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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

To change the world it has to be manufacturable at scale, stable, etc.

Not necessarily. If this material is legit, this proves that room temperature superconductors can exist. If it works in this material, others might also work. Eventually it may lead to a material that can be manufactured cheaply enough. The potential monetary savings of such a material is so great, that you'll see billions flow into materials research.

I don't agree. Producing something at scale is only relevant if the goal is mass commercial distribution. Communication satellites changed the world and they are practically all (i.e., some exceptions such as space-x constellation) one-off builds of single-shot projects.

Communication satellites only changed the world because they broadcast to mass produced receivers.

Mass produce as many receivers you want and don't launch the ad-hoc satellite. How useful are the receivers?

There is always low range broadcast I suppose.

I believe receiver use same tech as transmitter. When you have one, you must have the counterpart.

> I believe receiver use same tech as transmitter.

The hard problem solved by satellites is getting the satellite in orbit and getting it to stay there.

Humanity already could send radio waves across the planet. Emitter and receiver is not the hard problem.

People use the same stupid argument when commenting on quantum computer. But in case of QC, one is powerful enough to compute everything and we might not even need two, except for spare. Say a 1000 qubits QC exist, Work that it can do is the sum of all computering power in human history. You cannot even verify if the result is right or not because simply you don't have any classical alternative for that workload.

> But in case of QC, one is powerful enough to compute everything and we might not even need two, except for spare. Say a 1000 qubits QC exist, Work that it can do is the sum of all computering power in human history. You cannot even verify if the result is right or not because simply you don't have any classical alternative for that workload.

A 1000-qubit QC can't break a RSA-2048 key, let alone a lot of other interesting tasks. Quantum computers aren't magical things that provide exponential speedups on absolutely everything; they can only provide exponential speedups on some algorithms, and those algorithms generally require linear numbers of qubits to the problem size, so 1000 qubits is greatly limiting to problem size.

1000-qubit QC can't break a RSA-2048 key

Neither any classical computer can. We don't even have enough harddrive to store all quantum information in a 100 qubit QC, let alone 1000qubit. QC is limited to solve a subset of problems do not automatically equals to QC is useless comparing to classical ones. Also not able to invalidate the powerfulness of QC beyond 100 qubits.

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