Then it would be interesting to see if these specific problems still persist if would use another DNS. Since they are typical for using cf. Maybe your upstream does, without you having noticed so far?
> While composites might seem like a futuristic technology, in many ways, they hark back to millions of years of human and even pre-human material technology. Wood, after all, is the original composite material, as it’s composed of long and short fibers glued together by other substances—much like modern synthetic composites are often made up of carbon fiber held together by epoxy resins. Wood was a chief enabler of the success of our species, and it exhibits many of the advantages and disadvantages of composites.
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 a chief enabler of the success of our species
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.
>Trees have to be big, strong, lightweight, and bendable. Homogeneous materials won't work for that application.
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.
In any stellar system like ours, where oxygen is the most abundant element, except for the hydrogen and helium that are contained mostly in the star and in the big planets, almost all metals are completely oxidized (with the exception of the siderophile elements submerged into the cores of the planets, because of their great density) and the amount of metallic substances with a natural origin that can be found in the accessible surface layers of the planets is negligible.
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.
The only possible way this comment could be more satisfying to read would be if it ended with "Until now." before the camera pans to a strange planet and the movie begins
An interesting fact is that while almost all solid objects that exist in the Solar System have their origin in the condensation of gases from which the Solar System has formed, there exist also the so-called pre-solar grains.
The pre-solar grains are microscopic crystals, i.e. particles of dust, which have come to the Solar System as already solid grains of dust, from other stellar systems, typically having been propelled by stellar explosions, e.g. those of supernovae.
Such pre-solar grains have been incorporated in the many small bodies that have been condensed from gases along with the bigger asteroids and planets at the formation of the Solar System.
Some of those small bodies have fallen on Earth as meteorites (the so-called "chondrites"). When such meteorites have been analyzed carefully, pre-solar grains have been recovered. They can usually be easily distinguished from the local objects, by having very different isotopic compositions.
Among the pre-solar grains, there are many that have come from stellar systems of the second kind, with more carbon than oxygen. Such grains, instead of being silicates, i.e. the most frequent minerals in the stellar systems of the Solar type, have chemical compositions that are unusual for the minerals of the planets of the Solar System, like diamond, graphite, silicon carbide or nitride, titanium carbide or nitride, metal grains of either platinum-group metals or iron-group metals, other carbides, nitrides, sulfides, silicides or titanides.
For now, this is the only direct evidence of the second class of stellar systems, beyond the spectroscopic observations of various stars, which provide estimations for the relative abundance of carbon and oxygen in those stellar systems.
While we have some idea about what kind of minerals might be the most abundant in such stellar systems at the time of their initial condensation from gases, I am not aware of any attempt to simulate the possible internal structure for big planets in such stellar systems, in order to determine whether in such planets there could exist some analogs of the volcanism and hydrothermal vents that can provide the energy flux necessary for the appearance of life in the planets of the terrestrial type.
These are two of the coolest and most fascinating comments I’ve read. Idk if you are a professional …. Astrogeologist?? or just a really smart person but I would like to subscribe to your newsletter for sure. Thanks for sharing this!
No, I am an electronics engineer. However, I happened to have some relationships with a few professional astronomers, because my father had worked for many years in an astronomical observatory, and I keep following the research publications in this domain.
There are a few such facts about the history and the diversity of the world in which we live that deserve to be known by more people.
You have a talent for writing in a way that's both approachable and full of information. It comes across as super knowledgeable without losing that wonderful sense of childlike curiosity, which I think makes it particularly approachable or even inviting. It reminded me of PBS Space Time.
It's an artful balance that is so rare—especially online—that I think some of us just savor it when we do find it. I actually went through your older comments (sorry) just to keep reading what you had to say...
Most SF movies prefer to show only planets of the terrestrial type, in order to allow the actors to roam freely there and show their uncovered faces to the cameras.
At most there have been a few novels or movies that have attempted to describe less familiar landscapes, such as those that could be encountered on the satellites of Jupiter or Saturn.
There have been a few SF stories about planets made of some exotic materials, like diamond or some metals or some superheavy elements, but those were complete fantastic stories without any scientific base and the planets described there could not exist anywhere in the known universe.
I am not aware of any novel or movie that has tried to show a completely alien planet, of the kind that could not exist in the Solar System, but which could really exist in other stellar systems. A planet from a stellar system with a high C/O ratio might have rocks made of abrasive carborundum (i.e. silicon carbide), an atmosphere composed of methane, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide and an ocean containing a mixture of hydrocarbons, like some kind of petroleum.
If there would be life forms there, they could have very significant differences from the life forms that can appear in the stellar systems of the Solar type.
Here on Earth, an essential chemical property for life is the distinction between hydrophobic and hydrophilic substances, i.e. the fact that water and oil do not mix, which enables the existence of the cells of all living beings, which are made of hydrophobic membranes that partition a hydrophilic solvent. Perhaps on a planet with reversed abundances, where hydrocarbons are very abundant and water is scarce, one could have reversed cell structures, with a hydrophobic solvent partitioned by hydrophilic membranes, though it is not clear if such structures can be made stable. In such a place, most metals would be present in easy to reduce compounds, so living beings with metallic skeletons might exist. (Though at least for now, the appearance of life in such stellar systems seems less likely. In the terrestrial kind of planets, the energy flux for the appearance of life has been provided mainly by the free dihydrogen generated by the oxidation of Fe(II) ions to Fe(III) ions by water, in volcanoes and in hydrothermal vents. It is not known whether some equivalent energy source can exist in a place with little water, but abundant hydrocarbons.)
An SF novel or movie with such a subject, about the exploration of a completely unfamiliar world, could be interesting, but this kind of SF novels were written only up to around a half of century ago. Most modern SF novels or movies no longer try to analyze the consequences of intriguing scientific hypotheses, but they choose the lazier way of just transposing traditional fantastic stories into a pseudo-scientific framework.
To be fair we are the only creatures to make much use of anything, metal or no. That being said the metals are used by other creatures. Some might eat metal rich mud for nutritional value for example.
What those other creatures eat or use are not metals, but chemical substances that contain chemical elements that would have been metals in their pure elemental state.
For instance, many living beings, from bacteria to vertebrates make and use magnetite crystals, for sensing the magnetic field of the Earth.
Magnetite contains iron ions and pure iron is a metal. Nevertheless, magnetite is not a metal, but a ionic crystal, i.e. an insulator. Your blood contains iron and your bones contain calcium, but none of that iron or calcium is in metal form, all are oxidized ions.
There are no living beings that have metallic components. There are a few bacteria that are able to reduce to metallic form the metals that are the easiest to reduce, i.e. gold and silver. However those bacteria do not use in any way the metallic gold or silver that is precipitated outside their bodies by their activity. The reducing of gold and silver is just a defense mechanism for those bacteria, because the ions of gold or silver kill bacteria, and their precipitation when they are reduced removes them from the environment.
As I have said almost all metallic elements present close to the surface of the Earth or of any other planet of this type are oxidized, i.e. they are positive ions that are bound in various ionic substances, like oxides or sulfides, and they can be found inside the bodies of the living beings in the same state as outside (unlike carbon, nitrogen and sulfur, which are oxidized outside, but reduced inside the bodies of the living beings).
Only a few metallic elements are found also as native metals, i.e. copper, silver, gold, mercury and the platinum-group metals. Even for these metallic elements, most of them are far more abundant in oxidized forms (like sulfides or arsenides) than in metallic forms. Only gold is more abundant in metallic form than in oxidized forms, like tellurides (and that is due in good part to the fact that tellurium is also a very rare element, otherwise more gold would be found combined than in metallic form; the gold ions are extremely large, so that they cannot combine well with ions smaller than the telluride ion, like the sulfide ion that combines well with the smaller silver ions).
Carbon in the form of carbon dioxide as raw material is literally instantly available and the resulting "composite" is lightweight. This is not to say nature always considers recycling beforehand. Nature needed to invent fungi to break up this carbon dump. Carbon era is named thanks to this fact. And it's tempting to think nature "came up" with humankind to make the humongous carbon dump of the carbon era useful once again.
Really, you have causation backward. Eg. the supposed Carboniferous Period was an opportunity for something to evolve which consumes wood. Many "problems" get solved by accident in this way, but many also don't - as long as they take place over a long enough timespan. If they happen too quickly, there's not enough time for living things to adapt.
Currently there is an opportunity for an industrious plastic-eating microbe to hitch a ride in every gut on the planet, deciding the winners and losers of the plastiferous period. All that means, though, is that there's a chance such a creature could appear and take advantage, not that it will happen. (Yes I know plastic-eaters have been discovered, but I'm not aware of any having an effect on the fitness of other creatures.)
>but it would be interesting to ponder how they would have evolved on a metal planet
It overlaps a whole lot with the concept of a dyson trees, but the core problem is that it needs to be able to use the metal in the first place - earth is a metal planet, in the sense that ~10% of the planet is iron, and yet our trees are not steel.
I don't really think that's a fair assessment, since most of it is in the core. That's some very long and heat resistant roots.
I also can't help but wonder, could trees even use iron if it was plentiful in the upper crust? You need a lot of energy to separate iron oxide into elemental iron. Betting against what evolution can make is usually a bad idea, but that would be a neat trick.
> 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.
Why would defining it as a raw material be "more useful"? Why is defining it as a composite "less useful"?
Not just that. When learning about the anisotropic nature of composites (different strengths in different directions) wood is a tangible example for anyone who’s done arts and crafts, woodworking, etc.
I disagree. In advanced materials, we analyze materials categorically. In this instance, the way we would calculate the structure of wood is based on its isotropy, or more simply, its symmetry of strength and stiffness. The way wood behaves anisotropically means its structure is calculated the same way as most other composites. Composite Laminate Theory is the primary way that structure behavior is calculated for both wood laminates and carbon fiber laminates. We squarely categorize it in the same bin as carbon fiber, but that's just one perspective from one discipline, so take it as you will.
I don't know how I escaped learning about silcrete so far, being interested in both geology and primitive technology. Thanks for the tip! For anyone that curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silcrete
I think it's actually very fair to count wood as a composite. Composite is the concept, and wood happens to be a natural occurrence of the concept. Keeping it qualified as a composite also helps expand the mind: composites don't need to manufactured how we're typically manufacturing it in the present. When you think of wood as a composite, it's an opportunity for ah-ha moments in students.
> and finally Romans developed something resembling concrete (I dont remember kYa).
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.
Yeah there was a theory discussed on HN a couple of years ago that superior qualities came from mixing in quicklime (CaO). I'm not sure if they've developed that and tested it against modern concretes. I guess it's hard to tell if they'll last 2000 years without waiting quite a while. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34280239)
I heard it was that they used seawater not freshwater.
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.
Kinda feels like you're missing the point of the quoted sentence. That is, it's not that wood is actually a composite material as we define it now, but that wood has the characteristics of a composite, i.e. different substances intertwined in a way to give better properties than any individual material alone, and going with the theme of the article, this is a direct contrast to materials like steel or plastic.
The other important property that wood shares with modern manmade composites is that it is anisotropic - i.e., it is stronger in some directions of force than others. You can use bodyweight to snap a short grain board that would, if it were long grain, hold up under a ton or more.
One of my biggest everyday QoL upgrade is men's casual pants finally getting elastane.
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.
I'm glad there's more choice but I wish my favorite Levi's still had a 100% cotton option. After years of easy jean shopping I now have to find another brand.
Wrangler 13MWZ Jeans are what you want - they're head and shoulders above Levis, and they have a version with double spun cotton as well if you need more durability.
weargustin.com has great selvedge jeans...a little pricey for the uniquely dyed options, but for the regular jeans they aren't bad, and they last forever.
Interesting that you should say that, because I'm of the exact opposite opinion. In fact, the omnipresence of elastane in pants has been a big QoL downgrade for me.
complete disaster. terrible for your skin, feels gross, falls apart, and cannot be repaired. meanwhile my cotton pants that have been repaired many times are still treasured wardrobe items almost 10 years on.
I think they feel fantastic, especially performance fabrics during summer. Falls apart, depends. As thicc thigh toucher, I rub through cotton/denim within a few months. Unless I reinforce crotch area with sacrificial patch. I've never worn through stretch fabrics, hence no need to repair. As someone whose weight fluctuates, cotton also gets stretched out.
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.
> One of my biggest everyday QoL upgrade is men's casual pants finally getting elastane.
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!?".
A swing and a miss. The future of materials is going back to plant fiber; wood, hemp, etc. There will be plenty of fancy composite materials for specialty applications; but our world has been made out of plastic for generations now and updated, improved plant fiber materials will replace it as the affordable, more sustainable, and equally functional alternative.
Bamboo is one material that has seen some traction in replacing plastic, especially in kid food items etc. however they do break easier. Hemp is also finally starting to have a real comeback but still has a lot of roadblocks ahead because of almost a decade of “bad press”.
It's been amazing to see how it's affected sailing and other water sports over the past 2-3 of decades. Cuben fiber sails, Carbon-fiber hulls, hydrofoils on everything; something happened and then inflatable paddle boards were everywhere.
I would have been interested in the recycling aspect of these materials. We already struggle with plastic and PFAS, should this not be discussed before there's another problem?
Leave some steel around and it oxidizes away while otherwise being mostly harmless. Leave some carbon fiber embedded in resin around and it leaches endocrine disruptors and eventually turns into a pile of microplastic.
The resins used in carbon fiber for example do not biodegrade. New studies are coming out everyday demonstrating that microplastics and nanoplastics of synthetic materials interfere with the Earth's biosphere, in all sorts of ways. DNA transcription errors, hormonal disruption, increase in arterial plaque and heart attack/stroke, etc. Considering the article is largely about composite materials formed using resins, it stands out that no mention is made of synthetic, plastic resins vs the potential for biodegradable, non-accumulating resins.
Interesting article, if on the advertising side of things. I've done some hobby work with some basic composites and they're really neat to play with. Even so, I itch at the idea of bolts made out of composites; there are plastics and resins that don't creep under some conditions, but I wonder if the space magic they're describing actually...works.
Probably not great for the environment though, with plastic microfibers washing into our oceans and DWR coatings being toxic and leaching into waterways.
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 agree with the thrust of your argument, but I just want to point out that wool is not environmentally neutral. Sheep are incredibly destructive and have historical caused a lot of degradation of habitats.
That's more a matter of scale, I think, than material? Whether it's wool or leather or plastic or cotton or hemp or flax, if you need millions or billions of units of something, it's going to incur large scale habitat loss somewhere in the world.
I guess then it's a question of land use (converting ecosystems into rangeland) vs pollution (from fossil fuels and plastics).
Well, wool is particularly bad, emitting way more greenhouse gases than most other textiles for equivalent fabric output. And sheep farming has quite a shocking impact on biodiversity.
Vox cites a LCA database but not a particular study or metastudy. I tried to look for it but couldn't find the exact one.
It seems to me like the kind of thing where the numbers could be drastically different depending on where you draw the boundaries (for plastics, does oil extraction and refining count?) and the sorts of impacts you consider (not just CO2E but as you mentioned, biodiversity, water, waste stream, etc.).
I'm inclined to believe the overall point of that post (sheep make a lot of methane, as any ruminant). But I'm not sure that banning wool outright would have the desirable outcome. I don't think cotton can replace wool in many situations, especially in wet outdoor environments. Would replacing it with (new) synthetics, which is the most common substitute, really be a net positive across all the impacts?
Edit: I don’t think cotton is the best replacement. I’m no expert, but I think hemp, flax, and tencel are the “best” replacements in terms of sustainability.
Cotton is a terrible replacement for cold/wet. Not sure any of those other are great though. Don't know much about tencel but the manufacturer's advertising certainly doesn't frame it as a cold/wet clothing material.
There's certainly a tradeoff in some cases. I've had things break/wear out in ways that wouldn't have happened with heavier/thicker gear in years past. Also, much as I love merino wool, it wears out/gets eaten by moths in ways that wouldn't have been nearly the issue with synthetics in years past.
It's cheaper and doesn't last as long, but wouldn't that translate into being more degradable, not less? There are fewer atoms there, and the whole microplastics problem is it losing atoms.
Degradability is a function of how chemically stable a molecule is, not the number of atoms. Sure, plastics break down in smaller particles but the issue is that some of these smaller particles or microplastics are incredibly stable.
Not just the clothes, but the tents, ropes, shoes, bags, gloves, etc have all improved (and gotten more plastic). There's a bunch of metal waste too (oxygen cans etc) from what I understand, but at least that's mostly metal. And lots and lots of frozen poop and corpses, I suppose. It'll be interesting when it all melts...
Real expedition mountaineering is definitely not a lightweight endeavor even if there's more high fill down and other better warmth/weight ratio clothing. It's more about trimming a few pounds off the weekend (or longer) hiker/camper's weight budget.
I've only done lower (6K meter) peaks. Yes. Sherpas/porters carry a lot up to base camp and beyond. But you're still carrying a lot of gear. There's a certain narrative that clients basically get carried up the mountain and it really isn't true.
To write this whole article and not even mention circular production practices (eg full lifestyle resource management) and our resource constrained planetary context seems arrogant and stupid and undermines any heady excitement for this “progression”. What a junk article.
> All of that is possible because composites, while they have their challenges, are often able to perform just as well as high-strength metal parts, but with a fraction of the weight.
That's what Rush (who perished in the Titan submersible) also thought....
The problem here is that the OP's statement is correct, if you qualify it more: if the composite material is appropriate for the application, and properly designed for it, it can perform just as well. If the composite material is a stupid choice for the application for various reasons, and being touted by a guy who thinks safety standards are dumb, then you get OceanGate.
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.
Hence the inclusion of the word "often" in the original sentence. There are many different types of strength - just from the get-go using carbon fiber in a sub is insane because (even ignoring the interface problem with different materials) carbon fiber is known for its strength in tension, not so much its strength in compression.
from what I understand it's because it's a lot more expensive than its alternatives.
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.
Because it doesn't make a lot of sense to invest heavily into saving 100kg on the frame and then adding a 500kg battery. The i3 had a small, lighter battery and an extender.
The range killer is really drag, not weight. Weight contributes, but at high speed drag is such a large draw that nearly nothing else matters.
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.
So there are modern efforts to replace LP compressor blades of LM1500's (industrial conversions of J79's) to save weight and improve efficiency. Carbon fiber blades weigh a fraction of what metal ones do. Also, with computational fluid dynamics, new blade designs can be evolved and optimized for a specific power-band. For static applications, the risks of using more delicate materials can be tolerable if the efficiency in ROI exceeds service costs. There's a YT channel in Canada covering this development.
In the eastern block we used to call it eastern BMW - Bakelite Motor Vehicle (although bakelite wasn't exactly the composite used as it seems). Or that repair set for it comprised of just carpet tape. It didn't have that great reputation, at least not in 80s.
I think the Trabant was just fine when you compare it to the cars designed in its era - the 50s and 60s, I think it stands up to the Bug pretty well, its just they didn't bother updating the design for decades, and by the 80s, it looked like a relic out of time.
It's always fun to read an article like this, spot the "this is a press release" tone, and then spot which company had it placed in the WSJ. Along with a quote from the CEO. It's basically free advertising.
