Well some startups that were making progress towards these moonshot ideas have been bought by Google. Also, they have a significant portion of the world's smart

Well some startups that were making progress towards these moonshot ideas have been bought by Google. Also, they have a significant portion of the world's smartest human beings. But there are exceptions; there are companies, big ones and startups, that are working on self-driving cars, cancer-detecting nanotechnologies, high-altitude balloon-based Internet, robotics, home automation, etc. Thinking further into this question you've posed...there has been a lot of discussion here on HN about how hardware is harder to work with than software. Whether this is true in anything other than for psychological or cultural reasons, who knows. But certainly there is more 'entropy' with your invested failures along the road to success and it's not as simple as deleting or cutting and pasting LOC in a computer file. Hardware is material.