Where are the modern wonders that will last the ages?

thecrecarc

Diamond Member
Aug 17, 2004
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I was looking at some awe-inspiring pictures of the Great Pyramids, and it got me thinking on how it seems all the really large and impressive monuments are in the past. Modern Society may have things like Christ the Redeemer, the Statue of Liberty, some random buildings like Sydney Opera House but nothing I would really put on the scale of the Great Wall or the Great Pyramid of Giza. None of those would last nearly as long either.

Are there any major modern monuments for future society to gaze at millenniums later? I doubt the Hoover Dam would possibly last as long as, say, Petra. It's a sobering thought to wonder what remnants of current life future societies would study and gaze at (discounting nuclear weapons, global warming, and other such political doomsday fearmongering).
 

Ape

Golden Member
Jul 29, 2000
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Mount Rushmore, Hoover Dam. All I can think of at the moment.
 

Pulsar

Diamond Member
Mar 3, 2003
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You've got Mt. Rushmore, and a couple others.

One of my favorite demotivational posters has a picture of the great pyramid on it. The caption reads:

"Slavery: It gets shit done"

Frankly, you don't see people or governments spending the billions it would take to make something like Mt. Rushmore, or the pyramid, or even the statue of liberty any more. That kind of expenditure would result in someone getting hung by their toes for wasting money. Such is the life in a world driven by capitalism and monetary gain.
 

vi edit

Elite Member
Super Moderator
Oct 28, 1999
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And Voyager & Pioneer floating out in space somewhere and the images they captured and sent to us. We've put our money and efforts into different types of accomplishments.
 

HamburgerBoy

Lifer
Apr 12, 2004
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lol, you guys are ridiculous. The pyramids are a symbol of a primitive and evil society that squandered manpower on worship of tyrants. If thousands of years from now people will only remember the USA because of four human beings carved into a mountainside instead of centuries of scientific development and achievements, it implies a mass destruction of information infinitely more significant than any monument. LOL @ "capitalism :( :( :(".
 

thecrecarc

Diamond Member
Aug 17, 2004
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Mount Rushmore is a good one. After many, many, years, people will still be able to see the (eroded) faces of our presidents, long after their accomplishments is known only to dedicated historians.

The flag on the Moon is also very interesting. I wonder if/when we start building on the moon, if that flag will be preserved somehow. I see many easy accidents occuring that would lose that flag.

The telegraph system went away in less than a century. The Internet may last longer, but not on the time scale I'm looking at. Perhaps an evolution of the Internet may replace it, like the telegraph to telephone, but then its no longer the Internet.
 

Gibsons

Lifer
Aug 14, 2001
12,530
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Hoover dam
Norad HQ under Cheyenne Mountain
Any number of bridges and tunnels.
 

thecrecarc

Diamond Member
Aug 17, 2004
3,364
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Cheyenne Mountain is pretty good too, kind of like a modern day, and better hidden, pyramid. All skyscrapers, like the Burj Khalifa, will fall, but a mountain will not as easily.
 

OverVolt

Lifer
Aug 31, 2002
14,278
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All that will be left is probably the giant heap of floating plastic in the Ocean.
 

Meghan54

Lifer
Oct 18, 2009
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If thousands of years from now people will only remember the USA because of four human beings carved into a mountainside instead of centuries of scientific development and achievements, it implies a mass destruction of information infinitely more significant than any monument. LOL @ "capitalism :( :( :(".


The same exact thing could be said of the ancient Egyptian culture that produced the pyramids.

And about your LOL @ "capitalism".......I'd laugh, too. We don't have pure capitalism nor would I really want it. Capitalism leads invariably to pure greed and evil....and corps. have shown time and again that when chasing money and power, public good has little to do with their decisions, a la Ford and the Pinto gas tanks, Dow Chemical and Bhopal, etc., etc.
 

HamburgerBoy

Lifer
Apr 12, 2004
27,111
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The same exact thing could be said of the ancient Egyptian culture that produced the pyramids.

And about your LOL @ "capitalism".......I'd laugh, too. We don't have pure capitalism nor would I really want it. Capitalism leads invariably to pure greed and evil....and corps. have shown time and again that when chasing money and power, public good has little to do with their decisions, a la Ford and the Pinto gas tanks, Dow Chemical and Bhopal, etc., etc.

What thing could be said? I was talking about Egyptian culture, that they produced nothing of lasting value outside of worthless monuments to dead despots. If you're referring to the value of the Library of Alexandria, it was more a triumph of Greek intellect than anything. Given that this is the era of $20 printers and hundreds of pages of paper for a buck, and not one of laborious papyrus writing, loss of information is not nearly as endangered. If it was, somehow, the world would be far more fucked than in not remembering what a few individual leaders looked like on the side of a mountain.

Your lol-worthy hippie tangent is beside the point I was making, and I never said anything about "pure capitalism". Pulsar blamed capitalism for the reason why modern society does not invest time and money into the production of monuments, and while he has a point that it is owed some responsibility for it, acting as if human-idolizing monument construction is a better reminder of a country's accomplishments than the hundreds of inventions and innovations produced by its citizens under (relatively) free circumstances is ludicrous.

EDIT: Although to be fair, I suppose Pulsar didn't explicitly say that capitalism's reduction of idolization was a bad thing either.
 
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