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?
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.
Because the steel ball needs to be a perfect sphere, and no one in China could produce such finely honed materials prior to then.
Computer chips were impossible 100 years ago, for many of the same reasons, and the chips we make today, impossible to manufacture 20 years ago.
If something has value, and would this ever have value!!, trillions will be spent, over 20 years, making it cheap to do.
And those improvements in manufacturing capabilities will spread through all otger industries, the entire ecosystem improving itself over and over.
Because that's how it's worked, always. Put another way, if required, we'll do a solve.
Because that's what we humans do.
For the balls in pens, I think there was one factory in Japan that did that very well, and they had no qualms about exporting them to China at reasonable prices, so China could make pens fine enough, just the ball used in n high quality ones (which, were the ones that would actually sell) used a ball imported from Japan. The minister was angry the pens weren’t 100% Chinese, rather than just 99% Chinese.
One can easily imagine that there are many such components produced in China that other countries aren’t currently tooled to produce economically, so it’s not weird or very unprecedented that China wasn’t previously set up to make perfect balls for pens.
This rumor has been refuted many times. It is not hard core science to produce such "finely honed material", no one bothered to make it because the total market volume is way too small for typical modern steelmakers. Only 100 tons of such "finely honed material" is consumed in China each year and it is declining for obvious reasons.
There were heated debate in China for the particular matter - should China enter all such tiny specific segment to compete with every country. You don't need a smart brain to come to the right conclusion here.
> If something has value, and would this ever have value!!, trillions will be spent, over 20 years, making it cheap to do.
Obviously this is not the case.
Americans are not building high speed rails, not because it doesn't bring in the so called value, it is because such investment would threat the interests of those airliners. How much the US invested in high speed rail in the last 20 years compared to its total $ spent on wars?
It is also lagging on productions of EVs, maybe EVs don't bring in values? LOL
> And those improvements in manufacturing capabilities will spread through all otger industries, the entire ecosystem improving itself over and over.
until you get yourself de-industrialized and then it is over.
It doesn't bring in so called value versus the investment assuming actual final costs of building such a system. Except the north east however the cost of buying land to build it there and revamping existing infra like stations is a massive. People keep wishing it did but a system that is slower (door to door) and less convenient (lack of local public transit) than airplanes isn't particularly good.
America is pretty bad at building other infrastructure, too.
NY subway does not threaten interests of airlines, but its expansion is notoriously slow and expensive.
Aquiring the rights of way is an enormous undertaking due to rule of law. Getting construction permits is an enormous undertaking due to environmental law. Determining the path and stops is a giant political mess because nobody wants to miss out on being on the rail, but if you let everyone on, it won't be high speed anymore.
The whole thing won't have a lot of return until decades after it begins and only if it offers good comparative utility and value when it's delivered, which depends on the state of roads, air travel, virtual presence, and other things that affect demamd for travel.
Similar to UAP
If this does prove as a path to high temperature super conductivity under normal or at least achievable pressures then it would open a whole new world of potential materials for material scientists to explore.
Our understanding of superconductivity is already incomplete we do not have a working theory for current high temperature (~100k) superconductors either.
Advancing our understand of room temperature semiconductivity is worthwhile by itself even if we cannot manufacture this particular material.
Now, there is some value in continued work that ignores consensus or popularity. Consensus doesn't mean absolute certainty and historically big leaps have been made in areas people consider lost causes or wastes of time pursing. So, its good that we don't abandon searching the knowledge spaces entirely, but I will say that's often not the driving motive. It has more to do with careers and putting food on the table, such is the ecosystem that is research. LK99 won't disappear for quite awhile and people will continue novel research in the area.
And that's if their models and assumptions are correct. If it works.
The way I see it, the best this material can do for us is advance our theoretical understanding of superconductivity. There's no grand theory of how molecular/crystal structure relates to superconductivity. But maybe we've gotten a little bit closer.