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Room temp Superconductors, along with fusion, would affect the economy profoundly. What the exact effect on rent would be is hard to predict but under the "pos
by dekhn 3y ago
Room temp Superconductors, along with fusion, would affect the economy profoundly. What the exact effect on rent would be is hard to predict but under the "post-scarcity society" mental construct, having infinite energy at zero cost (amortized) would presumably make the price of housing change.
- consilient 3y agoRoom temperature superconductors would not give us zero-cost energy any time soon. Even if one had a high enough critical current to be used in transmission lines (which is not a given), transmission losses are under 10% in modern grids.
- Dan_Sylveste 3y ago> transmission losses are under 10% in modern grids Modern grids are designed to keep those losses down. If the losses weren't a factor the grids would be designed differently. Very differently. As in, North Africa would be so full of solar panels the generating fields would be visible from space.
- maleldil 3y agoHow would room temperature superconductors lead to a post-scarcity society?
- dekhn 3y agomakes it easy to deliver power from huge centralized fusion reactors to the edge. It is neither sufficient, nor necessary, but could be a useful thing to have.
- tsimionescu 3y agoThe point is that room temperature superconductors only matter if they have several other properties - they have to be ductile (easy to mold into wires), have good material resistance, maintain their superconductivity under high enough currents, and be cheap enough to produce. A ceramic room-temperature superconductor, like LK-99 would have been, is not a promising material at all, since it's extremely costly to make wires out of it. And even if we found a way to do so, it might not have mattered at all if it only worked for the very low currents/voltages in the original tests.
- dekhn 3y agoI was talking about a hypothetical RTSC that was amenable to industrial scale, not LK-99. Even so, merely knowing that RTSC with poor properties existed, would lead to massive search of the nearby (and other) spaces for better properties. See the history of glass optimization- hundreds of years of poking around with terrible quality glass, then a revolution during the Schott era, to modern day Gorilla Glass. Or silicon- the initial transistor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Replica-of-first-transistor.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Replica-of-first-transist...) was not something you could shove into a missile, that took 15 years to develop. To today's modern ICs which approach the atomic limits of semiconductor manufacturing. The hope is that the initial RTSCs will follow a similar path, obvious there no guarantee
- tsimionescu 3y agoStill, if LK-99 had turned out to be an RTSC, that wouldn't necessarily take us any closer to an industrial-grade RTSC. It could just as well be a false lead, an interesting material with some niche applications that would remain more of a curiosity than anything. RTSCs are not like cold fusion - as far as we know, they should be possible, so finding one would not upend science in some huge way. If the ones we find don't also happen to have all the other interesting properties we need, then they may never have any significant impact at all. This is what seems to be missed. If LK-99 had been an RTSC, it should still not have been major news outside materials science research, since it wouldn't have had any direct impact on the economy, nor any predictable pathway to one. Some other future discovery, if it ever happened, would have been the one that actually mattered. That potential future discovery may have built on the current work, but whether it would be 1 year down the line or 10 or 100 or never would not be knowable.
- dekhn 3y agoIt's like you're arguing with somebody different from me, who said something entirely different from what I said, while also agreeing with my unstated premise, and conditional language.