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Will Graphene Revolutionize the 21st Century?
An anonymous reader writes "Much has been made of graphene's potential. It can be used for anything from composite materials — like how carbon-fiber is used currently — to electronics. 'Our research establishes Graphene as the strongest material ever measured, some 200 times stronger than structural steel,' mechanical engineering professor James Hone, of Columbia University, said in a statement. If graphene can be compared to the way plastic is used today, everything from crisp packets to clothing could be digitized once the technology is established. The future could see credit cards contain as much processing power as your current smartphone."
...because the difference between graphene and graphite is that graphene is one atom thick, bypassing the sheet-on-sheet sliding that makes graphite such a wonderful lubricant. If you want multiple sheets to be used in a material and still have some structural stability, you have to cross-link the atoms, which just gives you diamond (or amorphous carbon, if it's half-assed).
No, if graphene is the material of the 21st century, it will be entirely because of its electronic properties, not the mechanical.
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
something can be expensive to build and maintain and still be worth the money many times over.
the US rail and road networks are incredibly expensive to build and maintain yet they're worth the cost.
Now I couldn't even take a guess as whether it could be worth the cost since we don't even know what a space elevator might cost so I'm going to stick to fairly safe and general statements and simply argue that there are a lot of possibilities unless a space elevator would cost trillions.
there's a hell of a lot of possibly very valuable applications if you could ship things to orbit for a very low price.
orbital power arrays would be fairly sensible and could even be cheaper long term than some of the current energy production methods: get even a fraction of the world energy market and you'd be able to make/save a lot of money.
There's some added advantages with zero pollution etc
If it's one country building the elevator they could almost monopolize the market for a fair amount of time and rake in money building arrays for other countries.
Once you build one elevator any more become far cheaper to build so much of the construction costs of the first could be spread out over multiple such elevators.
any country which can ship lots of hardware into space for a low cost would also gain a significant military advantage: it's hard to build a bunker which can survive a thick tungsten bar dropped from orbit.
There's pretty much the whole current worldwide market for launching satellites for communication and anything else which you'd pretty much take over.
So you've got the energy market, the military market, the current space market and probably quite a few I've not thought of for income and those are big big markets.