It has 4 fairly common ingredients and only needs a couple of days to create. You can be sure that China will make a spreadsheet with all possible combinations of synthesis and farm them out to their Universities for rapid development... and then they start hunting for the 'ideal' version... flexible, fast to synthesize etc.
The Manhattan project and moon landings happened because the US spent a significant % of it's GDP on the project. We might have Fusion already if they repeated it...
LK-99 is just chemistry... not nearly as complicated.
Ideally you build an international power grid. Solar in the Sahara powers Europe but then you loop it around the world and we have 24 hour power from Australia and the Atacama, tied into hydro, nuclear and wind.
Put it in your battery anode and you can charge your car in a few seconds.
Computers won't need cooling and can be way smaller. Quantum computing becomes more practical. AGI is more likely.
Huge implications for Fusion, which then means we can start pulling CO2 from the air since we'll have more power than we need...
While we're in this phase of Schrodinger's superconductor of 'waiting on replication', one thing is clear...
Science is broken.
If they really saw this as being possible in 1999 why has it taken so long to progress? Well, I guess it's because they had day jobs... but think of what could have changed if it worked 24 years ago... think of the carbon we've spewed out in a quarter century :(
We really need a multi-billion dollar x-prize for tech like this... and make it open-source so it's not paywalled behind a patent.
It's to protect the inventors while they license the technology.
If this works they'll be licensing the rights to use it to some massive companys... besides multiple Korean companies are already invested in it...
LK-99 would likely only be a first step... a brittle crystal doesn't make a great power line...