I read a book from the 80s (may have been Engines of Creation) where they talked about forever machines. Materials science and design advanced to the point where appliances and vehicles would last for centuries.
Yeah, truthfully there’s always a balance between energy use and durability. The key thing to remember is that when a durable machine breaks, all the materials that make it up are still there. A broken fridge still has all the same atoms that a working fridge does. A dead appliance is a large dense chunk of valuable materials waiting to be harvested. We can simply grind them to pieces, melt them down, extract the materials, and make new ones. Ecologically, the ideal would be to have set the energy efficiency and material use vs durability exchange to the point of minimum environmental impact. I’m not sure what that equilibrium point is. But maybe the least destructive approach would be appliances that last 30 years and then have to be scrapped. Maybe a thousand year machine isn’t worth the ecological cost, but neither are disposable 5 year machines. For any given appliance, there has to be some lifespan that produces a minimal ecological footprint. And that’s what we should be aiming for.
I read a book from the 80s (may have been Engines of Creation) where they talked about forever machines. Materials science and design advanced to the point where appliances and vehicles would last for centuries.
I wonder if such machines would suffer from the same efficiency issues of the 100 year light bulb.
By all measures except longevity it is a terrible light bulb
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centennial_Light
Yeah, truthfully there’s always a balance between energy use and durability. The key thing to remember is that when a durable machine breaks, all the materials that make it up are still there. A broken fridge still has all the same atoms that a working fridge does. A dead appliance is a large dense chunk of valuable materials waiting to be harvested. We can simply grind them to pieces, melt them down, extract the materials, and make new ones. Ecologically, the ideal would be to have set the energy efficiency and material use vs durability exchange to the point of minimum environmental impact. I’m not sure what that equilibrium point is. But maybe the least destructive approach would be appliances that last 30 years and then have to be scrapped. Maybe a thousand year machine isn’t worth the ecological cost, but neither are disposable 5 year machines. For any given appliance, there has to be some lifespan that produces a minimal ecological footprint. And that’s what we should be aiming for.
They have lightbulbs and wiring for them that have existed from the dawn of lightbulbs, still in use.