Well you know about all those fancy battery technologies you’ve seen in the news? Some of those are already 30 years old by now and they are still stuck in the lab whereas Li-ion actually became a product. There has got to be a good reason why that happened. Maybe the technology was too expensive, too fragile, or maybe there was another drawback the article never mentioned. Same kinds of challenges face superconductors, graphene and fusion. That’s why we have these headlines periodically.

Why not? Lots of technologies are literally just about mixing chemicals together, and we could have done that at any point in time prior, we just didn’t.

Lithium ion battery technology is literally just mixing materials together. We’ve had access to lithium for centuries but we didn’t turn that technology into batteries until about 30 years ago.

Richard Feynman had a really good bit about how bad human intuition is about quantum physics. About how we evolved to throw a rock at an animal out on a grass plane, and not to make good guesses about the nature of particles so small we can’t even fathom them.

Seems appropriate here.

Why not? The search space is massive, and it’s not the first time humanity stumbled upon some simple revolutionary discovery.

Just because we failed to figure out the conceptually simple thing until now, doesn’t mean it can’t be the case. Anything else is just some form of human exceptionalism.

The simple chemistry is pretty specific and doesn’t work very well (it usually makes a semiconductor instead, and even when it does work, it’s a few tiny impure specks most of the time).

Why is it unbelievable?

Wow, great link. Thanks for that. Looking like bullshit.

Thank you so much! Comments like these is why I love Lemmy. A hidden gem in the sea of news spam.

If I can ask, how did you even find that place?