well you're not wrong but a room tc superconductor would indeed enable us to cut down on transmission costs of power. I'm not sure if this is obvious but the only reason national powergrids are AC and not DC is because you can step down AC current and therefore have much lower heat dissipation through the transmission lines. So at the minimum you'd get cheaper power by eliminating all the resistive losses and stepper circuits . But also superconductors are used in MRI machines where right now they're kept below Tc using liquid nitrogen, which is hard to control (search MRI quenching). So room temp superconductors would make MRIs cheaper, which would be a boon to the developing world.
Most MR units these days use liquid helium not liquid nitrogen. And there is at least one cryogen free unit on the market right now, though it’s definitely not the kind (open, 0.5T) you’d use to replace most hospital magnets.
A superconductor suitable for use in an electromagnet that could be cooled with liquid nitrogen alone would be practically "room temperature" as far as these things go. Liquid nitrogen is cheap and abundant, as opposed to liquid helium which is required to get down to 4 K.
As stands at the moment, some older MRIs use liquid nitrogen to help insulate liquid helium. Newer machines use liquid helium alone.
It's been awhile since I've paid attention to the field, so apologies if I get this wrong. I was under the impression that cuprate superconductors were unsuitable for use in MRI magnets because they only superconduct across clusters of microdomains, making it impossible (at least with current technology) to generate the large, strong, and uniform field necessary for the application.
There seems to be ongoing research into producing suitable magnets with cuprates, but I don't know if the problem has been solved yet. In any case, there are no commercially available MRI machines that use cuprate superconductors.
Superconductors can be used to build ultra-powerful electromagnets. These are what you'll find in particle accelerators and experimental fusion reactors (tokamaks) as well as MRI machines. All of these devices are extremely large and very expensive, partly because of the equipment used to maintain them at cryogenic temperatures.
If you could build a room temperature superconductor, you could shrink these machines and reduce their cost and complexity by a large amount. Additionally, you would open up new applications for superconducting magnets, such as maglev trains.
As others have said, reducing electrical transmission losses is another huge benefit. It's only the beginning of the potential applications of room temperature superconductors though.
High powered magnets - these will improve scanners (see comment below), turbines, motors, generators.
YBCO superconductors can be fabricated into a flexible tape which is then useful for creating these kind of devices, but YBCO needs to be cooled with liquid nitrogen.
Our NMR machine that was used for discovering the structure of biomolecules had a superconducting magnet. The whole machine was pretty impressive (massive steel chamber filled with cryo-cooled magnetic coils). You'd "inject" current once in a while and it would swirl around for weeks/months at a time.
Novel magnetic effects, efficient power transfer, some special forms of supercomputers. Room temp super-conductors would change the world in interesting ways assuming of course that they could also be manufactured at scale.
Most importantly it would require an unlocking of fundamental properties in electromagnetism, chemistry, and quantum physics that as of today is still very much unknown.
You could have a world-wide power grid; you could power all humanity's energy needs by having a couple of "tiny" (100kmX100km) solar farms spread between world deserts located on different timezones so you won't need any storage.
My high school physics teacher (~2006) told us once when discussing career prospects that if you could build/discover a material that was a superconductor at room temperature, you'd probably end up the richest person in the world.
I've never forgotten that, and it sounds like the challenge still stands.
You don't think there would be an economical use for FTL travel? I mean I guess it depends on the details (it requires a spaceship that is a billion metric tons and requires a dozen working fusion cores to power it to get to 1.1C for example), but I can imagine a ton of uses for FTL technology.
Transporters would be more useful in a day to day setting, but that doesn't mean FTL is academic.
It's just a fancy plasma cutter. The defining feature of a light saber--being able to stop other light sabers from passing through it--seems of limited utility in an industrial setting.
Despite the visions in our heads of super sonic maglev trains spanning NYC to Shanghai, the real boon is probably in something like plasma containment for fusion generators ;)
I always said that one of these things would probably make you one of the richest (or powerful) persons on the planet:
- Practical nuclear fusion (that outputs more power that it takes to run)
- Superconductivity at room temperature
- Artificial general intelligence
- Practical high-density energy storage
Assuming you're talking about AGI, keep in mind that we're general intelligences and haven't solved the other three yet. It's not self-evident that AGI would do so quickly.
Imagine if you could run N agi all day though. You could have the knowledge of all scientists thinking of solutions 24/7 and all N agi would be talking to each other about their solutions. You could even have a small subset of them improving on themselves. So you get rapidly better thinking agi and then they brute force the nuclear codes and decide that life is meaningless and try to help us out.
Humans are GI, but it takes more than one human-level GI to make an AGI or it probably would’ve already happened. Simulation of a human mind has various estimates of computational cost (we don’t know what’s missing from out models, and won’t until we’ve got a working AGI), so taking an arbitrary estimate, all the iPhones in the world might be able to do tens of thousands of real-time human minds [1]. This is comparable to the entire population of the AI research community [2]. It is also expensive not only to put together that much computer power, but also to power it. It is very plausible we will run out of room for Moore’s Law (0.1 nm features) without having figured out how to go from narrow AI to general AI, even despite the fact that transistors already outpace synapses the way wolves outpace hills [3].
Not only that, but even humans with our actual GI, can only come up with theories and hypotheses that may or may not reflect reality. This is why scientists have to do experiments, to establish empirical evidence that they are right (or possibly more often, that they are not right).
There's also the fact that there's no known upper limit on the complexity/time needed to solve an arbitrary problem. Just because you can create an AGI doesn't mean nearly impossible problems suddenly become tractable.
Humans can already create humans that can outsmart them, and only every so often do they solve an interesting problem here or there.
It's pretty obvious that if you want to simulate a brain, a Von Neumann architecture is terrible. People will invent new architectures, just like they invented GPUs and TPUs.
And your second point is also flawed, the fact that Moore's Law stops working doesn't prevent one from having ever more computing power, by simply buying more chips. Google doesn't run on one massive computer, but on millions of small ones.
> It's pretty obvious that if you want to simulate a brain, a Von Neumann architecture is terrible. People will invent new architectures, just like they invented GPUs and TPUs.
It really isn’t. Sure, the Von Neumann architecture doesn’t match our brains, but right now silicon is so much faster than biology that our fundamental problem is elsewhere — our best understanding of what it means to learn from experience doesn’t allow us to make machines which learn as effectively as we do from as little data as we do.
And that is the point — we can only (usefully) invent a new architecture like we did TPUs when we have a better idea. Sure, we probably will, but to what schedule? Biology is not obligated to make sense to us. Despite my general optimism about AI, I have to accept the possibility that perhaps the rules governing our own intelligence could (in principle) be as incomprehensible to us as they are to any other primate.
> And your second point is also flawed, the fact that Moore's Law stops working doesn't prevent one from having ever more computing power, by simply buying more chips. Google doesn't run on one massive computer, but on millions of small ones.
You seem to have missed my point here, too. I explicitly suggested what you used as a counter-argument — millions of small computers working together. To be precise, I suggested using 217.52 million A12 SoC units, running at 5e12 op/s, and a (guesstimated) 5 W TDP. This gave me an estimated 35,465 real-time human brains at a power cost of 36.8 kW per brain, which consumed roughly 32,200 US dollars of electricity per year, even when making the over-optimistic assumption the chips were the only power requirement (i.e. no network, no cooling).
This also gave me a hardware supply cost of about $2,500,000 per brain (assuming the cost of the cheapest iPad using an A12, because I lack any better idea for how to estimate the cost of all other components needed to keep the chip working).
If you hit the atomic limit, you get a x900 improvement (I think) on those costs. Which is great [1] if we know enough about how our minds work to replicate them… and my point is that we don’t.
[1] except for the social and economic implications when minds powered by sunlight are cheaper than literal slaves given nothing more than the minimum food to keep them alive, which I also hope we’ll deal with but is a totally independent question.
All of the gravity shield things turn out to be bogus AFAIK. Like the people didn't account for the outgassing from their cyrogenic fluids and other such sloppiness. Or it was announced from a guy who refused to show his apparatus to anybody until they funded his work for a million bucks because he was "afraid they would steal it".
The biggest clue it didn't pan out is that if it were real we would be using it now.
The strangest one claimed to displace a pith ball, 50 meters away through several walls. They had some sputter deposited, superconducting sphere they were pulsing with current.
My vote is on industrial-scaled asteroid mining. The ability to both drop near-unlimited riches into coffers of the people you like and onto the cities of the people you don't like would seem to be the be all end all combo
> zero resistance in the material at temperatures higher than 8 Fahrenheit (-13 Celsius), perhaps as high as 44 Fahrenheit (7 Celsius)
> The teams synthesized only about a dust-speck worth of [lanthanum hydride] from expensive ingredients crushed to unfathomable pressures between hand-cranked diamond halves
While the temperatures are amazing (when I was young, superconductivity above 0 Celsius was the stuff of science fiction), the material might not have commercial applications in the near future.
> one of the researchers carefully sandwiches lanthanum foil and hydrogen gas in between the diamonds’ flat surfaces. Then [...] the researcher generates pressures of at least 170 GPa—pressures similar to those in the Earth’s core—between the diamond tips. Then [...] the team heat the material with laser pulses, producing the chemical reaction that would create the material.
It is always humbling to read about what it takes to do cutting edge research. This article was good at conveying the efforts required.
I do wonder if studying these simple hydrogen-based compounds is a dead end though. I believe the same mechanism (phonon-electron coupling) is at work here, than in conventional superconductors, so the physics is well-understood. It's been established that this mechanism can only support superconductivity up to 30-40 K at normal pressures [1]. Unconventional superconductors, on the other hand, don't have this hard limit, so there is probably more knowledge to be gained from studying those, which could be used to propose new, better superconductors.
Stress on surface of tempered glass in in range of 100 MPa. It's a lot less than the 170 GMa in this case, but perhaps it could get a bit higher in a similar material and the threshold of superconductivity could be lowered.
I remember when I was a kid in the 80s and early 90s there was all this talk about room-temperature superconductors being right around the corner. Getting to 8 degrees F is a big advance even if it is only tiny amounts.
Ever read Larry Niven's "Ringworld"? Don't forget that the Puppeteers destroyed the Ringworld's technological civilization by creating a substance that destroyed their superconductors. If we ever invent them it will be fantastic, but it will also be a central vulnerability to our civilization - but I guess we have other ones already.
47 comments
[ 12.6 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadhttps://blog.schneider-electric.com/energy-management-energy...
As stands at the moment, some older MRIs use liquid nitrogen to help insulate liquid helium. Newer machines use liquid helium alone.
There seems to be ongoing research into producing suitable magnets with cuprates, but I don't know if the problem has been solved yet. In any case, there are no commercially available MRI machines that use cuprate superconductors.
If you could build a room temperature superconductor, you could shrink these machines and reduce their cost and complexity by a large amount. Additionally, you would open up new applications for superconducting magnets, such as maglev trains.
As others have said, reducing electrical transmission losses is another huge benefit. It's only the beginning of the potential applications of room temperature superconductors though.
Most importantly it would require an unlocking of fundamental properties in electromagnetism, chemistry, and quantum physics that as of today is still very much unknown.
I've never forgotten that, and it sounds like the challenge still stands.
Besides, "probably impossible" seems to be a large overrating of our knowledge of superconductivity.
Transporters would be more useful in a day to day setting, but that doesn't mean FTL is academic.
Probably be a really useful piece of industrial equipment, not just a really strange weapon.
Despite the visions in our heads of super sonic maglev trains spanning NYC to Shanghai, the real boon is probably in something like plasma containment for fusion generators ;)
Humans are GI, but it takes more than one human-level GI to make an AGI or it probably would’ve already happened. Simulation of a human mind has various estimates of computational cost (we don’t know what’s missing from out models, and won’t until we’ve got a working AGI), so taking an arbitrary estimate, all the iPhones in the world might be able to do tens of thousands of real-time human minds [1]. This is comparable to the entire population of the AI research community [2]. It is also expensive not only to put together that much computer power, but also to power it. It is very plausible we will run out of room for Moore’s Law (0.1 nm features) without having figured out how to go from narrow AI to general AI, even despite the fact that transistors already outpace synapses the way wolves outpace hills [3].
[1] https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2018/10/01/pocket-brai...
[2] https://jfgagne.ai/talent/
[3] https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2017/11/26/you-wont-be...
Humans can already create humans that can outsmart them, and only every so often do they solve an interesting problem here or there.
And your second point is also flawed, the fact that Moore's Law stops working doesn't prevent one from having ever more computing power, by simply buying more chips. Google doesn't run on one massive computer, but on millions of small ones.
It really isn’t. Sure, the Von Neumann architecture doesn’t match our brains, but right now silicon is so much faster than biology that our fundamental problem is elsewhere — our best understanding of what it means to learn from experience doesn’t allow us to make machines which learn as effectively as we do from as little data as we do.
And that is the point — we can only (usefully) invent a new architecture like we did TPUs when we have a better idea. Sure, we probably will, but to what schedule? Biology is not obligated to make sense to us. Despite my general optimism about AI, I have to accept the possibility that perhaps the rules governing our own intelligence could (in principle) be as incomprehensible to us as they are to any other primate.
> And your second point is also flawed, the fact that Moore's Law stops working doesn't prevent one from having ever more computing power, by simply buying more chips. Google doesn't run on one massive computer, but on millions of small ones.
You seem to have missed my point here, too. I explicitly suggested what you used as a counter-argument — millions of small computers working together. To be precise, I suggested using 217.52 million A12 SoC units, running at 5e12 op/s, and a (guesstimated) 5 W TDP. This gave me an estimated 35,465 real-time human brains at a power cost of 36.8 kW per brain, which consumed roughly 32,200 US dollars of electricity per year, even when making the over-optimistic assumption the chips were the only power requirement (i.e. no network, no cooling).
This also gave me a hardware supply cost of about $2,500,000 per brain (assuming the cost of the cheapest iPad using an A12, because I lack any better idea for how to estimate the cost of all other components needed to keep the chip working).
If you hit the atomic limit, you get a x900 improvement (I think) on those costs. Which is great [1] if we know enough about how our minds work to replicate them… and my point is that we don’t.
[1] except for the social and economic implications when minds powered by sunlight are cheaper than literal slaves given nothing more than the minimum food to keep them alive, which I also hope we’ll deal with but is a totally independent question.
There were a few reports in the ‘90s of this, all involving superconductors.
The biggest clue it didn't pan out is that if it were real we would be using it now.
- cure for cancer
Also, if you were to flood the market with any material you mined, prices would go down.
"Elon Musk: How to Build the Future"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnBQmEqBCY0
(of course "down-to-earth" is very relative)
> The teams synthesized only about a dust-speck worth of [lanthanum hydride] from expensive ingredients crushed to unfathomable pressures between hand-cranked diamond halves
While the temperatures are amazing (when I was young, superconductivity above 0 Celsius was the stuff of science fiction), the material might not have commercial applications in the near future.
Instead, why not use active cooling and powerful insulation? Like this: https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/world-first-as-wind-turb...
It is always humbling to read about what it takes to do cutting edge research. This article was good at conveying the efforts required.
I do wonder if studying these simple hydrogen-based compounds is a dead end though. I believe the same mechanism (phonon-electron coupling) is at work here, than in conventional superconductors, so the physics is well-understood. It's been established that this mechanism can only support superconductivity up to 30-40 K at normal pressures [1]. Unconventional superconductors, on the other hand, don't have this hard limit, so there is probably more knowledge to be gained from studying those, which could be used to propose new, better superconductors.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCS_theory
Take notes, psychology.