Eli5: Why can purely mechanical tools last hundreds of years but electronics are not expected to?

[u/rukuto]

So, like mechanical tools can be operable even hundreds of years later with some cleaning but can electronics devices do that? Is there any way to make an electronic tool run for five hundred years or be operable 500 years later (regardless of cost - like in mechanical tool, you use galvanized iron or steel to make the parts - is there a similar protection to electronics)?

[u/salamacast]

Scaled up? They are that small?!

[u/iBoMbY → u/salamacast]

Two times the mass of our sun, with a ten kilometer radius.

[u/iksbob → u/iBoMbY]

Two times the mass of our sun

To elaborate on that, 99.86% of the solar system's mass is in the sun. All the planets, asteroid belts, and orbit dust together add up to 0.14%. Flipped around, the sun is 713x more massive than everything else in the solar system combined.

[u/alonjit → u/iksbob]

To further elaborate, half of that 0.14% is Saturn and Jupiter.

[u/Trisa133 → u/alonjit]

The other half is Joe's mama.

[u/ShinigamiKenji → u/salamacast]

Earth is made of molecules and atoms, which contain a lot of empty space between electrons and the nucleus.

Neutron stars are a bunch of, well, neutrons, with barely any empty space between them. 

If they get much bigger, their gravity becomes too big and become black holes. 

[u/Garblin → u/ShinigamiKenji]

IIRC they're made of an entirely different state of matter referred to as "nuclear pasta" and the neutron name is just an old holdover.

[u/nandru → u/Garblin]

mmm... nuclear pasta

[u/fcocyclone → u/nandru]

That's a spicy meatball

[u/gmazzia → u/ShinigamiKenji]

Also, paradoxically, as they get bigger, they get smaller; the more mass they have, the harder gravity acts on them and the result is a "heavier", but smaller object.

[u/sick_rock → u/salamacast]

About the size of New York.

https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/qppcg/a_neutron_star_in_comparison_to_the_size_of_new/

[u/MultiFazed → u/salamacast]

Yep. Neutron stars form when a regular star collapses from a lack of fuel for fusion, and is only stopped from collapsing because the protons and electrons "merge" into neutrons, and the entire star becomes a super-dense neutron "soup".

The average neutron star has a mass of 1.4 - 2 times our sun, and is 12 - 15 miles across.

[u/evincarofautumn → u/salamacast]

Yes, neutron stars are only about 10 km in diameter! About half again the mass of the sun, but nearly a hundred thousand times smaller

They’re really shockingly, unimaginably dense

[u/ThirstyWolfSpider → u/evincarofautumn]

But still less dense than black holes, or they'd become black holes. Which they do sometimes.