Sailing yachts too. Millions of affordable fiberglass yachts made since the 70's are now reaching the end of their lives. In the past abandoned wooden boats just rotted away. But the fiberglass hulks stick around. It's a coming problem.
Old fiberglass is full of cracks, scrapes, and holes.
It's repairable, but the repair is highly labour intensive, whereas making a new boat uses less labour.
Also, any repaired fiberglass item will always have a worse strength to weight ratio than a new item - you simply can't efficiently bond new to old fiberglass in a strong way.
Wait, doesn't rotting mean it releases the CO2 stored in the wood? I would says that's an issue more than something inert.
I wish more things were made to last. Imagine working in a 5000 year old skyscraper that's as good as the day it opened, or driving a 500 year old car that's as reliable as the day you purchased it.
Humanity's going to last a long, long time. Hopefully.
At least resources like wood and water are renewable. But oil and metal aren't. When we run out of oil, we can kiss plastics and cosmetics goodbye. As for metals, recycling scrap metal and asteroid mining are our only long term options.
Living in Europe and having ample opportunity to visit them, I'm always fascinated by the old cathedrals that just stand around in our city centers. I almost can't believe how people hundreds of years ago managed to erect these structures. And not only that but the level of detail and craftmanship that went into all of its components is mind-boggling. To me it also signifies a connection to previous generations which you don't often get anywhere else. Of course they are not nearly 5.000 years old, but it just sprang to my mind when I read this line.
And then, there are the aquaducts and water mills scattered all over the region (Austria). What an astonishing thing to see, still in operation, hundreds of years after they were built, water wheels pulling water up into the castle ..
That doesn't mean they were stupid or didn't have intimate knowledge of their craft.
In those days, models were built by the designers which were then given to the craftsmen to build. There's a museum in England which houses the ship models built by the naval architects to give to the ship builders. The models are exquisite.
And the technology of communicating to these craftsmen and artisans is another subject itself .. here in Vienna, we also have museums devoted to such things. I find it really fascinating personally.
Can you provide a link of which museum you're talking about specifically?
Just in case someone reading this happens to be living in Vienna... ;)
I'm also a big fan of the Deutsches Museum in Munich:
A bummer the Space pavilion is closed at the moment though. Definitely better to plan a visit to Munich when that re-opens again.
Everyone who's already been tells me it's really impressive
People love these old structures (as do I) and non-trivial effort is put into protecting and maintaining them.
For a famous example, there's the leaning tower of Pizza.
One simple example: reinforced concrete usually decays after a few decades. Without the rebars inside, we could make our concrete last much longer. But we'd lose out on the magic engineering properties of reinforced concrete.
Do you have an idea how big a ball of matter we are sitting on?
> At least resources like wood and water are renewable. But oil and metal aren't. When we run out of oil, we can kiss plastics and cosmetics goodbye.
Carbon and hydrogen and oxygen are plentiful. Oil is just convenient because it already combines them and also comes with a lot of easily usable energy.
But if you are willing to (or forced to), you can make plastics (or even oil or fuel) from scratch, you 'just' need to supply your own external energy. Nuclear or solar or wind etc will do just fine for that.
As an intermediate step, you can use coal as your raw material. Not as convenient as oil, but we have more reserves of it around the globe.
His variant of goldenrods were about 12% latex after some selective breeding.
I'd be curious what kind of plants we could engineer today to make rubber with. There's tons of stuff out there and yes we don't necessarily need oil or other resources if push comes to shove.
The world won't end if we ran out of (cheap) oil in the next few years. But productivity would take a bit of a hit for at least a while.
Telemetry would be the first thing on the backports list before the car is deemed roadworthy again.
There are also many others in that space fixing old timers, or 'new' old timers, say from the 80ies or 90ies. Can all be had without telemetry. Are there regions who allow absolutely NO EXCEPTIONS to 'grandfathered in' cars?
Wouldn't that be so totalitarian?