And I have said this for years. It’s not because nanotech isn’t feasible. It’s because those who know it’s potential have sucked at marketing.

Governments are only going to support something from which they see immediate short term gains. Look at how they’ve treated the space program for forty years.

You want research funds to go to nanotech, sell Hollywood on it’s rejuvenation possibilities, sell computer makers on it’s ability to place a computer in every cell. Intel Inside would have a whole new meaning. Sell it to the fashion industry by promoting how it could make clothes with completely new properties, like body sheaths that can shrink to fit perfectly skin tight, or fabrics which can change color.

By exploring nothing but the dangers, endlessly talking about the threats of grey goo etc, and refusing to SELL THE IDEA BY EVERY MEANS POSSIBLE, nanotech researchers have cut their own throats. They’ve done little to actually make the idea appealing to the masses, let alone government. “Here, let’s give you a technology which will make you a god… oh, but it’s gonna more than likely kill you first.” Where is the incentive?

You even allowed nanomaterials designers to steal your thunder and stretch “nanotechnology” into a buzzword that THEY HAD NO QUALMS ABOUT SELLING BY EVERY MEANS POSSIBLE. Nanotech “fuzzy fibers” indeed.

I am all too aware of how dangerous nanotech can be, but selling the dangers and downplaying the benefits, even castigating the wild imaginations of the creative dreamers who can foresee the potentials has been a poor strategy from the beginning. It’s no wonder after thirty years of endless moralizing and danger danger will robinsoning, that the government refuses to take nanotech seriously.

In other words, most nanotech researchers have been so overly cautious and trying so hard to avoid controversy, that they have sabotaged their own efforts to develop it.

And now, the rest of the world is passing us nervous nellies by.