alt Hacker NewsAll the properties have to be right and the price has to be right too.
Mainstream plastics, like all the ones that have their own recycling symbols, are made from monomers that cost about 50 cents a pound. There are thousands and thousands of polymers you've never heard of, some of which are very high performance, which are many times more expensive.
I think of the story that Silicon is not that good of a semiconductor as semiconductors go, but boy do people know how to make things out of it.
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.