New York calling - How fast can you get here from London?

Imagine living in London and commuting every morning to your office in New York in under an hour. No, we're not talking about telecommuting or even a virtual office, but instead a transatlantic tunnel. It's still in the conceptual stages, but the idea is spreading faster than pictures of Britney Spears flashing "Happy Land."

Transatlantic Tunnel?The Discovery Channel has been teasing us for a while now with their step by step feature of the Transatlantic channels' engineering.

It's called extreme engineering because it involves a supersonic train that operates 150 feet under the Atlantic and travels at 5,000 mph. The proposed tunnel is 215 times longer than current tunnels and would cost 3,000 times as much. Here's a short list of what it would take to make:

• 1 billion tones of steel - the combined world output of all steel mills in the world for one year
• $12 trillion dollars
• A full century to complete

The first 2 points on the list don't trouble me - it's only money and I know this would be a money maker. The last one's a downer though. At that rate even my grandchildren would be lucky to ride it.

Still, the idea of a transatlantic channel is ridiculously seductive. Think how it would change the way we travel. Remember how the Information Highway shrank the world? This kind of travel would open up exploration in way that even Buck Rogers couldn't have imagined.

Enjoy this YouTube video of the impossible dream. It's the closest we're going to get to a transatlantic tunnel in our lifetime.