprojects become viable.

3. Global Awareness

More than ever, countries are competing with other countries to stand out. As global awareness improves, so does the desire to standout and impress the rest of the world. Megaprojects become a source of national pride and a status symbol for emerging economies.

4. Fear of Technological Unemployment

Our growing worries of jobs being automated out of existence are causing elected officials to search for new jobs, and megaprojects will rise in priority as a potential source of work for the future unemployed.

5. Self-Collateralization

Megaprojects have a way of collateralizing themselves through the sheer size and impact of the project. Even though many will be based on unprovable claims and flawed accounting, the spinoff economies alone will create an overpowering momentum to push them across the finish line.

The growing list of megaprojects include everything from tunnels, bridges, dams, highways, airports, hospitals, skyscrapers, floating cities, wind farms, offshore oil and gas rigs, aluminum smelters, global communications systems, aerospace missions, particle accelerators, entire new cities, and much more.

In spite of their challenges, I’ve been focusing my attention on four major bridge-tunnel projects that will redefine humanity over the coming decades.

Bridges vs. Tunnels

For many decades, infrastructure proponents have argued the relative advantage/disadvantages of tunnels and bridges or a combination of both.

While bridges look far more impressive than tunnels, they pose a number of challenges when it comes to ships passing underneath, weather-related issues, and ongoing maintenance and repair issues.

Tunnels tend to be more expensive to build and operate, but will experience far less deterioration over time. While a 1,000-year tunnel is conceivable, a 1,000-year bridge is not.

Highway vs. Railroad vs. Tube Transportation

One key decision point with each of these bridge-tunnel projects will be whether to design it strictly for cars and trucks, trains, or whether it should also include provisions for future forms of Hyperloop-style tube-transportation.

As an example, the Channel Tunnel between Great Britain and France is only designed to accommodate a passenger train between the two countries. This means no cars or trucks, no cargo, and no provision for a potentially much faster tube-train.

These will be critical decision points moving forward. Each project below will have radically different use cases and traffic demands, and no easy answers.

Four massive bridge-tunnel projects will cause the world to connect in ways never before imaginable.

Four World Changing Bridge-Tunnel Projects

Our capabilities are growing. Every technological advance is giving us new capabilities with the ability to accomplish many times what we could even ten years ago.

For this reason, super engineering feats like I’m describing here are within grasp.

Even though there are many more bridge-tunnel projects that will have a significant effect, in my opinion, these are the four that will have the greatest impact on people everywhere in the world.

A bridge-tunnel across the Bering Strait is a challenging engineering fete in a cold unforgiving environment.

1. Bering Strait Crossing

Building a bridge-tunnel system across the Bering Strait will effectively create a ground transportation link between North America and Asia. While there are a huge number of obstacles around designing, engineering, and paying for it, the benefits will also be enormous.

The most likely design will involve a bridge-tunnel system crossing the relatively shallow Bering Strait between the Chukotka Peninsula in Russia and the Seward Peninsula in Alaska.

With the two Diomede Islands halfway between the peninsulas, the Bering Strait could be spanned by a bridge/tunnel network with one long 25 mile bridge connecting Alaska and the Diomede Islands, and a tunnel connecting the Diomede Islands with Russia.

History – The idea of crossing the Bering Strait was first envisioned in 1890 by William Gilpin, first governor of the Colorado Territory. He proposed a “Cosmopolitan Railway” that he imagined would link the entire world through a series of railways.

Two years later, Joseph Strauss, who went on to design over 400 bridges and was the lead Project Engineer on the Golden Gate Bridge, wrote his senior thesis about a Bering Strait railroad bridge. The project was presented to the government of the Russian Empire, but it was rejected.

In 1905, Russian Czar Nicholas II approved a railroad bridge-tunnel project, but everything fell apart with WWI and the Russian Revolution.

Several other proposals have arisen in recent years, and according to a report in the Beijing Times in May 2014, Chinese transportation experts were proposing to build a 6,213 mile-long high-speed rail line from Manchuria to the United States, a project that would include a tunnel under the Bering Strait and connect China and Russia to the United States and Canada.

Obstacles – The Russian side of the Strait, in particular, is severely lacking in infrastructure. No railroads exist for over 2,000 miles in any direction from the strait, and the closest unpaved road is 1,200 miles away. However, in 2008, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin approved the plan to build a railroad to the Bering Strait area, as a part of a 2030 development plan.

On the American side, Alaska is a vast state that also has very few roads. It’s estimated another 750 miles of highway would need to be built. The closest city of any significance is Nome, which is about 100 miles away. Currently there is no ground transportation between Nome and the other cities in Alaska. Overall cost estimates range from $65-$100 billion.

The Darien Gap represents the missing piece of the Pan-American Highway.

2. Darien Gap

In 1937 the countries in North and South America signed the Convention on the Pan-American Highway, an agreement to build a highway system connecting all of its member countries. Over the next couple decades, an elaborate highway system was built throughout both continents except for a 60-mile stretch connecting Panama to Columbia. This has become known as the Darien Gap.

The Pan-American Highway now consists of over 19,000 miles of roads ranging from Prudhoe Bay in northern Alaska to Ushuaia, Argentina on the southern tip of South America, with only one short piece missing in the middle.

The Darien Gap begins in Yaviza, Panama and ends in Turbo, Colombia roughly 66 miles away. A number of alternate routes through the ocean that bypass the mountains and swamps are also possible.

Obstacles: The Darien Gap is an environmentally sensitive area filled with treacherous jungles, virtually impassable mountains, impenetrable swamps, and unfriendly wildlife including poisonous snakes, man-eating cats, crocodiles, caimans, biting ants, and venomous spiders. The worst of all are the clouds of mosquitoes carrying everything from malaria to dengue fever.

Many government officials are also concerned about opening a channel for drug traffickers between North and South America.

Several routes have been considered for the Japan-Korea bridge-tunnel.

3. Japan-Korea Undersea Crossing

The Japan–Korea Undersea Crossing is a proposed bridge-tunnel project to connect Japan with South Korea via an undersea tunnel passing over-under the Korea Strait using the islands of Iki and Tsushima.

The distance along this route is roughly 80 miles at its narrowest point, but the latest proposal is to construct 120-mile bridge-tunnel.

The first conversations about building this kind of infrastructure started in 1917, a little over 100 years ago. Since then a number of discussions have taken place with many high-ranking officials in both Japan and Korea expressing an interest in making it happen.

Obstacles: While each of these four bridge-tunnel project has its own challenges; this one is by far the longest distance. As new studies arise, cost and benefit projections raise a host of new arguments for and against the project. As some cost estimates now show it exceeding $90 billion, some doubt the wisdom of it ever paying for itself.

While the image shows what looks like an easy span to cross, the actual construction of a bridge-tunnel across the Strait of Gibraltar will require extremely sophisticated engineering.

4. Strait of Gibraltar Crossing

The Strait of Gibraltar is the narrow waterway separating Europe from Africa, a distance of roughly 9 miles. However, a number of geological issues make crossing this short stretch of ocean a very complicated engineering, design, and physics challenge.

In 1979 the governments of Spain and Morocco appointed a joint committee to investigate the feasibility of linking the two continents that resulted in a much larger Euromed Transport project.

Over the years a number of tunneling projects have been proposed, and governments in both Africa and Europe would love to see it happen. But so far no one has come up with a complete plan for dealing with all of the extreme engineering challenges and the necessary funding.

Obstacles: As proposed, the tunnel would be 25 miles long, roughly 1,000 feet underground, and take 15 years to complete. Cost estimates range from $10-25 billion.

Final Thoughts

Each of these projects has been in discussions for decades, but what has changed is our exponential growth in capabilities.

While things like this seemed extreme in the past, each new technology breakthrough makes difficult projects of the past seem infinitely more doable today.

Countries themselves are being judged by their willingness to tackle super difficult megaprojects, and the scientific prowess they can bring to the table.

My prediction is that construction on each of these projects will begin within the next decade, and the interconnectedness of the entire world will radically change as a result of it.