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The only technology that has consistently grown at an exponential rate of doubling each year is IC/computing. It is utterly unreasonable to expect other science
by shas3 11y ago
The only technology that has consistently grown at an exponential rate of doubling each year is IC/computing. It is utterly unreasonable to expect other sciences and technologies to exhibit similar growth. There doesn't exist a Facebook for nanotech because nanotech doesn't grow and scale like computational resources.
Now, if you consider nanotech as a new term for some or all of the traditional fields of materials science and pharmaceuticals, then it is bullshit to claim that the hype died out. The traditional materials science companies soldier on and continue to grow at very impressive rates (stocks returning an annual 10-30%): P&G, Dow, Du Pont, 3M, etc.
The barrier for entry for startups is too high. Forget about building a manufacturing line, running a manufacturing line for a couple of days can cost in the order of millions of dollars. It is hardly a thing that one can do in one's parents' basement or garage. That is how most materials science-y and pharma companies have all been in the business for 50-100 years or more. Naturally, the successful companies in this area will be rather few in number.
- ThomPete 11y agoI don't disagree with you but I guess the point is that the application of nanotech used to be much more spoken of and visible. From self assembly of socks to breaking down pollution and gray goo. Now it's just doing what science does best, sit in the background and provide the basic building blocks of progress. But yeah building a nanotech company is not like putting a dating app on the app store that much is certain :)
- TeMPOraL 11y agoIT happened. It's much more sexy nowadays, providing immediate and tangible results, so media are all hyped about it. Maybe in a way it's better they shut up about nanotech - now we can do some real progress while having less frauds competing for research money.
- Dove 11y agoI don't know that you could measure it with something like Moore's Law, but aerospace capabilities grew at an astonishing rate at the beginning of the 20th century. From the Wright Brothers' first powered flight in 1903 to the first commercial flight in 1914 to flying around the world in 1924 to fighters and bombers and rockets in WW2 to breaking the sound barrier in 1947 to landing on the moon in 1969 . . . That sort of progress over 70 years strikes me as very comparable to the progress made in computing since the 1950s. Small wonder the science fiction writers of the previous generation thought we'd have flying cars by now! I would expect to see such an explosion of capability in a brand new field, in a society that had a lot of resources to dedicate to exploring it. It could happen with anything we really, really cared about, I think. Aerospace and computing both saw tremendous amounts of commercial, scientific, and military research during their accelerated growth phases. I don't know about nanotech. I'd say that sort of energy in this generation seems to mostly be going into building our society a hivemind. And I'm not gonna say that's wrong.
- shas3 11y agoA good analysis of this is by Vaclav Smil (One of Bill Gates's book club guys) http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/moores-curse http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/moores-curse