I have come to understand four very different time scales for development of technologies and their deployments.  And I think people often jump between them and end up making outrageously wrong, and sometimes damaging, predictions of when in the future a technology is going to be able to do what. Time scale 1. New Research Ideas New research ideas take ten to twenty years to form before there is an understanding to bring them to really solid lab demonstrations.  Some things take much longer as there are many,  many false starts, or there is a really hard step which takes decades to crack. Once things really have been established as a solid laboratory technology there is often a gold rush phase where major new tweaks, on essentially the same idea, come along every six months or so and it feels like the ground is shaking under us.…