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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?
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...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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