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.
Reducing the oxidized metals requires much more energy than reducing non-metals like carbon, nitrogen and sulfur (which is what the living beings do to make their structural materials), and preventing the reduced metals to spontaneously become oxidized again is very difficult.
This is why no living beings have succeeded to use metallic materials before the humans, and the latter have succeeded to do this only after mastering the fire, which is the other thing that the non-human living beings have not succeeded to do.
There exists a second class of stellar systems, where there is more carbon than oxygen, so almost all oxygen remains bound in carbon oxides, while most other elements are present as carbides, instead of oxides, like in the Solar System. These are much more rare than the stellar systems of the Solar System type and in such stellar systems the chemical composition of the planets would be extremely different from the planets of the Solar System. Because there is no detailed information about such a stellar system (due to their distance), there is very little knowledge about whether there would be conditions in such a system for the appearance of life and how could that evolve. If there is any chance for primitive life forms to use metals in their structures, that would happen only in such stellar systems.
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.
And yes, we'll have to wait a while. Though probably not 2000 years - we only have to wait until our concrete starts failing, which might be a lot sooner than that.
> 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.
I guess then it's a question of land use (converting ecosystems into rangeland) vs pollution (from fossil fuels and plastics).
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.
The rolling resistance coefficent of a car tire is about 0.01 and the force grows linearly with mass. Drag is v^2 and the coefficients are more like 0.2 - 0.3 of the frontal area on most EVs.
Weight savings don't offer that much range savings so there isn't much incentive to pull weight out of a design, especially when carbon fibre tub construction is so much more expensive.
BMW made a bet batteries would remain very scarce and expensive, a bet they lost pretty throughly.
Next-to-fucking-impossible-to-recycle composites.
