Ask Slashdot: How Would Room-Temp Superconductors Affect Us? 262
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?
Perspective, people, perspective (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
From a human perspective I am rather fond of living at or around room temperature.
Re:Perspective, people, perspective (Score:5, Informative)
Not really: radiative emission is the only type of cooling you can get in space. Depending how much power you're bleeding off elsewhere on your ship, it could be quite difficult to keep things suitably cool. Especially considering that any part of your ship facing the sun is going to be picking up quite a high thermal load.
Re:Perspective, people, perspective (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Perspective, people, perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
Virg
Re:Perspective, people, perspective (Score:4, Interesting)
Shiny surfaces do not radiate heat well, they reflect heat. Dark surfaces radiate heat, the nature of light generated indicates the real surface area of an object at the molecular level.
The perverse reality is there is no real profitable way to use superconductors. Superconductors save energy, save costs hence as a technology it is to be bitterly opposed by the insanely rich and greedy.
Cheap energy is an anathema to greed. The cheaper the energy, the less psychopaths are able to exclude others from accessing the benefits. In psychopathic capitalism it is all about exclusion, owning beach front to deny others access to the beach, owning all sources of production to deny wealth to others and, owning politicians to deny others access to democracy. Ostentatious egotistic posing (driven by psychopathy and narcissism) only has impact when the majority are forced to live in poverty.
The first use of superconductors is in cheap energy, cheap energy is the enemy of psychopathic exclusivity, so what will happen?
Re:Perspective, people, perspective (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Perspective, people, perspective (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
"Therefore, a superconductor which would allow us to eliminate the massive amounts of wastage in our electrical infrastructure "
The wastage in the electric infrastructure, on a whole, is about 7% in the US. Speaking of long-distance transmission only, it's closer to 3%
There's not much to fix here, so unless the new superconductor is also free, I don't think you'd see the massive uptake people imagine.
The main upside would be size, not cost. Assuming it has higher current density, piping power into urban areas becomes easier.
Re:Perspective, people, perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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However if the critical current density and magnetic field density are high enough, you get a h
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Brushless motors can be already 97-98% efficient. Not much to gain there. ...
But transmitting the power from battery, to ESC (Electronic Speed Controller) and finally to motor can gain quite a bit. Currently in RC cars you use extremely fine and expensive wiring, yet they tend to burn out now and then as amperages have gone beyond 400A peaks
House wiring will gain some, but 240V is quite a high voltage.
Car wiring will benefit a lot, the losses are very significant at 12V DC.
but most of these will require hig
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Re:Perspective, people, perspective (Score:4, Interesting)
Motor efficiency would go way high as transducers become more effective, too. Add in transmission line efficiency, less loss from heat transfer, and should the material otherwise have little/no environmental impact, could add huge capacity and make mass transportation vastly more cost-effective through electrically-driven trains and transports overall.
The cost of manufacture of these superconductors and their overall lifecycle costs have to be known, too. Still, very nice to dream about.
Re:Perspective, people, perspective (Score:4, Interesting)
You need to have resistance in the actual bits that use the electricity to do something useful. The resistance is the electricity being converted into "useful."
What you don't need is resistance in all the wires that are carrying that electricity around - any resistance there is pure waste, generating heat. And the smaller the wires, the more electricity they waste, which is why processors get so hot.
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Put this into your "without doing the calculations" claptrap.
Just think for a moment. Ok, so there is not enough petroleum on the planet to put everyone into near earth orbit. But, that isn't the only way. ENERGY is what is needed. How might you get enough energy?
1. Massive solar arrays in space. These arrays could have more surface area than the planet, and generate electricity 24/7.
2. Thorium and Uranium Breeder Reactors
3. Covering the earth with solar panels
4. ??? Fusion???
The first 3 are solid,
Re:Perspective, people, perspective (Score:4, Informative)
Is it hell, space isn't cold, it is inert. I seriously wish people would stop thinking this.
The only way heat gets out of things in space is radiative or an infinitely small amount of conductive.
Direct sunlight on a person would burn them in space, likewise heating up metals and components.
Space is actually probably harder to cool things down in simply due to sunlight.
On earth it is pretty easy to have something in shadow and vented so that an incredible amount of heat is exchanged over to the flowing air.
In space, you can only rely on highly-resistant insulators and/or mirrors to get rid of heat unless you liquid cool things. (which is good too since you can then use that heat inside the ship)
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Not if they're in a room.
the answer (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Funny)
Well, obviously, like every other industrial advance in the last few hundred years, it will cause cows' milk to sour, the sun to stop rising and setting, and cancer.
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And it would be fattening.
On the bright side, if we can believe the Roadrunner cartoons, it should make satellite retrieval and anvil delivery fairly easy.
Re:the answer (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
No, superconductors are not thermally superconductive, just electrically. Niven made a mistake there.
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Pity. Is there an analogue (even theoretical) to electrical superconductors that would work along the lines that Niven described?
A superconductor of heat might be almost as significant a discovery as the electrical ones.
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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
Just remember, whatever you do, for god sakes don't touch that computer!! All of the heat in your hand would be sucked out instantly!!!
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"Niven made a mistake there."
Not necessarily. Room temperature superconductors will likely have to work on an entirely different principle to current superconductors. Room temperature superconductivity might well involve ordered behaviour in the phonons as well as the electrons.
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This is a typical technologist prediction. I predict, after watching our economy, that there will be SO much resistance from companies who are on one side powerful and on the other side the biggest losers from such developments that it won't happen, no matter how sensible it would be. Instead, we'll probably get the same kind of power plants of today with higher efficiency and people thinking it's great that we now waste less power on transportation.
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I predict, after watching our economy, that there will be SO much resistance from companies who are on one side powerful and on the other side the biggest losers from such developments that it won't happen, no matter how sensible it would be
What won't happen?
Instead, we'll probably get the same kind of power plants of today with higher efficiency and people thinking it's great that we now waste less power on transportation.
First, that's the prediction that was made. Second, those people would be right. We're not going to get radically different sorts of power plants because there aren't radically different sorts of power plants to get. They're almost all heat engines in the end.
And it would be great if we were using a lot less energy on transportation.
As to "powerful corporations", they haven't ever been powerful enough to prevent the future.
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The prediction was that we'd get cheap solar power from the Sahara. Won't happen.
And apparently there are corporations powerful enough to prevent the future. For reference, see content industry.
Re:the answer (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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You can't predict everything, but you can predict some things.
In common english, we call this guessing. And when we evaluate examples from the past, we almost always make several mistakes that lead us to believe that our past prediction performance was much better than it really was. Taleb calls that phenomenon "silent evidence", meaning that when we look back, we usually miss a lot of the errors that were made.
There is one and only one way to correctly evaluate predictions, and that is to keep a spotless record of all the predictions made. If you don't have that comp
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You just put two lines there, each with current in an oposite direction. The same way people do transimission lines today.
Re:the answer (Score:4, Insightful)
If history teaches us anything, The first use would somehow be related to Porn.
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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.
The reason that we haven't given up is that there is some value in the attempt. And you ignore scope. Predicting what's going to happen in 500 years isn't going to be remotely accurate, but predicting near future applications of superconductors (should they come out today) is not a vast, open-ended problem.
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Where's my hoverboard? (Score:3)
Ease the transition to a non fosil fuel energy gen (Score:2)
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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.
Horrible... (Score:4, Interesting)
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The highest selling application of this will end up in some sort of glowing cat with a pink ribbon sold to kids, that you have to press a button to feed all day.
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No batteries for kids toys. Yup. Thats probably the winning application.
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Indeed. We should give up agriculture because it allows the feeding of larger armies in a given area thus making warfare more devastating. (/sarcasm)
Any technology from wheels to teakettles to field effect transistors can be put to military or nonmilitary use. I'm not going to give up my coffee pot because the metallurgy that went into it also allows you to make effective firearms.
well (Score:4, Interesting)
patents (Score:2)
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.
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I don't know why a discovery grants an intellectual property right...
prediction (Score:2)
All the initial applications will have something to do with high-frequency trading.
Not all that much? (Score:2)
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, i
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Well, we currently only lose about 6-7% of the electric energy we generate to transmission losses.
6% of a trillion-dollar industry is "not all that much"?
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And in order to achieve that, it's necessary to keep it quite rare for any large amount of electricity to be transmitted for long distances. With room-temperature superconductors, it's possible for electricity generated anywhere in the world to be used anywhere in the world. That's gonna make for a big change.
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The reason we only lose 6-7% is because we don't build long powerlines, we simply put up with things being built in non-optimal places, and drop projects that have insufficient local demand.
If that constraint goes, we can stop having to put powerplants right next to steelworks and nuclear plants anywhere near population centres, and solar energy/windfarms/hydroelectrics become vastly more competitive, because it no longer matters that the Gobi Desert, the Himalayas and the bottom of Victoria Falls don't hav
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Floating trains and cheap access to orbit. Yup, nothing much would change. Not to mention all the things we haven't thought of yet.
Interesting link on history of Tc (Score:3)
http://skepticsplay.blogspot.com.au/2012/01/superconductors-picture-of-progress.html [blogspot.com.au]
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.
It is not about "having" it (Score:2)
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.
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There are some interesting applications (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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As you can see in this video [youtube.com], it works already with liquid nitrogen, much higher as helium cooled supra conduction.
More solar and wind power in the USA (Score:2)
"Would you like some Cold Fusion with your order?" (Score:2)
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.
Power storage, and power transfer. (Score:2)
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 wir
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one word..... (Score:2)
Hoverboard !
Well, to begin with... (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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 [wikipedia.org] could be used in gyroscopes and the like.
Josephson junctions [wikipedia.org] 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 [wikipedia.org] 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 [superconductors.org] 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
M$ Office, RTSC PC edition (Score:2)
Tough to predict (Score:3)
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.
Air hockey. (Score:2)
Unlimited range Power Distribution (Score:2)
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
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Cool visions, alas, physics is a bitch. Superconductors do not have limitless current capacities/cross sectional area, and the higher temperature ones tend to have lower limits.
Not saying we couldn't do it, but the cables don't need to be thin as a pencil.
For that matter, they don't need to work at room temperature, either. There are commercial application using liquid nitrogen cooled superconductors for hot spots in the power grid.
Easy (Score:2)
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
Fusion reactors (Score:2)
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.
It would make rooms a lot colder. (Score:2)
Could you imagine? You'd have to collect all that condensed air...
better portable device battery usage (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:3)
I'd have to answer your question with a question (Score:3)
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.
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I thought virtually all the loss in a modern processor (post mid-1980s) was reactive not resistive.
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Unfortunately, not, not for more recent definitions of modern. We lose a pretty fair amount of energy now through "insulators", or so I was told by a chip designer once. Ah, not quite insulators, but "off" MOSFETs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subthreshold_leakage [wikipedia.org]
So we don't need better conductors, we need better not-conductors.
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length shrinks proportionally with the cross sectional area so nothing changes
All other things being equal, no it doesn't. The cross sectional area is two dimensional, whereas the length is one dimensional. This is really basic stuff. If you need an illustrative example, consider a bar with a square cross section. We will set the length of our example bar to ten times its other edges. We'll call the length of the cross-sectional square's edges n. So, the cross sectional area will be n^2 and the length will be 10n for any given n.
For n=10, cross section is 100 and length is 100 so rat
Re:CPUs/GPUs/SOCs/etc (Score:5, Informative)
100% computational efficiency, 0% heat release
You can't do that. Any non-reversible computation causes an increase in entropy, and reversible computation is not particularly practical. Achieving practical reversible computation would be a leap at least as large as room temperature superconductors.
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Reversible computing is not that hard, you just have to use reversible operations. You will need an instruction to throw away data though to be Turing complete though, but at least it would make the non-reversible instruction very clear.
Almost all math operation can be written as a reversible operation by make the operation produce a result and remainder.
A + B : ADDSUB(A,B) => (A+B, A-B)
A * B: MULMOD(A,B) => (A*B, A # B)
etc.
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Of course we are so far away from the kT limit per bit that we don't really need it either. At least for a very long while.
actually not a problem (Score:3)
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.
Re:CPUs/GPUs/SOCs/etc (Score:4, Interesting)
This is an active area of research because at the quantum level everything is reversable. If the hardware implementation difficulties of quantum computers ever get solved, we need to have both theories and "practical" languages to handle it. (By "practical" I mean one that actually looks like programming versus "programming" in terms of Hilbert spaces.)
My understanding is that to implement a hash function you have one of two choices. The first is to pay the "kT" cost by calling the "erase" operator (i.e. pipe it to /dev/null). The second is to have it generate "garbage" bits. These bits provide enough information for the computation to be reversed and are not hard to define (even for something like hash functions). For example, with a hash function, the data from which the hash was computed can be used as the garbage. By carrying the garbage bits around instead of erasing them, you might be able to (1) use them in some other computation, (2) be able to localize where and when you pay the heat cost of the garbage, or (3) be able to cheaply backtract the computation.
If you are interested in this, James and Sabry ("Information Effects" POPL 2012, "The Two Dualities of Computation", etc.) are actively developing the foundational theories of a language for programming in a reversable language (disclaimer: the authors are both personal friends of mine). Their stuff might still be a bit heavy for Joe Programmer, but it should be accessable to anyone familiar with higher-order, typed languages.
Re:CPUs/GPUs/SOCs/etc (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:CPUs/GPUs/SOCs/etc (Score:4, Interesting)
It is this latter property that is probably by far the most important. Note e.g. this article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/11/031112072719.htm [sciencedaily.com] -- if one were able to make the base of a chip out of a superconductor in good thermal contact with the actual semiconductor matrix a thin film on top of it, and couple that base directly to a superconducting heat sink, one could e.g. produce 10x to 50x the heat in the actual CPU and still remove it fast enough to keep the chip itself sufficiently cool. If the traces within the chip itself were superconducting, if clever use of superconducting material let one reduce the heat associated with switching closer to the limit, so much the better. Ultimately, it would probably mean that one could run chips at higher voltage and higher clock to produce faster reliable switching and still deal with the heat.
I don't have time to do a formal estimate of the speedup possible, but I'm guestimating that a real thermal superconductor -- one with "zero" resistance to the flow of heat -- suitable for use as the base material for a chip would permit a very rapid scale-up of chip speed by up to an order of magnitude in clock or effective clock. It also might make it possible to build a three dimensional CPU -- one reason chips are 2D is so that one can get the heat out; if one had a thermal/electrical superconductor one could in principle stack up layers and scale performance by one or more orders of magnitude, at first multiple cores on steroids but all at much higher clocks, later true 3d design and layout.
In any event, the impact would very probably be profound, at least if the hypothetical RTS was cheap and suitable for nanoscale integration as a substrate and/or trace material (and functioned as a thermal superconductor as well as noted).
Still, I think that simply eliminating resistivity in power transmission would have the greatest societal impact. PV solar power, for example, "instantly" becomes feasible because one can generate in the Mojave and use the electricity in Maine without transmission loss. That isn't huge, that is game-changing enormous. The Sahara become the electrical source for Europe and Africa, India for Asia, etc. Depending on the hypothetical materials magnetic properties (big if, actually!) it may well revolutionize electrical motor design, maglev trains and roadways, and more, but just letting us move power for free to where we use it makes Edison have the last laugh over Tesla -- human civilization can convert to low voltage DC electrical service. A civilization run on 5 VDC would make electrocution a historical oddity from pre-RTS times -- one can manage to kill yourself with as little as 9 volts (see my favorite Darwin Award, "Resistance is Futile" -- http://www.darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1999-50.html [darwinawards.com]) but 50 mA should be below the fatal threshold even for somebody that tries very hard.
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Re: (Score:2)
As far as I know all superconductors have a critical current density, above which point the magnetic field generated in the wire exerts enough force on the electrons that the wire is no longer a superconductor, which means at low voltage to sustain the large currents the wires would need to be much thicker. In-town distribution before transformer conversion to +/-120V is often at around 4kV, the superconducting wire would need 800 times the area to run at 5V. The massive current levels would also result i
Re: (Score:2)
I don't see how superconducting would help with cumputing.
You want to send as little current into your cpu as possible. The current it does draw results from switching transistors and leaking current through a blocking transistor.
The logic is based on voltage levels, not current. In an ideal (theoretical) cpu you would have distinct voltage levels over infinite resistors and instantly switching transistors, so that it works without drawing any current at all.
Superconducting is the last thing you'd want.
Re: (Score:2)
The first area I'd love to see improvements are the transportation fields. Think about converting all those commercial trucks/ships to hybrids with better electric motors powered by turbines. Instead of that damn semi getting a meager 6mpg, it could now see 30+ for the same weights and the companies could afford to pay their drivers better. How about practical EV's with usable range in the 1800Km/300 Mile range. Pull into a fuel/recharge station that uses Super Caps in the pump and recharge/fuel in the same
Re:CPUs/GPUs/SOCs/etc (Score:4, Informative)
The inefficiency of modern digital circuits comes from two things:
1. Leakage through gate oxides (insulators) and switched-off transistors (semiconductor action).
2. Charging and discharging transistor gates during turn-on and turn-off (capacitance).
Unfortunately, superconductors won't help with either of those. Even switching power supplies lose a lot of power through transistor switching and diode drops. For most electronic products, imperfect semiconductor devices are a bigger problem than imperfect conductors.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
There are new applications that can be opened up by having high temperature superconductors, though. Because I work in the telecom industry, one example leaps immediately to mind: if we can devise a high temperature ductile superconductor, we can replace all of the copper telephone lines, and the fiber optic that they're being replaced with, with superconducting lines. These lines would allow for service over a *much* greater distance than even fiber optic (which caps out at about 14km from the ONU), while
Re: (Score:2)
If things are ideal you can use it to store large amounts of energy indefinitely (of course if stuff happens it could explode). Such a energy storing method could change things a lot.
All the other conductivity stuff isn't a big deal- existing technology can already achieve small losses over great distances.
This sort of energy storage and "f
Small Hadron Collider (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Another application in telecom is allowing much better filters for the RF sections of cell phones and other radio gear.
They're already used in some cell phone base stations, as it allows very sharp tuning due to the lack of resistance in the inductors. But, it requires a cryo-cooler system to chill it down far enough to work.
Room temperature superconductors would likely let them be used in the handsets as well. This would allow packing even more data and channels onto the existing cell infrastructure.
Re: (Score:3)
Let's be realistic here. Like so many other technological advances, what's going to make it take off is SEX.
Levitating sex will sell, I have no doubts.
From there, the applications will (if you excuse the language) trickle down to more mundane uses. I'm sure there are lots of kitchen uses, for example. But sex first, cause that's where the money is.
Re: (Score:2)
The sleeping plates Niven describes in several of his books sound pretty good actually. Although you could argue they're good for sleeping, as well as sex.
Re: (Score:2)
Well the currrent near-roomtemprature superconductors are current limited anyway. THey loos super conductance when a too large current is flowing.
However strong magnetic fieldsare still an option.
The other great advances will be in sensors. You can very accurate sense magnetc fields and thus electricity.