| ▲ | siriusastrebe 12 hours ago |
| What would happen if we made bridges to last as long as possible, to withstand natural disasters and require minimal maintenance? What if we built things that are meant to last? Would the world be better for it? |
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| ▲ | fiedzia 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > What if we built things that are meant to last? Would the world be better for it? You'd have a better bridge, at the expense of other things, like hospitals or roads. If people choose good-enough bridges, that shows there is something else they value more. |
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| ▲ | siriusastrebe 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | Once the good-enough bridge deteriorates and we have to spend more money maintaining or replacing it Don't we end up just spending the same? Just now we're left with a crappy bridge. | | |
| ▲ | cm11 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Certainly, "enough" is doing a lot of work and things get blurry, but I think "good enough" is meant to capture some of that. Over building is also a problem. It isn't strictly true that building longer lived things is cheaper over time either, it obviously depends on the specific things getting compared. And if you go 100 years rather than 25 years, you'll have fewer chances to adjust and optimize for changes to the context, new technology, changing goals, or more efficient (including cost saving) methods. Obviously, there's a way to do both poorly too. We can make expensive things that don't last. I think a large chunk of gripes about things that don't last are really about (1) not getting the upside of the tradeoff, cheaper (in both senses) more flexible solutions, and (2) just getting bad quality period. | |
| ▲ | Ekaros 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It might very well be that building and maintaining a bridge for 100 years costs three or four times as much as building and maintaining one that last 50 years. If demolition costs are not same as cost of bridge well in long run replacing the bridge ever 50 years is cheaper. On whole it is entirely reasonable optimisation problem. What is the best lifespan of single bridge over desired total lifespan. | |
| ▲ | SchemaLoad 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | "Good enough" bridges still last 50+ years. We could design a bridge to last 200 years but we won't even know if the design we have today will even be needed in 200 years. Maybe by then we all use trains in underground tunnels. | |
| ▲ | pixl97 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Depends how much the infrastructure and needs around it changes. | |
| ▲ | nisegami 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | But we also got roads and hospitals. |
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| ▲ | GarnetFloride 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Look up Roman concrete.
There are 2000 year old bridges and aqueducts still in use. We only recently figured out how to reproduce Roman concrete. We’d have more but a lot were blown up during WWII. |
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| ▲ | bombela 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | There is nothing special about roman concrete compared to moderns concrete. Modern concrete is much better The difference is that they didn't have rebar. And so they built gravity stable structures. Heavy and costly as fuck. A modern steel and concrete structure is much lighter and much cheaper to produce. It does mean a nodern structure doesn't last as long but also the roman stuff we see is what survived the test of time, not what crumbled. | | |
| ▲ | throw-qqqqq 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > There is nothing special about roman concrete compared to moderns concrete. Modern concrete is much better Roman concrete is special because it is much more self-healing than modern concrete, and thus more durable. However, that comes at the cost of being much less strong, set much slower and require rare ingredients. Roman concrete also doesn’t play nice with steel reinforcement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete | |
| ▲ | Topgamer7 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think you are incorrect. Compared to modern concrete, roman concrete was more poorly cured at the time of pouring. So when it began to weather and crack, un-cured concrete would mix with water and cure. Thus it was somewhat self healing. Modern concrete is more uniform in mix, and thus it doesn't leave uncured portions. | |
| ▲ | darkwater 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | We have modern architecture crumbling already less than 100 years after it has been built. I know engineering is about tradeoffs but we should also acknowledge that, as a society, we are so much used to put direct economic cost as the main and sometimes only metric. | | |
| ▲ | bluGill 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | You would be very unhappy if you had to live in a house as built 100 years ago. Back then electric lights were rare. even if you had them the wiring wasn't up to running modern life. my house is only 50 years old and it shows signs of the major remodel 30 years ago, and there are still a lot of things that a newer house would all do different that I sometimes miss. | | |
| ▲ | GarnetFloride 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I've lived in a 100 year old house and and in a brand new house, they both had issues. That also both had advantages too.
Oddly the older house had a better designed kitchen. Our lives change over time and our housing has to adjust to that too. |
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| ▲ | recursive 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Devil's advocate here. Maybe we'd all forget how to build bridges in the next thousand years, after bridging all the bridg-able spans. |
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| ▲ | DeathArrow 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| What if instead of one bridge we build three, so more people can cross the river? |
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