711–720 of 821 posts
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We'll use them to build spacecraft that retrieve asteroids so rich in gold that it permanently crashes the price of gold? People don't seem to realize how radically society will change if this superconductor thing is legit.
How does room temperature superconductivity lead to the feasibility of asteroid mining? Could you please explain?
You wouldn't had believed it if I had told you a month ago.
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It would be sub-10%* gold content. We're talking about gold doping, specifically substitution in the Pb(1) site, not an alloy. ETA: I was off by an order of magnitude (originally I said sub-1%) because the doping is extensive, and the mass of the lead/gold is a dominant fraction of the total. The formula given in the paper is (subscripts in brackets): Pb[10−x]Cu[x](PO4)[6]O with 0.9 Similarly for Au we would have Pb[…
7.44% gold? That's ~$75 per oz of material. And you're talking about lead cable. Its kind of heavy, even if its thin. And it seems really easy to melt and separate. Notably, most power lines are actually aluminum, which is probably where people would really want this. Also chosen for its low weight / density, cause if you're gonna hang lines 100's of feet long, you want 2700 kg/m3, not 9000 kg/m3, and definitely not…
Perhaps assume an aluminum cladding for strength? Depending on how strong of a superconductor it is perhaps it's only 1% superconductor and 99% aluminum on top of the 10% content. So 0.1%?
I dunno, all these metals will be valuable in the future. Just saying, there's another large factor in estimating the gold content (conductivity saturation) that we don't know what it might be.
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breakthroughs since fire more important than the transistor probably include cooking, agriculture, the wheel, metallurgy, glass, ceramics, the heat engine, mechanisms in general (with things like pulleys, hydraulics, screws, and gears), construction cement (originally lime), math, writing, optics, electricity, chemistry (including things like distillation, the atomic theory, and recrystallization), plumbing, carpentr…
Don't forget: Soap/handwashing, antibiotics, the smallpox vaccine, the Haber-Bosch process, blood transfusion, anesthetic and PCR!
time will tell
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There's no need to wait for flying skateboards, you can buy a regular skateboard at any shop around town and crash and get killed by using it. (Said in jest by someone who recently turned 41 and hurt his back playing video games last year)
I remember the feeling, while skateboarding, of the change of the roughness of the ground - some streets (or at least portions thereof) were very smooth and that felt already quite like flying => I wonder how that would feel with 0 surface roughness :) >hurt his back playing video games last year Some extreme force-feedback device? :)
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paper recycling is profitable without any subsidies at all, and people do sometimes steal paper to recycle it here in argentina there are tens of thousands of people who make a living by recycling, sorting through whatever trash they can get access to in order to find materials with enough resale value to scrape by. they haul plastic sacks or two-wheeled carts all over the metropolitan area, stacking them high with r…
I don't understand how your comment implies a lack of subsidy, it only states that the people harvesting the material can make money off of it. Which would be true if it was subsidized, too.
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we already know how to stop climate change: actually stop burning shit and deploy existing technologies quickly. the problem is lack of will, not lack of technology. corollary: anyone trying to say we need fancy new technologies like fusion/superconductores/supercapacitors isn't actually very interested in stopping climate change.
Nuclear fusion would be quite handy. That's near limitless electricity from minimal input, with mostly safe failure modes and no nasty emissions. Decent superconductors might enable, less lossy power transmission across distance, Maglev at scale, or perhaps initially, lower power consuming, small devices - every little helps. I do agree with you though - that lot ain't any good right now. Don't allow yet more license…
I believe they call this thing “harnessing the power of the sun”. I’m mildly sceptical about the safety of it’s failure modes.
Not to say I don’t still want it, but…
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>This won't replace metal layers in CPU for a really long time. Superconductors are hard enough to make, CPUs are absurdly hard to make, and the wins on power savings aren't very large. If people make superconducting chips, it will be ones where the superconductors do active switching, what is much farther away and can enable much faster CPUs too. I would've thought the main wins would've been reduced heat generation…
> I would've thought the main wins would've been reduced heat generation. Most of the heat in a data center is coming from power burned in the devices themselves not the power transmission to those devices. Sort of like how a space heater is hot at the heater portion, not the power cable going into the heater. You aren't losing more than a W or so to transmission for every kW of power delivered. (in fact, you are gen…
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Nuclear fusion would be quite handy. That's near limitless electricity from minimal input, with mostly safe failure modes and no nasty emissions. Decent superconductors might enable, less lossy power transmission across distance, Maglev at scale, or perhaps initially, lower power consuming, small devices - every little helps. I do agree with you though - that lot ain't any good right now. Don't allow yet more license…
> mostly safe failure modes I believe they call this thing “harnessing the power of the sun”. I’m mildly sceptical about the safety of it’s failure modes. Not to say I don’t still want it, but…
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what are the practicalities of storing enormous magnetic fields and then collapsing them to draw power? that seems...not obviously a good idea.
Well, exactly. While there is a way of getting some of the stored energy as an controlled power, most of the failure modes of such a thing leads to uncontrolled release of the stored energy, manifested by the whole thing just somewhat instantaneously turning into very hot gas.