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Comment by TowerTall | Hacker News Reader

> It's something that literally has to be grown from the bottom-up, atom by atom --- in bulk, that's essentially a UFO-tier tech.

The UFO-tears were also at our level at some point. How far out in the future are we talking before humans can do this? Is there anything fundamental that would prevents us from doing it?

Also, it's the replicator from Star Trek, isn't it?

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> It's something that literally has to be grown from the bottom-up, atom by atom --- in bulk, that's essentially a UFO-tier tech. isn't that how your CPU is made?

No, your CPU is made from the top-down, via lithographic techniques.

The silicon wafers are grown from the bottom-up, but silicon is as chemically simple as it gets -- a pure element!

LK99 would be tougher to grow (correctly, and assuming that there is a specific superconducting configuration from among several semiconducting configurations,) by at least several orders of magnitude. Growing pristine crystals of such a complex and entropic material is something that has never been attempted.

They did show a thin film sample in their paper, where they show the superconductivity measurement setup. They even mention it is a thin film sample of the material. looks transparent on the probing station. That is what they measured for superconductivity, not the rock/ingot form. That seems to be only a sort of magnetic demo for the material, nothing more. But the superconductive applications material seems to be thin film tech, as they state in their original paper.

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