Another thing to consider is that a lot of these old cathedrals weren’t out of commission and under construction for 200 years; they roofed them over and started using them, while they finished up things like the bell towers, facade, etc… which may have taken decades or centuries longer. For example, the Florence Cathedral’s facade was only finished in the 19th century, and St. Vitus’ Cathedral in Prague was finished up in the early part of the 20th century if I’m not mistaken. Both have been in use as cathedrals for hundreds of years though.
And often that was financial, not just the amount of work. For example, York Minster took 200+ years to complete, but Chartres Cathedral took about 26 years to complete. And Amiens only took about 20. That’s because work would stop and start over the decades, like Sagrada Familia.
We are undertaking long-term projects- NASA’s manned Mars expedition isn’t supposed to happen until the 2030s at the earliest, and they’ve been working on it for 10-15 years already. It’s just that a lot of these projects aren’t the sort of thing that lend themselves to the medieval stop/start method.
I’d also include the proofs of Fermat’s Last Theorem, the Kepler Conjecture, and solutions to similar long-standing open questions. Admittedly these are not really institutional or organized projects (unless you count institutional incentives such as the Clay Prizes), but they’re eventually solved by someone who built on the research of earlier investigators.
I have a lot of comments but I’ll just stick to a few points:
I don’t understand why a single big project is actually what we want. Or need, for that matter. OP seems to think that the best way to solve a problem is to have a sort of ‘Manhattan Project’ where the government assembles all the best minds and writes a blank check and they don’t stop until the problem is solved. If you are asking for a new Manhattan Project, I would argue that this is actually NOT the best way to solve it. Lots of these tech-centric problems actually work better if you DON’T try to run them with one big umbrella project. Google the ‘DARPA Network Challenge’ for an example.
Comparing solving tech or medical problems to building the pyramids is an absolutely insane analogy. In the case of a pyramid or a medieval church, everyone knows what the solution will be. All that is required to accomplish it is levying the right amount of resources and manpower. Developing something like AI is the exact opposite. No one knows what the ‘right’ answer will be, and throwing resources into a bureaucratically organized effort is not necessarily the best way to discover it. (AI is actually a terrible example, because I’d argue we may not even WANT to discover it.)
In what way does space travel not fit the model of a generational scientific effort? We spent a few years trying to develop rocket engines, we spent a few years trying to get to the moon, we spent a few years building space-stations… I don’t know about you, but that looks like some definite progress in pursuit of a very long-term goal. And we have learned many, many, many things along the way. I guess I don’t understand what the objection here is. The exploration of the solar system began before I was born and it will continue long after we are all dead. It seems to me that we are still in the early stages of a pretty vast project. So what is the objection, here? Is it the fact that the work is conducted by multiple agencies rather than a single ‘Manhattan Project?’
The woman suffrage movement was launched in 1848 in Seneca Falls, NY. It finally achieved its goal 72 years later in 1920 with passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. None of the Seneca Falls activists was still alive to see the success of what they’d started, but their granddaughters would harvest the benefit. Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote, “We are sowing winter wheat, which the coming spring will see sprout and which other hands than ours will reap and enjoy.” When they started the movement, they knew they were in it for the long haul, but it has to start somewhere.
There’s the germination experiment started by William James Beal in 1879, scheduled to be completed in 2100. Wikipedia lists several long-term experiments like this. Perhaps the longest is the 500-Year Microbiology Experiment.
That’ll always potentially be true. So why start anything?
Because even with your primitive means, you find out useful shit along the way.
Besides which, if you want to carve out a narrow slice of research, the shit you find along the way with your primitive means is the very reason why you can do it faster 20 years later.
The construction of the real number line, a project that started with the Greeks and culminated in the 1800s, strikes me as a good example of a multigenerational project. I like Johanna’s example as well, and might tack on the civil rights movement. It’s not exactly what the OP has in mind, but I still think it deserves emphasis. Scholarship in general and science in particular is a process of accretion.
I’ve said on this message board that I would like to see an academic sketch a 200 year plan for space colonization, listing the challenges we face along with a rough idea of ordering. No battleplan survives contact with the enemy, but planning is nonetheless essential for preparation.
Every major infrastructure project we build is generational. My parents built the DC Beltway, and my generation is still paying for it. Likewise the bridges that now need replacing, I’ve paid on those loans throughout my adulthood.
I get so ticked off when I listen to people speak of the “Greatest Generation” as if they were Gods on Earth. You’re welcome, Grandpa, I paid off your big project last year.
If the OP wants something big and physically imposing (and thus likely to be used for a long time), there are a number of examples among the various astronomical and particle physics observatories. But there’s two issues: as someone pointed out above, we want results sooner than 100 years, so we get them done a lot sooner than that, and secondly, they’re all in out of the way locations, mostly because civilization has a way of interfering with the observations.
You probably heard of some of them. The Palomar Observatory has been around since 1948, for example and was the largest or second largest visible light observatory for a long time. (And better than the larger one when it got displaced from #1.) It’s since been superseded by numerous larger instuments, but those are located in remote areas like the mountains of northern Chile. I think it’s still occasionally in use for scientific observations.
You probably heard of the Large Hadron Collider, too. It’s not the first particle accelerator at that site, but most people never heard of its predecessor.
There’s a bunch of others I could list if you want. Most are fairly recent or even still under construction, but one or two have been around for quite a while.
Sagrada, which means holy. Not Sangrada, which would meant either bled out (leech-based medicine), very slim-waisted (usually referring to a woman) or tightened for a better fit (when it refers to clothing).
Lots of projects were started for non-religious reasons and with the intent to last through multiple generations; whether they did last that long or not is a different question, but the specs apply to a large amount of family-owned companies. I’m personally familiar with several ranging between the 4th and 6th generation, and know a family lawyer’s firm that’s been around since at least the 13th century uninterruptedly (family in that you must be a relative to be a partner, not in that they practice family law).