A Catalog of Things That Are Definitely Not the Future of Electronics

​​One of many newsbites from this week's AAAS meeting—the rare scientific conference that emcompasses absolutely every kind of science—is ​the new potential of an old electrical material called germanium. Like graphene, when the stuff is peeled away layer by layer until it's just a single layer of atoms (two-dimensional, or very close to it) it becomes a superneat electrical conductor that is, according to a press release, the future of electronics. As the future of electronics, germanium is hardly alone.

Other futures of electronics include spintronic devices, ​stretchable electronic materials, ​moletronics (or electronics at the molecular scale), ​high-temperature superconductors, ​doped crystals, ​lithium-based batteries, ​silk,​ self-destructing implantable electronics, silicene, ​midfield powering, graphene, graphene, and graphene.

All of that is fine and good but also really hard to keep track of. Barely a week goes by without some press release in my inbox advertising another electronics future. So maybe we can take a break, just for today, and ask what isn't the future of electronics.

The electrical conductivity of wood is about 10^−16 S/m, which is a decimal point followed by 15 zeroes and a 1. Copper, on the other hand, boasts a conductivity of about 5.96×10^7, which is a 5.96 followed by six zeroes. Wet wood is a bit better, but wood in any form is not so likely to be the future of electronics.

Babies are a much better conductor than wood, but as a whole, human bodies aren't great conductors or consistent conductors. For example, human skin has an electrical resistance of some 100,000 ohms, but human guts have a resistance of more like 300 ohms. What's more, all of that resistance quickly breaks down given sufficient voltage. Insulators and resistors are necessary for electronics, but they need to be fairly unchanging. An electrical engineer doesn't grab a blank resistor and hope for the best, they grab the one with the exact amount needed for their circuit to operate correctly.

See above. The outermost layers of the outermost layer of human skin is mostly dead cells, 25 to 30 layers deep. It's these cells that help skin maintain its poor conductivity, but it also doesn't take much more than a pinprick to allow current to bypass this protective layer. At the same time, we can figure that a sheen of salty sweat might change the situation a bit, as the conductivity of human sweat ​spikes upward to around 236,000 S/m, making it about on par with regular old copper wiring. ​

Well … this is a fudge. We're not likely to quit our rare Earths habit anytime soon, but the past several years have featured nonstop alarm bells over their availability. Most of these materials come from China, which allows for only limited exports. This is increasingly so as the country continues to build its own new-school electronics demand. The result might be the crippling of the high-tech industry, or a more clever high-tech industry in the first place; look, for example, ​ at IBM's latest solar cell advance, offering very high-efficiencies with regular, widely-available materials.

How bad of a conductor is rubber really? Pretty bad, almost as bad as wood. And unlike, say, human flesh, rubber stays an insulator even when exposed to very high currents. Tires used to even have the problem of being too good of insulators, which had the effect of allowing huge charges of static electricity to build up. This might be a bad thing if you happen to be carting around a full tank of highly combustible gas.

Turns out static is a problem with medical instruments too, or a potential problem as plastic-y instruments become more common. One effect of static buildup is an increase in attraction between airborne particulates and charged objects. This could have some downsides if that charged object happens to be exposed guts of a patient in surgery.