The point is that room temperature superconductors only matter if they have several other properties - they have to be ductile (easy to mold into wires), have good material resistance, maintain their superconductivity under high enough currents, and be cheap enough to produce.
A ceramic room-temperature superconductor, like LK-99 would have been, is not a promising material at all, since it's extremely costly to make wires out of it. And even if we found a way to do so, it might not have mattered at all if it only worked for the very low currents/voltages in the original tests.
I was talking about a hypothetical RTSC that was amenable to industrial scale, not LK-99. Even so, merely knowing that RTSC with poor properties existed, would lead to massive search of the nearby (and other) spaces for better properties.
See the history of glass optimization- hundreds of years of poking around with terrible quality glass, then a revolution during the Schott era, to modern day Gorilla Glass. Or silicon- the initial transistor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Replica-of-first-transist...) was not something you could shove into a missile, that took 15 years to develop. To today's modern ICs which approach the atomic limits of semiconductor manufacturing.
The hope is that the initial RTSCs will follow a similar path, obvious there no guarantee
Still, if LK-99 had turned out to be an RTSC, that wouldn't necessarily take us any closer to an industrial-grade RTSC. It could just as well be a false lead, an interesting material with some niche applications that would remain more of a curiosity than anything.
RTSCs are not like cold fusion - as far as we know, they should be possible, so finding one would not upend science in some huge way. If the ones we find don't also happen to have all the other interesting properties we need, then they may never have any significant impact at all. This is what seems to be missed.
If LK-99 had been an RTSC, it should still not have been major news outside materials science research, since it wouldn't have had any direct impact on the economy, nor any predictable pathway to one. Some other future discovery, if it ever happened, would have been the one that actually mattered. That potential future discovery may have built on the current work, but whether it would be 1 year down the line or 10 or 100 or never would not be knowable.
It's like you're arguing with somebody different from me, who said something entirely different from what I said, while also agreeing with my unstated premise, and conditional language.
My point, which I believe contradicts yours, is that it's perfectly plausible that 1000 years from now humanity knows about plenty of RTSCs and still chooses copper and aluminum for power transmission and sillicon for transistors etc, because none of the RTSCs are actually useful on an industrial scale - so RTSCs would not have any significant effect on the economy. Of course, the opposite is also perfectly plausible.
I take your other comments to imply that finding one RTSC would prove or at least suggest that a path exists to some significant industrial usage of RTSCs down the line. I don't think that's correct, and I'm arguing about why I don't think that's correct. Of course, I may have misunderstood your comments.
I fully agree that finding an existence proof of RTSC could also fail to achieve anything, and even not affect rent at all- absolutely zero change in the two world lines.
Let me rewrite my original sentence that bothered people, so it's a bit clearer. Here's the original:
"""Room temp Superconductors, along with fusion, would affect the economy profoundly. What the exact effect on rent would be is hard to predict but under the "post-scarcity society" mental construct, having infinite energy at zero cost (amortized) would presumably make the price of housing change."""
Change "would" to "could" in the first sentence to make it conditional. Add an additional sentence at the end pointing out that house prices are complex and many factors influence them, and another pointing out that while sometimes we can achieve a property in a material, but fail to realize its industrial potential".
It does seem reasonable to posit that RTSCs, even if they failed to realize their industrial potential- could have an affect on rent. Rent is (to a zeroth order approximation) determined by a wide range of macroeconomic activities, and if we reordered our entire society around improving RTSCs, that could have indirect effect on the cost of housing.
All of that was implicit in my original text- and I had hoped to make that clear- rather than making a strong statement like "rent will go down if RTSCs exist".
A ceramic room-temperature superconductor, like LK-99 would have been, is not a promising material at all, since it's extremely costly to make wires out of it. And even if we found a way to do so, it might not have mattered at all if it only worked for the very low currents/voltages in the original tests.