I’m frequently amazed at what some people manage to achieve in a single lifetime.
And I’m often amazed at the way cities grow, develop and change over even smaller periods of time.
But on the other hand, I appreciate that great cathedrals used to take generations to build, the vision painstakingly nourished and nurtured to completion through many sets of hands.
I can’t imagine a modern engineering project that could take more than a decade or two, max.
Sitting back trying to imagine something, some project that would take two or three hundred years, well I just can’t.
So that’s got me wondering what projects could be undertaken in the real world, (not the science fiction space) that would take more than say a hundred years?
Most engineering projects no longer take decades unless the builders decide to do it that way or run into some unanticipated delay. With modern equipement, pretty much anything can be built within a few years. If China decided to dismantle the Great Wall and rebuild it ten feet further north, they could do it in under five years using an army of modern construction equipment.
The only projects I can think of that would require long stretchs of time are those that involve natural processes. For example if you’re “building” a forest - you can move all the earth around quickly to where you want it but once you plant the saplings you’ve got to just sit back and wait for them to grow.
Getting self-sustaining colonies on Mars might take a century if only to demonstrate they really are self-sustaining. Creating a large colony out of multiple asteroids might take more than a century simply because of limitations in the kind of fuels we have to use.
Can I just add, because you beat me to posting this, that Sagrada Familia is one of the most incredible things I have ever seen. When I first laid eyes on it, I felt like I had been slapped in the face. It has a kind of living, looming presence to it that I have never experienced in a building before, ever.
I’m not sure the Sagrada Familia counts, as it could have been finished a lot quicker if there hadn’t been so much arguing about how or even if it should be finished. (Gaudi’s plans were mostly destroyed IIRC).
OTOH, a lot of the generational building programs for cathedrals were less a matter of the inefficeincies of the construction techniques of the time, but a matter of how the work was paid. IIRC much of the less skilled work was done as a form of tithing, and in fits and starts depending on how pious the local populace was feeling.
For a counter-example, the Hagia Sofia was built in less than seven years, and it remains one of the most stunning works of architecture in the world.
The statue of Crazy Horse, for example, is taking so long because funding for the monument is so sparse.
I think that not only is Little Nemo correct about whether a modern project would last that long, but for the most part even the great historical works that we think of as taking centuries to build did so more because they were so low on the funding totem pole, than that the methods of the time required that long to complete.
A submerged semi-floating tunnel across the Atlantic would take a very long time to build… maybe not 100 years, but probably longer than any current project.
ABout the nly thing I can think of would be a mass water-distribution and irrigation system. While modern equipment might make them faster, these things in Iraq and China were built over centuries and millenia.
Err… if it could be built at all. I know it’s proponents are all “rah rah” but there are massive engineering issues with the concept. But actually building it might not take long at all.