What happens when we run out of it?
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Silicon reacts kind of funny when combined with small amounts of other chemicals and then powered with electricity; with some arrangements it allows the electricity to flow, and with other arrangements it stops the electricity. Sort of like an electrical switch, but one that doesn’t need to move. We call these electronics ‘transistors’.
Before silicon transistors, one of the things used was vacuum tubes. They were huge, produced much more heat, and were a fraction of the speed of silicon ones. There’s a reason there’s advertisements from decades ago talking about how 1 kilobyte is more memory than any human could possibly use, but nowadays we use 1000’s more than that even looking at a static web page; transistors are literally thousands or millions of times better than the tubes were.
The simplified way we’ve designed computers (arguably since the abacus) is “do an action if the data is a certain way”. With transistors and binary, we can do this billions of times every second. Replacing silicon transistors with any thing else requires either physical movement or an element that responds to electricity in a similar way to silicon without being too expensive.
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