Insert Mr. Crabs “Money” meme here.
Something seems fishy here.
The Vegas orb thing probably qualifies as a wonder.
Do you mean The Ball or The Globe?
According to google I mean the Sphere, apparently?
Oh, that orb thingy. Got it.
The simple truth is that you have to justify the cost. Art is expensive and generates no quantifiable income. Capitalism is poison.
“This meme was brought to you through a single piece of glass several thousand miles long, at the bottom of the ocean”
Undersea cables do have repeater stations, but your point still stands because those are also an engineering marvel.
Single piece of glass that runs on electric pulses which travel trough a neatly arranged mineral structure.
More like light pulses travelling through an amorphous silicon dioxide mineral structure, but apart from that you’re entirely right.
Undersea fiber optic Internet trunk lines, for anyone who missed the joke
In late game, Wonders are for culture and not science victories. We need to put more into one and get the other, as Canada just stole Einstein from me.
I mean, Sagrada Família im Barcelona is still under construction
It’s going to be funny when China finishes it first and the whole thing goes poof
The Large Hadron Collider and the International Space Stations are amazing wonders. It used to be that humanity’s most expensive projects were religious temples. Now it’s machines for scientific research. Some people apparently have a problem with this, and they’re generally not the sort of people I like to be around.
This is the Large Halibut Collider
I’m already married but can arrange a quickie divorce if you’ll just
Those are exceptions. The majority of our (visible) expensive projects today are homages to power and money
Yep. It’s 2024, and rich men are still funding projects to glorify themselves and assuage their ego.
It used to be that humanity’s most expensive projects were religious temples. Now it’s machines for scientific research.
I wish that were true, but the world spends far more on machines of war than we spend on science.
Same thing
Warfare science is still science and often has the benefit of funding groups that develop civilian science as well. Civie science doesn’t pay as well as the brass do
Highway systems are also massive.
I’m sure wondering why they built that.
butt actually
We haven’t. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Família
since 1882. Very cool, i didn’t know this!
This video features more information about this building (but it is not the main topic). https://youtu.be/iRv_syz2DAc
I can’t think of a single thing built in the last century that will still be there in a thousand years. We may still build some cool stuff, but none of it is durable anymore it seems.
Hitler’s flak towers are not going anywhere. There’s other 20th century buildings which can last a thousand years with occasional maintenance, but those flak towers, nothing will take them down.
Most very old buildings that survived to this age, survived because the locals had a use for them and maintained them, or because they had a pyramidical shape. The colloseum was a castle, the parthenon a church, … Without that usage, we’d only have the foundations and a few basements left.
I don’t know. There’s a bunch of giant statues that have been built. Buddhas, Guan Yu, Ghengis Khan, etc.
I have no idea if these were cheaply made, which I suppose is likely, but if they’re concrete/stone, I could see them possibly lasting.
Survivorship bias. The ancient stuff that survived to the modern day are not more durable than contemporary engineering, they’re just the 0.1% of structures that managed to survive this long.
The problem isn’t that we can’t build something that will last a millennium, it’s that we rarely, if ever, need things to last that long. Nuclear waste storage facilities are the only thing that comes to mind. Everything else would need to be torn down and renovated or brought up to code at some point.
The ancient stuff that survived to the modern day are not more durable than contemporary engineering
Basically any stone structure made for any reason will vastly outlast any steel reinforced concrete structure. Although concrete might appear superficially stone-like and unchanging it is actually porous and chemically active. Within about 100 years the steel rebar inside a concrete structure will rust, expand, and crack the concrete apart. Freeze-thaw cycles and plant activity will reduce it to rubble shortly thereafter.
Meanwhile a piece of stone block was already about a billion years old before it was cut out of the ground. A stone structure might be destroyed by earthquakes or human activity, but it does not have a built-in self destruct sequence countdown timer like SRC does.
The problem isn’t that we can’t build something that will last a millennium, it’s that we rarely, if ever, need things to last that long.
We absolutely can and sometimes we do.
These Late English signs seem to say the tomb is… cursed? They were trying to contain something evil. All the scouts we send in fall ill and die within days.
The duomo took 600 years to be mostly complete and still has work being done though mostly restoration and maintenance. It has a marble quarry dedicated solely to it. Absolutely magnificent building, I did all the tours a few months ago, loved it.
That is why we don’t build buildings like it anymore, insanely expensive and time consuming. Plus our current rich people would rather rape kids on their massive yachts and private island than commission beauty to be admired by wider society like the wealthy of old.
Yeah, but what about the Taj mahal?
Was built 400 years ago, I wouldn’t consider it modern. Also not nearly as intricate as il duomo in decoration and masonry
