UFO-tier or semiconductor fab tier[0]. But even then there are very few physical and economical situations where you can say "let's deposit X number of atoms per square nanometer of substrate" and not get laughed at.
Because the steel ball needs to be a perfect sphere, and no one in China could produce such finely honed materials prior to then.
Computer chips were impossible 100 years ago, for many of the same reasons, and the chips we make today, impossible to manufacture 20 years ago.
If something has value, and would this ever have value!!, trillions will be spent, over 20 years, making it cheap to do.
And those improvements in manufacturing capabilities will spread through all otger industries, the entire ecosystem improving itself over and over.
Because that's how it's worked, always. Put another way, if required, we'll do a solve.
Because that's what we humans do.
For the balls in pens, I think there was one factory in Japan that did that very well, and they had no qualms about exporting them to China at reasonable prices, so China could make pens fine enough, just the ball used in n high quality ones (which, were the ones that would actually sell) used a ball imported from Japan. The minister was angry the pens weren’t 100% Chinese, rather than just 99% Chinese.
One can easily imagine that there are many such components produced in China that other countries aren’t currently tooled to produce economically, so it’s not weird or very unprecedented that China wasn’t previously set up to make perfect balls for pens.
This rumor has been refuted many times. It is not hard core science to produce such "finely honed material", no one bothered to make it because the total market volume is way too small for typical modern steelmakers. Only 100 tons of such "finely honed material" is consumed in China each year and it is declining for obvious reasons.
There were heated debate in China for the particular matter - should China enter all such tiny specific segment to compete with every country. You don't need a smart brain to come to the right conclusion here.
> If something has value, and would this ever have value!!, trillions will be spent, over 20 years, making it cheap to do.
Obviously this is not the case.
Americans are not building high speed rails, not because it doesn't bring in the so called value, it is because such investment would threat the interests of those airliners. How much the US invested in high speed rail in the last 20 years compared to its total $ spent on wars?
It is also lagging on productions of EVs, maybe EVs don't bring in values? LOL
> And those improvements in manufacturing capabilities will spread through all otger industries, the entire ecosystem improving itself over and over.
until you get yourself de-industrialized and then it is over.
It doesn't bring in so called value versus the investment assuming actual final costs of building such a system. Except the north east however the cost of buying land to build it there and revamping existing infra like stations is a massive. People keep wishing it did but a system that is slower (door to door) and less convenient (lack of local public transit) than airplanes isn't particularly good.
America is pretty bad at building other infrastructure, too.
NY subway does not threaten interests of airlines, but its expansion is notoriously slow and expensive.
Aquiring the rights of way is an enormous undertaking due to rule of law. Getting construction permits is an enormous undertaking due to environmental law. Determining the path and stops is a giant political mess because nobody wants to miss out on being on the rail, but if you let everyone on, it won't be high speed anymore.
The whole thing won't have a lot of return until decades after it begins and only if it offers good comparative utility and value when it's delivered, which depends on the state of roads, air travel, virtual presence, and other things that affect demamd for travel.