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> Try to take yourself back to the past and imagine the idea of putting a seemingly endless number of electrical poles everywhere to carry telephony and electri
by jemmyw 3y ago
> Try to take yourself back to the past and imagine the idea of putting a seemingly endless number of electrical poles everywhere to carry telephony and electrical signals anywhere in the country,
But that's not what we did. Folks at the start of the process might have imagined that eventual situation, but they built up small networks, then a skeleton network with human connections (telegraph), then human driven routing. You can't just point at those mega infrastructure items we already have and say oh we have that so we can just apply that to another because that glosses over the whole and very long process of getting from mini projects to mega ones.
- somenameforme 3y agoOf course you're right that everything starts with the first step, but it increasingly seems that we're averse to even taking that step. And I'd also argue that the dramatic differences in economic and technological 'power' available today also must change what is considered a large scale. Skyscrapers, for one example, were once a visionary undertaking but have long since become completely mundane construction/engineering projects. The Line was designed to be literally modular, being made up of 135 modules of less than a km in length each. That such a "vision" is considered exceptional, to the point of even not being realistic, is something that to me feels like a complete deterioration of the vision and ambition in society.