We don't make concrete like the Romans did though.
Still concrete will still last longer than most other materials. The biggest issue with modern concrete construction is the usage of reenforced concrete using iron or steel rebar which tends to corrode quickly. Reenforced concrete seems to have a half life of ~50 years.
Will be interesting to see how carbon-fiber reinforced concrete[1] fares in comparison.
"If heat could be bled off of the magma chambers, cooling and solidifying them, not only would that stop the volcano from erupting..." Where does the confidence to make this claim come from? I can imagine that the consequence of this might actually just be strengthening the "barrier" the magma has to erupt through, and when it finally builds up enough energy to do that, it'll be stronger in proportion to how strong t…
Maybe the earth just burps occasionally and it's not really a gradual buildup of pressure and this would do nothing.
Anytime soon is one thing, but "If at all"? It's been happening for millions of years, and it sure seems like there still "activity" there. Not sure what kind of scientist could say they don't expect it to ever erupt again?
If we can be pretty confident it'll be 100 years, that's long enough for technology to progress a lot before we fiddle with it. Not sure what "soon" means in this case, but I suspect they don't mean "within a couple years".
> Not sure what "soon" means in this case
Like there being infinite number of infinities that are ever larger, there's a seemingly infinite number of soons, each further away in time than the previous.
So I propose we invent something like aleph[1], but for soon. This way we can communicate clearly just how soon soon is.
UV from sunlight degrades fiberglass/FRP over time. I believe that boats are painted to protect them from this, and need to be recoated periodically because the uv sunlight will degrade the paint eventually, also.
Seems unlikely that you’d have a reliable source of paint for 1000 years, which might be the limiting factor. But there’s always some rate of chain scission, even in the absence of UV/water/whatever. I just have no idea whether that has a meaningful impact on material properties over 1000 years.
I feel like if you're really hard pressed for a UV blocker you could just use mud.
> Betteridge's law of headlines aside. Godwin-Bettridge-Graham law: Any headline that ends in a question mark which is posted to HN will have Bettridge's law of headlines mentioned at least once in its first dozen comments.
What's the law for when someone has to point this out too, I wonder?
We don't make concrete like the Romans did though.
Correct, because the way the Romans made concrete wouldn't be suitable for 30 and 70-story buildings.
The way the Romans used concrete to form structures that could be plausibly carved out of raw rock. The dome of the pantheon is an impressive feat of engineering, but the general shape bears similarity to rock caverns. Which is great, because concrete is essentially rock.
Meanwhile, the kinds of beams and walls we make out of concrete wouldn't work if carved out of rock, they are only structurally sound because we put steel rebar in the concrete. But rebar expanding due to rust is how concrete usually fails. Plus using rebar prevents you from using salt water in your concrete, which is one of the ways in which Roman concrete might be better than ours.
I have a lot of skepticism about anything I read from constructionphysics.substack.com. I'm a mechanical engineer, not a civil engineer, so take my opinion with a grain of salt, but it reads like it's written by someone who does not have a solid understanding of engineering fundamentals. For example, they suggested in their "How to design a house to last for 1,000 years" series that you'd want to build such a house o…
I mean, it would be exposed to the normal conditions any residential construction is exposed to. How often is your house dunked into seawater? 800 years from now something terrible could happen that turns all the rain into sulfuric acid but then all residential buildings everywhere are screwed.
Living near the ocean means that salt air corrosion will become a problem eventually. It eats away car bodies over time, for example.
In general, it's true compared to other metals. Compared to other materials in general (e.g., glass) it's certainly not true. Over the scale of a thousand years, there could be a big difference between something that is corrosion resistant (stainless steel) and something that doesn't corrode at all.
But are you suggesting a non corrosive material would outlast stainless steel? Otherwise I don’t see the point in your distinction. Obviously your example of glass wouldn’t. I guess I would have thought stone would last longer.
We have a lot of stone or concrete buildings from 2000 years ago still standing, and even more from 1000 years ago, so those would be safe bets. No surprises there. There's a glass window just shy of 1000 years old in a Cathedral in Germany, and other slightly younger ones scattered here and there, so glass definitely can make it. It just isn't very impact resistant, and it's also a fairly new material so there are fewer examples to draw from. Similarly, materials like Bronze would do just fine over 1000 years, and have done so in the past, but they tend to be appropriated for new building projects even if their original building is still standing.