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Whats the coolest thing you can imagine that will be possible by Room Temperature Superconductors?
by rspoerri 3y ago
Whats the coolest thing you can imagine that will be possible by Room Temperature Superconductors?
- neom 3y agoThe changes in imaging technology would be interesting. Personally, I'd love an at-home fMRI.
- dist-epoch 3y agoAnti-gravity toys.
- vlovich123 3y agoA freezer that uses almost no energy :D. But there’s lots of applications - computers that are orders of magnitude faster and use way less energy, maglev trains that are orders of magnitude cheaper. Think about how as electronics got cheaper they permeated nearly every aspect to the point that cheapo $20 gadgets probably have a simple microcontroller instead of an analog circuit. Room temperature semiconductors would be a material science breakthrough that would permeate every aspect of our lives within ~40 tears similar to how semiconductors did in the 1960s (assuming we got better and cheaper at manufacturing it at scale which would be the next challenge after confirmation). That being said, I think it’s something we should remain hyper skeptical about as a prior because of the low likelihood and how difficult it is to verify superconductance (because the samples are so small they have to use roundabout techniques to establish it like the Meisner effect that can be confused with other properties because measuring 0 resistance itself is even harder and more error prone).
- rspoerri 3y agois heat exchange greatly improved by superconductors?
- vlovich123 3y agoWell partly it was trying to make a joke on the “cool” phrasing from the parent, but yes potentially: https://phys.org/news/2019-06-superconducting-quantum-refrigerator.html https://phys.org/news/2019-06-superconducting-quantum-refrig...
- tuatoru 3y ago"40 tears" is a nice typo, although it's more likely to be gigatears than individual ones. Much wailing.
- jesuslop 3y agoI wonder if RTS enables large scale quantum computing
- 0x000xca0xfe 3y agoSuper powerful tiny motors. Would be great for robotics and drones.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoGlobal HVDC transmission network, moving power around the globe on a dime.
- tuatoru 3y agoSaving five percent (US) to thirty percent (generic less-developed country) of generated power in T&D losses. There isn't any obviously-orders-of-magnitude-better application for room-temp-and-pressure superconductors apart from MRI scanners, and those aren't things that the average person would use every day, or even every week, even if they came in cereal boxes.
- Alpha3031 3y agoIf they came in cereal boxes I wonder if it could help improve noninvasive BCI to the point of usability.
- nextweek2 3y agoA ceramic would make a crappy wire. Being flexible is a useful feature for long distances. What you save in transmission loss ends up on maintenance of an expensive brittle material.
- throwup238 3y agoMagnetohydrodynamic energy storage for terrestrial power networks and space based propulsion.