The Large Hadron Collider and the International Space Stations are amazing wonders. It used to be that humanity's most expensive projects were religious temples. Now it's machines for scientific research. Some people apparently have a problem with this, and they're generally not the sort of people I like to be around.
Seriously, we started building things so massive that you literally can't see all of it at the same time unless you're in the air, riding in a magical skychair.
The ones in DC are pretty inspiring, too, in a Brutalist kind of way.
They're lit from below, so you can tell when a train is at a platform by the shadow it casts on the ceiling, which perfectly aligns with the recessed concrete blocks that make up said ceiling.
Idk if this is truly a wonder, but when I heard about it earlier this year I was stunned by how magnificent it looked. NJ opened the largest Hindu temple outside of Asia last fall. It looks crazy.
Also pretty sure theres a church in Spain that is still being built that was started in the 1500s or some shit and is in the exact same style of gothic architecture as shown above.
The Sagrada Familia, yeah. It's... pretty big, they're hoping to finish it in the 2030s.
(Construction started in the 1800s though, maybe there's an even older one idk about?)
There's a shockingly large, beautiful one in my hometown of Pearland, Texas - the Sri Meenakshi Temple.
It was only the third Hindu temple built in America, and, at least when it was built, it was the only Meenakshi temple outside of India. It's still a venue for high-profile Hindu weddings.
When it was built, Pearland was a mostly-rural community with a population of about 10,000 (2020 census is around 120,000), and they built this phenomenal temple in the middle of nowhere on McLean road.
In late game, Wonders are for culture and not science victories. We need to put more into one and get the other, as Canada just stole Einstein from me.
I realize it's a joke but answering to the first tweet - one could simply post a picture of the Sagrada Familia which is super impressive if you've seen it live and it's still under construction today.
CopenHill deserves a mention, although it would be nice if it were more of a blueprint for industrial architecture going forward, rather than a wonder unique to one progressive European country.
I can't think of a single thing built in the last century that will still be there in a thousand years. We may still build some cool stuff, but none of it is durable anymore it seems.
Survivorship bias. The ancient stuff that survived to the modern day are not more durable than contemporary engineering, they're just the 0.1% of structures that managed to survive this long.
The problem isn't that we can't build something that will last a millennium, it's that we rarely, if ever, need things to last that long. Nuclear waste storage facilities are the only thing that comes to mind. Everything else would need to be torn down and renovated or brought up to code at some point.
These Late English signs seem to say the tomb is... cursed? They were trying to contain something evil. All the scouts we send in fall ill and die within days.
The ancient stuff that survived to the modern day are not more durable than contemporary engineering
Basically any stone structure made for any reason will vastly outlast any steel reinforced concrete structure. Although concrete might appear superficially stone-like and unchanging it is actually porous and chemically active. Within about 100 years the steel rebar inside a concrete structure will rust, expand, and crack the concrete apart. Freeze-thaw cycles and plant activity will reduce it to rubble shortly thereafter.
Meanwhile a piece of stone block was already about a billion years old before it was cut out of the ground. A stone structure might be destroyed by earthquakes or human activity, but it does not have a built-in self destruct sequence countdown timer like SRC does.
The problem isn’t that we can’t build something that will last a millennium, it’s that we rarely, if ever, need things to last that long.