Would pillow fort engineering become a more serious field?
The boring answer is that we’d use different materials for construction. Or we’d find a way to make them suitable for construction, like how we turn sand and gravel into concrete, or pack snow into ice blocks.
This is the human way.
<thing> is not behaving the way I want it to? Fuck with it until it does.
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Additionally sand and gravel can be reinforced. If you alternate layers of sand and fiber mesh into a 25cm cube, it can support the weight of a car without any significant deformation.
Concrete may be hard, but it can’t deal with tension that well, this is why we add rebar to it, it makes it able to deal with enough tension that it gets useful as a building material.
The same principle would apply to pillows, pillows are soft and squishy, put them in a vacuum bag and suck out the air, and you wiuld have a pillow and a plastic bag turned into a sort of a brick.
In construction we modify the raw materials to fit the purpose we need them to.
This is a very unique question. I’ve never seen it in the other place or anywhere else.
Probably people would just pack materials harder into brick molds and carry on as usual though.
I imagine we’d start harvesting bone a lot.
Reminds me of “The Gods Must be Crazy” where the tribe uses coke bottle for umpteen things because that’s the hardest thing they can find, besides having other properties like smoothness.
sandbag igloos? theres earthships made with car tires and sand bags etc. helps to be partially underground.
We build stuff with clay all the time. The adobe empire will rise again (no, not that one)
Clay is often baked and hardened, however, is it not? What if it remained rather soft?
Reinforcement with the less plentiful harder materials like we do with rebar in concrete I imagine.
Tall skyscrapers wouldn’t be a thing. I think we’d see more buildings with Pentagon-like proportions.
Wood is one of those materials. If it’s soft and squishy as lumber, it follows that the trees it is cut from would be likewise. So, no super tall trees.
As others here say, we would modify the materials to fit our purpose. There are some increasingly tall buildings made from wood, I saw some neat YouTube videos about them and how they process the wood and press layers together to improve strength.
Food would be interesting if teeth were soft and spongy.
Smoothies for every meal!
