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Comment by HenryKissinger | Hacker News Reader

Nothing escapes entropy, but if you multiply the rate at which everything naturally decays with the sheer volume of things that exist and will one day need to be replaced, we're going to bankrupt the planet of its resources.

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.

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>Imagine working in a 5000 year old skyscraper...

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.

Also living in Europe, I find myself in awe of this fact quite often. There was a time when 'high technology' meant, knowing how to cut stone in such a way that it could be transported and assembled by an illiterate mob into a vast cathedral.

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 ..

> illiterate

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.

That's right, it simply means "cannot read and write" - but that's my point .. even in spite of the fact that the end assembly process was being done by folks who could not read/write (most of the time) they were still able to assemble these extraordinary structures using the technology available to them.

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.

>here in Vienna, we also have museums devoted to such things

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... ;)

Technical Museum! (http://technischesmuseum.at)

Ha, funnily enough I was just thinking about looking up a technical museum in Vienna 2 days ago. Thank you!

I'm also a big fan of the Deutsches Museum in Munich:

https://www.deutsches-museum.de

Yes that is an awesome museum, too! Be sure you make the effort to find the computing-history section - there are some awesome things to see there, such as the original Z4 from Konrad Zuse, and a replica of his Z3 too ..

A bummer the Space pavilion is closed at the moment though. Definitely better to plan a visit to Munich when that re-opens again.

The craziest part is these were built over very long periods of time spanning multiple generations. Inter-generational cooperation is just something I can't imagine happening today.

Köln cathederal was started in 1248 and finished in 1880 (albeit with a bit of a gap in the middle).

The Sagrada Familia was started in 1882 and should be finished in 2026. That's a much shorter span, but it's entirely within the modern era.

A number of these older structures also have modern reinforcements added to keep them from collapsing.

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.

Pisa?

The pizza one needs more maintenance.

We could make structures that last essentially forever today. But it's often not the right economic trade-off.

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.

Rome is even more impressive - 2000 years old buildings. Pantheon is just huge!

And the Pantheon still has the world’s largest cupola inside. We still don’t understand how to build them that big, despite 2000+ years of studying that sucker.

We know exactly how to build them that big, but choose not to because we have better materials and better techniques. That cupola was created because the builders were too ignorant to figure out a better way to enclose the space, with modern steel it is trivial to create a building that encloses the entirety of the Parthenon.

I was planning on finally visiting Rome this year :)

Everyone who's already been tells me it's really impressive

> [...], we're going to bankrupt the planet of its resources.

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.

There was a story here on HN just yesterday about Edison's experiments with goldenrods to create rubber.

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.

Yes. Though do keep in mind that having cheap oil is infinitely more convenient than the substitutes we are talking about.

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.

>driving a 500 year old car that's as reliable as the day you purchased it

Telemetry would be the first thing on the backports list before the car is deemed roadworthy again.

I don't believe that, because otherwise companies like them https://www.fj.co/ wouldn't have a business case.

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?

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