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Somehow I find marble and travertine in things like hotels a bit depressing. It took millions of years to form and it's a marvel of serendipitous geological pro
by gravescale 2y ago
Somehow I find marble and travertine in things like hotels a bit depressing. It took millions of years to form and it's a marvel of serendipitous geological processes. Then it gets sliced and stuck to a wall for a decade or two before another renovation or a demolition happens and it gets smashed up and thrown away.
- golergka 2y agoWould it be better for billions of tons of it to just sit locked away in the Earth and never see the light of day?
- iamgopal 2y ago[flagged]
- Joker_vD 2y agoOr consider iron. Almost all of it has actually sank into the Earth's core, the deposits we extract it from are but tiniest scraps of the metal left on the face of the planet. So irreverent!
- gravescale 2y agoAh well, but we could always get as much more of it as we want with an exciting enough mining project! And if that fails, just sit tight and it'll be most of the universe for a few quadrillion years, somewhere between "cold, dark and quiet" and "very cold and very dark and very quiet"
- acchow 2y agoWe could probably even make more iron in a fusion reactor. But anything heavier than iron would probably require a supernova.
- laurencerowe 2y agoI don't think there's anything stopping us from making trace amounts of elements heavier than iron. The superheavy elements have only been synthesised in the laboratory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superheavy_element https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superheavy_element
- namibj 2y agoWay easier to just electrolyze olivine, of which we have plenty. Downside is that you actually get more silicon and magnesium out of it, and those are higher strength each than the iron you get from each chunk of rock. I.e., if you wanted to use them to make a bridge, it'd be mostly of something like silicon fiber reinforced magnesium instead of steel. Unless refining them to sufficient purity turns out to be too difficult to be worth it.
- gravescale 2y agoIt kind of feels like at least you "should" stick it to something that you expect will last a substantial amount of time, rather then something that is entirely expected to be gutted in, on the scale of how long a tile could practically last, relatively short order. Obviously, I know that The Market says "no", it's a few dollars a tile wholesale!
- abofh 2y agoDon't worry, the market corrects - what's the market price on Galapagos turtle soup or dodo omelettes? Others are right - the matter is neither created nor destroyed, but you are also right, that form is/was unique, and it is at least a bit sad to know that it's unlikely to be seen again. Take from that what you will, but I take from it that the world will only be like this for a moment, and if I want to see it, the only way to encourage that is to go and see it, not hope that society will realize it needs to (or wished it had) preserve things. Whether these are the things we'll regret losing - different question, but I'm sure a british museum will hang onto one :)
- cultofmetatron 2y ago> or dodo omelettes we should definitely not let it get that far....
- abigail95 2y agoThis comment is all over the place. Is the market for marble good or bad in this case? Is it producing an efficient outcome? Can it be made to do so? What are the non market solutions? You fault something just because it exist but give no alternative. Species like Dodo are expected to go extinct as humans flourish and move other things out of our way. All species eventually go extinct. We only exist because we out competed what came before us, which out competed what came before it. You can mourn the loss of the Dodo not existing in a zoo for you to gawk at but I find that to be on the level of complaining about a TV show being cancelled. If it filled such an essential biological niche that its loss is noticed (it obviously wasn't - hundreds of years went by before anyone noticed it was gone) - if it were noticed, and was such a heavy loss, that's the first niche that will be filled by something else. You can't have Darwinian evolution without this. The Galapagos Giant Tortoise will never go extinct because the market for protecting and investigating and gawking at them is too strong. If that interest ever wanes the animal will no longer occupy a useful niche and will cease to exist, unless it adapts.
- kjkjadksj 2y agoWe’d at least be able to clad the interiors of the generation ships with them 10,000 years from now if we did
- hn_throwaway_99 2y ago> It took millions of years to form and it's a marvel of serendipitous geological processes. Wait until you hear what happens to oil...
- neuronic 2y agoThe storage medium for sunlight are carbohydrates Ü
- danans 2y ago> before another renovation or a demolition happens and it gets smashed up and thrown away. That's sort of material has a high resale value and usually is sold for reuse in other applications.
- abeppu 2y ago... is that generally true? What are those other applications? Like, if I want to put in new stone counters, in general I'm picking a kind of stone I like, and the firm measures or makes a template of my use, and cuts from a slab, right? If I have a really small job, perhaps it's possible to get a deal from the offcuts of some prior installation. I don't think it's generally an available option to e.g. get measurements and then peruse a list of countertops removed from recent local renovations where the dimensions are strictly larger than mine, and have my counter cut by trimming their 11' linear counter to my 10' space. But given that widths/depths are often determined by (standard) cabinet or vanity measurements, I feel like this ought to be doable, and these materials could have a straight-forward series of multiple uses.
- hattmall 2y agoStone countertops haven't been in super wide usage long enough that there is a huge supply for used. But if getting one replaced there's certainly a market for a stone counter. Even the sink cutouts for real stone can sell for a good bit. A lot of stone countertops though are actually cheap composites where the slab is mass produced. Like how you can walk into an apartment complex and they all have granite countertops with nearly identical patterns.
- rootusrootus 2y ago> A lot of stone countertops though are actually cheap composites That still call themselves granite? Quartz is the well known man-made composite, but it tends to be a little more expensive than granite, not less.
- jamesfinlayson 2y ago
- crubier 2y agoThis is what happens to essentially all materials. Metals, Plastics, Oil, Stone, Sand, Concrete all come from things that have been standing mostly still for millions of years before we extracted their components
- cogman10 2y agoSome materials are more replaceable than others. A pine wood fixture can be regrown relatively quickly. Even something like oak based furniture can be replaced in a few hundred years. Heck, even plastic is pretty replaceable as reducing bio-material into plastic isn't unheard of. (The first plastics were made out of casein from milk).
- ametrau 2y agoYou can make plastic from air and light.
- berkes 2y agoHow?
- feoren 2y agoUse lots of photovoltaic power (light) to sequester CO2 and H2O and jam it together into more complex carbon compounds? If trees can do it, we can at least approximate it (trees come from the air, not the ground).
- cogman10 2y agoA bio method will likely be a lot cheaper. Algae plastic would be three route to look at as you can grow a ton of algae very quickly. A little GMO and you could optimize it for CO2 sequestration.
- concordDance 2y agoAbsurdly expensive though.
- lazide 2y agoAnother way to think about it - It was formed and buried in ways that no one could ever see or appreciate it, until now. A decade or two in a high visibility location is more attention than it ever would have gotten buried under ground.
- WalterBright 2y agoThe tiles in my house are reclaimed.
- gravescale 2y agoI wonder how they get them off the wall intact? I took up a bathroom floor of (glazed ceramic) tiles and I barely had a piece larger than a handspan to show for it, they were nearly all absolutely welded to the adhesive. Would be great if there could be a 3M Command Strip style pull-to-release tab!
- deadbabe 2y agoIf only we felt this sentimental about human beings.
- ugh123 2y agoThe bright side is more people will have seen and touched the marble than if it had stayed where it was.
- zeristor 2y agoI do agree with your sentiment, however this is pretty much how geology works. Rocks brought to the surface, and eroded by water, or plunged into the depths and melted to spew out as volcanoes, etc, etc, etc. Perhaps the remnants of bathroom tiles will be subjected into the ground and mined in millions of year to decorate a future species bathroom.
- lightedman 2y ago"It took millions of years to form" Not particularly. Travertine and dolomite limestone are hydrothermal depositions. They form quite rapidly, and in some locations you can watch it being formed to this day, like in some areas of Yellowstone (where the travertine is only a few thousand years old at best.) Dolomite is a little slower than Travertine to grow, but what we now understand about its formation also means it was very likely to have been rapidly-formed by simple geologic acid washes over shorter periods of time than we initially thought - read https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbressan/2023/11/27/scientists-solve-200-year-old-dolomite-problem/?sh=4184018d43a5 https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbressan/2023/11/27/scienti... and you'll catch on to what I'm saying.
- pfannkuchen 2y agoDoesn’t natural erosion have a similar effect on probably a much larger scale?
- m463 2y agoalthough it is NOT what you're talking about, you reminded me of this article: https://www.theonion.com/geologists-we-may-be-slowly-running-out-of-rocks-1819571484 https://www.theonion.com/geologists-we-may-be-slowly-running... Personally I think of those caves full of ancient crystals, or the stalag[mt]ites in newly unearthed caves. And the lost redwoods.