800 years from now something terrible could happen that turns all the rain into sulfuric acid but then all residential buildings everywhere are screwed.

For people hit by hurricane Sandy the answer is at least once.

Hopefully the house ain't in Florida. Or California's Central Valley.

Isn't this true though? Especially relative to other materials that can corrode?

It seems like you're reacting as if he said it _cant_ corrode.

I guess I would have thought stone would last longer.

(Of course they have all had lots of maintenance done...)

Oh what about titanium?

Edit: lol oh well even timber structures Can last a millenium if maintained

The biggest issue with modern concrete construction is the usage of reenforced concrete using iron or steel rebar which tends to corrode quickly. Reenforced concrete seems to have a half life of ~50 years.

[1]: https://www.compositesworld.com/news/tprc-research-studies-v...

Basalt fiber rebar might be a better way to go, as it won't oxidize. Studies will be needed to find out if it actually is better in the long run.

The biggest problem is rebar spalling though, not the concrete.

Meanwhile, the kinds of beams and walls we make out of concrete wouldn't work if carved out of rock, they are only structurally sound because we put steel rebar in the concrete. But rebar expanding due to rust is how concrete usually fails. Plus using rebar prevents you from using salt water in your concrete, which is one of the ways in which Roman concrete might be better than ours.

In the northeast US, sidewalks frequently are in horrible condition after only a few years, because of the salt used in the winter. Sidewalks do not use steel rebar; they're just simple poured concrete. So why can't they make them with a better mixture that doesn't corrode so easily? (I'm guessing the answer is: replacing them frequently makes a lot of money for some concrete company that the town mayor is friends with.)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancestral_Puebloan_dwellings

ie, the durability of those structures is more due to where they are, than what they are made of.

Something like granite would be a much more long-lived structural material in wetter climates. Indeed that's the primary stone used in, say, Machu Picchu.

Frp is great for fuel tanks and exhaust systems - it’s superior to stainless for these applications (corrosion resistance being key factor). But yes as mentioned by sibling UV will definitely degrade

But there’s always some rate of chain scission, even in the absence of UV/water/whatever. I just have no idea whether that has a meaningful impact on material properties over 1000 years.

That heuristic matches on the hordes of liars who try and sound smart while hedging their claims with a liberal application of weasel words to avoid being provably wrong. And those people outnumber the "good engineers" probably by at least an order of magnitude...

It's true, it does depend. But machines can exhaustively describe the hypothesis space now. Comprehensiveness is not the only virtue of a human.

Just because some humans somewhere figured out something in the past doesn't mean that humans somewhere else today know how to do it. Lots of knowledge has been lost to time.

How many buildings of the same type didn't survive?

If your goal is to use a method that has _any_ chance of success, however small, then the old ways are probably a good bet. If you want the highest chance of success you should probably at least evaluate new methods.

What's old is new again!

If they want the house to last for exactly 1,000 years then I'm not sure what to tell you. Maybe something based on the milleneum clock? Or explosives and a really long fuse, Wile E Coyote style?

It's quite possible that if you want a newly built structure to last that long with the highest probability, you should pick new materials.