spider silk IS actually significantly stronger pound-for-pound than the same amount of steel, but only in one direction! and coincidentally, it’s the same exact direction that got a bunch of people killed in a submersible last month.

see, when people talk about the “strength” of spider silk versus steel, they’re specifically talking about tensile strength:

which is specifically the measure of the strength of a material when two forces are pulling at it from the ends, like when a steel cable is holding up a bridge support, or crane cargo:

or like when a strand of silk is supporting the entire spider.

that’s tensile strength, baby!

but there’s another type of strength that’s very important to take into consideration when you’re actually building things like bridges and submersibles, and spider silk and similar materials like carbon fiber are absolutely garbage at it! and that’s compressive strength.

this is basically the inverse of tensile strength, where instead of being yanked at from both ends, the forces are crushing inwards at the material from both directions instead.

you can expect to see these kinds of forces involved in road surfaces, vehicle engines, and again, submersibles.

now steel and its more competent cousin titanium are fucking GREAT at compressive strength! the harder the outside forces are compressing them, the stronger the metals get.

NOT TODAY, FUCKERS

but strand-based materials like spider silk and, again, carbon fiber, are fucking garbage at this. they can take a certain amount of pressure, but each round with compressive forces snaps some of the strands that makes up the material! and those don’t grow back, so basically you’re just gradually reducing your poor overstressed carbon-fiber hull into a completely useless shell of shattered thread fragments over time as the strands of fiber that actually give it strength die off one by one.

and eventually, something’s gotta give! and then people die about it.

this is why, even though spider silk IS stronger than steel in one specific way, we’re never going to stop using steel in industrial applications and switch over to spider silk or carbon fiber full time. these materials all have their areas of use, and steel just covers a wider base of applications.

and don’t even get me started on shear strength. we’ll be here all damn day.