Suppose that there is a project starting today that will not be completed until 3025. Like cathedral-building, it will ennoble the people who devote their labor to it. It will result in a monument for the ages. What is the cathedral-building project that is starting today?
The Sagrada Família started construction in 1882, although it was in 1983 Gaudí took over and transformed the design into a Gothic-Art Nouveau combination. It will apparently be completed next year (144 years after the first stone was laid) but work on sculpture and decoration will continue on for another decade.
None of the above answers the question posed in the OP, but it clarifies how much can be achieved in ~150 years.
I don't think there exists a true successor, perhaps the ITER fusion reactor building? It's a much shorter timescale than some of the cathedrals being discussed but fills a similar religious role for this Godless world.
My initial thought, clichéd as it is, is that it's going to have something to do with building intentional communities that are living in a sustainable balance with nature and with the world at large. The traditional version of that is communes and kibbutzes but those haven't made a damn bit of difference so I wonder if there's something else to be found that's maybe more patchworky, infrastructural, and less reliant on inclusion/exclusion dynamics.
Or maybe it's just all the seawalls we're going to need.
California High-Speed Rail is probably the closest thing to a generational project we have. The obstacles these days are sociopolitical rather than material logistics. We have absolutely nothing in works on the scale of 1000 years, unless we're talking SpaceX as a serious early step to Mars. IIRC Einstein or Hawking or one of those guessed we had around that long left as a species.
The era of noblesse oblige is over. I think future projects will be like the Internet: who invented it? Sure, Tim Berners-Lee programmed something resembling the primordial Internet, but I hesitate to say one man conjured the Internet into being. It's an anonymous, organic process. Similarly, I agree that complex infrastructure will probably be the projects of the future. I would like churches and other artistic pursuits to be our focus, but I think many people don't see the purpose. Luckily, infrastructure can be, in its way, ugly or beautiful as well.
Anonymous :
27 days ago :
No.5373
>>5375
>>5373
Wikipedia is exactly the type of intense contemporary autism I mean. Maybe Tik Tok / the reel model, but that's like the inverse of a monument, I suppose.
>>5372
The era of noblesse oblige is over. I think future projects will be like the Internet: who invented it? Sure, Tim Berners-Lee programmed something resembling the primordial Internet, but I hesitate to say one man conjured the Internet into being. It's an anonymous, organic process. Similarly, I agree that complex infrastructure will probably be the projects of the future. I would like churches and other artistic pursuits to be our focus, but I think many people don't see the purpose. Luckily, infrastructure can be, in its way, ugly or beautiful as well.
Wikipedia, then?