edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38373137
root cause: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=cloudflare+archive
Not to nitpick too much, but while wood is "technically" a composite material made up of fiber embedded in lignin, I don't think it's very useful to include it under the broad category of composite materials. Engineered woods like plywood and cross-laminated timber definitely are, but it's more useful to classify regular wood as an organic raw material rather than a composite.
The first composite material humans had any experience with was probably silcrete. It's naturally occurring but ancient humans figured out how to strengthen it by heat treating it in a fire (80-160 kYa). The first time humans intentionally made a composite material is adobe/mudbrick (11 kYa), wattle and daub (6 kYa), plywood in Mesopotamia (5.4 kYa), cob (4 kYa), and finally Romans developed something resembling concrete (I dont remember kYa).
Wood was the chief enabler of trees. Trees have to be big, strong, lightweight, and bendable. Homogeneous materials won't work for that application. You need a composite. So evolution invented one.
Even more amazing: Trees 3D print themselves out of carbon dioxide.
Why wouldn't titanium work for that application? (Assume that somehow the plant can move nutrients and fluids around some other way.) Or even steel, as long as it's not solid? Obviously, nature can't produce hollow steel tubes, but lots of metals satisfy your requirement list here.
Carbon dioxide and low-entropy energy in the form of solar light.
Why would defining it as a raw material be "more useful"? Why is defining it as a composite "less useful"?
About 2 kYa, give or take a couple of centuries.
And it was actual concrete, rather than something resembling concrete. In fact, better than the concrete we were making a hundred years ago, and better than most of our concrete fifty years ago.
Roman aqueducts and bridges are still standing 2000 years later. Not sure I'd put money on the same being true of our stuff.
> Modern composites, starting with Bakelite
AFAIK Bakelite is a resin, not a composite.
No mention of fiberglass, which had been used for many decades before carbon fiber went into widespread use.
> composites—which are amalgamations of a variety of fibers, embedded in a variety of plastics
Steel reinforced concrete is a composite and doesn’t fit this definition.
> Because molded Bakelite incorporated fillers to give it strength, it tended to be made in concealing dark colors.[9]
E: not just elastane but performance fabrics from athleisure in general, good moisture/odour/temperature control, easy to maintain etc. Some people like break in into their cotton/denim classics, but performance fabrics tend to not need break in in at all.
Other than that, good moisture and odor control, comfort/mobility of stretch too much of life upgrade. Also fairly wrinkle/iron free. I'd take convenience over durability anytime.
I will say synthetics haven't been able to replace bed sheets on most of criterias above.
I don't know if it's elastane but I've definitely seen QoL improvements in clothing compared to 35 years ago (back when I was a teenagers).
Underwear are soooo soft. And they fit perfectly. Same for t-shirts. Same for socks.
I don't know what makes some clothes so comfy (and requiring no ironing either btw) but there's "something" that makes lots of clothes simply better nowadays.
And they last too: I'm the kind of person who hates shopping (which drives my wife mad) so when I find something I like, I'll buy three or five of them (which drives my wife even madder). I've got some pieces I have since years and years (that one is nearly divorce reason ;) Sometimes I find a five years old picture and think: "Oh I already had that thing back then!?".
Yeah, many clothes are just simply better now.
That and having breakfast. It's the same almost everyday - unflavored whey + frozen fruits protein shake.
Brain cycles saved by not having to think.
There are a lot of "specialty applications" I think, where plant based material is not ideal. Otherwise I agree.
Are we talking far-tech where plants and other biome actors are engineered to produce materials in a particular shape and manner?
For carbon fiber, a quick google reveals that polyacrylonitrile is the most widely used resin. According to google it is not readily biodegradable: https://www.igtpan.com/Ingles/reciclagem_poliacrilonitrila.a....
Compared to, say, what they climbed Everest with originally, yeah, our gear today is lighter, cheaper, more effective, but also more environmentally impactful and much less degradable.
It's all just byproducts of the oil industry. We're a lot more comfortable now, but it didn't come free.
That's what Rush (who perished in the Titan submersible) also thought....
Still, you have a good point: in engineering (and especially safety-critical projects), you can't just throw some composite material in there willy-nilly and expect it to work out great. OceanGate was a great example of some really stupid and reckless engineering.
The BMW i3 had a carbon fiber frame and was still reasonably priced back in 2013, yet no other normal cars seem to have went this way.
Something the article completely sidesteps when talking about metals versus composites :-)
Cost versus steel may well have been a factor as well.
Like yes, for a bunch of structures you can neatly automate it (see most rocket production), but the shapes of (current) cars don't easily offer themselves to similar options. Automation is possible but would probably be finicky and require a lot of space and energy (for the heating).
but someone else please jump in if you know better/more.
Next-to-fucking-impossible-to-recycle composites.
