There's a quote I thought of when you said this. It's from a very old Wired article (back when Negroponte was a part of it) titled "The Millennium Clock" by Dan

There's a quote I thought of when you said this. It's from a very old Wired article (back when Negroponte was a part of it) titled "The Millennium Clock" by Danny Hillis: "I think of the oak beams in the ceiling of College Hall at New College, Oxford. Last century, when the beams needed replacing, carpenters used oak trees that had been planted in 1386 when the dining hall was first built. The 14th-century builder had planted the trees in anticipation of the time, hundreds of years in the future, when the beams would need replacing. Did the carpenters plant new trees to replace the beams again a few hundred years from now?" I sincerely hope we do launch more deep space probes in the near future, for our collective far future selves.