UV light and mildew: why physical objects degrade over time

https://tedium.co/2021/11/05/why-physical-objects-decay/

by Amorymeltzer • 5 years ago

53 36 5 years ago

oleganza2• 5 years ago

Surprised to not find a mention of the second law of thermodynamics in the article.

Seems like it was intended to be a simple and practical list of things that can be avoided or improved to reduce the process, rather than explaining the physics behind it.

But now that you mention it, this would be a nice opportunity for you to explain how thermodynamics applies to degradation of these kinds of materials mentioned.

kadoban• 5 years ago

I'm not sure the second law really applies, these aren't closed systems (the Sun shining on them being the most obvious input).

oleganza2• 5 years ago

Yes, that's true. Thanks for correcting me.

ClumsyPilot3• 5 years ago

"But digital photos, while not nearly as high a resolution as a modern pro-quality camera can take, do not age themselves quite so quickly."

This is a bit of a side-track, but most families have an archive of physical photos dating back decades, you put them in an album, and 50 years later they will still be there.

Meanwhile every family I know has decade of digital photography that was lost to broken hard-drives and corroded CD's. The only way to preserve digital information is to constantly babysit it, making sure you have two/three copies and replacing the broken disks (or outsource the process to Dropbox/Onedrive/whatever).

There is no consumer-friendly process of archiving things - you can try burning it to optical, but will there be a drive to read it in 50 years? No-one I know still has an optical drive, and that's if they last.

cheschire2• 5 years ago

You just skipped over all the solutions to the digital problems and ignored the vulnerabilities inherent in single physical copies such as damage or loss.

I get the feeling you’ve made up your mind already.

ClumsyPilot3• 5 years ago

"You just skipped over all the solutions to the digital problems"

I am all ears, please tell me which solution I could recommend to my aging parents except "pay dropbox"?

stickfigure• 5 years ago

I know multiple people whose homes burned down. Physical copies are quite vulnerable to loss.

xvilka• 5 years ago

1. Make a GitHub repository where everyone can send their most important photos, encrypted with their own keys.

2. Get enough stars

3. Be archived by Microsoft/GitHub in Svalbard

hypertele-Xii2• 5 years ago

So if the photos are encrypted, how do you check they're photos at all? Your solution doesn't exist because any such service offered will be immediately flooded by undesired use. It'll spread illegal content ranging from video game ROMs to child pornography. Script kiddies will use it as a command & control server.

Wowfunhappy2• 5 years ago

The only way to preserve digital information is to constantly babysit it, making sure you have two/three copies and replacing the broken disks

Yes, but I babysit all my digital information via that one process, and that's a lot of information. My collection is currently sitting at just over 3 TB. That's an awful lot of photo albums, and yet it still fits on a single hard drive (per copy of all the data).

There is no consumer-friendly process of archiving things - you can try burning it to optical, but will there be a drive to read it in 50 years?

Yeah, probably. I can still find players for Vinyl easily enough. Mind, you'd need to burn the data to one of those fancy M-Discs; normal consumer-writable discs won't last that long.

aitchnyu• 5 years ago

My mum and sisters have obsessed over a photo album application with captions, family tree and password protected diary in early 2000s. The photos have survived as files. But they have given up on the apps and the data. Now mum is investing into My Heritage which she thinks will survive forever.

mongol2• 5 years ago

Also, how likely are digital copies to cross generation boundaries? When grandfather dies, a family member is likely to clean out his home, find the photo album and ask "what do we do about this?". But will that happen with his digital photos?

lordnacho3• 5 years ago

But will that happen with his digital photos?

It's easier, isn't it? Here is granddad's old HD that still works but has pitiful space compared to modern ones. Copy, paste, now you have his photos forever.

Broken_Hippo• 5 years ago

I used to have a bunch of film that needed developing. So did others in my family. Unfortunately, I couldn't always afford processing. Digital doesn't have that. I have a phone, which means I have a camera. Even if I lose photos, I've been able to enjoy them for a period of time.

As a bonus, being able to freely take photos means that I've personally become a better photographer.

howaboutnope• 5 years ago

That's not even moving the goalposts, that's like walking off the playing field to do something else entirely.

The people who took photos of my parents in their childhood and youth are most likely dead, so at this point not even they care anymore how good a photographer they were. I certainly don't, I care that I still have those photos.

dillondoyle2• 5 years ago

For most non-HN types I think the answer is FB and Instagram. but the posting has trended away from the actual 'family memories' photos many of us would want to save. Wouldn't want to bet on that being there 15 years from now though.

tomerv• 5 years ago

Facebook images have such low quality, and posts tend to randomly disappear. I wouldn't use it as any kind of archiving tool.

lordnacho3• 5 years ago

There is no consumer-friendly process of archiving things

Hire a cloud or two, maybe a NAS as well. I've had my NAS sit there copying down all the photos each day since forever, no intervention needed.

Someday it will die, or the cloud service will die (because Google does that to services lol), but they won't die at once.

derbOac• 5 years ago

This is funny to me because I've had discussions surrounding the thesis of the title with my in-laws, about building materials. Vinyl lumber is great for areas prone to excessive shade and moisture, because it's so resistant to rot. Put it in full sun though, and it eventually turns to plastic powder. Some lumber is the opposite, though: it's difficult to maintain in wet shade because it gets destroyed by fungi and moss; put it in the sun, though, and take care of it, and it can last for a long time.

It's interesting to me UV light and rot are coming up in a totally different context, as it points to the importance of these two types of decay phenomena. The other, of course, is physical force, in the form of wind or physical impact. But in the absence of that the two great destroyers are microbes and radiation.

lmm• 5 years ago

Some lumber is the opposite, though: it's difficult to maintain in wet shade because it gets destroyed by fungi and moss; put it in the sun, though, and take care of it, and it can last for a long time.

I wonder if that's partly because the same UV that would damage the vinyl is killing off the microbes.

Daniel_sk• 5 years ago

Most plastics will get brittle over long time, at least the older production ones (modern plastics have better plasticisers) even when kept in good conditions. Exposing it to UV light will make the process faster. But even O2 exposure will oxidise it over time. Rubber will also dissipate over time and get brittle and crumble. All of this is usually fine from a perspective of a humans average lifespan, but a lot of artefacts from this age will not be preserved.

cesaref• 5 years ago

It's an interesting subject, and i've some experience of photographic preservation having printed in darkrooms for 20 years or so.

When considering archiving old photographs, there's quite a bit of difference between colour and B&W prints, and also colour and B&W negatives. The B&W prints and negatives contain silver, which is what makes the dark spots on the print and negatives, and it's presence stops microbes attacking the material.

For colour prints and negatives, the silver that was originally present in the material is removed with a bleach stage when processing (with a dye being activated to produce the colours you see) so you need to use some other method to protect the material from microbes. I think modern colour film stock includes a stabilizer, whilst older processing used Formaldehyde.

ggm• 5 years ago

Life in the sub tropics is this. Modern books crumble. Old books fox. All books are eaten by roaches.

lordnacho3• 5 years ago

What's fascinating is my own sense of time has been somewhat frozen by the advent of digital technology.

I'd grown up watching old clips of Pele, Carlos Alberto or Tardelli, then Maradona. They looked a certain way by the time I was 20.

Then around the mid-2000s, everything went digital and soon HD as well. You can watch the 2006 World Cup and think it was happening live. The style of shorts has also more or less frozen, so it's not as easy as looking at 80s-style super short shorts to guess the year.

Same goes with photos. My parents died and I got the family album. You can tell the different colors diffuse at different rates. Shots from the 70s look a different way to ones from the 80s and 90s.

With my kids, everything is digital. I have pics of them from almost every day, and they look just the same.

I think the fading process is actually faster than we think, as even those pics of the family from the 80s looked kinda old by the mid 90s.

UV light and mildew: why physical objects degrade over time

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