What problems can human beings only solve over a very long period of time? And how can we build institutions that solve those problems?
Below is a list of marvellous projects which human beings have undertaken over an exceptionally long time. Many examples contributed by people on Twitter.
The focus is on goal-directed projects (e.g., a scientific experiment or a building), less on more decentralized or unplanned changes (e.g., languages, domestication of livestock, cities, religions). Of course, those are also fascinating, but they have less of a sense of a long-term goal. Jericho is incredible, but the founders probably weren't thinking "I hope this is still here in 9,000 years".
This page is a riff on Patrick Collison's list of /fast projects. There are surprisingly many commonalities with those projects.
The proof of Fermat's Last Theorem involved an incredible amount of mathematics developed over decades and centuries: wikipedia.
Many Cathedrals were built over more than a century. An example is Notre Dame, over 1163-1345. There are many more.
An ongoing example is the Sagrada Familia, begun in 1882, and continuing today.
The Cape Grim Air Archive, which has been archiving air since 1978, so later researchers can conduct longitudinal studies.
The Framingham Heart Study, a longitudinal study of the heart which began in 1948.
The Central England Temperature series, from 1659 to the present.
The early designs for the LIGO gravitational wave detector were developed in 1967; the instrument itself was developed over many decades, and first saw gravitational waves in 20161.
The E. coli long-term evolution experiment, from 1988 to the present.
The pitch drop experiment from 1927 to the present2.
The Clock of the Long Now, which aspires to last 10,000 years.
I suspect many key open source systems (Linux, Wikipedia) will still be around in 100 years. I won't be surprised if certain standards still show up in a thousand years, perhaps in a modified form. ASCII gives rise to Unicode gives rise to [???] Will Unix Time or TCP/IP ever be replaced? Modified: sure. But there's at least some chance they'll be with us for millenia.
The 2nd Ave Subway in Manhattan, with preparatory construction beginning in 1942. First phase opened in 2017.
The list of oldest companies in the world is food for thought. Sad to report the 2006 demise of Kongo Gumi, which began in 578. It was in the construction business, originally of Shinto Shrines (I believe). Such Shrines undergo a continuous process of renewal; an example is the Izumo-taisha, which may date to BCE.
Wikipedia lists many other long-term exeriments.
A fun question: of these projects, which required a long time, and which could have been greatly accelerated?
In 1998 I went to a talk by Kip Thorne where he said LIGO would likely need a strain sensitivity of "1 part in 10 to the 21" to see anything. That's an accuracy comparable to measuring the distance to the Sun to an accuracy of one atom. I laughed, and thought it would take centuries, at least. In the second sentence of the abstract of the 2016 paper they report a strain sensitivity of 1.0 \times 10^{-21}.↩︎
My office was for many years in the same building as the pitch drop experiment, and I would often walk past it multiple times a day. It has a slow but steady psychological impact in how you think about the space of projects open to you. This is fitting.↩︎