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from the nothing-lasts-more-than-8-years dept.
Mankind has a history of long term projects. The Pyramids, Stonehenge, The Great Wall, getting Mickey Mouse into the Public Domain...
Some of these projects took multiple centuries of effort. Not a single person present at the start of those saw them completed. This is made worse when you consider lifespans that were half or less what they are currently.
But what was the LAST project that spanned lifetimes? Do you know of any going on today?
The Great Wall was started in 300 B.C. and completed some 1900 years later.
As humanity considers things like colonizing other planets and space megastructures we are talking about activities that will take centuries of effort. This turns into millennia as we look at things like terraforming and actually spreading humanity beyond our own star.
Does humanity in the current instant gratification social media quarterly results era have the appetite for projects that our grandchildren won't see completed?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by takyon on Monday December 24 2018, @10:45PM (5 children)
Clock of the Long Now [wikipedia.org]: Not a multi-generation project, but represents multi-generation thinking.
ITER [wikipedia.org] is a project spanning multiple decades, and longer (into the 2050s) if that is the track we need to ride on to reach a commercial reactor. But I don't think ITER's longevity is so great.
In fact, the premise seems wrong. Why do we need to do something in 1,000 years of time if it can be completed in 10? We may not be attempting projects that take centuries of effort, but we are getting an incredible amount done in a shorter amount of time. The end result is what matters, not the time taken. Although if we are rushing things that should take longer, causing accidents or lowering quality, then we might have a problem.
Then you have stuff like city planning and sewer management. Ongoing, never-ending projects on incredibly massive scales that have spanned over a century or two in some cases (in America).
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(Score: 4, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday December 25 2018, @04:24AM (4 children)
If you look at small scale projects (not necessarily involving thousands of people), they are literally everywhere... any decent scholar knows this. In science there's classic stuff like the pitch drop experiment (been running for about 90 years). Something that immediately occurred to me that's a bit larger scale is the Oxford English Dictionary, whose first edition took about 70 years to compile and publish... and is obviously ongoing.
On smaller scales, these multigeneration research or scholarly projects are quite common. I can think of quite a few sources I've had to cite for publication dates that have spanned decades... I was just consulting one a few days ago: the edited correspondence of Marin Mersenne, who is sometimes known as the "Secretary of the Scientific Revolution" due to his voluminous correspondence with scientists around the world in the 1600s. The 20th-century edition of that correspondence took 57 years to publish (and longer before the first volume appeared to plan the project and begin work). The reasons for such lengthy projects are manifold -- in this case, it was likely a combination of the many languages and topics in the edited correspondence that required attention and expertise (as well as finding scholars to devote chunks of their time to such a project).
And that's just an editorial project -- producing new knowledge is obviously a larger issue... in some ways, we can view ongoing scientific disciplines as multigenerational research projects. They may not always have centralized organization, but they are certainly cumulative endeavors that every scientist realizes is likely never "complete."
(Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Tuesday December 25 2018, @04:59AM (3 children)
I've heard of the pitch drop experiment.
RandomFactor is asking about large-scale, ambitious projects. In the sciences, ITER, LHC, and ISS come to mind. RF mentions infrastructure and building projects such as the Great Wall and pyramids. And of course, space colonization, which is certain to be a long-term effort and represents an indefinite time commitment since, as I pointed out, a city and its infrastructure are maintained continuously by various projects.
RF asks:
Again, you see the answer in our cities. They start out small but expand over time. They require some degree of planning and flexibility. They need supporting infrastructure such as sewers. Buildings come down and pop up. Things need to be repaired, replaced, and modernized. The work is never truly over. Building a colony on Mars is like building a city or industrial factories on Earth. It won't be done in a day, and it will be continuously expanded over time. The first colonists may never get to see what the colony ends up looking like 100 years later, but each generation will gradually push towards that outcome. Things like asteroid mining will definitely occur if the economics of it are right. It would start out slow but eventually all rocks in the solar system will be under our control or at least observation. Hopefully we reach a point where all incoming interstellar asteroids are captured and put into solar orbit.
Ambitious projects needn't take centuries. They should take whatever amount of time is optimal. But if that time can be reduced with no ill effects, it should. I'm not seeing a good example here of a future megaproject where we are forced to commit centuries of effort with little return in the meantime. Maybe geoengineering to fight climate change? Even then we should see some measurable impact before the project is over (if it ends). If we are talking megastructures, the Dyson sphere looks physically impossible. A Dyson swarm looks achievable... but you can benefit from it one swarmlet at a time and just keep on adding more.
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(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday December 25 2018, @10:20AM (2 children)
Not sure why you want to be so argumentative when I was agreeing with you.
I don't think most cities are great examples, since urban planning has been a disaster in most places -- consider Boston (awful, due to not knowing the need for future expansion) vs. many recent cities in the West and Southwest that grew up in the past century or so, which are needlessly spread out and therefore dependent on individuals driving cars everywhere... sometime now seen as environmentally problematic.
It's all fumbling around in the dark from generation to generation... with massive corrections made as you get common problems of growth (inner ciry decay vs. revitalization cycles) etc. Not saying my examples of science knowledge growth are different -- but surely scientific knowledge is a "large scale ambitious project" for humanity, perhaps THE most important.
And what of my OED example?? Trying to classify and document the entirety of a language and its history isn't "ambitious"?
And the question was whether humans still are interested in such long-term projects. My point is that there are scholars everywhere who always do such things... who are invested more in the "long-term" rather than next quarter's business returns.
It's proof that there's a strand of humans who have that dedication. Who do you think drove the "ambitious" projects mentioned in the question, like the Great Pyramid? Do you really think most of the workers in such projects cared about much more than where they were getting their next meal? Most likely they cared about not getting whipped by a slave driver.
"Humanity" didn't have the ambition for long-term projects like the pyramids or the Great Wall or medieval cathedrals. They were spearheaded by small groups of elite visionaries... who in the past literally would tend to kill those who didn't obey them. We may not prefer such feudal or autocratic systems anymore, but that doesn't mean our scholars and engineers and leaders can't have a vision for long-term projects...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 25 2018, @04:00PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 26 2018, @05:00PM
i had to do a find to see if anyone had thought to mention gnu/linux.