The rehearsal for Mars that's happening under Nashville
What does Elon Musk’s Music City tunnel have to do with civilizational collapse, Martian colonization, and technocratic control? Everything, unfortunately.
On the surface, the announcement seemed almost forgettable. Last week, the state of Tennessee quietly agreed to lease a downtown parking lot in Nashville to a private company for a new transportation project.
That’s the boring version — lowercase ‘b.’
Now here’s the Boring version — capital ‘B’:
Nashville Selected by The Boring Company for Underground Loop Project
Tennessee and The Boring Company Unveil the Music City Loop: A Zero-Emissions High-Speed Transit System Connecting Downtown Nashville to the Airport. Construction Expected to Begin Fall 2025 | Initial Legs Operational as soon as Q4 2026. Zero Taxpayer Dollars (or Funds) | Built to the NFPA-130 Safety Standard
Nashville, TN - The State of Tennessee and The Boring Company today announced their intent to partner on a transformative new private transportation project that will bring The Boring Company’s innovative Loop system to Nashville, marking a bold step forward in advancing mobility, economic growth, and infrastructure modernization across the region. Loop is an all-electric, zero-emissions, high-speed underground transit system owned and operated by the Boring Company in which passengers are transported directly to their destination. The system will meet or exceed the stringent National Fire Protection Association (NFPA-130) fire and life standard.
This announcement officially kicks off a public process to evaluate potential routes, engage community stakeholders, and finalize plans for the project’s initial 10-mile phase. The Music City Loop will connect downtown and the Convention Center to Nashville International Airport with a transit time of approximately 8 minutes - using underground tunnels beneath state-owned roadways.
Following approvals through this process, construction will begin immediately, with the first segment of the Loop system expected to be operational as soon as Spring 2026.
“Tennessee continues to lead the way in finding creative solutions to longstanding challenges,” said Governor Bill Lee. “By leveraging the innovation of private companies like The Boring Company, we’re exploring possibilities we couldn’t achieve on our own as a state. This potential partnership represents the kind of forward-thinking, fiscally responsible approach that will define the future of transportation in Tennessee.
With that press release, Elon Musk’s tunneling venture officially planted a flag in Middle Tennessee. The plan is for a 10-mile underground “loop” to whisk riders in Teslas from downtown to the airport in eight minutes or less, similar to one currently being built in Las Vegas.
The Tennessee plan was hatched with no public vote and no formal input from the city of Nashville. Just a handshake deal between the governor’s office and Musk’s company, giving them a decades-long lease on a publicly-owned subterranean corridor.
It’s all being framed as a gift to the good people of Nashville: a privately funded, tech-forward solution to urban congestion, promising zero emissions, zero cost to taxpayers, and bragging rights to futuristic infrastructure.
But this is Collapse Life, so of course we have questions. Because, if you read the fine print, trace the playbook, and look beneath the surface (no pun intended) you’ll find this isn’t just any tunnel. It’s ostensibly something much larger: a live demonstration of how power is shifting from public institutions to private empires, from democratic planning to corporate sovereignty, and — quite possibly — from Earth to other planets.
The first and perhaps most troubling question: why Nashville? Certainly not for its geological friendliness. In fact, Nashville is quite the opposite — a city built on fractured limestone, known for water-sensitive soil and sinkholes. Even the CEO of the Boring Company, Steve Davis, admitted as such at last week’s announcement event:
Tough place to tunnel, in Nashville. If we were optimizing for easiest places to tunnel, it would not be here. You have extremely hard rock, like way harder than it should be. It's an engineering problem that's fairly straightforward to solve, but very hard rock and then a very variable distance to top of rock. It's not like the rock is at the same distance. You go 500 feet and the rock is at a completely different place. But we'll work through that.
So here’s a company that is self-funding the construction of a tunnel in a politically convenient but technically hostile environment. Sounds like a strange business plan.
According to Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, the project is “100% privately funded” — financing will be shouldered entirely by The Boring Company and its private partners, with no tax dollars or public subsidies involved. The state will lease the underground land to The Boring Company at no cost for the next 50 years, but the company itself is responsible for all construction, equipment, and operating expenses.
What company would do that? And why?
In many ways, the difficulty appears to be the point. What if the tunnel is not a civic amenity at all, but an outer space experiment — a Martian simulation disguised as local infrastructure? Musk has long been explicit about his extraterrestrial ambitions, declaring his desire to die on Mars (just "not on impact"). That vision demands a new kind of engineering, one capable of boring through rock on a planet with no atmosphere, no infrastructure, and lethal radiation.
The Nashville tunnel bears all the hallmarks of such a prototype. The Boring Company’s Prufrock machine was designed to operate in oxygen-free environments. Its modular construction, battery-powered systems, and narrow tunnel diameter aren’t optimized for urban convenience; they’re stress tests for future colonies. Success in Nashville — under real-world stress — would validate the company’s systems for far harsher conditions elsewhere.
A tunnel without a vote
The plan for the Music City Loop didn't go to ballot. There was no referendum and no public planning sessions. Local officials weren’t even briefed before the announcement. That’s not just unusual — it's revealing. The project is being executed via state-level authority, with permits granted swiftly and largely out of public view.
This mirrors a growing trend in tech-led infrastructure: projects pitched as innovation while bypassing traditional democratic channels. There’s an emerging template here:
Leverage the aura of innovation to secure public land and goodwill
Offer vague benefits in lieu of detailed scrutiny
Avoid regulatory burden by operating outside traditional transit frameworks
Treat public input as after-the-fact PR, not planning
Musk’s loop project in Las Vegas followed a similar script. So did plans for one in Fort Lauderdale, and an aborted Chicago express tunnel. No public transit agencies or labor unions were involved. No accountability was offered to riders or taxpayers. Just a sleek promise of faster, cleaner, smarter movement — one that consistently underdelivers on capacity and overdelivers on spectacle.
It took Boring one year to dig 1.7 miles for two tunnels connecting parts of the Las Vegas convention center. At that rate, it could take 40 years to complete the entire 68-mile system and 104 stations it eventually promises to build in Sin City.
Who pays the price?
The promise to Nashville is “zero taxpayer dollars.” But that’s a sleight of hand. The land is public. The permits are public. Emergency response planning, traffic rerouting, and potential damage to Nashville’s aging water systems will all demand public resources.
Hard rock means more vibration, more noise, and more disruption. And yet, there is no transparent remediation plan, cost disclosures, or competitive bidding process. Any overruns can be framed as R&D failures — valuable learning, written off against future Martian ventures.
This project is testing the limits of how far a private company can go before people start asking real questions. Can you dig under their homes without asking permission? Can you use their cities to stress-test extra-planetary technology? Can you frame it all as progress while avoiding any measurable obligation to the public?
Apparently, yes.
Because the point of this tunnel isn’t just to move bodies. It’s to move the Overton window — to make a future ruled by public-private partnerships acceptable and to condition people to see post-sovereign urban governance as not only inevitable, but desirable.
Maybe Elon Musk really will die on Mars one day. But here, in the fractured limestone beneath Nashville, the real groundwork is being laid — not just for the future of transportation, but for the quiet handover of power from public hands to private labs, one tunnel at a time.
Generally, as I understand it, a city decides on an infrastructure project and then puts out an RFP that companies can bid on. In this case it sounds like the company went looking for a city where THEY could pay for the privilege of building a tunnel. And better yet, they didn’t talk to the city managers at all. Nor engage in the well-accepted standard of public consultations. If you want to use public lands -- i.e. common wealth -- this is a minimum requirement.
What’s the downside? Zero accountability when things go wrong on a project that no one had input on and that will now require public funds to maintain, repair or remediate.
This is a complex and potentially untested process in this area with this geology. Personally, if I was a Nashvillian, I’d be displeased with my elected officials and I’d ask what accountability any of the actors have should things go pear shaped. None of those questions have been answered.
So there’s that.
I'm a lifelong Nashville resident with family history here since 1804. This came as a surprise to me and when the city was proposing a transit tunnel a couple of years ago I thought it was ridiculous but having it done at Boring company expense and not as part of a massive project that takes away lanes from our major streets changes my attitude.
Nashville had an extensive electric streetcar system long ago. It was lost after a shortsighted effort to make it compete with bus companies - since it needed tracks there could be only one streetcar company and the bus company lobbied for it to be broken up into neighborhood streetcar companies to make it "fair". Of course the suburban lines couldn't turn a profit so they rapidly failed, and without the suburban lines to feed it the urban company failed immediately thereafter. But the private bus companies couldn't turn a profit either so they rapidly failed as well leaving us with no private urban transit companies at all. Which may have been what big government types wanted all along. My cousin, a retired teacher, had her entire savings in Nashville Electric Railway stock, and she lost everything.
Our limestone is known for caves - there's a sealed one under my neighborhood. I wonder what the Boring Company will do with any caves it encounters.