Room temperature superconductors would represent the greatest leap forward since electricity itself. Ultra-cheap, ultra-high resolution MRIs, lossless power transmission across vast distances, massive gains in computing power, much lower cost supercolliders for advanced physics, low-cost magnetic confinement for fusion power experiments, and so on.
Just a note: Superconductivity is not only destroyed by temperature, but also by magnetic fields or a too high current. We might find a room temperature superconductor that is basically useless for energy transportation or high magnetic field applications.
Another problem: almost all known high-temperature superconductors are ceramics and thus very brittle and hard to work with.
What we want is a cheap, metallic, high temperature superconductor with a high maximum critical magnetic field and high critical max current density…
But of course any improvement could give big improvements in some applications. Having a nitrogen cooled MRI wound be awesome.
An6 form if room temp super conductor would be awesome. Like electronics will stop emitting heat and in case of ICs and microprocessors, difficulty to work with won’t he an issue as you fab them.
Also school level science experiments will get more exciting
Room temperature superconductors. Those things are insane, but by now, as far as I know , the only way to create them is with extremely low temperatures.
Considering this one makes several of the other ones listed here more viable, I think it would have the most impact.
A wealth tax. With that we could fully fund all the research people mention and have the means to roll out the advancement in a way that doesn’t cause massive externalities.
Nobody’s talking about this one, but if NASA is able to confirm even the slightest degree of lab-scale spatial warping we’d be in for a huge sea change in potential futures.
High temperature superconductors.
Specifically anything above commercial / household freezer (-18C); but if we could get to ~105C (above water boiling) it would change literally everything.
Electric motors become more efficient over a much greater RPM range.
Superconducting magnets become much easier to construct and run, this gives us a much better chance at fusion.
Transmission lines themselves are pretty efficient as it is, but all of the associated switchgear at the conversion points all gets really warm, this could be virtually eliminated.
The conductors on circuit boards, and potentially inside microchips. This reduces heat loading and thus makes all computing devices more efficient.
The conductors in batteries; enabling these to be smaller and thus increasing battery energy density.
Finally making super-capacitors actually viable as longer term energy storage.There are so many aspects of life that would be impacted by this one breakthrough, that it is probably the most important thing that will happen this century (scientifically speaking). It would be almost as revolutionary as when electricity itself became widespread.
Specifically, I think the abilty to make hydrogren from renewable resources at large-scale will change everything. Hydrogen fuel cells are more space efficient, and require less toxic manufacturing, when compared to current renewable energy generation and storage methods. If hydrogen is seen as cheaper or more green than other power sources, it will change the market completely.
Hydrogen generation is also an active research area, and just this year they’ve have some promising results for renewable hydrogen.
For everyone? Nuclear Fusion is on the cusp of reaching net zero emissions. Meaning we can create massive amounts of clean energy. Right now, we use nuclear energy off of Nuclear Fission creating hazardous waste and resulting in excess heat/waste
Nuclear Fusion would allows us to create clean energy with the goal of being net zero
Nuclear Fusion and “net zero emissions” doesn’t really make sense.
What I think you are trying to say is that fusion is nearing the point where net energy is possible (that is getting more energy out then the amount of energy put in to create the reactions in the first place). Fusion is not practically close yet, but there are tantalizing hints that we are close.
See this from 2022; the national ignition facility produced more energy that was impacted on the target (2MJ in 3MJ out), but this doesn’t take into account the huge inefficiencies in the laser generators to produce that 2MJ laser pulse.
There are a bunch of fusion experiments that are hitting massive temperatures (120 - 150MK) which is starting to get into the range where practical fusion could occur, the center of the sun is approx 15MK but also has massive gravity to encourage fusion.
So fusion is still a decade away at least, but we understand the science much more completely now. We know the problems (well a bunch of them) and it is mostly now a very difficult engineering problem rather a problem of understanding the science.
Yes. You are correct. Thank you.
APM (Atomically Precise Manufacturing)
Mind-reading technology
Solid state batteries are just starting to hit the market but are still fairly comparable to lithium. In theory the mature tech is more energy dense, more thermally stable, charges faster and may be less environmentally damaging.
Pretty much anything that substantially improves batteries will be huge. R & D money is pouring in and that likely means progress. Improvements could be felt in factors like environmental impact, weight, energy density, safety, and charge time.
Star Trek-style matter replicator/recycler. Just imagine being able to empty a garbage dumpster into a bin, shut the lid, press a button, and an hour later you get stacks of industrially useful metals & materials, bolts of cloth, and sacks of fertilizer.
… in the next 5 years?
In my defense, I’m half asleep, and due to lack of caffeine, didn’t notice the bit about “which could actually happen in the next 5 years.”
So with that in mind, I’ll say something about environmentally friendly raw materials for super efficient battery storage.
The cool part about molecular assemblers is that you only have to build one the hard way.
I second the lemmy saying there is a considerable gap between discovery and implementation.
But to answer your question, I believe we are due some major breakthrough regarding psilocybin and other psychedelic substances which have been banned since the 60s. Research is well underway and with our current technology + knowledge in neuroscience we’re due to catch up quickly, unless everything gets tangled in too much red tape.
Improvement in mental health has a pretty immediately impact in our lives after all.
More efficient or even lossless, sustainable energy storage.
Lossless is impossible, as
heat is produced and loses energyengineers will always put blinking LEDs on the batteriesThis is true. You only have to deal once with a device that doesn’t have a light or something to realize just how essential indicators are. I have sworn to the electronics gods to never to make a device without at least a power led.
Fusion in my house. Matter/energy converter in my house.
Honestly? A major breakthrough in fusion, or to a lesser extent, any other clean energy. We’ve decarbonised a decent chunk of the world’s energy profile, but there’s a strong financial incentive that politicians are vulnerable to protecting oil and gas, slowing down further decarbonisation. Batteries and supercapacitors also could do the trick.
The large storage batteries that use sodium ion. They should be able to get like 5,000 full cycles before they degrade and can be buried or stored outside. That and a solar array on a roof should let most anyone be completely off grid. Full solar house that should last for 15 years before the system needs replaced. The batteries will last longer and be cheaper than lithium. Solar panel prices are consistently getting cheaper.
I think in 5 years time there will be a lot of the electrical grid system (for most who will be still attached to the grid) just getting power almost completely from solar, and storing enough in these batteries for the nights and cloudy days.
I don’t think fusion would be as useful a technology as it would have been a few decades ago. Now renewables (wind, solar, hydro) seem like more and more as the clean and cheap energy of the future. The biggest problem of storage is rapidly being solved with batteries springing up everywhere.
The real problem with fusion is that even if it worked, the plants would be very complex and expensive. It would be much cheaper and reliable to build solar, wind and batteries instead.
Having operational fusion reactors would be cool as hell, but it wouldn’t have that much impact on our lives in the end.
Fusion is likely the end-game power gen tech for humanity, assuming no new physics (and excluding Dyson structures). For the long term, it likely will be the most useful way of generating mass amounts of electricity you can get, and access to more energy enables more possibilities of all sorts of things, enabling even things that are extremely impractical today due to their energy needs
For example, carbon capture becomes a possibility, and stuff like mass desalination. And then you could, in theory, go even more extreme with stuff like terraforming mars at human timescales, with enough energy. Of course this depends how practical and efficient fusion reactors actually would be, but with enough energy you can do so so much
While I agree with what you’ve said, I’ve always felt fusion and other such tech is the future of long distance space travel, not Earth based energy use. Wind and hydro are useless in space and solar has issues with power accumulation the further away from a star you go. We will still need some kind of “fuel” based energy source if we’re ever to enter deep space and cross the gaps(unless battery tech increases much further to the point that a “battery” lasts a significant portion of the vehicles lifetime). Even then, you’d need recharge stations at each end or to park by a star to refuel in between.
We have fusion/fission now. That kind of battery tech is still a ways off. Feels shortsighted to ignore nuclear now just because it’s not perfect in this specific environment.
If we have a lot of cheap energy, we might be able to do industrial-scale carbon capture.
Respectfully, I disagree. We’ve entered an AI boom, and right now, the star of the show is in a bit of a gangly awkward teenage phase. But already, these large data models are eating up mountains of energy. We’ll certainly make the technology more energy efficient, but we’re also going to rely on it more and more as it gets better. Any efficiency gains will be eaten up by AI models many times more complex and numerous than what we have now.
As climate change warms the globe, we’re all going to be running our air conditioning more, and nowhere will that be more true than the server centers where we centralize AI. To combat climate change, we may figure out ways of stripping carbon from the air and this will require energy too.
Solar is good. It’s meeting much of our need. Wind and hydroelectric fill gaps when solar isn’t enough. We have some battery infrastructure for night time and we’ll get better at that too. But there will come a point where we reach saturation of available land space.
If we can supplement our energy supply with a technology that requires a relatively small footprint (when it comes to powering a Metropolitan area), can theoretically produce a ton of power, requires resources that are plentiful on Earth like deuterium, and doesn’t produce a toxic byproduct, I think we should do everything in our power to make this technology feasible. But I can certainly agree that we should try to get our needs completely met with other renewables in the meantime.
I don’t think it’s gonna get cheaper than renewables, they’re literally using free energy without needing any human intervention aside from inspection and repairs. The issue is the oil and gas companies paying the politicians. Also right-wing parties that do everything they can to keep emissions up just cause. No new technology can fix those issues.
Nuclear is going through a breakthrough and it’s coming along at a neat net zero.
In a breakthrough experiment, nuclear fusion finally makes more energy than it uses
Sort of. It made more energy than the lasers that actually caused the reaction. It still used vastly more energy than that to actually power those lasers. We are still far off but it was a major stepping point.
We’ve decarbonised a decent chunk of the world’s energy profile
Unfortunately, things like AI continue to fuel our hunger for power, preventing fossil fuels from being phased out… and as such, CO2 production continues to accelerate uncontrollably.
Yes, atmospheric CO2 production continues to accelerate. It hasn’t even begun to slow down, much less reach a steady state or reverse.
And this is excluding the feedback loops (arctic permafrost, methyl hydrates, etc.) that are now beginning to cook off in nature.
We are still solidly on the “business as usual” path towards civilizational collapse by some point in the 2050s, and functional extinction by some point between 2100 and 2200.
