In recent years, humanity managed to develop a tractor beam that can move around objects at the millimetre scale with beams of light.

Before that, we naturally had beams that could move things at the atomic scale. With the right configuration of lasers, power, and control software, I imagine it would be technically possible to use this technology to construct something atom by atom, though it would be painstakingly slow.

So we do have replicator technology. It’d just take years to produce a single tea, earl grey, hot right now, rather than seconds. Not exactly practical, but still interesting nonetheless.

In a time where every major browser is announcing revolutionary new LLM AI integrations, I feel like Mozilla announcing a new email client is like listening to your friends talk about the new cars they just bought and going “I found a dead pigeon at the side of the road once” because you want to feel included.

Like, good for you, but that’s not what this conversation is about.

For the people wondering “What’s the limit” or “What happens at 1nm”, you should know that “3nm” is just marketing speak, not the real size of the die. It doesn’t mean anything, other than it’s better than “4nm”.

According to the projections contained in the 2021 update of the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems published by IEEE Standards Association Industry Connection, a 3 nm node is expected to have a contacted gate pitch of 48 nanometers and a tightest metal pitch of 24 nanometers.

That said, after “3nm” they’ll go to “2nm”, and after that they’ll start referring to things in “Angstrom” terms instead. 20A, 18A, and so on.

1A = 0.1nm