One thing that really got my attention when I studied nanotechnology is how many original technologies we still use regularly, just in a refined/modified form (Chemical Vapour Deposition, a technique used heavily in the production of many ordinary products from computer chips to chip bags, is fundamentally the exact same technology first used to smelt ore). It actually wouldn’t be hard at all to transition to lower impact technologies in a lot of places if people were okay with not electrifying/connecting everything possible.
They’re both essentially vaporizing a metal with high heat to deposit upon a substrate above. Early smelting was just looking to purify the metal and remove impurities, and now we’ve refined that same technique with strictly controlled parameters to deposit exactly what metal we want to have where, to build the microscopic features of modern computer chips.
this is neither what smelting is or what CVD is. smelting goes from oxide to metal, and uses carbon monoxide at ~atmospheric pressure for that. early smelting was used for smelting, but early purification method was forging. there’s Mond process, but it’s not smelting. CVD occurs in vacuum and uses something probably rather reactive on its own that decomposes on target surface, sometimes giving one atomic layer at a time, and it doesn’t have to be metal
It actually wouldn’t be hard at all to transition to lower impact technologies in a lot of places if people were okay with not electrifying/connecting everything possible.
I would assume the push to connect everything under the sun is driven more by cheap electronics and corporate marketing teams rather than actual consumer demand. Making products “smart” is cheaper and more profitable than making them better quality. Go figure.
sustainability.stanford.edu
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