HN user
I think a lot of people who have pets or kids who are outside a lot and some rooms with hard floors would be pleasantly surprised at how good even a really mediocre mopping does when it's done often enough.
If room temperature superconductors existed that were practical for transmission scale wires, it would be possible to make a global superconducting electrical grid. The middle East could fill their desert with solar panels and export that electricity to Europe. The sunny side of the planet could export solar power to the nighttime side of the planet. You could make electrical motors out of it a fraction of the size of current motors, like 1000 of horsepower out of a soda can, which would revolutionize the design of pretty much everything in the world with moving parts. Mechanical transmissions would go the way of the vacuum tube. Any vehicle or ship that's not completely electrified would be hybrid electric at least. You could also miniaturize transformers which has a lot more implications for making everything that uses a lot of power to be much more powerful and cheaper.
There's already underwater powered trenching/laying equipment they use to bury the cables within X miles from the shore. The Baltic Sea is probably shallow enough to bury it all the way across at a higher cost per mile of course.
Here I was thinking in the opposite direction. That it kind of skipped step 0. Why should we want to socialize, why should we care to? Wasn't the work day enough interaction with other humans for one day and why should we feel a need to seek more? I'm not very social lol
Modern chainfalls use one loop of chain to drive a gear reduction which drives a separate load chain. Differential chain hoists with an upper and lower pulley and no gear reduction are found in museums.
Just about every forklift uses a 1/2:1 pulley system in the the chains that lift the fork carriage up the mast. The main lifting pistons push a pulley upwards with chains tied to the fork carriage and mast base routed through the pulley.