this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
160 points (94.9% liked)
Asklemmy
43909 readers
1302 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Nanotubes and graphene themselves had a deep hype cycle. They're super strong... as long as they're atomically perfect. The second bit just kind of got left out of the popsci stuff circa-2009.
The biggest thing about technology nobody talks about is manufacturing. The physics was there to design a modern GPU in WWII, it's just that reliably making a thing with few-hundred-atom switches starting with 1940's tools is a very hard problem. The correct approach to do so wasn't even clear until the 70's or so, and then it took many decades of finetuning and building up ever larger and more expensive fabs that can print features that small in environments that perfect.
There's no clear way to place individual atoms of a large object at reasonable price right now. Maybe some kind of biotech will make it possible eventually, or just scaling up current atomic manipulation techniques a lot, but for now CNTs are but high-tech asbestos.