this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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Technology
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Ok, what is the importance of a room temperature semiconductor.
Room temperature superconductor. Not semiconductor, that's something different.
With it we can build all sorts of otherwise impossible technologies.
Batterys with massive charge capacities that last weeks.
Stupidly high speed hover trains.
Electrical wires that don't heat up with use, don't waste energy, and can never electric you.
Body armour that actually repels bullets.
Probably some kind of horrific bomb.
It looks like the big technological leap in relation to 'How can we use superconductors to hurt things' is to use them in making advanced EMP devices. It doesn't seem like anyone has figured out any other obvious use cases for them that massively change or improve upon the other horrific devices that we've already come up with.
In regards to potential for use in war crimes, it could be a lot worse.
One thing I could think of would be miniaturized railguns. A large part of the bulk in rail guns at the moment is the cooling system for the electro magnets and capacitors to deal with inefficient power delivery.
A room temperature superconductor would fit both problems.
That would make some orbital insertions a lot cheaper, too.
Railguns have the unfortunate side effect of applying their full acceleration over just the length of their rails, which tend to be relatively short compared to the thickness of the atmosphere.
They're fun to shoot some bullets at hypersonic speeds, not so much to impart higher than orbital speeds to complex structures when they get pancaked before leaving the muzzle.
Room temp superconducting magnets should make motors and power generation a bit more efficient. Magnetic plasma confinement gets a shit load easier as well.
Those are currently viable with conventional technologies. Explosively pumped magnetic coils with some big-ass capacitors. You could probably do something similar with a spark gap instead of a coil.
Room temperature superconductors would make them easier to build. Probably smaller.
These are some of the dumbest proposed applications I've ever seen for this. You have no idea what you're talking about.
That's not a nice thing to say. I bet they —and everyone— could learn from getting some of the myths dispelled, instead of just getting insulted.
I don't have time to write all of that out. Start over without any of these guesses as to what these materials do. It's irresponsible to say things as if they're facts, when you know nothing of the subject. Like your most recent post.
You wrote a decent response a few comments down, that's good enough. This isn't ExpertSexChange, so some people might not be experts, but I think we can collectively manage the basic stuff while treating everyone with respect. As for my most recent post, I'll admit having sent it before fully reading their sources, but probably should discuss it over there if you want?
While I appreciate that you're trying to point out factual errors in the comment you are replying to, please keep in mind Beehaw's primary principle (and only* rule) when interacting with folks in the comments: Be(e) Nice. You can correct factual errors, or just point out that a comment is wrong, without insulting the person making the comment. Please try to engage more kindly in the future. Thanks!
Wires that wouldn't electrocute us?
Is it because we would have resistance and it wouldn't so it'd ignore us?
Yes basically.
You get electrocuted when you touch a bare copper wire because the human body is less resistant to electricity than copper (your nervous system is optimized to not be resistant to electricity). Electricity would prefer to go through you than the cable.
But your nervous system still has some resistance, and you can't get less resistance than zero resistance, so regardless of what you're doing, the electricity would prefer to stay in the superconducting cable.
For the same reason you could also submerge the cable in water and nothing would happen.
The reason all this is very useful is that currently in order to prevent everybody getting electric shocks you have to insulate the cable in rubber. If you could safely make bare cables you could save an awful lot of rubber.
This has so many errors. Copper is a far better conductor than people. Set up a multimeter for resistance across your skin if you're dubious, it'll be in the kΩ per cm. Current will flow if a potential difference is present, regardless of whether there is a less resistive path available. Also the material in question is a metal oxide, not a metal. It's brittle. So making it into a cable in the first place will be incredibly difficult and expensive. And even in their own paper they showed a limiting current of something like 400 mA, which is not suitable for high power applications.
Your skin actually has quite a lot of resistance especially compared to a copper wire, while it's definitely bad news for a current to be flowing through your nerves it would need to get there first. Current doesn't really 'choose' a particular path either; if you have a potential difference V between two points the current will take all paths available between them and Ohm's law I = V/R tells us that the current will be greatest through the path with the least resistance. The reason you don't get a shock when you touch a properly insulated wire is that the path that includes your finger also includes the resistance R of the insulation which is very high so correspondingly I is very low.
A room temperature superconductor would allow 100% efficiency for energy transmission and allow all sorts of technologies like cheap maglev trains using flux pinning for example.
You know how your phone and computer heat up when doing something intensive? This happens due to the resistance inside it. Superconductors would allow this electricity to pass through with virtually no resistance, generating no heat.