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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: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 24 2018, @11:37PM (6 children)
China is and has been playing the long game to become the sole world superpower (uber-power?).
Western democracies cannot think long term, as the next term's election results are all that matters to those in power.
Democracies still are better than authoritarian governments (as when authoritarian governments go off the rails, they go off really bad), but 'foresight' is a difficult problem to solve in democracy (especially when the electorate doesn't know any better with dumb voting choices (either party) that are often made..)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 25 2018, @04:47AM (3 children)
China is threatening to go to war over the China Sea [telegraph.co.uk] even though an international court has rejected territorial claims [theguardian.com] made by China.
World war 3 here we come.
China's long term project may very well be to rule over the planet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 25 2018, @04:52AM (2 children)
consider the bright side
they may be successful in wiping out islam
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday December 25 2018, @05:09AM (1 child)
They don't seem to be accomplishing that in Xinjiang, although they are putting Muslims under surveillance [wsj.com]:
We'll see what the "assimilation" part means and if it works.
China may not be able to conquer its own territories, much less the world. If the one party government ever falls, the autonomous regions, Taiwan, etc. will get a chance to permanently break away. In the meantime, they could try flooding these places with Han Chinese mainlanders to dilute local cultures. But China is facing population decline and shrinkage [soylentnews.org] in the next 50-100 years.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 25 2018, @11:55AM
The chinese population will eradicated by heatwaves soon enough
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/08/01/asia/china-climate-heatwaves/index.html [cnn.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 25 2018, @06:01AM
Like what? I won't claim that running a large country like China is easy. But the key long term planning they need to make is to merely get out of the way. Sure, there's things like pollution, shoddy products, fraud, etc that need policing, but that's not what people laud them for when they speak of the "long game".
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Wednesday December 26 2018, @03:12AM
What long game? The long game of polluting all of its land and water to hell? The long game of skyrocketing lung cancer rates? The long game of rampant and systemic corruption? The long game of raising a miseducated population? The long game on basing decisions on what's most beneficial for a single politician to keep his power? The long game of exporting swathes of wealth to foreign nations for hiding?
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