What cyberpunk tech would you use a room-temperature superconductor for?
What cyberpunk tech would you use a room-temperature superconductor for?
Room-temperature superconductivity looks like it might be a step closer to becoming a reality. Let's stick with fiction for the moment though, what technology would you put in a cyberpunk world that makes use of zero-resistance electronics without the need for massive cooling? Super-fast computers? Super-powerful magnets? Maglev? Railguns?
Chips that enable better-than-GPT4 performance with the form factor and power usage of a thumb drive. Within the realm of plausible sci-fi, and pretty dangerous from an IT perspective. Any one of your employees could find a thumb drove in the parking lot, plug it into their computer, and then your super secure air-gapped network has an adversary on the inside.
When most of the big computing power has been outsourced to the corps' cloud computers, this could power the cyberdecks that the hackers can use to do their work unmonitored
Depends on what the material is like. If it's brittle like ceramic (as some of currently highest-temperature superconductors are), there is not much you can do with it. But a metal that you can create wires and coils from would be revolutionary. Still, there are limitations to how much current density the superconductor can handle at a given temperature before quenching. Also, high-frequency logic circuits lose power to capacitances and inductances, not just resistances.
I am guessing it will be only really used for power delivery and electromagnetic applications.
I mean there are always portable coil/rail guns