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Ask Slashdot: How Would Room-Temp Superconductors Affect Us?
Bananatree3 writes "While we have sci-fi visions of room temperature superconductors like in the movie Avatar, the question still remains: How would the discovery of a such a material impact our everyday lives? How would the nature of warfare change? How would the global economy react? What are the cultural pros and cons of such a technological shift?" And just as important, in what contexts would you want to see it first employed?
By the standards of the physical universe, "room temperature" is pretty arbitrary. For a spacecraft, keeping superconductors cold is reasonably easy.
I could levitate my dinner plate, replacing the need for cushions on my sofa.
That is where I want room-temperature superconductors first of all.
100% computational efficiency, 0% heat release, no fans/ventilators/etc, almost completely quite computer (except for rotational HDDs and PSUs).
The most realistic answer, but not the one you want to hear, is: Nobody really knows.
If history teaches us one thing than it is that we are horrible at predicting the outcomes of anything major. In hindsight, we can "explain" things, but our predictions suck so badly, it's a surprise we haven't given up on the subject. And that's for both experts and non-experts.
Nobody came even close to predicting the impact of computers. Or electricity. People didn't think WW1 would become the slaughterhouse it did. There are refugees around the globe who are living in "temporary" shelters, waiting to return home because the conflict will surely be over any day now. Some of them have been waiting for a decade and more.
The real impact of this technology, as most, will most likely not be anything that anyone today predicts, but something that someone in the future comes up with that nobody thought of before. That includes the inventors. I don't think Graham Bell ever thought that "please turn off your mobile phones" would be a screen shown in these newfangled movie theatres that just came about in his time.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Warfare? Who'd go to war when they had a hoverboard at home?
Better porn. What else is technology for?
SMES.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Can't we just assume that current applications of superconductors would become more portable and smaller?
Not necessarily more prevalent or cheaper though. No one said room temperature superconductivity would be cheap.
Assuming that it goes high enough, power disturbation. It's enough of a savings that every decade or so people talk about using current generation superconductors for it, need for cryogenic cooling and all.
Then making a lot of stuff that uses current superconductors cheaper, like MRI machines and particle accelerators.
Sure, I bet that there will be _plenty_ of new stuff, but I'm less convinced that anyone is going to be able to predict what that will be all that well.
The first use will be warfare as is always the case sadly. You'll probably first see rail- and coil-guns show up. Next you'll find its uses in radars and specifically in trying to make them useless. Then it will proceed into gimmicks for rich people. After that it'll go to civil scientists (space exploration, particle accelerators, ...) and maybe a few years later into people's houses. Somewhere in between all of that somebody might find a use for it in medicine (other than improving your standard NMRI).
replace the string between two tin cans with a room-temperature superconductor and you'd have excellent clarity of sound between my sons room and the kids next door, even when the 'string' isn't taut. That's what I'd like to see first.
OLED monitor floating in midair. pen floating in midair. FLUX PIN ALL THE THINGS
And how about replacing rare earth metals used as magnets?
Depending on who discovers it, it might make us take a good hard look at the patent system when the patent holders start screwing over everyone who wants to do anything with it. Especially if the material can be manufactured relatively cheaply and a major part of the cost is the right to manufacture it.
Even more interesting would be if it was discovered in China or some other country with a (perceived?) history of disregard for foreign IP.
The technology itself will probably be interesting too.
And how about replacing rare earth metals used as magnets?
Superconductor electro-magnets are not permanent ones - the moment you tap into their stored field, it decays.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
I don't think it would, because of your assumption.
Affordable or not, at some point you have to do a cost/value trade-off and it will be a LONG time after they become technically affordable before they give you a manufacturing tradeoff that's *worth* throwing away the 40p fan we use at the moment.
Like SSD's - been around for YEARS, but still not viable for everything, or even close to it.
All the initial applications will have something to do with high-frequency trading.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Well, we currently only lose about 6-7% of the electric energy we generate to transmission losses. So, superconducting transmission lines are unlikely to be earth shattering. Someone else posted a link to SMES -- these are superconducting energy storage devices. If those become cheap and plentiful, then we might blunt the distinction between "peak" and "offpeak" electricity use, allowing us to size powerplants more moderately.
If the material could work in place of aluminum or copper in a semiconductor, it might help cut down the amount of power your PC sucks out of the wall.
But, in general, I wouldn't expect anything dramatic. A lot of things would just get "a little more efficient."
Program Intellivision!
http://skepticsplay.blogspot.com.au/2012/01/superconductors-picture-of-progress.html
For those wondering, the highest critical temperature as of 2012 is 135K. Room temperature is about 300K. So no, unobtanium hasn't been discovered yet.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
It is about producing it in large enough quantity and cheap enough to deploy it. Even than, I expect that changes would be slow and minor, not anything earth-shattering. Why always these stupid fake "visions" where one thing has tremendous impact? The world does not work that way.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Wouldn't it allow far more efficient ways of storing and retrieving electricity ? It would make alternative power sources (sun, wind) far more attractive.
Maglevs comes to mind - you only once load the magnets along the track, and then they will keep the magnetic field forever.
Imagine roadrails along the interstates which keep the cars on track. Also the hover car will suddenly be feasible - as soon as the car moves forward, induction will load the magnets inside the car and let it hover along the supra conducting magnets in the road. You can see the effect already today at some science shows where they have supraconducting maglevs. Zero friction against the track, just air friction left. One can imagine subways with supracontucting tracks, which work with air pressure along the tubes.
Super strong magnets can be build, which you once load with electricity and which then keep the magnetism forever. Construction could get rid of glue and screws, just put the elements together, load the magnets once, and they will keep everything in shape. You could lock your house with magnetic bars, which once locked, keep tight until you unload the electricity from the bars and they open again.
You could store electricity in giant coils instead of chemical cells, making loading and unloading the electricity much faster, and enabling lots of non-constant electricity creators like windwheels and solar panels to work within a giant grid and finally overcome the problem of the electric base load.
The US currently loses about 6.5% of the power generated to transmission losses. If we developed a material capable of being used for transmission lines (i.e. super conductive at >60 C and malleable enough to be made into wires) we would gain that back promptly which would also reduce our carbon emissions. It would become far more economically viable to build large scale solar and wind power farms in the central areas of the USA (further from the large population centers) as one would not be losing as much to transmission losses.
If the semiconductor has a high flux density quench then we could make a small toroidial coil and dump a large current into it. The stored power could then be extracted by magnetic coupling using a coil wrapped around it.
There's a down side though if you can store large amounts of power. If you break the circuit the power will need to go somewhere and you get a large explosion. It would make a good bomb, EMP weapon, replacement for gun powder (rail gun anyone?), car battery, etc. (I'm using this in my up coming MMO)
If you can store really large amounts of power then why bother with small power plants? Take your town battery to Niagra Falls, charge it up, then truck it back. No more power distribution grid problems and power loss over long haul lines.
- I've got bad karma because I won't parrot everyone else's opinion
Well, we would need plenty of cheap electricity to power all those super superconducting super devices. I guess the DOA Superconducting Super Collider might have a second chance.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
storage: if there is no loss, can you make a ring of superconductor material, and start feeding dc power into that ring letting it spin around and around the hoop... feeding it more and more... then letting it sit till you need it, at which point you tap in and pull it out... theoretically this ring could hold a HELL of a lot of electricity.
transfer... most of the power from an electrical generation station, nuclear, hydro, coal, whatever... is lost in the wires getting it to where its needed... if the wiring had no loss, our current infrastructure would have at least twice the power available to do work.
Well, Red Wine Consumption would go through the roof!
Great, until thos damn puppeteers devise a virus to unexpectadly turn them into dust Then all or our floating buildings will come crashing down around us. Thats gonna suck.
Low loss energy transfer from solar power plants in Sahara desert to Europe, which will allow Europe to abandon fossil fuels.
Hoverboard !
Most people think of superconductors as merely a "perfectly efficient" conductor. While this is true, it just scratches the surface of what's possible with superconductors. Using superconductors just to improve efficiency wouldn't be that big a deal by itself. It would improve battery life a little bit, and maybe drop bulk electricity transmission overheads, but not by much, and certainly not immediately. Making most superconductors into high-tensile wire is a non-trivial exercise, even if cooling isn't a problem -- and it will be! Just because a material is discovered that can conduct at "room" temperature isn't helpful for wire outdoors in direct sunlight, or in a hot environment inside high-temperature machinery. Last but not least, superconductors have current and magnetic field limits that increase as they are cooled past the transition temperature. A superconductor with a transition temperature of 26C would probably have only a few limited applications above 20C.
The other uses are more interesting, and often more amenable to thermal control:
The Meissner_effect provides magnetic shielding, which is useful for all sorts of things, like amplifiers, or for protecting sensitive electronics. This is also what causes magnets to levitate above Type 2 superconductors. I assume that a room-temperature superconductor would be Type 2, so levitation would likely be possible.
The London moment could be used in gyroscopes and the like.
Josephson junctions provide all sorts of functions, like ultra-sensitive magnetic field sensors (think hard-drives and MRIs).
Still, all of that is a bit... meh. I mean sure, you get less noise in your now ultra-sensitive amplifier, and electricity will cost 10% less than it would have otherwise in 30 years. Is this life changing? Probably not really.
A much more interesting potential application than all of those combined is Rapid Single Flux Quantum digital circuitry. That stuff makes silicon look like vacuum tubes. Think 100GHz+, self-clocking, 1000x as efficient as CMOS, and manufacturable now, with only the cooling requirement the big down-side. If RSFQ could be made to work at room-temperature (or even near it), you could be looking at a sudden massive leap forward in computer power like never before. For example, with a power draw 1000x lower, it would be possible to stack every chip in a typical computer into a little "cube", with much shorter wire lengths, and hence, latencies. We can't do this now, because that cube would literally melt in seconds form the heat.
The reality-check of all this is that many MRI machines are still cooled by liquid helium, even though superconductors that work at liquid nitrogen temperatures have been available for a while. This tells you a lot about the limitations that might restrict the application of even a hypothetical room-temperature superconductor. For example, ultra-sensitive sensors and RSFQ may not work at all, because the tiny signal quanta may be swamped by the background thermal noise. Similarly, manufacturability of wire and maximum magnetic field strength is a key requirement for a lot of applications, like MRIs and electric motors.
Personally, I suspect that the first room-temperature superconductor will be initially manufacturable in bulk only as a thin-film, so expect the first decade or two to be mostly about improved circuitry and sensors more than anything else. This might be closer than people think. For example, there's a harmless quack who claims to have achieved superconductivity at 28C by manufacturing extremely complex copper-based crystals as a thin layer between two different traditional copper-based superconductors. Assuming for a second that he's onto something, it gives you an idea
It's rather tough to predict the impact of room temperature semi-conductors without knowing a lot more about the specifics of the technology.
For example, is the material suitable for long-haul power lines? Does it have the tensile strength to be deployed as multi-kilometer wiring? If it is, we can expect to see a dramatic improvement in the efficiency of power distribution, resulting in delays in the deployment of new power plants because the old ones would suddenly be delivering 10-20% more power to the home/business instead of losing it in the wiring.
Is the material suitable for fine wiring? If so, we may see some marginal improvements in the power drain of general electrical and electronic equipment.
No matter what happens in this field, we can expect that the military will be the first to apply the technology. They're really the only ones with the budget to become "early adopters" of such a shift in technology, other than research prototypes coming out of the likes of IBM.
All in all, though, I really wouldn't expect a very dramatic shift in power systems, though. Efficiency is great, but it rarely is an earth-shattering improvement.
Improving the efficiency of transmission doesn't change the speed of transmission, so it really wouldn't affect the raw computing horsepower of machines, just their power consumption. It's not like anyone has been talking about any superconductors that could replace the metal wiring layers on VLSI chips -- having a material and being able to vapour deposit or lithograph the material are two dramatically different technologies, and it could be decades after the discovery of the material before someone comes up with a practical way to use it on the microscopic scale of chips.
Personally I'm more interested in some of the "light switch" technologies that are being experimented with, because those technologies could change the fundamental physics of computing far more dramatically than reducing power consumption would.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Now without air.
"And just as important, in what contexts would you want to see it first employed?"
1) It will be too expensive to use commercially for the first ten years
2) As the price comes down it will appear in boutique products that filter down from the filthy rich to the merely well-off
3) Once the price hits a certain point it will appear in every day products and energy consumption will drop.
a) Energy costs will then skyrocket
b) The feds will mandate an updating of the "grid"
c) Trillions in taxes will go into adding this material to power lines
4) The cost of the material will rise once more and stabilize, bringing wealth to everyone who is already wealthy and nothing will change for the rest of us
So far, the history of man has shown that major new techs are typically used to kill people before they are adapted into more civilian uses
it would be world-changing, without a shadow of doubt. imagine having transatlantic cables the thickness of the present internet fibreoptic cables that distributed terawatts of power as well as information. it would not need to be high voltage, so there would be no risk of arcing.
now imagine those cables running across the world's deserts, to a massive array of solar collectors.
now imagine those cables running to deep ocean temperature-differential power stations (water 1 mile down is 3-4 centigrade lower temperature: you can get about 100 megawatts out of that).
now imagine those power generators - distributed across the world so that they continuously generated power - connected into that world-wide, world-accessible power distribution grid.
you basically would never have the problem of running out of electricity, ever. it's not to say that people in african countries would not try to shimmy up the telegraph poles with crocodile clips in order to try to filch off some power, so you'd have to take that into account and provide them with easy-to-access power sockets at ground level in order to make it unnecessary for them to try to plug themselves into what would be effectively an infinite current sink that could turn them into ash within milliseconds if they tried leeching it, but apart from that little problem you'd basically be able to solve the world's power needs at very little cost per human.
While it can be hard/impossible to predict how they will effect us in the long term, I think it is quite easy to predict what will happen in the short term.
First, if we do get room temperature superconductors working at a reasonably useful scale, they will be expensive. The first batch of any new technology is expensive because: 1) Manufacturing capacity is still being built. 2) Recovering research costs. 3) Little in the way of competition.
So any use of these superconductors will have to 1) Be used by people with large budgets. 2) Be used by people willing to take risks with unproven technology. 3) Have the technical skill and know how to actually make use of room temperature superconductors. So who fits the bill? Same people as always: 1) Military, 2) Scientific Research, 3) Very large corporations (ie. typically the ones who can get massive government contracts.).
Military: I can think of a few applications: Replacing catapults on aircraft carriers. Rail guns (massive current creates a lot of head in the wiring, not just the rails). Electronic warfare (ie. high powered radar/jammers, miniaturization). Active stealth with powerful magnets.
Scientific community: Atom smashers like the LHC could become much much cheaper if they didn't need to cool the superconductor magnets. Same thing for fusion reactors. Anything using a lot of current: ie. lasers, plasma physics, etc.
Large corporations: Power transmission lines. Those big DC super high voltage lines would be good candidates. Power substations near large power stations (especially nuclear). Maglev trains, industrial flywheels, exotic electric sports cars, aircraft (to cut down on cabling weight), industrial batteries, anything in space.
The key point is that there are many, many uses for room temperature superconductors before they get cheap enough to use in consumer goods. This is one of the technologies that can be immediately applied all over the place.
Quantum locking!!!!!!!
Well, first we'd build Warhammer 40K power suits. Then the copper industry would attempt to sue the superconductor industry out of existence.
Then we'd paste the copper industry with the aforementioned power suits. Possibly whilst wielding sledgehammers.
In superconducting transmission lines, AC still sees impedance. It's only DC that sees zero impedance. An interesting question might be whether or not superconducting t-lines would push enough benefits in the DC direction for us to see DC t-lines.
I would want to say "maybe at the highest voltage levels but not for the lines running right into your house".
(IANAE yet.)
We tend to think of superconductors primarily as infrastructure for transmission of electricity. But think about how it can be used to *store* energy! I'd really like to see an analysis in this direction - how much energy can be stored in a coil, and what would be some problems with it.
Workable high-temperature (i.e. room-temperature) superconductors would make magnetic fusion reactors (tokamaks) a lot cheaper. This is one of the things that would be a game-changer for fusion.
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
If it won't facilitate flying cars by the year 2020, I'm not interested.
For the sufficiently clueless, even trivial applications of common sense are indistinguishable from wisdom
If things are ideal you can use it to store large amounts of energy indefinitely
If the critical field strength is so high that it is a practical energy storage device then building a far smaller version of the Large Hadron Collider would be possible. At the moment the LHC is limited by the largest _reliable_ magnetic field strength we can create. If we can replace those with magnets 100 times more powerful which do not need liquid helium cooling then we could shrink the ring from 27km round to 270m round - or increase the energy of the LHC by an order of magnitude or so.
Could you imagine? You'd have to collect all that condensed air...
...we'd sure stop giving a shit about what happens in the middle east, south america and a variety of other places. All countries full of poor people would be treated pretty much the way we treat most African nations...cant name them, couldnt find them on a map, dont care about what happens in them.
I think it'd be a most wonderful thing. We'd probably meddle in others affairs a lot less.
The DC to DC conversions inside portable electronic devices would get a lot better. All the circuits inside the devices would be more efficient. It might enable some kind of better battery technology also. Room temp superconductor is not going to be able to be produced on a large scale at low price anytime soon after discovery, so transmission lines are the last thing on the list to get made.
to see some room-temperature semiconductors in the future. keeping the quantum computer in the living room has been a tough job lately. Ive found that while the couch and the area rug dont mind hovering below absolute-zero, the cats certainly dont appreciate it very much.
Good people go to bed earlier.
You people go on that any power system that achieves "perpetuum mobile" (never refer to it in English, you won't sound smart) and has to be modeled as an open system is absolutely impossible. You then site a law of thermodynamics that doesn't apply and isn't true in an open system. Windmills are okay, though. And so are photovoltaics. But you say there is no other fundamental asymmetry in our universe that would provide energy into an open system. We understand the origin of matter, electromagnetism, etc. so well that we know for a fact that all has been discovered, etc. You all think that any power system claiming to somehow extract power from a gradient in space-time itself should be dismissed as impossible without a second thought.
Yet, none of you have a problem with room temperature (23 degrees C) superconduction? Please tell me what scientific principle allows for it.
I guess as long as the pseudo science has been covered in your favorite sci-fi story, then it's possible. Otherwise, it's preposterous for you to even consider it.
Storage is not generation, fool.
If you use reversible logic blocks you can still run non-reversible algorithms...as i understand it you could reverse it on the CPU that ran it forwards, but when you write the result to permanent storage or put it out on the network you throw out the extra information (wasting some energy) and it becomes no longer reversible.
Skynet Clippy on M$ Office RTSC edition, for a RTSC PC?! *shudder*
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
First Maglev tranis would be an obvious aplication Then Accelerators and maybe fusion power and thisd annd last railguns
For starters, they'll cost a fortune, which will make them not very widely deployed. Slowly, the Chinese will make them cheaper and cheaper, meaning more and more people will be able to afford them. Then there will be a tipping point, where Apple sticks their logo on superconductors and sells it to the hamsters... I mean masses. By this time, they will be so "normal" that no one will notice that a transition has happened. You know... like any other kind of technology out there.
Not a big impact to everyday life, not much to write sci-fi over. I think the biggest change is that the old Sahara Mass Solar Power idea could become viable.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The practical considerations for applications it ends up in depend tremendously on how much it costs. If this room temperature supercondictor costs more than the current cryogenic cooling of a conventional superconductor, because it's made from a super exotic material or requires a prohibitively expensive process to manufacture, it's not likely to displace it from most current applications, let alone get into many new ones. Of course that still depends on the price difference; If they're comparable you'll see some change over. Power companies would love it, but if the conductor costs significantly more than the percentage of power they are losing to resistive heating in a given section, it won't get changed. Chip applications may be a notable exception if it's not terribly expensive, but they have the additional consideration of manufacturing: if it can't be laid down on silicon in a process that is compatible with the current lithography, they are almost certainly going to stay in a niche market for a long time even if the bulk material is dirt cheap.
So folks can do the Glass half full thing and figure out places where it can be used, but without an answer to "How much does it cost" there is no way to predict the paramount information of where it *will* be used.
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.
Not only could we transfer energy at little loss, we could store it indefinitely with no loss. This would solve a good portion of our energy concerns, like we could harvest energy from unreliable sources (like wind) without the need to have generators running for redundancy. We could also harvest energy from places which provide a lot but nowhere near the demand (like wind) and transfer it without much loss. The most effective technology we have in storing energy right now is a dam, we pump up water at slow times and drain it at peak times, kinda old-fashioned if you ask me!
Rather than waiting on the material science advances of the coming decades, why don't we put some nuclear reactors out in the ocean, hydrocrack the sea water using high pressure electrolysis, and then pipe this liquid hydrogen & surprlus electricity back to the coast lines using insulated pipelines loaded with magnesium diboride (MgB2) low temperature superconductor?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnesium_diboride
Who cares if a reactor goes Chernobyl or Fukushima out in international waters in an ocean already chock-full of uranium?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#Recovery_from_seawater
By submerging the reactor core in a nitrogen filled bubble in the great depths of the ocean, the ambient pressure makes confinement a trivial task, with the 75ATM of a boiling water reactor being only 750 meters from the surface. This serves a dual purpose of making the high pressure electrolysis safer, and reducing the pressure differential required to maintain liquid hydrogen at it's critical temperature.
All of the above points enhance reactor safety and reduce construction costs exponentially. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square-cube_law)
The economic motive for building these at the equator would translate to existing infrastructure for space launch platforms to be built closer to the equator than Cape Canaveral.
http://quicklaunchinc.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1IXYsDdPvbo
Using liquid metal reactors could reduce the operational oversight due to their inherent safety:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_metal_cooled_reactor
Google has an autonomous car. I've been in a nuclear reactor operating room. These reactors could be dropped in the ocean like boat anchors and would need no oversight to speak of. If the consequences and probability of a meltdown are non-existent, you could have a teenager at the surface playing video games in a fishing boat with a big red button labeled "SCRAM".
Duh. The very first application is a non-technical one: the skateboard. It will change the world.
But storage is a critical component to a diverse power grid that includes opportunistic generation/collection, so yes, this would help green energy, as well as energy efficiency in general. Which is wy people already make money doing it.
Someone had to do it.
Levitating bearings in all forms of transform
Levitating high-speed trains
Cables for charging electric cars
Cabling within electric cars
Motors within electric cars (eliminating the cost of cooling)
Domestic and industrial induction hobs
Stylish electric heating units (big induction hobs)
Cheaper, smaller and more accessible medical imaging devices (MRI scanners)
Electric shielding for audio equipment
maybe also efficient radio antenna and iPhones that have good reception without compromising style?
Tank armour that slows incoming projectiles before they impact?
magnetic railguns on gunships to reduce maintenance costs of the guns versus explosives.
Viewed as simply a low resistance wire, you are using them as a winding, and going back to the basic excitiation motor/generator design just with a much lower excitation winding resistance (just that of the junction.) So yes, that constitutes "replacing the rare earth magnets" which are basically used as a replacement for excitation coils in the first place. Really their application depends on the field strength they can maintain. Were it high enough to eliminate the need for ferromagnetic cores, the improvements could be pretty drastic.
If they were cheap and durable enough there would be a good market for superconductors in motor/generator setups (there already are such motorsin large scale application using high temperature superconductors where the cooling is affordable) and levitative bearing applications, however, we're just as likely to discover low-rare-earth formulations for PMs as we are room temperature superconductors.
Someone had to do it.
The first applications will be price dependent. If the superconductor is really expensive (and I suspect it will be at least initially) then you need high value applications that use relatively little material (like MRI machines). While long distance electrical lines to wind farms in Kansas and solar power plants in the desert would be cool they probably won't be cost effective. Similarly, motors in cars: probably not tremendously cost effective, but I'd bet electrically powered military drones will use them in their motors.
You don't count the existence of Troma Studios to be a major impact? How could we have TromaVision without nuclear power?!?!?!?
It's my Constitutional right to be able to bare rail guns, so I don't want to hear about it from all you pinko-commies.
If this means I have to keep my room temperature at 98kelvin, I am dead set against it.
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
Steady drop of copper prices, if the provided superconductor is cheaper.
Room-temperature semiconductors would enable the construction of at-home MEG systems, which would quickly become a far more interesting and powerful technology to construct a brain-machine interface with than an EEG. The only problem is, you'd need to wear a Faraday cage around your head...
With room temp super conductors the reduced i^2-r heat is nice.
But copper is pretty cheap. That room temp super conductor would have to have quite a low price tag on it to replace copper transmission lines. So I doubt electrical-$ losses would drive users to adopt it.
There are situations where the i^2-r heat makes choices for you. Being liberated from those decisions, is most likely the place where you would see i^2-r loss elimination decisions. CPUs and other compact electronics comes to mind.
But, that is just an incremental change. A few more Ghz on your processor at best.
The thing that is REALLY novel about super-conductors is the Meisiner effect.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meissner_effect
Imagine a floating table.
Imagine a floating bed.
Imagine a floating car lift at a service station. turn the heater on, it drops to the ground, drive the car onto it, pour cold water on it, and up the car goes.
If they don't need power hungry refrigeration, they are useful as"
- Nearly 100% efficient storage batteries
- Protection against ionizing radiation
- A really good regenerative braking system, maybe no engine needed.
- High speed vehicle suspension system, like maglev trains and cars
- Railguns
- If they can sustain high Tesla fields they might be good for armor against metal shrapnel
- Ion drive space ship engines
- Lossless spinning reserve power generation
- Better sound reproduction using magnetostriction drivers
- Research into magnetic monopoles
- Magnetic refrigerators using magnetic hysteresis effects - extremely efficient
- Plasma torches
- Your turn to be creative
As much as I liked avatar, the site this took me said that unobtainium was first used in avatar. this is actually false. it was used in a movie called "The Core".
Also it is an engineering term used since at least the 1950's.
Puppeteers
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"