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I was actually pondering something related today. I worry about my cats' paws getting glass in them. Because the pavement is full of tiny pieces of glass, even
by goldenkey 9y ago
I was actually pondering something related today. I worry about my cats' paws getting glass in them. Because the pavement is full of tiny pieces of glass, even worse if someone breaks a bottle outside, they won't actually vacuum and clean it up, I guess wind can help a bit..but it's just shuffling the glass around. Glass doesn't decay on a human time scale.
Which brought me to the grim fact that there are so many substances that do not decay in a reasonable time..that you are pretty much stuck with them in your body if they somehow get there. With glass, at least if you realize early enough, you can yank it out. And some people say that 10 or 20 years after getting glass stuck in them, that it came to the surface of their skin on a random day.
Which brings me to thinking about if we'll ever be able to truly know what substances are doing to our bodies in full fidelity. Like, some people believe that food colorings are unhealthy - will there eventually be a time where we have a machine, you stand in it and eat the fruit snacks and we get a full picture of where every molecule of titanium dioxide is headed? ..Imagine, we see a HUD of a human body, and a heatmap, overlaying that 99.95% goes to the kidneys but we see that 0.05% gets stuck in the prefrontal cortex of the brain in a peculiar area. We test more people and see that they also get the deposits in the same area...something we thought was totally harmless turns out to be depositing itself in some arcane area by some arcane mechanism... Yes, I eat fruit snacks and I don't think this is the case...it's just a silly hypothetical situation. And I am aware of fluorescent tagging technology which can do something similar but sometimes poorly, because ultimately it is modifying the original molecule. (Incompleteness sucks doesn't it?)
Maybe some day..
- eutectic 9y agoAt least broken glass doesn't stay sharp for long when exposed to the elements.
- goldenkey 9y agoHow sure are you about this? The walk I had barefoot on a street in Brooklyn ended in a multitude of sharp embedded glass and other objects. And this was a clean street..without people dropping bottles on the ground constantly. EDIT: to all those downvoting me, a fucking veteran glassblower says that glass takes forever to erode.. https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-broken-glass-take-to-break-down-in-the-woods https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-broken-glass-take-to-bre...
- allannienhuis 9y agoA nice soft forest floor described in that link is a completely different environment than an urban street/sidewalk. Glass would erode completely differently in those environments. Of course even in an urban environment the average piece of glass would still take a long long time to have its sharp edges smoothed. I can't disagree with the idea that walking around barefoot in the city is not the best idea ;P
- code_duck 9y agoDepends on the environment, of course. In the ocean or Lake Superior, sharp glass gets rounded to smooth pebbles within 100 years. I’d estimate the sharp edges take 20-30 years to disappear. Sitting still on a street, of course, not much will happen. As far as areas of expertise, I am a veteran (20 years) glassblower, but I am not an expert on how glass decays at all. I’m skilled at making it into things.
- dTal 9y agoWhy wouldn't it? Archaelogists find obsidian blades thousands of years old that still have an edge.
- icegreentea2 9y agoAnything out on a (well traveled) sidewalk is going to be constantly moved around by traffic (and weather) causing it to abrade against the sidewalk itself (and whatever else is around) causing it to 'weather' away (round off). Pretty much anything old we find like those knives are pretty much guaranteed to have been essentially buried all at once, and then left more or less undisturbed from that moment on. Minimal physical movement, minimal abrasion, minimal dulling of edges.
- justin66 9y agoArchaeologists look in places where objects have not been exposed to the elements.
- _ph_ 9y agoGlass does not have to decay. It is chemically basically the same as sand. So as long as it does not have larger sharp edges, it is a normal part of nature.
- allannienhuis 9y agoyup, glass is about as inert a substance as you can get - one of the reason's it's used for containers of non-inert chemicals :) That said, "normal part of nature" doesn't mean non-toxic. There are plenty of toxic things found lying around in nature.
- justin66 9y ago> Glass doesn't decay on a human time scale. It doesn't oxidize. I bet if you find any in the environment (excluding freshly broken glass on the street and that sort of thing) you'll find something where the sharpness of the edge has abraded away. If you're on a beach or near a creek, you'll possibly find something that looks dull and round and more like a pebble.
- Pulcinella 9y agoYeah it’s already oxidized. Silicon dioxide is pretty much at the bottom of the energy well. The only other place to go is for SiO2 to react with fluorine.