Instead of building these long, expensive, barely feasible terrorist targets, woudln't it be easier just to develop flying cars? Weren't those things suppose to be ready by the year 2000? Where the heck is my flying car???
Not Worth It I'm not convinced it's worth it. For that price you could develop a whole fleet of suborbital expresses. They would have a much better view, failures would only affect one section of the system, and you would have flexible routing. If you simply must have a super bridge or tunnel I would suggest you look into a link between Africa and Europe. The distance is much more reasonable and the potential benefits greater. Connecting Britain and the eastern US would provide a shortcut between two basically identical areas, the economic incentive is relatively small.
In the 1960's they were saying we'd have flying cars, household robots, and floating houses that revolved, all by 1980. Nobody ever predicted hand-held calculators or home computers. Dick Tracy had his two-way wrist radio, but nobody predicted the mineaturization of anything else. Artificial intelligence is still a fantasy, and the smallest cell phones are still 15 or 20 times bigger than Tracy's radio. Predictions of the future are notoriously worthless. The only one who ever predicted anything was George Orwell, but he was predicting the sociology of politics, not technology.
Call me a stick in the mud, but I'd prefer to see that kind of money go toward curing things like Alzheimer's, AIDS and cancer first. Then we can start the party train.
