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?

Comments

Perspective, people, perspective

[ShooterNeo]

By the standards of the physical universe, "room temperature" is pretty arbitrary. For a spacecraft, keeping superconductors cold is reasonably easy.

Re:Perspective, people, perspective

[GreenTech11]

While you're correct in the second half of your comment, you are ignoring the very good reasons that are driving our search for a room-temperature superconductor. Without doing the calculations, I very much doubt that there is enough fuel on Earth to lift the entire population into a near-Earth orbit, not to mention the massive amounts of infrastructure required to keep them there, (and breathing).

Therefore, a superconductor which would allow us to eliminate the massive amounts of wastage in our electrical infrastructure is certainly useful. Conveniently, most of Earth is at a "room temperature" or similar, making it a far less arbitrary concept. In terms of effect on everyday life, I like to think that in the long run it'll be beneficial, hopefully removing some of the lack of resources which drives most conflicts. Of course, most of human history is against me on that one, technological leaps like these tend to trigger conflicts in the short term, before providing net benefit to the populations, hopefully we survive the next one.

Re:Perspective, people, perspective

[virg_mattes]

The idea that the superconductor won't be adding to the thermal load is all well and good, but it doesn't cope with the problem of heat that comes in from solar radiation or heat generated by other parts of the ship like engines. Furthermore, it becomes a self-reinforcing problem, because being unable to dissipate heat makes the superconductor stop superconducting, which only adds to the problem.

Virg

Re:Perspective, people, perspective

[NEDHead]

While these facts may be true on the surface (I haven't actually checked), what you are missing is that most energy production is relatively local, and hence generating capacity is built & run to deal with local maximal demand. Truly efficient long, long distance transmission lines would allow distant capacity to be factored in to the system. Think wind, solar, day vs night etc. There is currently a project (Tres Amigos) designed around a superconducting hub to connect the three major energy networks in the US. In addition there are (at least) plans for several other superconducting trunks, including one to link a number of off shore wind projects. The net efficiency gains for the system as a whole would far exceed the 3-7% mentioned above.

That said, I am partial to local production, as finely grained as possible, to cover the baseline requirements and minimize the opportunity for system-wide failures.

Re:Perspective, people, perspective

[Iamthecheese]

That 7% is transmission loss only. Now consider using it in computing to prevent waste heat from being generated. In radio transmitters for better efficiency. In house wiring. In appliances. In cars. In electric cars. Now you're talking about at least a 50% boost. And that's before you consider using it in electric motors and generators.

the answer

[Tom]

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.

Re:the answer

[TheRaven64]

You can't predict everything, but you can predict some things. Before the Internet, people could look at networks and think that it would be possible to replace mail order shops and newspapers with a network connection, for example. It's a small leap to go from board games to imagining a machine that could sit in your living room and let you play any board game you wanted on a screen. It's a bigger leap to go from that to the kinds of computer game we have available today.

There are some very obvious applications for room-temperature superconductors, if they could be made cheap enough. The most obvious is long power lines. For example, a moderate sized solar power plant in the middle of the Sahara desert could provide Europe with most of the power that it needs quite easily, but the transmission losses make it unfeasible. With a superconducting power line, it would be just as cheap as local solar power. Taking this a step further, you could have a power ring going all around the world so that there would always be sun shining somewhere and feeding in power. This would cause quite massive changes to the economics of power generation and distribution.

Another obvious place is in transportation. Maglev trains can run very efficiently now, but with room temperature superconductors the cost of building the track would be much lower (you could use electromagnets that would permanently keep their charge and wouldn't require cooling).

Basically, anything that uses magnets or relies on power distribution would suddenly become massively more efficient. More importantly, perhaps, a lot of things that currently use ball bearings and other anti-friction devices could be modified to use electromagnets instead.

It's also worth remembering that superconductors are not just free of electrical resistance, they also have a constant temperature along their lengths. This would make them perfect for anything involving heat redistribution, if they could maintain their superconducting property up to around 350-400 Kelvin. For example, you could easily make a small fanless computer if you could cote the whole of the outside in a layer of superconductor with a pad touching the top of the CPU - the entire case would be a heat sink, and the CPU would never get hotter than the case. House heating systems would be similarly simplified. Rather than having a boiler that heated water and then pumped it through radiators, your radiators could just be coated in a superconducting material with superconducting wires leading into the boiler. As you heated up the end in the boiler, you'd heat up all of the radiators. More efficient and also simpler to build. Not to mention being easier to extend - you could add another radiator by just running a wire from an existing one...

Re:the answer

[TornCityVenz]

If history teaches us anything, The first use would somehow be related to Porn.

Re:the answer

[khallow]

The prediction was that we'd get cheap solar power from the Sahara. Won't happen.

I certainly won't get cheap solar power from the Sahara, but that's because I live in the US. Europe is a different story and they're already starting prototype plants.

And apparently there are corporations powerful enough to prevent the future. For reference, see content industry.

Trying is not the same as succeeding. For example, Cnut the Great tried to command the tide (coincidentally, to show to his subjects the ephemeral power of kings, a point relevant to our discussion today) and we wouldn't claim that he succeeded just because he made an attempt. Similarly, we wouldn't claim that the "content industry" has succeeded in "preventing the future" merely because they've tried legal ploys to maintain their business models.

There are some interesting applications

[Sique]

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.