Bananas are Walmart’s best selling item and I have it on pretty good authority that there’s an associate whose primary assignment is to keep the bananas stocked during peak weekend hours.
A couple of them, really. Semiconductors are one. Oil is another–very slightly longer timeframe, but not by much.
The silicon JATO is just about to burn out. We’ll keep the velocity, but we’ll need something else if we want to keep accelerating.
Molecular assembly seemed to have a burst of interest a couple decades ago, but I’ve seen very little lately. It would be amazing, clearly–produce high tech products for the price per weight of bananas (or wood, or whatever). While photolithography is basically in the nanotech range today, we don’t seem to be any closer to molecular robots that build more molecular robots. Except, of course, by co-opting biological assemblers. Maybe one day.
A daughter of a co-worker was a PhD in that area. She was not optimistic.
Natural life AKA biology is a chemical factory far more than it’s a machinery manufacturing plant. All sorts of obstacles come up at nano-scale for movement. Even as all sorts of obstacles to chemistry drop away. But life-level complexity is an astonishingly subtle and inscrutable beast that’s giving its secrets up slowly despite untold billions of dollars and scientist-hours poured into it every year.
If quantum computers are ever viable, it might make real nanotech possible. QCs aren’t useful for nearly as much as the hype suggests, but simulating other quantum systems–like atomic-scale machines–is one of those uses. Effective simulation of nanotech isn’t the only obstacle, but it’s certainly a big one.
I don’t think we necessarily need to replicate the complexity of life, any more than we needed to replicate flapping meat-wings to achieve flight. But we’re nowhere close to building any kind of self-replicating device, even assuming an infinite supply of power/materials and a limited set of outputs. Gonna be a while, I think. We’ll make more progress in the bio-realm just because we can build things without actually knowing much about what we’re doing.
Not yet, but think of the possibilities. Imagine being shown every possible ad at the same time! This will put personality profiling out of business.
First, a cheap product that hasn’t been mentioned yet: flour. I just bought a 25lb sack at Costco and when I went over my receipt was amazed to find out it was less than $8.00. But apparently 31 cents/lb is about right for the price of flour.
On bananas: I wouldn’t be too sanguine about “oh, they’ll just find a different banana variety if Cavendish goes down.” There are all kinds of banana pests and diseases, and the resistant varieties are the exception, not the rule. Plus, bananas bred for export have to stay unripe for a long time.
“Normal” bananas, for those of us lucky to live in places where they grow easily (or did - Hawai’i used to produce lots, but banana bunchy top disease has decimated production), put a Cavendish to shame. Most varieties are smaller, more fragrant, sweeter, and infinitely more delicious. I remember the first banana I ate when I moved to a tropical island in the 1980s - it was a revelation. The Cavendish you can buy in a grocery store is the iceberg lettuce of fruit.
I’ve read that lots of the other varieties of bananas have big seeds. I wonder if there is a similarly sized seedless banana variety that could replace the Cavendish.
You totally win the thread award for best username / post combo!! 
I don’t think there are any bananas cultivated for food that have big seeds- just wild ones and some grown as ornamentals.
Though it is possible to induce some seedless varieties to produce seeds, that is part of the problem- an awful lot of crop varieties are still based around growers going ‘Hey, this plant’s different, and that trait may be useful!’ and then crosses and whatnot to stabilise the new combo- because bananas are cloned, rather than grown from seed, spontaneous interesting plants don’t pop up much, and even if they do it may not be possible to cross them in to other varieties. We can do some of it in a lab, but that’s still massively more complex and expensive and some countries won’t grow it at the end.
Many other cloned fruit crops -like fruit trees- are grafted- so the roots are a different variety, and a lot of the disease resistance and vigour comes from the roots. Not bananas, it has to all be in one. All in all, the diseases can potentially evolve far faster than we can change the crop to cope, and that’s very tricky.