You have 1000 kilograms of clean, fresh water in a single IBC container in Sydney at the Opera house. You will be paid 1 million dollars if you can deliver it to Los Angeles McArthur Park within 3 weeks, or 21 days, or 504 hours. You can split the water into as many containers as you want, and the IBC doesn’t need to make it to LA, just the water inside. If you deliver 2000 bottles each containing 500ml of undiluted, clean, fresh water, or like, 99% of it to account for evaporation and some spillage, that counts as a win. You can assume that any partial water deliveries that remain in Sydney or arrive in LA won’t be stolen in your absence so you don’t need to hire guards. There are no consequences for failing, but if you do fail or succeed, any money you spend on the project, you don’t get refunded. Normal consequences for breaking laws apply.
How do you do it, or do you even bother trying?
You can ship 1 ton/1m3 of cargo via any international air freight company to the other side of the world for less than 10,000 dollars.
(Source: I’ve done it plenty of times)
A day for pickup and transport to the airport in Sydney, 24 hours for actual transit, a day in customs in LA, a day for a truck to deliver it to that location. 5 business days to get that IBC to your destination in LA, tops.
a day in customs in LA,
It might take a bit longer, since this is a pretty weird cargo with an even weirder story behind it.
Still, you should be able to clear it well within the states time
1000L of water is literally nothing on a global logistics scale.
Single transportable tank would hold more than enough. (A fuel truck, for example can hold up to about 45,000L)
Stick it on a freight aircraft overnight.
Chill for 20 days and line up how I’m gonna spend my easy money.
Is this some silly AI training question? 1000kg is the weight of 10 humans with some luggage for each of them, so transporting it by plane shouldn’t cost drastically more than 10 passenger airfares. I mean come on. Plus you have to move it around by truck before and after the plane flight. Again no biggie. Clearing customs, who knows.
Yeah, this seems really odd. Today’s shipping industry is worth trillions, fully globalised, and pretty much bookable online. The biggest hurdle is paperwork, and has been for a while.
Like some others have said standard air freight costs are significantly under that 1M, and take hardly any time compared to 3 weeks.
This is a “problem” that might be worth millions to solve in the 1700s, but it’s been long solved.
IBC tank holds roughly 1000 liters, costs almost nothing and can fit on a truck.
Even at 300 (over paying) you are on your way.
That falls into the regular shipping realm. Any shipping company can handle that.
To make it challenging we could say that you’re not allowed to use the internet, only phone calls.
Make it more challenging and say that you cant use a shipping company of any kind.
Fed Ex it. It doesn’t cost a million dollars to air mail a metric ton of water. I’ll have it there in 3 days.
Any global freight company could do that. Probably don’t even have to pay extra for express delivery to make it in time.
I’m pretty sure you could charter a cargo plane that can carry more than a tonne for a lot less than a million.
I know there is a nostupidquestions comm but is there a reallyfuckingstupidquestion comm?
1.000.000$? Just book a private flight. 1.000.000$ is “call the airline” kind of money. Call FedEx or something.
The smallest cargo planes can carry twice what you want in weight.
I’d call GAC or Pentagon (No, not that pentagon) and book the shipping. They’re the ones we use at work for these things, as well as larger stuff, and they’re pretty fast and costs a lot less that that kind of money.
While they organize the physical shipping, I’d call my logistical superhero of a coworker so we can get all the customs stuff out of the way and processed before arrival.
Once we had to ship four 20ft containers around the world fast, and we ended up booking (via GAC, iirc) an An124. I’ve been promised that next time we do so, I get to go along.
Isn’t this… how futures and even regular trading works?
In the simplest form, you sell the water in Sydney, buy in Los Angeles with contract criteria specifying what “clean, fresh water” is to you, done.
I give someone 10k to do it for me. He can keep the rest of the 10k.
I wait a little and get a million.
Do I get a million for every metric tonne of water transferred?
It’s 12006km from Sydney to Los Angeles as the bird flies. Garden hose is ~$2/m. I’d break even after 25 metric tonnes.
A garden hose is about 2cm in diameter, you’re gonna need a pretty massive pump to get any flow rate to speak of through that hose. I’ll be back with numbers for you ;)
The hose itself would require 3.77 million litres to fill. But after that! Profit!
At standard domestic pressure (3.5bar), we’d expect 60 litres per minute through that hose. Just filling the hose would take 52 days.
I may have missed something, but I got a substantially longer time, with a lot higher pressure.
I’ve been a bit busy at work, but I’ll deliver on my promise of numbers :D
I’ve used the Darcy-Weisbach equation for the pressure drop / flow rate relationship, and assumed
- We have laminar flow in the hose (which is reasonable)
- You’re delivering water at 1 bar (can’t go below that without suction on the receiving side)
- Viscosity of water: 1.0518 mPa s
- Viscosity of air: 18.03 micro Pa s
- Your hose is indestructible, and can therefore tolerate arbitrarily large pressures.
- You have the pump ready at day 0, and the hose is already stretched out at day 0.
The biggest pumps I could find (1, 2, 3) can deliver water at 400 MPa, with pretty high flow rates (much larger than what we can support with our hose). We’re talking about pumps that draw on the order of 1 MW of power.
We start pumping water into the air-filled hose at 4 000 bar on day 0.
After two days, the water front has moved about 1000 km along the hose. Flow rate is at about 1.2 L/s, and pressure at the water front is at a solid 450 bar. This is looking good.
After one week, the water front has moved about 2000 km along the hose. Flow rate is now at about 0.6 L/s, and pressure at the water front has fallen to 200 bar. You begin to worry.
After two weeks, the water front is now at 3100 km. Flow rate has further fallen to 0.4 L/s, and pressure is at 150 bar. The pressure on you to deliver is substantially higher.
After three weeks, water has been pumped 3900 km, and is moving at a speed of 1.15 m/s. Pressure at the water front is around 100 bar. The guys that loaned you money for the massive pump and indestructible hose are lurking around your house.
About 100 days later, the first water starts flowing out of the hose in LA at a flow rate of about 0.5 L/s. It would take you about half an hour to fill the 1000 L tank at this rate. Too bad the tank was impounded by the guys that loaned you the pump and indestructible hose. You have gone into hiding.
Is this for a Smokie and The Bandit reboot?
Instead of trucks lining up over a valley it’ll be cargo ships over the entire ocean.
