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Such a project would see no tangible benefits for tens of thousands of years. Unfortunately, humans tend not to put much effort into anything that has no benef
by londons_explore 3y ago
Such a project would see no tangible benefits for tens of thousands of years.
Unfortunately, humans tend not to put much effort into anything that has no benefits within ~100 years. "If neither me nor my children will benefit from something, I don't want to invest my time/money."
- yincrash 3y agoWouldn't it still protect humans who visit (or stay on) Mars from the solar radiation?
- Levitz 3y agoThat makes sense though. I can hardly imagine any effort put 10.000 years ago that would be valuable now, with the technological difference.
- reactordev 3y agoYeah humans can measure progress afterwards but are terrible planners for anything beyond ourselves and next of kin.
- bobthepanda 3y agoI mean, how would you even do maintenance over 10,000 years? At some point your descendants will be too far to remember the reason but not far enough to need it and they’ll stop wasting resources on a nothing activity.
- withinboredom 3y agoPeople still do some maintenance on the 8k year old Afghanistan water system (underground aqueducts) because they are still used today. I’m failing to find some good sources, but when I was there in 2008, it was something the Army Core of Engineers was investigating on my base.
- bobthepanda 3y agoThat solves an immediate need though, not a once in a few ten thousand year disaster.
- kaz-inc 3y agothis[1] places them at 3k years old: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanat
- withinboredom 3y agoThat sounds more right to me than a memory of some random conversations from nearly 20 years ago.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y agoYou could write exactly what this is and what you’re supposed to do with it on a big stone plate outside… Then in 10,000 years, find that an entire religion, culture, and wars were built around the simple maintenance instructions.
- bobthepanda 3y agoOutside, on Mars. So we have to assume we will maintain the ability for human Mars travel in ten thousand years, that anyone can read English or whatever in ten thousand years, and that the supporting religion didn’t lose any of its wars. To put this in perspective our first evidence of any human agriculture was 12,000 years ago.
- hattmall 3y agoYeah, maybe, ever heard of the Georgia guidestones? They lasted ~ 30 years...
- blamestross 3y agoProgress is exponential until "surprise it is a sigmoid!" I'd argue we are there already, but even if we aren't planting seeds is rarely a waste in the long term.
- dehrmann 3y agoOnly 5,000, but look at the pyramids. They're cool to look at, and the construction is fun to think about, but they're utterly useless. For any sort of 10,000 year space project, there's little (1%) harm in having a 100-year cool-off period to see if it still makes sense and how far technology has come.
- pchristensen 3y agoRoad networks in cities are probably the most durable creations.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoI’m not sure I understand why you think this would take 10’s of thousands of years to yield benefit. The most important benefit is shielding the planet surface from solar radiation and cosmic rays. This would be immediately beneficial to anyone living on the surface and would be essential in any terraforming effort of any duration, long or short. There are proposals that terraform mars in the span of a few generations (orbital solar powered large lasers evaporating the iron oxide and melting the ice for instance). But even without terraforming making the surface less hostile has immediate benefits.
- Loughla 3y agoAll of the terraforming business always seems like just digging around in your belly button. We can't even fix the problems on our first planet. How (and why) can we even begin to think about another one?
- wiseowise 3y agoThere’s a lot why’s to do that. How is the question.
- c22 3y agoI guess if we do develop terraforming technologies I'd rather we test them on Mars first.
- mortehu 3y agoWe have solved countless problems on our planet. What are "the problems" you are thinking of?
- sgu999 3y agoGreen house gases emissions and the collapse of biodiversity are two reasonably conservative examples
- simondotau 3y ago
- thejackgoode 3y agoA hundred years? I feel like 90% of what happens is done because of election cycles and quarterly reports
- londons_explore 3y agoPeople build bridges today that are expected to still be standing in 100 years. They could have made it a bit weaker, not bothered with paint or inspection hatches, and saved a little money, and had it only last 25 years... The time-value of money says that any benefit 25+ years from now is almost worthless, so it probably wasn't worth spending anything on those things to make the bridge last longer. Yet in most cases we still tend to build it to last 100 years, despite the economist saying it isn't worth it.
- moffkalast 3y agoProbably not the best example since once a bridge is built you can immediately use it, the benefits don't only start rolling in after a 100 years. Making sure something lasts is correlated with natural disaster safety margins anyway so if it has to be built to survive near term extremes it'll generally also survive a while as a side effect. Older constructions also seemingly last longer through survivorship bias and the lack of computer modelling at the time meant that safety margins had to be higher. A better example are maybe tree avenues that take decades to grow into anything useful, or maybe long term river redirection projects or reactors. ITER's still in construction after 16 years. But there's just about nothing we do that would take more than a few decades to start showing returns.
- elliotto 3y agoI'm not sure what the rules are in the US but in Australia the infrastructure service life is set by regulation. It's not an economic / financial argument or even a benevolence / moral argument that causes this, it's a legal requirement. There are significant real world advantages of having a bridge last more than 25 years that are not reflected by a financial return on investment.
- ozim 3y ago
- Elucalidavah 3y agoTo fix that, we need humans that actually expect to live for tens of thousands of years.