[HN Gopher] Buildings made with fungi could live, grow, and then...
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Buildings made with fungi could live, grow, and then biodegrade
Author : znpy
Score : 44 points
Date : 2021-03-26 19:28 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cbc.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cbc.ca)
| ArkanExplorer wrote:
| Why not just create buildings designed to last hundreds of years
| instead?
|
| In many European cities (at least those that avoided becoming
| battlefields) there are apartment buildings hundreds of years
| old. I live in a 200 year old building built during the Austrian
| Empire, which has gigabit fiber amongst all of the other modern
| conveniences.
|
| The interiors are typically redecorated every 20 years and the
| apartments themselves overhauled (ie. replace the floor, update
| wiring) about every 50 years. The facades and roofs are
| periodically maintained by the city.
|
| The walls between neighbors are about 50cm of solid brick, so I
| also have complete silence and isolation.
| bobthechef wrote:
| Yes, and this is why American housing, including apartment
| housing, ticks me off so much. The building materials are
| crappy and neighbors can typically hear each other ("luxury
| housing" may not be affected as much when everything is built
| from concrete, including the floors/ceilings). Cities have laws
| about how much surface area ought to be covered with rugs to
| reduce noise for the neighbor below while walking.
|
| Yes, please build to last. It will discourage crappy design, it
| will be more forward thinking because you can't just tear it
| down or slap it together in 3 months, it will be more
| economical in the long term (better insulation than the 2x4
| cardboard boxes common in the US). Building materials are less
| toxic. It will also buck the consumerist glut that currently
| affects every sector of the economy and has led to enormous
| waste and poor quality. Actually, that's really the way in. To
| buck consumerism, an ethos of quality and classic style and
| design needs to be promoted. Anything else should be shunned as
| cheap and low quality.
| centimeter wrote:
| One of the tricks of modernity is to constantly lower the
| standard of living, claim that standard of living is actually
| based on something like the number of pixels on your TV, and
| say "look how much cheaper things are getting, and the standard
| of living is going up!"
|
| Durable buildings, good food, and robust societies are all
| capital-intensive to construct, and huge amounts of capital
| have been destroyed and/or transferred away from you by certain
| post-modern political movements, so it's no longer viable for
| everyone to live in a good solid building with plenty of space.
| Instead, you have to live in a cheap pod apartment with thin
| walls. But don't worry, they'll remind you it's more efficient,
| greener, etc. You may not have a good kitchen, but you can
| order a bug burger to be delivered by a subliterate third-world
| indentured servant. Very modern and eco-friendly!
| User23 wrote:
| Washing machines are a good example. The old ones are still
| running 40 years later and the new ones you're lucky if they
| don't fail the day after the warranty expires.
| elric wrote:
| If you have a plan to house 7+ billion people in "durable
| buildings", feeding them "good food" living in "robust
| societies", I'd love to hear it.
| seibelj wrote:
| The solution is to stop debasing our currencies by printing
| insane amounts of money, as the parent poster is implying.
| If the goal was to create higher-quality goods every year
| rather than cheaper, lower-quality goods then the market
| would naturally develop this way. But we are constantly
| forced to reduce quality to maintain profitably in an easy-
| money world.
|
| As an example of how this affects the real world, notice
| how the prices of good things - high quality meat, cheese,
| seafood, housing, education, healthcare - continue to rise
| every year well above the supposed "true" rate of
| inflation.
| grenoire wrote:
| No need to be snide about it, OP simply suggests better
| standards for us all.
|
| These will require making fundamental changes to how we
| live, build, farm, create. There is no master plan in the
| end, but an ideal of a reliable and sustainable future is a
| good place to start at.
| [deleted]
| Phenomenit wrote:
| I'm even convinced that we actually have a lot of inflation
| but instead of decrease of the value of money we get
| decreased value of the base function and durability of our
| goods. Everything is getting worse because our financial
| system can't handle durable goods.
| radicalbyte wrote:
| Inflation is caused by lots of people having excess money
| to spend. What we're doing now is we're increasing the
| money supply but instead of letting the money spread out
| we've built huge dams around it.
|
| With all of the money in big dams, it's not being spent, so
| we're not seeing inflation increase with money supply.
| api wrote:
| I heard the situation since roughly the year 2000 described
| once as "in-deflation": inflation in everything you need
| (housing, health care, tuition, food, etc.) and deflation
| in the wages paid for labor and the cost of manufactured
| goods (due to deflationary pressure on labor).
|
| This results in an economy where for example state of the
| art manufactured goods cost the same or even less than a
| large grocery store run. The primary cost in a TV, washing
| machine, air conditioner, or tech gadget is labor, and
| labor is subject to intense deflationary forces. Food on
| the other hand is tied to the costs of things like land and
| energy that have kept up with inflation.
|
| It's the result of inflationary monetary policy combined
| with aggressive outsourcing and automation. The latter
| pushes wages down, causing the inflation to only show up in
| (a) assets, and (b) things that are hard to outsource like
| education and healthcare. Inflationary monetary policy
| should make everything to up to varying degrees, but wages
| are subject to so much downward pressure they won't budge.
| elric wrote:
| Old bricks and old buildings are fine, they've already been
| made. But making bricks is pretty energy intensive. Brick
| laying requires mortar, which requires cement, which results in
| a lot of CO2. Brick houses are heavy, and require strong
| foundations. Usually concrete these days, again, lots of CO2. I
| have no idea at which point it makes sense to grow buildings
| out of fungi, but if they are a greener alternative to brick &
| mortar then it seems like an avenue worth investigating at
| least.
| grenoire wrote:
| Just to get a frame of reference: How much CO2? I'd assume
| that building once, and then not having to replace it for
| hundreds of years _is_ the long con and more energy-
| efficient, if that 's the metric we're going by.
| cjhveal wrote:
| Cement production accounts for ~7-8% of all global CO2
| emissions. Wikipedia cites sources which claim ~900kg of
| CO2 is produced for every ton of cement. It's possible that
| frequent rebuilding could be more emission-efficient.
| sjwalter wrote:
| I visited a friend of mine out in Lancashire in the UK one time
| after I had just bought a home on the west coast. I mentioned
| that my home was quite old: It was a craftsman built in 1908.
| My friend quipped that his home was one of the newest on his
| street, at 250 years and counting.
|
| On the one hand, I absolutely love the idea of creating lasting
| structures that stand the test of time and can serve many
| generations of people. That seems reasonable and cost-effective
| from a long-term perspective.
|
| On the other hand, I also visited Japan and I learned that
| people generally tear down their houses and rebuild from
| scratch every 20-30 years. I don't know all the details about
| how this system came to be, but someone told me it was for a
| few reasons: One, lots of earthquakes meant making housing more
| cheap and replaceable reduced the impact of the shakes. Two,
| the financing structures are impacted by the Georgian land-
| value taxation system Japan implements, meaning almost
| everywhere the land on which the building sits is 10-1000x more
| valuable than any building could be. And three, the idea that
| future generations will have different needs and wants, and so
| having a house built hundreds of years ago that's perfectly
| fine structurally but ill-suited to modern living is an outcome
| to be avoided.
|
| That also hearkens to something Joel Salatin said about how he
| thinks about building capex on his farm: He plans for any given
| structure to last 20-30 years. If it makes it that long, it's
| almost certain the farm's needs have changed enough that you'd
| want to tear it down anyways.
|
| I don't think there's an obvious answer here, and maybe it's
| like most things: The best solution is a variety of solutions.
| ArkanExplorer wrote:
| Japan is at about the same latitude as California, and
| completely surrounded by water. The need for thick insulation
| is much less.
| maoeurk wrote:
| Perhaps that's true on average, but there are some very
| cold places in Japan and the housing is the same there as I
| understand it: built to last 20-30 years.
|
| For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asahikawa#Climate
| bobthechef wrote:
| > I also visited Japan and I learned that people generally
| tear down their houses and rebuild from scratch every 20-30
| years.
|
| From what I understand, the Japanese has a strange cultural
| aversion to housing that's been lived in or in which people
| died.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| This would not be good for my rare book collection
| rossdavidh wrote:
| No big thing there, parts of my house are biodegrading already.
| :(
| imoverclocked wrote:
| Sounds like you've replaced one fungible asset with another.
| Mayzie wrote:
| This reminds me of a Wraith Hive Ship from Stargate:
| https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Hive_ship
| mcbishop wrote:
| Way cool. I'm wondering if this increases (or decreases) the
| likelihood of black mold in the building.
| SturgeonsLaw wrote:
| Probably decreases, assuming everything is working as planned.
| Mycelium building materials will need to be kept dry in order
| to prevent them from consuming their media and sprouting
| mushrooms, and these dry conditions would prevent mold.
| Additionally, the mold and mycelium would compete for the same
| nutrients, with the mycelium already far more established.
|
| If too much moisture gets in though, it's game over. Perhaps
| the mycelium bricks/plates can be coated in a sealant.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| Just moisture and temperature, those are really the only two
| variables.
| fishmaster wrote:
| Fungi are one thing I both don't really understand and find
| extremely fascinating. If anyone has recommendations for
| comprehensive books or other materials for laymen I'd be
| grateful.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| Most people would probably recommend Paul Stamets' book
| Mycelium Running in response to this question. I haven't read
| it personally (despite owning 20+ mushroom books), but that's
| probably the closest to what you're looking for. Langdon Cook's
| book The Mushroom Hunters is also a lot of fun, but it's
| definitely not comprehensive -- it's just stories about the
| commercial mushroom harvesting world.
|
| If you want to get into mushroom foraging then the best way to
| learn (in addition to joining your local mycology club) is by
| getting some of the picture books, e.g. Mushrooming Without
| Fear and Mushrooming With Confidence. (Field guides aren't good
| for beginners, even the simplified ones.) If you're in the
| northeast, Lawrence Millman's book Fantastic Fungi of New
| England is also great.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| I recently read Entangled Life: How Fungi Make our Worlds,
| Change Our Minds & Shape our Futures. It was a pretty good read
| and I learned a lot about fungi:
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52668915-entangled-life
| samstave wrote:
| "There's been buzz lately about mycelium" -- Well, Paul Stamets
| has been talking for decades. Did a TED talk, amazing other
| videos - a fantastic Joe Rogan Podcast etc.
|
| Mycelium is AMAZING - and I really hope that we start using it in
| the myriad ways it is versatile for so many different
| applications.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Maybe I am being dense, but wood also biodegrades, and is an
| easier building material to use...
| imoverclocked wrote:
| The wood doesn't self-heal or continue to grow once it is cut.
| Given that they grow some of this material from wood or wood
| dust, you could potentially recycle your old wood into a new
| material directly.
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(page generated 2021-03-26 23:00 UTC)