I think the rule of thumb, though, is that most things don't turn out to be viable, and then most viable things are only barely useful due to constraints. But occasionally they DO occasionally come up with world-changing technology.

Dark example, but the atomic bomb for instance was a dramatic improvement in our capacity to destroy things: night and day difference.

> I feel like this whole thing is going to be graphene all over again. A massive initial hype around "world changing tech" that ends up being very difficult and costly to scale and produce commercially.

That's kinda how science goes. The first free-electron laser was built in 1971. It took decades to develop and commercialize free-electron lasers and we still in the early days.

It is rare for a single discovery to revolutionize everything especially in the 21st century. Typically it is a series of discoveries in a row that taken together allow new processes and technologies. Each discovery on that road is important.

The short term impacts of discoveries are overestimated, the long term impacts are underestimated.

On a 50-100 year time scale, the perception of graphene may be very different from what it is now. We are looking at a tadpole and saying, I thought these eggs were suppose to hatch into frogs, not tadpoles.

The history of the laser makes for fascinating reading. Moreso because the longer they looked the harder it was to find things that were candidates that they couldn't get to exhibit the effect given the right conditions, but some of those were so extreme that they would have been discarded outright in the early days.

The idea originated with Einstein in the middle of WWI, and it took until 1960 for the first working device to be made with lots of incremental progress in the middle. After that it's been a non-stop series of inventions each of which gave rise to new practical applications and new avenues of search. Originally described as 'a solution looking for a problem' it turned out that indeed, it was the solution to a lot of problems, we just didn't realize how applicable this tech would be.

It’s worth pointing out that graphene literally is just a single layer of graphite. Making macroscopic objects out of graphene would mean layering them. So effectively we already have graphene in the form of graphite fiber (also called “carbon fiber”).

Graphite with zero defects and perfect crystallinity has the same properties as graphene. It IS layers of graphene.

(This is all essentially true for carbon nanotubes, too, which are just tubes made of graphene… maybe graphene is more chemically reactive due to the ends of the sheets though.)

My guess would be that it'd be similar to silicon wafer production and just require lots work to industrialize the process and hone production. Graphene is just particularly difficult due to its 2-d nature, but lk-99 looks to a regular crystalline structure.