He’s playing with his new middle age crisis toy. Cars and spaceships got boring.
fearout
joined 2 years ago
Not really. If that turns out to be true (nothing is guaranteed yet), the processes described are pretty straightforward and don’t require any super-advanced tech to be reproduced. Full-scale production could be rolled out in mere years. That would become beneficial for stuff like MRIs or electric cars as soon as production starts.
After that, my guess would be that some large-scale energy infrastructure projects, for example, could be completed in about a decade.
Locking social norms at some predetermined stage is a great way to curb all progress. Like, slavery was a social norm at some point.
Just wanted to comment that your cover image is great and on point :)
Texas charges prisoners for water? What the fuck, how is this even remotely legal?
Looks like a non-native speaker misread the title and jumped straight to some weird conclusions from there.
Long-distance energy transfer without energy loss will make it possible to connect more energy grids and sources together, so stuff like the saharan desert providing solar power to Europe, for example, suddenly becomes feasible. Maglev trains will no longer require lots of power to run, since they could utilize superconductor magnetic levitation. You could make super-efficient processors that wouldn’t really heat up at all. Superconductors are also key to quantum computers, so expect lots of advancements in that field as well. They will also make it much easier to build and run fusion power experiments.
Lots of tech in general would benefit from this discovery, stuff like MRIs, electric vehicles, space telescopes or particle accelerators would become way more efficient, cheaper and easier to produce.
Edit: also, check out this video by Isaac Arthur for some more sci-fi examples of what this tech can be used for in the future (discussed in the second half). It’s more space-colonization-focused and kinda like a thought experiment, but interesting nonetheless.
Reposting my comment from another thread to add a bit of context in case anyone’s curious.
So I read the paper, and here’s a tldr about how their material apparently gains its properties.
It is hypothesized that superconductivity properties emerge from very specific strains induced in the material. Hence why most of the discovered superconductors require either to be cooled down to very low temperatures, or to be under high pressures. Both shrink the material.
What this paper claims is that they have achieved a similar effect chemically by replacing some lead ions with copper ions, which are a bit smaller (87 pm for Cu vs 133 pm for Pb). This shrinks the material by 0.48%, and that added strain induces superconductivity. This is why it apparently works at room temperature — you no longer need high pressures or extreme cold to create the needed deformation.
Can’t really comment on how actually feasible or long-lasting this effect is, but it looks surprisingly promising. At least as a starting point for future experiments. Can’t wait for other labs’ reproduction attempts. If it turns out to be true, this is an extremely important and world-changing discovery.
Yeah, it’s definitely very rare. I can’t seem to find that article right now, but I remember reading that these events account for something like 0.1–0.3% of all wildfires. So while insignificant as an actual cause in general, with 100k+ wildfires happening each year it means that a couple of hundreds per year should still be caused by those. Which is still like one every 1-2 days on average.
Not enough to be a noticeable threat, but enough to cause a pedantic comment mentioning those as existing :)
Oh I bet there are several labs that are already on it :)
So I read the paper. Here’s a tldr about how their material apparently gains its properties.
It is hypothesized that superconductivity properties emerge from very specific strains induced in the material. Hence why most of the discovered superconductors require either to be cooled down to very low temperatures, or to be under high pressure. Both shrink the material.
What this paper claims is that they have achieved a similar effect chemically by replacing some lead ions with copper ions, which are a bit smaller (87 pm for Cu vs 133 pm for Pb). This shrinks the material by 0.48%, and that added strain induces superconductivity. This is why it apparently works at room temperature — you no longer need high pressures or extreme cold to create the needed deformation.
Can’t really comment on how actually feasible or long-lasting this effect is, but it looks surprisingly promising. At least as a starting point for future experiments. Can’t wait for other labs’ reproduction attempts. If it turns out to be true, this is an extremely important and world-changing discovery.
You still need a magnet-superconductor pair for quantum locking and magnetic levitation. This is called the Meissner effect and it seems like it has been confirmed for this material. Here’s a video showing an example of such a system.
Before, the best way to scale this up might’ve been to make permanent magnet rails and run a superconductor train along those rails, but that would have been totally infeasible and inapplicable in real life, since building rails out of permanent magnets is expensive and dangerous, and the train would need to house a really large superconductor chilled to liquid nitrogen temperatures. You couldn’t have built a track out of superconductors irl because good luck keeping those at the temperatures required for superconductivity to kick in.
If this material turns out to actually work as claimed and to be producible at scale, you can switch those and make an electromagnetic train that travels along superconductor tracks. Which is way easier, cheaper and much more doable in general.
But the earth’s magnetic field is extremely weak, and even the tiniest pieces of superconductors are unable to lock with it. So no, it does not allow for trackless levitation.
But a cool new train system design becomes possible though!