For some generations in the middle of such projects, I can imagine that their huge undertaking is just "something they do", essentially just their job, and from their point of view it has always been there, and will always be there to the extent of their lifetime.
Do we still have anything like this?
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/26/1048358753/if-nasa-green-ligh...
> "We do need to learn how to conduct missions over these very long timescales if we are ever going to come close to achieving any of the aspirations of interstellar exploration that are so often posed in the popular media," she says.
> To help understand how to deal with the intergenerational nature of this proposed mission, the research team reached out to Janet Vertesi, a sociologist with Princeton University who has studied the organizational aspects of other projects in space.
> ...
> She's led discussions with the researchers to help them sort through this. Astronomer Carey Lisse, who is working on the interstellar probe study, said these sessions were "very blunt and made us think a lot."
> He's done the math. "I will be 75 in 2036 when we launch. That means that I know I'm not going to be on this mission probably for more than 10 years after launch," says Lisse, adding that the need for handovers is just a fact. "This isn't just theory or just talk. It's going to happen multiple times, probably two or three times at least."
> ...
> Ocker, who doesn't even have a Ph.D. yet, points out that she'll be late in her career by the time this probe reaches interstellar space, if NASA decides to support it and if it launches in the 2030s. "I'm very hopeful that this mission will happen. I really hope it does, in which case I'll be very excited to use the data when it does eventually come down," she says.
In The Expanse series of novels, essentially every citizen on Mars is working towards terraforming the surface, something they know will not be achieved in their grandchildren's lifetime. This will probably be a goal very near in the future. Let's just hope it goes better than the novels.
Quantum physics was worked out for the most part within a person's lifespan. We've since slowed down, and it may take a few generations to make another great leap. In the meantime theorists and experimentalists will be formulating hypotheses and collecting data that may not be usable in their lifespan. Just look at how long we had to collect data on Mercury's orbit before we could use it to help prove General Relativity.
In terms of buildings, the longest one might be
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Fam%C3%ADlia
Otherwise I would say science in general.
Our cities and mega-structures, including things like roads and fields.
Or more broadly, our terraforming of the planet.
When you look at time lapse videos of human developments it looks pretty similar to watching swarm insects construct big structures over long periods.
We started it a long time ago and it sped up a lot over the last few centuries, and it's still going on.
No need to look at individual pieces opf technology, all you need is to "zoom out" in both space and time to see the human swarm busily at work on a project that not a single individual understands.
If you do want to look at individual smaller pieces, things like the space station or (space/air/road) vehicles in general: We keep tinkering and changing them through space (in parallel across the world) and time (across many generations).
For the space station for example, I'd consider it "completed" the moment it was taken into operation, the rest is building upon it and maintaining. Cathedrals are single objects, though of course I don't know how they were built, and for how many hundred years they may have seemed "complete enough" to the untrained eye.
There are multi-generational scientific experiments e.g. the pitch drop or (hopefully) LTEE.
Most significant archeological sites are multi-generational as well though I don’t know if we can describe them as a single work.
One thing that’ll be interesting if we actually manage more than one generation is the software projects, the early luminaries have been passing for a while, the early architects of still extant software projects are going to start retiring or (sadly) passing en masse pretty soon.
I don’t look forward to the obituary of donald knuth but I do wonder how tex and metafont will carry on.
Are they building something, especially of scale? The pitch drop experiment in particular is extremely passive as I understand. You essentially wait for the pitch to drop, with occasional maintenance (which I imagine being minor, maybe I'm wrong). LTEE though I think qualifies, because when I watched a documentary about it, I had the impression that it's quite some work.
Even still, an entire Cathedral or traveling through all of France (and organizing people to do so) seems much larger in scope. Though maybe those are just more extreme examples themselves?
> One thing that’ll be interesting if we actually manage more than one generation is the software projects
I'm not entirely sure if there is a common UNIX descendant out there that still even has one original line of code from one of its early ancestors[1], but there's certainly building and maintenance going strong around it.
TeX and Metafont I'm less sure, but there seem to be so many developers of very elaborate packages, that I would be surprised if TeX itself was left rotten.
Generally, it seems that many software projects have changed maintenance teams many times, with no involvement of the original authors anymore... but that's also more maintaining something existing (and building upon it), not something with a clear completion goal several generations down.
[1] Though I would not be surprised if you pointed to, say, some terminal code in a BSD variant and tell me it's from the original BSD.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTyX_EJQOIU
I don't see the reference.
Why does Cassini's child continue a project that they won't finish? why does King Louis XIV's successor continue funding it? Was the payment structure lump sump for 4 generations of work? or simply compelled labor?
It is easier to assume something like "this mechanism shouldn't exist" if you (general "you") think a group of people are already beneath you due to your implicit biases.
if something "shouldn't exist" in a time period it has nothing to do with judging those people as inferiors, its simply the timeline of the development of technology (or our misconception thereof)
https://entangledstates.org/2021/10/05/the-connection-betwee...
https://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/pseudoarchaeology-racism...
https://hyperallergic.com/470795/pseudoarchaeology-and-the-r...
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.364.6436.110
Also, Even today white supremacists think Einstein was a fraud:
https://christiansfortruth.com/albert-einstein-plagiarist-an...
But that is harder to believe than "Dumb Egyptians couldn't make pyramids, so aliens did it..."
Sure they did. Bronze is not that hard to work with. Simple silica (sand) abrasives cut through it quite well. Lapping makes things nice and flat. Accuracy is defined by your skill with tools.
Hand sheet metal layout is a real skill even in the modern world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DypIDbAVTc
Another group hauled a Stonehenge sized block of stone from area the stones came from to the site of Stonehenge in about two weeks.
Estimate is that, using existing tools of the time, 100 stonemasons could have done the Sphinx in about five years.
And we have medieval and classical buildings in Europe where the building methods are fully known and there were no flying saucers or other magical methods.
Typo
It turns out that Archimedes had actually discovered some of the foundational principles of integral calculus centuries before Newton or Leibniz even considered it [1]. In fact, Eudoxus — another Greek mathematician — had created a "method of exhaustion" which was essentially an informal, geometric method for computing limits (though he tried to make it as rigorous as possible) [2]. And if they don't impress you, then Euclid on his own is an extraordinary mathematician. The Elements is a modern mathematical marvel, with all of its theorems on foundational geometry and algebra stemming from 5 axioms.
Astronomy was a critical part of many ancient cultures, from the Aztecs to the Indians (and of course, the Greeks). After some pondering, it makes sense why they would invest so much time, energy, and innovative zeal into creating a device as intricate as the Antikythera. I wonder how many other inventions and revolutionary ideas created by ancient cultures have been lost to time.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Method_of_Mechanical_Theor...
With our technology for example we could make all the parts for the Antikythera mechanism in a short time. The ancient Greeks definitely had no technology that would have allowed them to do that, so we see the existence of the Antikythera mechanism as a great mystery.
But I don't see any reason to believe that the Greeks built it in a short time. It could easily be the lifework of the builder, or even the lifework of successive generations of a family of builders.
If you need to make a very precise gear in a day you need our technology. If you need to make a very precise gear in 50 years you just need someone with an abrasive that is harder than the material you are making the gear from.