this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2023
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It’s like all the revolutionary battery technologies, computer storage technologies, fusion, cure for cancer, anything with graphene in it, cure for immune diseases and all that. People just love to write clickbait articles about this stuff.
Developing these ideas in the lab takes decades, and turning those ideas into actual products takes even more time. When you see articles about these topics, you can be pretty sure you’ll never hear about it again.
Edit: Just to be clear: technology is going forward all the time, but news articles tend to fucus on things that are interesting or fascianting, and extrapolate from there. The technologies that actually end up becoming widespread might not be interesting enough to write about.
The real reason it takes time is because we try not to harm people even in experimental drug testing. It would be much faster to simply toss shit at the wall and see what sticks, but that's not exactly humane. So we have to find analogues that hopefully mimick humans will enough, but they don't really work well. So it takes lots of time to build up enough evidence with those preliminary tests to convince the safety board to allow human trials. Then trials have to slowly scale up to limit the amount of people harmed by unforseen effects with a lot of time between as the safety board reviews the previous results before allowing the next test.
It's all good to do, but it does make development frustratingly slow sometimes. Especially when people are actively dying waiting for the new drugs.
Looking at the price per kWh for commercial batteries tells me that we are seeing the battery revolution right now.
Graphene is already commercially used in some applications:
There are already very effective cures for some types of cancer (note that the differences between the many types of cancer can be huge and so the effort and time needed to create cures will also be very different. some treatments also are effective but not completely understood yet, like for bladder cancer)
Nuclear fusion devices are commercially used in material analysis (mostly in the semiconductor industry and in ore processing). There are different types in use – some even use thermonuclear fusion on a small scale.
It all seems like super crazy superconductor level tech until it becomes mundane and part of peoples lives ... then we stop noticing how amazing it really is.
Oh, I’m not saying that development isn’t happening. I’m just saying that the articles you see on the magazines and papers tends to focus on wild technologies like grinding metals into nano particles and using that as a battery. Yes, New Scientis (or was it Scientific American… can’t remember) actually wrote about that stuff and predicted that cars of the future would use this energy source. Ideas like that get reported bacause they sound cool, while incremental upgrades to plain old lithium ion technology gets ignored by the tech magazines.
I’m really looking forward to seeing graphene and carbon nano tubes being used in various applications. Scaling up your production usually is the real problem though. Even if you’re able to produce a few micrograms of something in the lab doesn’t mean you can actually turn that into a commercial product. The transition from NiMH to Li-ion seemed like that for a while until one manufacgturer (was it Sony or Philips?) took the risk and started making those batteries in massive scale. Consumers loved that, and before long everyone started using this wonderful new technology. When someone takes that risk with graphene, we’ll probably start seeing it everywhere.
mRNA vaccines had been in development for about 20 years prior to 2019. We were lucky.
It's difficult to pin down "when did mRNA research begin?" but, a pretty good date is to say, "The 1990s." But you could go back as far as 1960 or 1970 if you were being technical.
https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2021/the-long-history-of-mrna-vaccines has a good write-up.
mRNA technology is a HUGE breakthrough. Like I said, we were lucky it was essentially ready and able to help with the COVID vaccine development when it was.
Nope. In this case they figured out that you can “tag” molecules with N-acetylgalactosamine, and that convinces the Liver to tolerate the molecule that causes the immune reaction and signal the immune system. My wife has a major anaphylactic reaction to certain shrimp and this would be a game changer.
Graphene actually is used in small amounts in a few places today. The difficulty is still in scaling up production.
I won't really know which computer storage technologies you're referring to. There are plenty of different ones, most of them just have niche applications or are too expensive to replace today's SSDs for general use, as SSD technology have gone a long way. It's a similar story to batteries, honestly. Lithium is still just the cheapest for what it does, but alternatives for niche applications exist.
Fusion needs more funding, no way around that, otherwise the theory is sound.
But of course, it is true there's tons of clickbait. But promising new developments do exist.
Before SSDs became widespread, the tech news would usually find a way to include an article about a revolutionary new storage technology that could store 100x more than a CD. Yes, that was a long time ago, and no, we didn’t hear from those technologies ever again.
100x more than a CD?
700 MB was the typical capacity of a CD. 100 times 700 MB is 70000 MB, ~70 GB.
SSDs nowadays can hold multiple TB of data, and HDDs can get even bigger in capacity 20 TB HDDs are available for consumers.
I was mainly thinking of all the countless articles I saw in various magazines in the 90s and 00s. It was pretty wild what people were thinking what storage of the future would look like. Then DVDs and higher capacity HDDs came along. In the end, they actually ended up having the capacity that the articles were speaking of. It’s just that the technology wasn’t quite so creative.
Also, we didn’t really replace the floppy disk with one of those revolutionary technologies the articles were talking about. Floppies simply died out when CD-RW and DVD-RW became good enough. Eventually those died out too when flash drives became cheap enough. There was a long list of candidates that were supposed to occupy that same space, but they just never became anything. Eventually cloud storage took over and by that it was far to late for any of those dead technologies to even try.
I recall seeing one Nokia phone that actually did have a tiny HDD inside it before flash memory became cheap enough. That could be considered one of the wild technologies that were supposed to take over the market, but never did. Turns out, CF and SD cards were so much better, so they ended up becoming the new standard. Once again, all the wild articles in the tech magazines did’t predict flash memory to dominate the market, because that just wasn’t click bait enough for the editor. Instead, wild quantum crystals and crazy experimental stuff like that was in the headlines all the time. Maybe all the incremental developments in DVDs, HDDs and flash memory just wasn’t sexy enough to write about.