This isn't being designed by people who are amatures. It is being done by people with advance degrees and years of experience in the field.
none of those degrees are in earth sciences, that is painfully obvious
It is distributing that people like you with zero experience and education in these areas seem to think you know than people with advance degrees and years of experience in a field. Please tell me what qualifications do you have.
no, what is truly disturbing (I'm assuming you meant disturbing, not distributing) is that people like you are so ready to abstain from skepticism and accept any claims from authority as long as they appeal to your fantasies.
an introductory earth science class would reveal that they are woefully ignorant about the materials unless they have some "magic" material they are holding out on us, and if they do they're not being honest and forthwith about the technology like a true scientist would be, which would likely mean they have ulterior motives
a painfully obvious example of their ignorance and/or deception:
source:
http://www.solarroadways.com/clearingthefreakinair.shtml
As you can see, asphalt has a hardness of 1.3, copper has a hardness of 3, iron and nickel have a hardness of 4, and steel falls between 4 and 4.5. As you get closer to diamond, you finally come to glass, which has a hardness of 5.5-6.0.
So if anyone tries to tell you that glass is soft, just remind them that even simple window glass is harder than steel. By comparison, it's asphalt that is soft.
One more thing: When you temper glass, it becomes 4-5 times stronger than the non-tempered glass listed in mohs hardness scale (it doesn't make it harder - just stronger). Bulletproof and bomb (blast) resistant glass is made with tempered glass.
Solar Road Panels are also made of tempered glass.
1. asphalt is only one component of blacktop roads, the other materials in the aggregate are much harder (harder than glass), the asphalt merely acts as a glue to hold it all together (being soft is a good thing).
2. blacktop doesn't need to be hard like a solar roadway would have to be, the whole point of the glass surface is to allow light through for the solar elements to harvest energy, and a high hardness is what you need to resist scuffing.
3. it doesn't matter that glass is harder than steel, steel and many metals are very soft materials, what we have to worry about is the silicates that comprise the majority of the earth's crust, such as quartz which is the most common continental mineral, and is harder than glass and steel. Dust and sand comprised of such silicates will ruin a glass road, and while it might scratch up an already rough blacktop surface, that doesn't really matter, it doesn't need to be transparent and unblemished like glass surface does for a solar road.
4. they're being pretty deceitful when they go off tangent talking about how glass is harder than steel (what does steel have to do with anything here? the problem will be from dirt/sand/dust, not steel, it doesn't matter that glass is harder than steel...), or that tempered glass is stronger (they even admit that strength does not have to do with hardness, but you need to tell your friends anyway!), or how they say
"as you get closer to diamond, you finally come to glass, which has a hardness of 5.5-6.0" (good for glass, diamond has a hardness of 10, many silicates are above 6, quartz is a 7, glass
will lose)
5. and then there's the comment about bulletproof/bomb (blast) resistant glass, and then they associate the solar road glass with that. First off, "bulletproof" / blast resistant glass is not cheap. Second, it is meant to protect against a single incident, i.e. once its damaged it needs to be replaced. Such glass will still scratch and scuff just as easily, it just doesn't shatter, at least not in the same way, and that's because its actually made with two or more types of glass (and often other material, such as plastics), one hard and one
soft, the soft material allows for flex and prevents the catastrophic shattering you get with hard glass.
And that's just [pun]scratching the surface[/pun] as to how their idea is fundamentally flawed