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Comment by sergiotapia | Hacker News Reader

Imagine humanity liberated to such lengths. Sickness, poverty, energy, travel, entertainment - all for cheap and in abundance. Pray this is real!

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Yeah, no. That's not going to happen even if we discovered room-temperature superconductors.

The simple reason is that few of humanity's "ills" have to do with scarcity of anything but knowledge, motivation, and kindness.

Uncentralizable energy overproduction would help.

Not a physicist but my understanding is superconductors have max amount of current you can put through it, so its not clear it can be used for free energy distribution at scale even if it is a super conductor.

Even if it allowed infinite current, the only thing that would become "free" is what we currently lose to inefficiencies in the conductors. There's still the cost of generating electricity, maintaining the distribution infrastructure (which would likely be far more expensive than what we have), etc.

Room-temp superconductors would make magnetic confinement fusion a looot cheaper and smaller, in turn making energy production easier as well.

Cheaper and smaller than what? All the existing fusion power plants?

We have to make it work before we can optimize it. Fusion still poses many engineering challenges that have nothing to do with the quality of our superconductors. How to not melt the reactor walls and what to do with all those angry neutrons, for starters.

Cheaper and smaller than all the existing experimental fusion reactors such as Wendelstein 7X or the under construction reactor ITER.

The vast majority of their size, weight, and cost is related to maintaining extremely low temperatures for the superconductors right next to the angry neutrons.

If you could use a regular coolant loop with heat pumps and only needed to maintain, say, -20°C, it'd be much easier to keep the superconductors cool and transport away the neutrons' heat.

The neutrons are an issue because they slowly destroy the reactor materials [1].

Point is, even with better superconductors we'd still be a long way from practical fusion power. They'd be a step forward, but they're not the key that's going to unlock a world of cheap clean energy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_embrittlement

we solved energy production 70 years ago and we're still in the shitter

That's sad but true. We should have thousands of nuclear reactors out there powering everything. :(

We could, if we wanted. And I see a vibe shift in that regard.

It'll probably only result in cheap levitating toys on AliExpress and Temu.

Or a cheaper and smaller MRI that a hospital charges 3 times as much to patients to use.

I’ll take a superconducting oscilloscope that does 50ghz instead of 500mhz

There have been scientific breakthroughs throughout human history and none of them "liberated" humanity in regards to sickness, poverty, energy, travel, entertainment. Why should this one now be different? There will always be sickness and poverty in a capitalist system that is built on the exploitation of others to sustain itself. During capitalism, medical ånd technological advances such breakthroughs might bring will always disproportionately benefit the rich. Sickness, poverty at least could already be "solved problems", as some people I think say, if not for class injustice in a system that depends on inequality to function.

You write as if there is any alternative to capitalism that isn't far, far worse. It is truly the height of luxury to throw stones at the system that enabled the current wealth of the world.

It has.

Out modern standard of living is significantly better than ..say.. 800 years ago purely because of industrialization.

If you agree that we'll always be mortal then there will always be sickness, etc., even without capitalism, and in fact this breakthrough (if it is one) didn't originate in a capitalist system.

With that in mind, liberation is a means, not an end. When I think of it that way I see great progress. Here are 2 examples:

- Sickness: Fluoridation reduces enamel caries in adults by 20%-40%. "Tooth loss is no longer considered inevitable".[1]

- Poverty: The number of humans living in extreme poverty has never been lower[2]

I could keep going but I think you get the point. I agree that we have serious problems in the world, and many of them are getting worse, but in terms of health and wealth, humans as a whole have never had it better. Some of that might actually be _due_ to capitalism, or at least Democracy, which has a hard time existing without it.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4841a1.htm

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-in-extre...

Really? "none of them liberated"? Have you checked life expectancy in the last hundreds of years? Doubling life span is not a liberation?

And we are on a tech website, do you see open source being a part of the capitalist system?! Due to open source movement a huge amount of benefits were to anybody with knowledge, irrespective of their fortune. And don't get me started on medical advances. There are so many things that are shared for research and everybody can benefit from the information.

Yes, any system can be improved, but throwing rocks without practical suggestions is useless.

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