Asklemmy

nanotechnology was supposed to be the most super amazing thing ever.

Like blockchain, 3d-printing, cloud and machine learning?

I'm no nanotech scientist, so I won't pretend I know all of the ins and outs here, but I'm sure when most people think about nanotechnology, they're probably picturing something like the later generation iron man suit from the marvel movies made up of billions of tiny nanobots that can reconfigure themselves and such. If such things will ever be possible, they're still a long way off

I have a hunch you probably have some visions in your head of tiny robots similar in size to a red blood cell swimming around in someone's blood stream, that seemed like a trope that was used by a few different sci Fi series when I was growing up, and certainly the kind of thing I personally picture when I think of nanobots. Problem is, at the nano scale, those kinds of things are kind of huge, a blood cell is a few thousand nanometers across. Most of what we're doing with nanotechnology is just a handful of nanometers in size, at the scale of a few molecules or even atoms. Eventually we may be able to put some of those parts together to make tiny robots and computers and such, but right now we're still kind of figuring out how to make the nuts and bolts and gears and such to make those bots out of.

There's also a lot of nanotech research that you may not really think of as technology but more as something like material science or chemistry. Any time you hear about new developments with carbon nanotubes or graphene, that's nanotechnology. Practical applications for stuff like that are still mostly works in progress, we're probably years, decades, maybe even centuries out before some of those things really come into their own, but when we do work out the bugs, they will absolutely be revolutionary.

But it's not all far future stuff, it's almost guaranteed that you have used and maybe even have in your home or on your person right now something that makes use of nanotech in some way. One example I saw mentioned a lot is sunscreen, there's a lot of sunblock that makes use of zinc oxide and/or titanium dioxide nanoparticles, clothing may contain nanoparticles to help with things like waterproofing, reducing odor, etc. there's lots of mundane nanotech that you're probably already taking advantage of.

I'm studying nano science right now, I think it still exists. And if it does it's still a super amazing thing.

It split into two.

The “very small scale structure manufacturing” part is alive and kicking. You are holding about a trillion perfect nanoscale devices in the palm of your hand right now.

The “we will make tiny robots that live in your body and fix you” club was always selling snake oil-and they knew it. The technology they were pushing just does not work at atmosphere temperature and pressure and immersed in oxidizing not quite neutral pH fluid.

Thankfully, there a much better way to make tiny machines that live in your body. That’s making/adapting/causing others to make proteins that do what you need them to do. Proteins are essentially bio-robots that can manipulate their surrounding by changes in their folds (conformation), for example by exposing binding sites in reaction to something binding to another binding site.

TLDR: nanotech is one of the largest industries in the planet. A lot of promises were made by idiots in the nineties, but biotech, another huge industry, has picked up the slack very well.

It became normal and normal is boring.

The Gartner Hype Cycle

I heard Bill gates installed it in covid vaccine for like 2 years straight.

It's used in medicine, meta materials, and physics everyday.

Totally replaced by the most super amazing AI ever

While we're at it, how about cybernetics, too?

It’s still here, but you aren’t seeing it because it’s really small.

It is still around, only the buzz around it died