Yep. Were there is a will there is a way.
Our scientists are always working on new technologies and are improving/developing new technics to control energy.
Engineers are constantly developing new manufacturing technics and are improving the machines.
One example I like is about a metal bender. A simple device on a metal pedistal with a big metal nob in the middle. It has a handle that goes on it with a nob on that. You take a metal bar, put it on the machine, pull on the bar hard and it bends the metal all smooth like.
However if you need a metal bender device you need to find someone that already has one to build another machine for you. You need a metal bender to build a metal bender. However using some engineering technics and laws of leverage and stuff like that, you can bend bars a bit heftier then the bars that the machine that's making it is built out of.
So each machine that gets built is a bit hardier, can bend slightly larger and tougher metal bars. Then the machine that gets built from that machine can be made more powerfull and bigger.
Then they begin adding motors, developing other metal shaping devices that continously built machines bigger, more powerfull, and more complex then themselves.
etc etc.
Now we have gigantic machines that we use to build super oil tankers, skyscrapers, monsterous bridges and stuff like that.
The only thing people aren't sure about is were the first metal bender came from, and how the guy built it without having a metal bender in the first place.
And that's how I figure that enginneering science is like. Each new developement of technology provides the means to press the boundries a little farther back. They provide the basis for testing new ideas and developing new technics to handle problems that are created by pressing current technology far beyond it's current capabilities. You can build bigger, purer silicon wafers buy correcting mistakes from the past, thus making it cheaper. Machines to make the traces for the cpu's are designed on ever improving computers that can provide the means to make tighter and tighter tolerances. etc etc.
And the occasional breakthru doesn't help either. For instance from a slashdot story from a while back I learned of the race to create a pure very large diamond. Diamonds are just carbon crystals of a particular type, it's just hard to make big pure ones because anything you use to make the diamonds gets trapped in the cystal structure.
Now you got one guy using a russian technic developed years ago for making large industrial diamonds. It never took off because the amount of persicion needed for a very complicated proceedure ment that almost every time you try to make a diamond something went wrong. Now using modern robotic technology and computers that level of repeated exactness is fairly easy. So he makes diamonds that are big, and completely undetectable from a natural diamond in a chemical/visual way. The only real flaw is that they are to perfect.
The second guy is more interesting. He creates diamonds by growing them in a chemical enviroment. Buy slowly growing them up from a diamond "seed" the chemicals bond to the existing diamond and grow more crystals on that, making it bigger. One of the things he is growing are large wafers. So he grows them out, slices them up into thin slices, puts them in the chemical enviroment and grows them thicker and wider.
Eventually he want's to create diamonds that are very wide, deep, and flat. The bigger the seed he creates for the next diamond the bigger and faster he can grow the next diamond.
You see you can dope diamonds, just like you can with silicon. You add impurities to modify the electrical behavior of the crystal and create transistors. Since you can add the impurities at will when you grow diamonds like that you will eventually be able to build diamond-based electronics and especially CPU's.
The neat thing is that diamonds can wistand intense heat without fear of breaking down like silicon. So you could make a CPU core that you can overclock the snot out of. You can have it put out hundreds of degrees worth of temperature. The only practical limations would be the ability of the surrounding electronics to withstand the heat of the cpu.
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