AppleBonker wrote:But what of all the material innovations going into improving the core components of those devices? You're just going to ignore all of those advancements? Hell, some of the innovations are not even in the materials themselves, but rather in the methods of producing them that lower the cost or improve the quality (sometimes both). A lot of the work in the materials field right now is focusing on those issues, not trying to create some new wonder-product.
To be honest, it's kind of a semantic issue. These iterative steps I would hardly call game changers or life changing. They are part of the regular, fairly predictable development of any technological advancement, and have been happening in some form since people started using tools. We naturally are constantly looking at more efficient and faster ways of doing things. Building, manufacturing, textiles, argriculture, and all sorts of day to day components of society have steadily improved on a natural progression as time passes.
Every single microprocessor advancement that has found its way into consumer level electronics has followed the same pattern of taking the existing tech, making it smaller, and faster, and using more of it. Something more to what I am talking about would be if this material took us off in leaps and bounds in a new direction, which it very well could. It wasn't part of the preconceived natural line of progression so much as something completely new and different. The question is where does that go. I guess my main point is that kind of monumental leap in advancement only comes about a scant few times a century (or less) and the last few candidates for this have been around for a considerable amount of time without really making their impact felt. buckminsterfullerene and its descendant the carbon nanotube have been around for quite some time now and while there have been countless proposed uses for them, we are seriously any put into practice on any appreciable level.
RCA wrote:Dattebayo wrote:
So are diamonds. Your argument is invalid.
Any organic substance is biodegradable.
Not entirely true. Carbon Allotropes, which include diamond and graphite (and thus graphene) are widely and more or less unanimously in scientific circles considered to be inorganic.
