Now I'm imagining what history would have looked like if the alchemists had indeed stumbled upon a floating lead apatite sample a few centuries ago...

Good idea! They wouldn't have been able to do any applications without a voltaic cell, and it would have been a novelty. Like gunpowder in ancient China.

The force of tradition is amazing. Imagine centuries knowing how to make something that explodes violently, and using it for entertainment instead of weapons.

Just like how Mesoamerican civilizations invented the wheel, but only used it on children toys and not for transportation. There were no draft animals in the region, but they didn't even make wheelbarrows.

https://www.mexicolore.co.uk/aztecs/home/the-concept-of-the-...

Is there a name for this kind of effect?

The "untyped languages are just fine" effect :P

"The road not taken" is a Science Fiction trope that generally explores that idea.

I always call this a "local maximum" problem. Once you've optimized the crap out of your tech, any change makes it worse (e.g., replacing crossbows with primitive guns). But if you do switch, then optimizing that technology takes you to an even higher maximum.

The problem is that you have to go backwards to go forwards, and you can't always predict (or convince the powers-that-be) that the end result will be better.

Extremely relevant to electric cars. Looks like we are close to electric > ICE, (or past that point, whatever), but it was a long painful time of hyping subpar cars by those who believed in the potential of the technology.

Agreed! I also believe that once we flip (EV > ICE) the momentum goes the other way.

For example, let's say that 50% of cars on the road are EVs. Now gas stations have a problem. You can't survive with half your customers gone, so maybe half the gas stations go out of business. But that means your nearest gas station is much further away, so now the incentive for EV goes up.

In California (and the Bay Area, particularly), I bet we'll see this relatively soon.

Keep in mind, the Chinese were using bombs, granades, and rockets in warfare. Cannons were slowly being incorporated during the Ming.

It’s just that, the Chinese also had standardized crossbows capable of punching through armor, and allowed for long range sniping, centuries before gunpowder. The Manchus who founded the Qing dynasty valued archery, and were slower to adopt firearms. The mid and late Qing period saw firearm military units, with bows and arrows evolved for powerful short range attacks, ceding long range to firearms.

Even so, it looks like Chinese generals were interested in fielding firearms, and found them effective.

Wikipedia has a list of theories on why gun development stagnated, and the leading theory is that Chinese fortification were more resistant to cannon fire. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder_weapons_in_the_Min...

As far as Mesoamericans and wheels, I’m not sure the hilly terrain and dense jungle would make wheeled transports that easy. They seemed to be able to create step pyramids with stone just fine.

Even in the west, firearms took centuries of evolution and constant peer-level warfare to evolve into the primary weapon.

The Mesoamerican civilizations did not have copper, bronze, or iron metallurgy which is a prerequisite for making the metal rims needed for transportation wheels. A wooden wheel without a metal rim is too fragile for transportation.

Without the wheel, humans are actually relatively comparable to other pack animals in carrying efficiency. It is the wheel that makes moving larger loads more efficient which makes it advantageous to domesticate pack animals that can exert greater force.

Bronze was extremely common in Mesoamerica for household goods like needles and fishhooks. Copper was also common, but mainly for ceremonial and ornamental objects like bells.

As for wooden wheels being too fragile, you can build a perfectly good wheel without metal bands. It's simply going to be heavy and annoying if you're trying to run a wagon to Oregon.

Another example that I read about once and have never been able to verify (or it may be completely made up) is that the because the Chinese invented porcelain first (which was more sturdy than glass or something) they never bothered with glass, which meant they missed out on all the cool astronomical discoveries (which then has implications on their development of mathematics and physics).

Again, no idea if there is any validity to this or just something completely made up.

The Chinese invented cannons about the time they invented gun power. However by coincidence their forts used stone walls thick enough to resist cannon fire and so it was not really better than the various catapult systems they also had (which also couldn't breach their fort walls).

https://acoup.blog/2021/12/17/collections-fortification-part... Goes into this in more detail for a couple paragraphs.

Shooting in steep trajectory, howitzer style, would still be valuable.

You have to know it’s possible, and be able to aim at useful internal targets despite this being well before aerial surveillance photographs and calculus.

My guess is there’s probably a whole bunch of neat things we could build with existing manufacturing tools, that we don’t yet know are even possible, and which the future will have similar discussions about.

The introduction of counterweight trebuchet from the Mongol empire in Persia for the seige of the Southern Sung city of Xiangyang is well documented here:

https://deremilitari.org/2014/05/the-mongol-siege-of-xiangya...

I like the idea of pausing a seige in China to send a message to some experts in Mosul, wait for them to ride back, then build their novel device, and win.

The ring of solomon was a curious mix of metals with a magnet in it. Its inventors were definitely up to something.

I want to believe.

After several millennia of killing people for gold, we can finally put all that gold to good use—using it to create superconductors that can power energy weapons we can use to kill each other.

♫ It's the circle of life ♫

People cut cables for copper. Imagine what will happen with cables with gold.

It would be sub-1% gold content. We're talking about gold doping, specifically substitution in the Pb(1) site, not an alloy.

Any amount would be a big deal. Consider a lead, tungsten or uranium projectile with a superconducting jacket fired from a railgun. Then consider how many projectiles we'd make.

Personally, I think it's just cosmic coincidence that the elements at play here are also the same used in bullets.

FWIW strip mining operations till materials for ~6 PPM gold.

The superconductor itself would be 7.44% gold, but the wire would probably be much less -- superconducting tape isn't particularly strong so it will probably be wrapped up in layers of insulator and support wires.

I think that's right. There's no indication that it's mechanically strong, so you'd have it wrapped in layers of rubber/epoxy and steel cables in order to suspend it between power poles or transmission pylons.

YBCO tape has a critical current in the 1-10 MA/cm2 range, so if the properties of this RT stuff is anywhere close, the actual superconducting element of the wire could potentially be very thin.

Having to handle lead for a practically unretrievable amount of gold would (I hope) be enough of a deterrent for the vast majority of "citizen scrappers". Worst case, I think a Pb/Au scrap grey-market would look something like the current catalytic converter market, where raw materials are purchased at set rate by an intermediary and then sold for further processing. Most people know there's gold in their computer parts, but still opt for the recycling bin/ziploc bag in a junk drawer.

Nah, they'll just drop it in a smelter and sort it using gravity.

It might deter those in wealthy countries, everywhere else would be another story.

7.44% gold? That's ~$75 per oz of material. And you're talking about lead cable. Its kind of heavy, even if its thin. And it seems really easy to melt and separate. Notably, most power lines are actually aluminum, which is probably where people would really want this. Also chosen for its low weight / density, cause if you're gonna hang lines 100's of feet long, you want 2700 kg/m3, not 9000 kg/m3, and definitely not 11000 kg/m3. Although probably also significant applications in mm, um, and nm scale wiring.

At the end of their comment it notes that because it's a superconductor it would be thinner.

Perhaps assume an aluminum cladding for strength? Depending on how strong of a superconductor it is perhaps it's only 1% superconductor and 99% aluminum on top of the 10% content. So 0.1%?

I dunno, all these metals will be valuable in the future. Just saying, there's another large factor in estimating the gold content (conductivity saturation) that we don't know what it might be.

Computer components already have gold in them, and they are already recycled for gold.

There's a wide space between "can be recycled" and "profitable enough that there's theft for base components that can be resold". That doesn't mean it won't be profitable to harvest the gold (I don't know), but one does not imply the other.

For example, paper recycling is profitable when centralized (barely), but even that's with most the pipeline subsidized, and it's not profitable to the degree that people are stealing paper to turn in because it's worth the effort.

paper recycling is profitable without any subsidies at all, and people do sometimes steal paper to recycle it

here in argentina there are tens of thousands of people who make a living by recycling, sorting through whatever trash they can get access to in order to find materials with enough resale value to scrape by. they haul plastic sacks or two-wheeled carts all over the metropolitan area, stacking them high with recyclables: aluminum, copper, car batteries, brass, whatever they can find. a crt tv left out on the curb will have its yoke broken off within an hour or three in order to harvest the copper. neighborhoods sometimes lose phone and internet service for months at a time because someone has recycled the cables. commemorative bronze plaques go missing from cemeteries

but the recyclers are not called aluminieros or bronceros or cobreros, taking the name of their profession from aluminum, brass, or copper; they are instead referred to by the most abundant material they recycle

they are the cartoneros, because what their carts are usually piled high with is cardboard, cartón

(needless to say this activity is not subsidized)

I don't understand how your comment implies a lack of subsidy, it only states that the people harvesting the material can make money off of it. Which would be true if it was subsidized, too.

it's not such a politically popular activity as to attract subsidies; it is tolerated and pitied rather than lauded and promoted

No one is saying they are subsidizing people scavenging. They're talking about farther up the chain.

i think rather that the activities further up the chain are profitmaking industries that are, on net, taxed rather than subsidized

> people do sometimes steal paper to recycle it

> they are the cartoneros, because what their carts are usually piled high with is cardboard, cartón

Paper, or coardboard? It's unclear whether you're referring to cardboard as paper, because after your assertion the only thing possibly linked to it in the rest of the comment is your references to cardboard.

Cardboard is not paper. They share base components, but referring to cardboard as paper is akin to referring to a chair as a board. A chair is made of wood, and may be made of multiple boards, but if we're talking about the qualities and price of boards and you start trying to refute that with the price of chairs, people are going to call you out as losing the thread, rightly so.

For what it's worth, the subsidies I was referring to were the governmental ones in the U.S. where recycling centers and trash services can get funds, tax breaks, or special rates on lending when dealing with recycling which means all recycling done through those trash services are in some part subsidized by the state. At best that usually means you might get your recycling picked up for free or with reduced additional charges, but for the average person in the U.S. paper recycing is not worthwhile at an individual scale. Apparently it pays something around $50-$75 a ton, which isn't nothing, and might be worth doing in some locales, but I have to imagine the logistics of moving material of that weight on a regular basis to where it can be accepted means there are much more lucrative materials to harvest (either it's a long haul for most people, or I imagine middle men accepting it locally and transferring it are going to take a large cut).

mostly cartoneros recycle what the biz refers to as corrugated fiberboard, which most people call cardboard in english. it's made of paper and glue

there are different kinds of paper, which require different recycling streams; cartoneros will accept some others but not all

your talk about 'losing the thread' makes me think you are playing some kind of game where the objective is not to find out what the truth is but to sound convincing even if what you are saying is false

i am not playing that game. as far as i'm concerned, it's up to you to find out the truth, or not, not up to me to shove it down your throat, though i'm happy to provide relevant information

i am aware that in the usa recycling, even fake recycling, is heavily subsidized. that's why i was providing information about what happens in places where subsidies for recycling are scarce to nonexistent. almost nobody recycles plastic here (except for small programs that are subsidized and do things like recycle polypropylene bottlecaps), and only big operators recycle steel. but paper — specifically the kind of paper that corrugated fiberboard is made of — is abundantly recycled; it's not nearly as remunerative as brass, copper, aluminum, or lead, but it's the bread and butter of the cartoneros because people discard it in much higher volumes

i don't think it pays anywhere close to US$75 per tonne though, maybe a tenth of that

> refers to as corrugated fiberboard, which most people call cardboard in english. it's made of paper and glue ... there are different kinds of paper

Isn't that exactly the point I just made? I'm confused as to why you're restating it. In English nobody is going to mistake someone that makes a statement about "paper" as talking about "cardboard", whether they're referring to corrugated fiberboard or plain fiberboard (which are both often referred to as cardboard depending on whether the context is arts, crafts or something else).

> your talk about 'losing the thread' makes me think you are playing some kind of game where the objective is not to find out what the truth is but to sound convincing even if what you are saying is false

If you look at my original comment, what I said about paper is purely an example to illustrate that commonly recycled doesn't necessarily mean worth supporting harvesting for base materials. Many other things go into that assessment (such as whether the base material can be easily separated from other materials and how its cost to transport affect any possible profit that might motivate people to do so.

That you refuted that example by using an entirely different material seems to either be a non-sequitur or misguided. While presented as a counterpoint, it doesn't really seem to affect the claim I was making at all.

That is what I meant by it lost the thread. It didn't really add to the conversation at hand usefully in the way it was presented. If it was presented as an interesting factoid about recycling and cardboard, which is related to paper, that would be one thing, and I would fully support it. But as to whether it means something that can be/is recycled will be scavenged for profit in all cases, I don't think it really says anything one way or the other, and that was what I was trying to convey.

If you're trying to say that paper itself as what any native English speaker would assume we're talking about if they read it, and not just cardboard, is also profitable to recycle and people collect and turn that in for profit then please clarify that point. Otherwise, while an interesting fact, and I'm happy to now know it, I'm not sure it actually affects what I was trying to communicate originally in any way.

corrugated cardboard is made of paper, not an entirely different material; recycling cardboard is recycling paper. at this point i'm starting to question whether you've actually seen a piece of cardboard at some point or whether you're a large language model

certainly it is not the case that something that is commonly recycled will be scavenged for profit in all cases. even gold sometimes escapes recycling

> corrugated cardboard is made of paper, not an entirely different material; recycling cardboard is recycling paper

Did you actually bother to read what I wrote in my various comments? Much of it was devoted to explaining the difference in what it meant and when people say paper compared to what they mean when people say cardboard. Why do you think I talked about boards and chairs?

> at this point i'm starting to question whether you've actually seen a piece of cardboard at some point or whether you're a large language model

I could say the same for you, given your inability to follow what has been said across even a handful of replies.

> certainly it is not the case that something that is commonly recycled will be scavenged for profit in all cases. even gold sometimes escapes recycling

Which also wasn't my point. My point, again and put bluntly, is that some materials may exist in a space where it's not profitable enough to harvest for an individual but they are still recycled either because of subsidies or because efficiencies of scale can be brought to bear by a larger organization, or the combination of the two (subsidies for larger regional trash pickup companies that can also bring economies of scale to bear) which mean a material is recycled, even if not profitable for the common person. Another example would be items that are unlawful to discard of in the trash. There are various chemicals and materials that it's unlawful to dispose of in the trash in the U.S. (motor oil), meaning those items are taken to a recycling and/or disposal center even if there's no payment for doing so.

It's not about it escaping recycling because people miss it, it's about how both economies of scale and subsidies and laws that all go into whether something is recycled which affect that calculus beyond just whether it's profitable, and thus something being commonly recycled is not necessarily an indicator that it's lucrative enough to do so that the material will be harvested by people for profit.

Gold is everywhere in computing, not a big deal.

Not computing, arms manufacturing. Lead, tungsten or uranium projectiles with superconducting jackets fired from railguns.

You would probably put the superconductor in the barrel and magnets in the ammunition :)

We'll use them to build spacecraft that retrieve asteroids so rich in gold that it permanently crashes the price of gold?

People don't seem to realize how radically society will change if this superconductor thing is legit.

How does room temperature superconductivity lead to the feasibility of asteroid mining? Could you please explain?

If you need large amounts of gold (or other rare metals) to make superconductors, then asteroid mining suddenly becomes financially viable. Before you'd crash the price if you started shipping large quantities back to the surface.

Magnetic launch. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver

You could also ask "How does room temperature semiconductivity lead to the feasibility of asteroid mining?"

the answer to that question is the answer to your question.

What?

Asteroid mining becomes cost effective if the demand increases.

I don't think the material is very ductile so I'm not sure that you'd be able to easily run a cable like copper/aluminum/steel transmission lines

That would likely be addressed by vacuum deposition techniques.

> I want to believe.

Yeah, it's always possible this may not pan out but I'm really enjoying the visceral reminder that new fundamental science always has the potential to be suddenly transformative across a spectrum fields.

Yeah, I wasn't all that interested at first due to the general uncertainty around the claims, but that Derek Lowe takes it this seriously does lend a certain tension.

YOU IDIOT! W need the gold to turn the slaves back into carbon,m so we can make more slaves to harvest the gold!!* - https://youtu.be/rMz7JBRbmNo

--

I know we hate jokes - but apropos

>After several millennia of killing people for gold, we can finally put all that gold to good use

Wouldn't that just make gold even more valuable (and thus more killing will ensue, even ignoring the high energy weapons).

♫ And it moves us all ♫

♫ Through despair and hope ♫

Watch gold be the only practically viable solution, making this new material wonderful but also incredibly expensive.

Time to start mining asteroids.

Is this how the science fiction future we’ve all read in books becomes reality?

SpaceX becomes an evil megacorp mining gold from the asteroid belt with LLM AI controlled robot slaves so that we can make hover cars using superconductors?

No no, you use the LLM AI to funnel real people into becoming Belters, then fake their communications back home with those same LLMs, then move your X HQ to Mars and oppress them from there.

...also, Elon would totally pull a Duarte....

Yes, I can see it now. “X corp” is the amalgamation of Twitter, Tesla, and SpaceX. It mines the resources of the outer solar system using enhanced humans (“replicants”). They have Neuralink implants keeping them under the control of their evil overlord: MuskX.

Interestingly enough, there's already some idle speculation that the apparent variability of LK99 synthesis might be improved with zero-G manufacturing.

Postulation :

Can someone please take layers of graphene and pure gold leaf and tell me what that may result in, aside from beautiful "damascus"?