Most of the question is in the title. What project has already been launched and started operation has the most distant ‘go live’ date? I will leave the definition somewhat flexible but I can give you some criteria for the spirit of the question to keep in mind.
Some concrete, not just conceptual, work has already been completed.
There must be a specific goal with a project plan being executed with a real target date.
The project is timeline expected to be actually met with few, if any, dependencies with unknown variables like future technology breakthroughs.
A good example would be something like the Great Pyramid which took a very long time to construct but was always well funded, used known technology and was intended to be completed in a specific timeline.
A bad example may be something like a manned mission to Mars. Plenty of people have talked about it and a lot of preliminary work has already been done but there are so many unknowns that it may happen or just get dropped completely in the foreseeable future.
From the linked website in beowulff’s post:
“The full scale 10,000 Year Clock is now under construction. While there is no completion date scheduled, we do plan to open it to the public once it is ready.”
Emphasis added.
Further, while not the OP, I would offer that long-running performances don’t really meet the intent of the OP. Their “go-live” date (i.e., start of the performance) was/is, in most cases, not that far out into the planning stages. I personally would be thinking more along the lines of the LHC which was under construction for 10 years.
Thanks for all of the good answers so far. What about practical projects though? Boston’s Big Dig has roots that go back to the 1970’s or earlier, intensive construction ran from 1991 to 2007 (16 years) and ended up costing over $14.6 billion. Are there any current, large-scale projects, in the world that have already started construction with completion dates that won’t be realized under many of the people that started work on them are retired or dead?
According to Wikipedia, the Sagrada Família church in Barcelona started construction in 1882 and is scheduled for completion in 2026. While this is only 11 years away now, the overall construction time is 144 years.
There is a good chance here in Seattle that the Alaskan Way Viaduct Replacement Tunnel may be the ultimate winner. The tunnel is roughly 10,000 feet long, and up to December of 2013 the machine doing the tunneling (Big Bertha) had traveled approximately 1,000 feet. Then it went tits up, and has moved zero feet since then. Frantic efforts to get it unstuck are so far fruitless.
So, as an estimate of the completion time the only thing we have to do is to divide the length remaining by the current speed of Big Bertha. So, 9,000 / 0 = … damn, my calculator just froze up.
The ITER/DEMO fusion energy production project probably qualifies for your criteria, with South Korea planning on a Phase 2 (net electrical power production) at 2050. DEMO will require some technical innovations (and I suspect the target date is optimistic by at least 15 years based on the current unplanned slips on ITER and notwithstanding budget issues with ITER) but the basic technologies and milestones are pretty well understood; the challenge is simulation and control of the plasma, which innovations in quantum computing may make easier but are not fundamentally required.
Agreed that a practicable crewed Mars mission plan is not currently in the offing (nor should it need to plan out beyond 2040 for a single mission profile) but it is a relatively simple exercise to lay out the development of a space exploration and exploitation architecture to develop a sustainable human presence though the middle of the century and beyond based solely on credible extensions of current and demonstrated technologies (solar electric and nuclear thermal propulsion, centrifugally-generated pseudogravity, interception and capture of small, resource rich asteroids and comets, et cetera) provided there is some public or massive private committment to developing the necessary infrastructure… Longer term terrestrial projects are unlikely just due to the varagries of budgets and priorities of governments or even large IFO/NGO and private foundations such as the World Band, International Monetary Fund, and Gates Foundation, though thr latter has long term goals of eradicating diseases such as polio and malaria through basic small scale improvements in public health and sanitation.
Any large engineering project can have estimates along those, but many won’t be public; also, the estimation of the dates doesn’t come out until relatively late in the design phase. I had a project helping an aeronautics company figure out what paperwork did they need to use at different stages of a prototyping situation in order to comply with applicable laws: the prototypes they were starting to build were for a motor whose design had started five years before, the motor was expected to “go serial” in another fifteen. That’s a relatively smallish project compared with DEMO or with, say, building a bridge between Denmark and Germany (dates not made public yet, but apparently design is already starting).
That’s a complete guesstimate, though, based on current income and assuming no infighting within the Board. Work was pretty much dead for decades at one point; the sculptures above the Passion Gate were considered “too modern” by half the Board and the fight over whether they should be traded for more “traditional” ones again took years (and again the work was pretty much stalled)… currently the works are going real fast, but we’ll see. Gaudí himself thought it would take a couple of centuries, but of course he hadn’t encountered modern concrete.
And of course we’re assuming that works underneath the church won’t manage to bring it down before it’s finished (there has been a lot of controversy over the high speed train’s tunnels being very/too close to the SF).
There are many projects that have started and finished that meet this criterion. E.g. the construction of the Duomo in Florence was approved in 1294, commenced in 1296 and completed in 1436. While nobody in 1294 could have predicted 1436 as the topping-out date, it was known from the outset that the project would take many decades, and would require the development of new technologies.
And there are other equally ambitious projects which were expected to take as long or longer to complete, but which were not completed. The Cathedral in Siena was commenced in 1196. The project was suspended in 1348 on account of the Black Death; work on the main body of the church was never resumed and what was originally to have been the north-south transept of a much larger building is now the entire cathedral.
Compared to these, a construction period of 16 years for the Big Dig is the blink of an eye, and remains so even if we add in the 20 years or so of planning before that.
(there has been a lot of controversy over the high speed train’s tunnels being very/too close to the SF).