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Comment by sawjet | Hacker News Reader

Cathedrals like the Notre Dame were the moonshots of their time, only able to be built by immense societal consensus. It's unlikely with todays demographics shifts that we will ever witness a project as monumental as these were 1000 years ago. What a shame.

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Sagrada Familia

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/11/151105-gaudi-sag...

Also, from other threads in these comments:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dresden_Frauenkirche#Reconstru...

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-281...

With increases in wealth and technology, we could see even more monumental projects implemented by only fractions of society. Then, there's also China. There are serious proposals for China to unilaterally dig a tunnel to Taiwan. I suspect they're also serious about long term colonization of the Moon and Mars.

Another one recently finished:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilica_of_Our_Lady_of_Licheń

Not necessarily.. Even a cell phone is the result of hundreds of thousands of people coordinating: hardware designers, manufacturers, software, shipping, retail, etc. If anything, everything around us is a monument to the hyper level of society/global consensus.

I agree, it amazes me how far you can regress down the rabbit hole of how closely tied we are all together. After the things you listed there's raw materials mining, power grid, education systems. If any one thing stopped, the whole system falls apart. It really is amazing what a bunch of barely evolved apes can accomplish when we work together across time, families, cultures, and nations.

> immense societal consensus

They had a referendum asking the population to approve or not the construction? Or was it an autocratic entity (king and/or church) who decided?

Second that. While I am in awe everytime I have the privilege to visit a grand place of architecture. I cannot forget that one of the reasons they exist was the societal structure back then, which I would rather not live in.

Because absolute authority no longer lies in the hands of a few people? What societal consensus was required? As long as the church, which was flush with cash, kept paying, people kept building.

You're aware that the literal moonshots were in living memory, right?

Within living memory, but during a vastly different (political) climate.

Edit: Can anyone explain to me why this is getting downvoted?

Is there really a consensus that the current political climate is comparable to the cold war?

The cold war which is intertwined with the space race that put a man on the moon?

You mean when they shot the president? Or when they were putting communists on a list just 15 years earlier?

Is it really hard to guess that I was talking about the cold war and the aptly-named space race (which is directly related to said cold war)?

I can't comprehend how anything else could come to mind.

Yes, as both incidents are part of the political climate of the time, and are a part of history. They are not the proudest moments, but it is doubtful if, without the spectre of Communism or the USSR, the US would have tried to land on the moon.

humans have always lived in chaotic times

So you're saying the climate right now is comparable to the cold war?

In some regards, yes, certainly it is. In other regards, not so much.

We have a cold war going on between India and Pakistan, two nuclear powers, still, that involves nations housing 1.5 billion people combined.

We have a more and more polarized West that's basically fighting a bit of a civil cold war right now, "populism" against "progressivism" or whatever you'd like to call it.

Putin is the oldnew Enemy of every Western politician and pundit (exceptions prove the rule).

And we have a China that looks at all that and mostly quietly builds up their influence in the world, that one could consider a bit of an economic cold war.

Oh, and China is literally doing moonshots, too [1]. And so is India[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Lunar_Exploration_Prog...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Lunar_Exploration_Prog...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrayaan-2

The moonshots could likely be the last truly monumental effort completed by the West for at least a century.

There are numerous ongoing "moonshot" projects in the west as we speak. Not sure where you get this idea from.

Name some.

Literal moonshots or monumental efforts?

Apollo program, LHC, Human Genome Project, ITER, and more...?

And yet the Sagrada Família is being slowly built in Barcelona, and financed mostly by tourism.

The Reims cathedral was heavily damaged during WWI and completely rebuilt. It loosely ressembles Notre-Dame de Paris.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reims_Cathedral

Bureaucracy and corruption might be more a reason something of this grandeur may not happen easily anymore.

They were much greater: the people who designed them were dead long before they were completed. For better or worse, we can't build cathedrals now.

"immense societal consensus."

Wasn't it more that some kings or bishops got a big ego trip and the peasants had to do the work and got taxed?

Depends as well on centralization of wealth. Maybe well see somebody like Bezos will build a pyramid in orbit to be his or her tomb

i think the first literal moonshot (apollo 11) is on par in terms of monumental projects built by immense social consensus, and that the future of space exploration could yet produce another example within our lifetime.

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