As for the rest of your questions . . . mechanochemistry was first accomplished back in like 97 I do believe! Zyvez has been moving fifty atoms(as of the last report I’ve heard; see this website!) per second; i don’t know if that was actual mechanochemistry. Their timeline is sometime around moore’s law – 2020; almost certainly before 2030, the world won’t be the same(if we’re still here; china is itching to take out Taiwon, and North Korea wants to take out South Korea and Zyvex is intimately tied up with them; seems to me that North Korea is waiting for China to perfect their anti-aircraft carrier technology to start war with South Korea with China keeping America at bay; i’ve heard that china could have their anti-aircraft carrier weapons system perfected in three years . . .

But, there’s other ‘nanotechnologies’; dna-nanotechnologies; right now, we can self-organize pretty well; now, we have some hints of being able to do some mechanochemistry with it as well. There was also an Israel group which figured out how to make ‘stiff’ carbon structures of any shape(only spheroids have so far been reported). The race to a nanomanufacturing that can cure the sick, kind of sweep away the economic system is heating up for sure! I would think within five years, dna-nanotech can do a lot. Question is how much and can it ‘bootstrap’ itself to a more robust nanomanufacturing system before Zyvex gets going?

Applications are harder to predict; new scientific instruments and some medical abilities for sure.

Also: What are some alternatives to diamondoid for nanomechanical devices? Silicates? Glass? Metals?