SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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) 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.