9 thoughts on “Diamond Nanothreads”

1. We’ll all be dressed in Victorian garb a la Stephenson sooner than expected.

2. I hate to sound like a natter nabob of negativism, but I think they’ll have trouble closing the business case for building the largest structure in the history of mankind out of the most expensive material on the entire planet.

   1. Umm, George… wouldn’t the same reasoning apply to SLS? (given the 10’s of billions in costs, building the thing in diamond would actually be cheaper…)

      In a sane world, you’d be right…. but not in this one. 🙂

      Besides, it’d only be the largest structure in length, not mass. 🙂

   2. If it’s “the strongest man-made material in the universe”, then it probably isn’t the most expensive material on the planet, but in the whole cosmos. Man-made material, that is.

3. Be careful with that stuff. The Ringworld engineers used it to hold the shadow squares together.

   1. But in the Darkship universe dimatough showed up everywhere.

      1. Did it decapitate panicky puppeteers as easily as on Ringworld? 😉

4. The global sales of kevlar are capped at $7B or so which is DuPont’s entire materials unit. http://www.dupont.com/content/dam/assets/country-config/assets_tool_annualreport/2013/documents/006083-01E-AnnualReview_lr.pdf

   The diamond thread would cannibalize only a portion of that market unless it was cheaper than steel for cable.

5. Ridiculously expensive new materials have a way of becoming cheaper. Napoleon III of France used to reserve his aluminium cutlery for special guests – lesser lights had to make do with mere gold.

   Rather more alarmingly, in 1943 there were at most a few grams of plutonium in the entire world – now there are hundreds of tons of the stuff.

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