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?
Horrible... (Score:4, Interesting)
well (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Horrible... (Score:3, Interesting)
No batteries for kids toys. Yup. Thats probably the winning application.
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: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: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.
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: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: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?