23 ms·
Plastic Archeology
- sproketboy 3y ago[dead]
- taubek 3y agoAddition related to LEGO and plastics - Lego abandons effort to make bricks from recycled plastic bottles - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37673494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37673494
- flir 3y agoContemporary archaeology - it's a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_archaeology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_archaeology Most famously, Bristol Uni excavated their own van: https://pages.vassar.edu/realarchaeology/2017/11/19/dismantling-a-van-in-the-name-of-contemporary-archaeology/ https://pages.vassar.edu/realarchaeology/2017/11/19/dismantl...
- anfractuosity 3y agoRegarding contemporary archaeology, I was thinking archaeologists of the future may find things like USB disks, HDDs, but it sounds like both of those last < 10 years when unused even above the ground. CDs may be readable I guess.
- sitzkrieg 3y agoyou will definitely get over 10 years out of most of them as long as theyre not rusting or something
- anfractuosity 3y agoAre you sure, I'm trying to find some papers, but I've found things like - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/12/most-hard-drives-have-a-lifespan-of-three-to-five-years-have-you-checked-yours-lately https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/12/most-hard... https://superuser.com/questions/1647730/what-is-the-shelf-life-of-an-ssd https://superuser.com/questions/1647730/what-is-the-shelf-li... Edit: This has an interesting table - https://web.ece.ucsb.edu/~parhami/pubs_folder/parh19f-ebdt-data-longevity-compatib.pdf https://web.ece.ucsb.edu/~parhami/pubs_folder/parh19f-ebdt-d...
- sitzkrieg 3y agoi dunno, i still use several hard drives from 2006. and at least one usb drive. ssds with constant writing will probably wear out pretty uniformly, but i was only thinking of actual hard drives that said i have a hilarious 80gb intel ssd from nearly the same period that works fine because its basically unused.
- anfractuosity 3y agoNeat, that's interesting to know.
- chrisbrandow 3y agoAs a chemist, I would guess that the guy tapping of the plastic on his teeth was a real assessment of the plastic. There are so many physical properties that are hard to describe, but still recognizable, and I do stuff like that all the time.
- thanatos519 3y agoI once got some very very vintage Lego bricks which didn't survive the dishwasher! I wish I had thought twice about that because they were clearly pre-ABS.
- s1mon 3y agoI've been designing injection molded plastic parts for various products for 30+ years. I'm not a materials scientist, but from what I've seen with plastics, there will be experts who will be able to date plastic archeology to a high degree of accuracy. The basic materials of things like polycarbonate or ABS may be fairly consistent, but the additives (plasticizers, lubricants, colorants, etc) seem to have a lot more change, specialization, and innovation over time. There's a constant push-pull of wanting the cheapest possible generic materials vs wanting performance, while the plastic companies need ways to differentiate their products to make it so that very specific grades get designed in. With the right technology (e.g. chromatography or mass spectrometry) the right industrial historians/chemists will be able to fingerprint plastic objects and date them.
- helpfulContrib 3y ago[dead]