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I get the idea of superconductivity at room temperature in theory. But I don't have enough knowledge to understand in real terms, how will the world change if t
by nocoder 3y ago
I get the idea of superconductivity at room temperature in theory. But I don't have enough knowledge to understand in real terms, how will the world change if this is true?
- chii 3y agoFor one, lossless storage of electricity.
- dgoldstein0 3y agoI think you mean lossless transmission? If we can actually replace transmission lines effectively with it, unclear whether it's practical for that yet.
- heisenzombie 3y agoAlso energy storage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_energy_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_energ...
- dgoldstein0 3y agoNeat, I hadn't heard of it, but totally makes sense
- jacquesm 3y agoThat's how superconductivity was demonstrated in the early days: a current in a loop that didn't decay.
- Sporktacular 3y agoBoth. There are coil based ideas for storage.
- bawolff 3y agoEveryone talking about all sorts of important applications. All i want is a maglev hot wheels track using flux pinning. Just imagine all the cool toys a room temp semiconductor would enable.
- macinjosh 3y agofull of lead, haha!
- birdiesanders 3y agoI feel like lead in toys is worth a comeback, the "simpler times" people pine for were because lead. I joke, of course.
- marvin 3y agoBreaking the sound barrier in your five-year-old’s bedroom seems like a dodgy business idea.
- brodouevencode 3y agoSo you say. He's on board with it.
- jacquesm 3y agoMy youngest would be all over that. I'm already concerned about the windows the way things are right now.
- anonuser123456 3y agoYou know all those bird scooters people leave lying around cluttering up the sidewalk? With a room temperature superconductor they will become hover scooters cluttering up the sidewalk! And all of the high voltage transmission lines we want to build but can’t because of permitting reasons would have zero energy loss if we actually built them, which we won’t.
- HeartStrings 3y agoIs this actually true?
- p1mrx 3y agoWe would first need to build a superconducting track for the hover scooters (containing magnets) to ride on. Assuming we ever figure out how to mass produce the superconductor inexpensively. Perhaps if the track were arranged in a grid-like pattern, the scooter could use superconducting electromagnets to accelerate and steer.
- depereo 3y agoIf it's a room temperature superconductor there's probably 10% US GDP available annually to figure out the manufacturing considerations.
- kijin 3y agoI would actually welcome scooters that only work on specialized tracks. Walking safely on the sidewalk will become as easy as staying away from those tracks.
- j13n 3y agoEuropean cities found that shared space between pedestrians and vehicles reduced speeds and increased safety. Carving up public spaces into those that are safe and those that can trivially injure or kill ruins the outdoors for so many.
- Keyframe 3y agoAlmost instant battery charging for example.
- appplication 3y agoDo you mean replacement of chemical batteries for superconducting ones?
- drtgh 3y agoif he means that, I do not see it happening so easily, Energy storage in a superconductor is done in the form of magnetic field, a superconducting induction coil (SMES), whose density of energy storage per kilogram is highly inferior to a capacitor and a supercapacitor, which stores energy in the form electric fields, and whose density of energy storage per Kg in turn is very inferior to chemical batteries. The magnetic fields are charged and released quicker in inductors than in capacitors (and than in chemical batteries), also the material have a longer life, and the rate of self-discharge is sightly inferior in superconducting inductors, nevertheless the density per kilogram -and to administrate such sudden energy release- limits very much the applications. If LK99 becomes true, and is improved much (as the electrical current in the paper is limited to milliamperes range), at middle term I don't think on it happening. If at future is achieved superconducting through nanowires, with inferior weight to batteries, may be, but in a car for example would need the added weight of metallic "magnetic shields" for health security. IMHO, I don't see it beyond stationary applications.
- appplication 3y agoThis is consistent with my understanding as well. I don’t see instant battery charge being something that this enables. Current battery charge rates are limited by battery structure degrading more rapidly at high charge/discharge rates, so this wouldn’t really have any direct effect.
- musha68k 3y agoIf feasible and indeed not as expensive to produce these materials, high potential for: - higher efficiency turbines and solar panels - more clean energy for the same investment - fusion? - low-energy computing at higher performance, as we learned recently LLMs so far can't take advantage of hitherto zero marginal cost of software anymore - democratization of advanced quantum computing? It's all very exciting and in a truly replicable and industrially-feasible scenario I'm starting to feel this could be another 1960s kind of rate of change. One can dream, no? Maybe we can finally get rid of all the doom & gloom stories we tell ourselves and actually do something with these unexpected presents of our times? Think smartness instead of ignorance, (old) Star Trek instead of the latest Fallout fantasy on the horizon? Why not? These and many more consequential innovations might develop just in time, as climate change is coming at us much faster than we are willing to admit (don't look up). That said, even with all of that (including fusion) we will still need to cut our co2 emissions; drastically change our lifestyles / minimize consumption and deal with already locked in impacts hitting us sooner than later. Enthusiastic midnight edit: Also what's up with graphene based ICs and optical computing advancements? Competition of new old ideas finally come to be realized? What's next? I want a new breed of superconductor enabled Lisp Machines by 2030! Why not home brew "3D print" the whole thing? That should be the ultimate target here! The handling of "open source" lead would probably suck though %D. I guess Alan Kay wouldn't be enthused by such a Lisp Machine renaissance in principle yet still stand with his "the best way to predict the future is to invent it" credo. Let's predict a future for a planet that shifts back into balance!
- dumpsterlid 3y ago[dead]
- themagician 3y agoRailguns. Everywhere.
- dumdumchan 3y agoNukes. everywhere.
- mcpackieh 3y agoI'm thinking coil guns instead. Room temperature superconductors don't solve the rail erosion issue with railguns, but I think should greatly increase the performance of coil guns. My thinking is that zero resistance through the projectile itself and through the rails would help, but you still need to make an electrical connection between the projectile and the rails. Either this is done with a plasma arc or physical contact, but either of these causes erosion of the rails even if there is no electrical resistance through the rails or projectiles. Am I missing something?
- fennecfoxy 3y agoCoil guns seem like they'd last longer, wonder what the performance figures for coil vs rail are. For future rail guns, they'd just have replacement rails available as they do barrels for tanks/artillery guns (that wear out after about 1000 shots afaik).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- leptons 3y agoIt means we won't lose MRIs when the earth finally runs out of helium as they require liquid helium to run the superconductors that generate the magnetic field. We're running out of helium with no way to replenish it. Helium is the only element on the periodic table which is a non-renewable resource on Earth. So MRIs will get much cheaper, and they could end up being as cheap as taking an x-ray today.
- fennecfoxy 3y agoI suppose you could count elements like gold, too. Since we technically can produce extremely radioactive gold in small amounts but the cost is so prohibitive it would never make sense to. In a thousand years people are gonna look back at us idiots filling balloons with helium and letting them disperse into the upper atmosphere and shake their heads at how stupid we were.
- cthalupa 3y agoBased on our current data LK99 isn't a replacement for helium cooled superconductors for the same reason YBCO and similar aren't - critical current/critical magnetic field aren't in the right ranges for what we need out of MRI machines. I do think it's too early to say one way or the other what all of this ends up looking like, so we might find that purer/larger samples have better properties than what was measured so far, or the discovery puts us on the trail of other RTAPS in the same class that might be better for these purposes.
- leptons 3y agoI never claimed LK99 had the properties needed for MRIs, the question I was answering was "how will the world change with room temperature superconductors", and my answer is valid in the context of the question.
- cthalupa 3y agoCorrection: YBCO and other REBCO can get up to the needed magnetic field strength, other issues are the reasons it's not a good candidate for MRI machines - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5472374/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5472374/ (Too late for me to edit)
- hwillis 3y agoYou can't get CT scans very often, because they hit you with large doses of ionizing radiation. Ultrasounds are low-resolution spotlights; you shine them at a particular spot to diagnose something specific. With this you could get an MRI at your annual checkup. You could diagnose all number of diseases like that, not to mention 95% of cancers. Each year your scan is automatically compared to the previous year, and any sudden changes in morphology can be biopsied. The learning would be revolutionary for medical science as well- right now we have so little data on what kinds of benign growths people have that our best method for figuring out if a mass is a problem is asking if there are any other symptoms. Not to mention entirely new kinds of medical devices would be possible, eg using SQUIDs. Ground-imaging MRI would also be revolutionized. Archeology, paleontology, geology, mapping resources and finding minerals would experience a quantum leap. You would be able to drive a car through the desert and spot fossils or faults or mineral signatures. Space travel would become essentially free with the use of launch loops. Which would also make long-distance travel incredibly cheap and practically pollution-free. You would need electricity alone to reach low earth orbit, or to accelerate planes to multiples of the speed of sound. Grid-level storage, peaker plants and load-following would become nearly obsolete. Superconducting catenaries would connect every nation on earth. Normally plants have to turn off when everyone goes to sleep; now factories in China can be powered by US fission. Canadian homes could be kept warm by Australian solar. HVDC interlinks would be obsolete. We might eventually transition away from AC power entirely. CPUs could be anywhere from 10% to 50% more efficient. GPUs even more so. Fires, particularly house fires would become less common as wires simply stop conducting when they are overloaded.
- XorNot 3y ago> We might eventually transition away from AC power entirely. This is actually a really good point I hadn't fully considered, but it's right: the primary reason we use high voltage anywhere is because it minimizes resistive losses (and the reason we use AC is because it's easy to transform between voltages). But most of the stuff in my home doesn't need high voltage - it's all running at 5V or 12V. Or it's a motor which is magnetically driven and depends solely on magnetic field strength (which is independent of voltage). If all your conductors have zero resistance, then high voltage is obsolete. You could safely run a residential property on 12V power. Home electrical hazards would a thing of the past.
- perlgeek 3y agoI don't think anybody can really say for now, but if the price of it comes down enough, there are two rough categories of things that can happen: * devices that currently use superconductors don't have to use cooling anymore, and so become much cheaper to build and operate (MRI machines, certain sensors, high-power magnets for things like fusion research, big generators, big motors). This is a pretty solid bet. * devices where superconductors would be an improvement, but currently don't make economic or practical sense. These are almost certain to crop up, but which ones will pan out is IMHO very speculative. In the latter category, things like computing chips, more sensors, certain art works (sculptures with permanently levitating parts, how awesome!), smaller motors and generators seem plausible. But there is likely whole categories of things we haven't thought of that could benefit from either zero resistance or rejecting magnetic fields.
- nocoder 3y agoThanks everyone for the responses. Really appreciate the community for explaining!