Yeah, maybe. But you're right, when it comes to metals, steel's vastly most substantial component, iron is about the most abundant metallic element in the universe, so it ain't gonna disappear from our manufacturing materials list anytime soon.
Iron and steels have their obvious problems - rust for instance, bad performance high high temperatures is another and it'd be nice if iron had properties more like say titanium but that's wishful thinking.
Taming iron to behave the way we want it to has always been and still is a major problem. For example, stainless steel is expensive and it's always been a bit of a kludge (the need for hundreds of different varieties of alloys attest to that; same goes for hardness, for instance, the many tool-steel-like alloys that are needed by industry).
If anything, we need considerably more material science research to make iron alloys much better than they are now and thus make them appear very sexy to everyone's eyes.
Yeah, maybe. But you're right, when it comes to metals, steel's vastly most substantial component, iron is about the most abundant metallic element in the universe, so it ain't gonna disappear from our manufacturing materials list anytime soon.
Iron and steels have their obvious problems - rust for instance, bad performance high high temperatures is another and it'd be nice if iron had properties more like say titanium but that's wishful thinking.
Taming iron to behave the way we want it to has always been and still is a major problem. For example, stainless steel is expensive and it's always been a bit of a kludge (the need for hundreds of different varieties of alloys attest to that; same goes for hardness, for instance, the many tool-steel-like alloys that are needed by industry).
If anything, we need considerably more material science research to make iron alloys much better than they are now and thus make them appear very sexy to everyone's eyes.