>>13138635We can't make forests of CNTs bigger than 28cm right now, mostly because the catalyst gas fades quickly in current environment. I'm willing to bet that you can with fusion, create magnetic bottles wherein basically only the catalyst gas + CNT material exists and can be aligned and channeled through formation apertures to create massive strands of CNT forests; which you can then use to create whatever you need.
Alternatively, you can use fusion to yeet all your CNT production into LEO, wherein microgravity can allow for more stagnation of the catalyst materials within a localized space and improve yield potential of CNTs.
All of the above is speculation, but I do know for a fact that current CNT productions in addition to the aforementioned material and catalyst issues, is also incredibly energy intensive. Fusion will remove the roadblock from at least in being able to scale that aspect of the production either on ground or in space--and through enough compute and material science research simulation with the assistance of AI (of any kind), we'll be able to figure out the best configuration and ratio to mass produce CNTs.
It may take a bit of time, but the industrial scale production issue will be resolved decades earlier thanks to fusion than otherwise; and having megatons or gigatons of CNTs available at variable lengths means you've entered a new era of material possibility:
1. they're room temperature CNTs
2. I'll try and find the paper in a following post, but I recall that at the quantum level, CNTs get all kinds of fucky where they get colder the more energy that runs through them.
3. CNTs and Graphene are closely related. Industrial scale production of CNTs means you can do industrial scale graphene. That means you can replace silicon with graphene for computers and lead to a 10x improvement in perf per watt. A Zen3 core at 3Ghz would as powerful as 10 11900K @ 3GHz at 65W. 12TFLOPs GPUs = 1.2PFLOPs @ 200W = full RT @ 4K60 w/ physics.
