Human cargo

I've been thinking about travelling recently. It can be kind of a hassle with the waiting around at the airport, security checks, baggage and so on. The main thing is just how much it takes away from your day. Even a trip of a few hours can basically eat up all your time once you take all the incidental stuff into account.

One thing that's always made me feel like I'm cheating the system is overnight travel. Many international train services in Europe, for example, offer an overnight sleeper option. If you play your cards right, all the wasted travel time happens while you'd be asleep anyway, so you basically get it for free. Of course, you still have to be awake for all the incidental stuff, which makes this system much more compelling for rail than air travel because of the lesser security requirements.

I'm wondering if you could go even further with this idea and have a kind of door-to-door human cargo service. You order a little pod, like one of those Japanese capsule hotels, to act as kind of personal shipping container. You load your stuff into it, get in and go to bed. During the night, the pod is loaded onto a vehicle which takes it to an airport or train station where it is carried on to its destination. From your perspective, you go to sleep in one place, wake up in another, and all the logistics are taken care of for you.

There are some pretty large open questions, particularly around security and what happens if you need to leave your pod. The nice thing about each passenger being isolated is that you wouldn't need to do carry-on security checks, and checked baggage could be in a special compartment so it can be screened while you're alseep without disturbing you. Maybe you could have some isolation system so that if there's a common area like a bathroom then only one passenger is allowed out at a time to use it.

There'd also be a pretty hard limit around journey length. Obviously if the total time is more than 8 hours, this system becomes a lot less attractive. Still, the idea of getting your travel time for free seems so compelling that it'd be worth investigating. For many situations you might even be able to replace long-haul flights with a series of short-term pod jumps.