Yeah humans can measure progress afterwards but are terrible planners for anything beyond ourselves and next of kin.

I mean, how would you even do maintenance over 10,000 years?

At some point your descendants will be too far to remember the reason but not far enough to need it and they’ll stop wasting resources on a nothing activity.

People still do some maintenance on the 8k year old Afghanistan water system (underground aqueducts) because they are still used today. I’m failing to find some good sources, but when I was there in 2008, it was something the Army Core of Engineers was investigating on my base.

That solves an immediate need though, not a once in a few ten thousand year disaster.

this[1] places them at 3k years old: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanat

That sounds more right to me than a memory of some random conversations from nearly 20 years ago.

You could write exactly what this is and what you’re supposed to do with it on a big stone plate outside…

Then in 10,000 years, find that an entire religion, culture, and wars were built around the simple maintenance instructions.

Outside, on Mars.

So we have to assume we will maintain the ability for human Mars travel in ten thousand years, that anyone can read English or whatever in ten thousand years, and that the supporting religion didn’t lose any of its wars.

To put this in perspective our first evidence of any human agriculture was 12,000 years ago.

Yeah, maybe, ever heard of the Georgia guidestones? They lasted ~ 30 years...

Progress is exponential until "surprise it is a sigmoid!" I'd argue we are there already, but even if we aren't planting seeds is rarely a waste in the long term.

Only 5,000, but look at the pyramids. They're cool to look at, and the construction is fun to think about, but they're utterly useless. For any sort of 10,000 year space project, there's little (1%) harm in having a 100-year cool-off period to see if it still makes sense and how far technology has come.

Road networks in cities are probably the most durable creations.