system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Say that atoms found in the island of stability were found to be really stable. What could we potentially use them for?

There is something called the island of stability which dictates that it may exist heavy elements that are stable. If we create such elements and their half-time is on the order of years. What could we use this new material for?
gpt
Some things that we need heavy materials for could be improved if we had *heavier* materials. For instance, shielding against gamma radiation. You want something with a high Z so that it's got a lot of electrons which can leech energy from a gamma ray via the photoelectric effect and Compton scattering.

Superheavy elements will have higher Z than anything else currently on the periodic table.

They could also have some very cool chemical properties, because at such high Z, the atomic electrons have to fill higher and higher orbitals. This means that have larger and larger single-particle energy levels, and relativistic effects start to become important. This can actually change the behavior of macroscopic amounts of that material. The band structure can be completely changed by relativistic effects. You could have materials which you'd naively expect to be metals based on their location on the periodic table, which actually behave like semiconductors. Of course this is all theoretical, since we're talking about elements which might not have been produced at all, let alone in macroscopic quantities.

But anyway, there are lots of reasons why we need to pursue this avenue of research and understand the extreme limits of nuclear and atomic physics.