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by A_D_E_P_T 18 days ago
Yeah.

Think of how many man-hours over the past ~35 years have been spent in trying to make graphene and carbon nanotubes into useful products. It's easily somewhere in the millions. And really all we have to show for it are resins with slightly improved thermal conductivity and a rogues' gallery of grifters and failed startups.

Discovery's easy, scaling in the real world is hard, and scaling something that makes good commercial sense is very hard.

1 comments

I get laughed at if I go to a conference and suggest that carbon nanotubes could be the answer to something!
Silicon is the Facebook of solid-state apps.

Institutions look for the "killer app" but it's the

network effects that makes unaffordable the playing fee. any entity that wants to disrupt the house has to .. ship all the _tooling_ at once [and all made of/dependent on nanotubes, for instance]..

Aside from that: Carbon nanotubes shareholders will have to learn basic strat from a future Social Network that puts Meta in the recycle bin (short of emptying it, so that could well be Meta reinventing itself!)