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Comment by perihelions | Hacker News Reader

This is some remarkably long-term planning:

"If construction goes ahead as planned, the majority of the foundations for the island off Denmark's capital should be in place by 2035, with an aim to fully complete the project by 2070."

I can't recall ever seeing the year 2070 or later in print, in the context of some definite project or plan. Are there other examples?

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Seems reasonable. Maasvlakte is a comparable project: an artificial island (20 km2 while this island is "only" 2.8km2) outside Rotterdam harbor and it was built over 25 years (1974-1997)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maasvlakte (Dutch wiki has much more info: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maasvlakte )

Another comparable project is the new Strandeiland in Amsterdam

https://www.amsterdam.nl/projecten/ijburg/deelprojecten-ijbu...

1.5km2, started this year, fully complete in 2040. But it's built in shallow, tide-less Ijsemeer not in the sea so it's a lot easier

EDIT; the Dutch out of necessity have plans for up to 2200: https://www.delta.tudelft.nl/article/keep-our-feet-dry-new-n... “One day with a sigh of relief we will give up this country to the waves.”

My most favorite fact about Strandeiland is how it looks on google maps plan view. Apparently google already extracted streets from the satellite imagery, but didn’t yet updated the shape of island itself. So you see streets on IJ surface. https://goo.gl/maps/wrL42MHhBvPf1Ben9

Oh and of course in this country cycling paths are built before any houses.

Some countries export streets, addresses and buildings in a machine readable format. So it could be based on a periodic import, not on image recognition.

China buit several artificial islands in just a few years - and not near shores (but some on reefs).

https://southfront.org/chinas-artificial-islands-south-china...

It can be done faster if enough resources are allocated... Denmark doesn't seem to be in a hurry.

Might sustainability and geological context play a role? I thought the the Chinese islands were build on coral reefs and existing small islands. I also wonder about differences in currents and even requirements based on future use. A small military base to extend your empire probably needs to be less stable than a place you want to build a city on that should last forever.

Comparison to the Palm and World islands in Dubai strikes me though.

Projects like this usually have multiple goals, not least of which is to guarantee a baseline number of jobs with a desirable skill set within the country. Out of the tens of thousands of people that will work on this project, most likely fewer than 100 will work on it from the start of their career to the end. For the rest, it will be a year or two of their entire career.

> Ijsemeer

Minor nitpick, it is 'IJsselmeer'. Double 's' and 'IJ' is both in capital letters when its part of a name. Otherwise great links, thanks!

Kobe in Japan has several artificial islands. all built by a Dutch company.

I used to work with Dutch people who like to tell that “God made the world, the Dutch made the Netherlands.” I corrected them, saying they made a lot more than that: I grew up on an island in France that was under the control of Dutch merchants in the XVIIth century; they built a levy to double the amount of dry land. There’s polders like that everywhere.

The levy has been fine for the last four centuries, but local engineers were thinking of raising it. For that, they might need someone to help them translate the original blueprint. I once joked about deciphering it when talking to another Dutch friend on mine. She’s close to the Royal family and I was curious possibly needing asking Historian for help. She didn’t seem surprised at all. Apparently a lot of Dutch diplomacy, to this day, is sharing that expertise and that unique, century-long, perspective. The King is a hydrological engineer (and a commercial pilot) and has lead international projects.

The techniques and examples are pretty much ideas tested centuries ago, with the occasional minor adjustment like: windmills with Archimedes screw can be marginally improved if you use wind power and electric pumps. I’m sure someone on one of those projects has had to joke “Grand-grand-papa wasn’t a big believer in ballast. It was a new idea then. But we can try this time.”

> they built a levy to double the amount of dry land

In English, the word you are trying to use is levee. As a French, you might recognize where that came from ;)

Actually though, at least in the US we call those things the Dutch built “dikes”, which is, not surprisingly, just the anglicized version of what the Dutch call them.

Well, to be somewhat fair: the IJsselmeer used be a sea (Zuiderzee) but The Netherlands blocked it off with a large dyke in the early 1900's.

So you could consider it part of the long term planning

It's not unusual to see such timeframes in the context of nuclear decommissioning. For example:

"At around 2116, care and maintenance will end and any remaining buildings will be removed and the site returned as close as possible to its original state."[0]

Also, depending on what you mean by "some definite plan", and how young you are, your pension plan may include an estimated retirement date later than 2070.

[0] https://www.anglesey-today.com/decommissioning-wylfa.html

I think that’s about the time that interplanetary space travel starts in Star Trek. I always thought that’s way too early and the whole time should be starting 1,000 years later.

Given only 58 years from the first flight to getting someone in space, they probably thought another 100 years of innovation sounded OK!

Crazy looking back to think that Star Trek originally aired before the moon landing.

Seems like Blade Runner did even worse.

Indeed. I don’t get it though. Why not push every timeline out by a safety margin of hundreds/thousand years?

Personally I would have a hard time suspending disbelief if a story set in 2200 didn't have super-human AI and all diseases cured. Similarly there should be no pollution or over-population, at least in first world countries.

For humanity to avoid achieving those things, there would have to be some significant barriers to progress that we don't know about yet, or a fairly disastrous collapse, which would limit the possible stories that could be told.

I suppose that setting a story thousands of years into the future allows there to have been multiple collapses and renaissances, but I'm not convinced that such a path is as likely as a permanent collapse or reaching some sort of uninterruptible paradise state.

I just think of it as an alternate timeline now

Nice. That’s great trick

I think the retirement thing is a stretch. A 16 year old might see a retirement age of 2070 using a retirement age of 65.

Someone born in the late 1990s might expect to retire around 2070. Given the population structure in wealthy countries, early retirement at 65 is no longer feasible for most people in the younger generations.

People from my mother's generation often started working when they were just 16. So when I see someone talking about them retiring at 65 it's important to keep that in mind.

I was actually working 30+ hours/week from 12-13 years old, and I'm GenX. We're slated to retire at 67.

P.S. - I was doing data entry for local real estate companies and simple BASIC 'cash register' setups for local businesses.

This is an oft-quoted phenomenon, but I think it's important to point out it need not be true. We've had chronically weak demand, in which case more retires should actually be good, raising wages and spurring productivity improvements.

In the US, just need to keep healthcare costs under control.

Retirees are not known for generating large amounts of demand compared to younger people who work.

I don't really follow? Workers are supply (their labor) and demand (their consumption), but as we have more productive industrial capacity and more of it, the cycle breaks down as not enough labor is needed, reducing their purchasing power and further slackening the labor market in a vicious cycle.

Retirees don't work, which means nevermind the absolute amount of demand (no kids, etc., make less per household sure) the ratio of supply to demand offsets the productivity / industrial capacity gains. Coupled with more retires, that could restore the balance and get the "Keynsian feedback loop" going again.

(We could still go into a massive worldwide recession, but that would be a political result of the powers that be not wanting the profit share of national income to decrease. That is plenty possible but not some unavoidable "demographic destiny".)

I see. Thanks for clarifying.

Calling 65 years old early retirement is insulting...

Not sure if joking but that’s generally the age where pension kicks in/an individual can start pulling from tax advantaged retirement accounts.

In the US you can start pulling from retirement accounts in your 40’s as long as it’s even distributions for the rest of your life.

The options for retirement funds in my 401(k) include "LifePath Index 2065 Account A", but that's as far as it goes for now.

Not quite the same, as it’s already completed, but John Malkovich made a film with Robert Rodriguez that won’t be released until 2115.

100 Years is an upcoming experimental science fiction film written by John Malkovich and directed by Robert Rodriguez. Advertised in 2015 with the tagline "The Movie You Will Never See", it is due to be released on November 18, 2115. The 100-year span matches the time it takes for a bottle of Louis XIII Cognac to be properly aged before its release to consumers.

Pending release, the film is being kept in a high-tech safe behind bulletproof glass that will open automatically on November 18, 2115, the day of the film's premiere.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Years_(film)

That's just pomp and show business though. I think the ancients were very long term planners. One of the upsides to a regime with very centralized and absolute power. Great wall of China, Pyramids of Giza to name some.

The Great Wall is impressive, but wasn’t fully built as one project. It was patched together from multiple parts (with some major upgrade/renovation projects)

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

The Great Wall of China (traditional Chinese: 萬里長城; simplified Chinese: 万里长城; pinyin: Wànlǐ Chángchéng) is a series of fortifications that were built across the historical northern borders of ancient Chinese states and Imperial China as protection against various nomadic groups from the Eurasian Steppe

On that note, if you are interested in the complexities of building a multi-generational structure, I really recommend Kafka’s short story, The Great Wall of China. It is not about the actual historical wall, as far as I know, but it uses it as an example to make some genius insights about human society and psychology.

http://www.kafka-online.info/the-great-wall-of-china.html

One of my favorite would be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petra

Which even today looks like it would take many years to produce as is.

Oh Yeah: Dieter Meier, of the band Yello, made a plaque with a promise that he honored 22 years later.

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

>As a conceptual artist, he has been keeping himself busy with many art exhibitions. He began his career as a performance artist in the late 1960s. In 1972 as part of Documenta 5, Meier installed a commemorative plaque at the railway station in Kassel (Germany) which read: "On 23 March 1994, from 3 to 4 pm, Dieter Meier will stand on this plaque". He honored the promise 22 years later.

https://www.dietermeier.com/1994

https://fawny.org/shyello.html

yeah, I bet their safe software fails in 2038.

On Jan 19. At 03:14:07 UTC.

You don't know that! Can't predict leap seconds

What are the chances the tape contains an empty tape?

Nobody is going to come and complain you didn't do the work you were paid for...

The movie was made before he knew it was the one that would be locked away.

100 Years is apparently a short film, Rodriguez having stated in a 2019 interview with French YouTuber InThePanda: "I was making several short films for them, and I finished that one first, we shot that one first, I thought that was gonna be a commercial or something. And then I showed them the movie and they said 'Yeah, that's great, that's great. That's the one we lock away.' And I said 'What? That's the one you lock away? What about the other one with the future--' 'No, that's the commercial.' [...] The one that I was most attached to was the one they locked away."

The Dutch fairly routinely reclaimed land that could only be built on decades later (once it dried out sufficiently to be stable enough to build on).

One of the largest such projects was the Zuiderzee works, which closed a large inlet of the North Sea. Then (according to the table in the Wikipedia page), 1650 km^2 land was claimed from the sea (the land was large enough to add a new province to The Netherlands in 1986).

Even though (AFAIK) the timeline was not exactly laid out, it was clear from the outset that this project would take many decades.

The scale of the Zuiderzee works is really insane. Even building of the dyke that encloses the inlet was projected to cost a year of the national budget.

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

Closest I can think of is the Chuo Maglev in Japan, approved in 2011 with a completion target of 2045.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%AB%C5%8D_Shinkansen

You could also add Sagrada Familia in Barcelona to the list, construction began in 1882 and might be done by 2032.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Fam%C3%ADlia

That wasn't the original plan though.

Although medieval cathedral construction plans did often have timelines of roughly a century. The reconstruction of Notre Dame in Paris is expected to be 20–40 years which puts it awfully close to the 2070 completion date as well.

If we’re talking cathedral delays, Köln Cathedral was started in 1248 and finished in 1880.

Quite a turn of events that made it possible to resume that building after the original plans were found, here is the summary i found:

> In the 1790s, when the French Revolutionary Army drew close to Cologne, the Cathedral treasures were removed for safekeeping. These included the plans and drawings for the west front, which were transported with other items to Amorbach and eventually lost and forgotten. In Amorbach, the large “F-Plan” was used by a family for some time to dry beans, and later wrapped around their son’s new suitcase to protect it as he traveled to the university in Darmstadt. It was in Darmstadt, in the attic of the inn where the son arrived that the Plan was rediscovered and recognised by G. Moller as the missing drawing of the west front.

Source https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/younghistorians/2012/oral...

Japan also has many artificial islands, I wonder how long some of those projects took.

Most of those are a continuous project. The islands are the ultimate destination for incinerator ash and large garbage. The occasional tunneling project will dump the dirt etc.

You can see from goog maps how there are a couple outline online islands under "construction" and once those are filled they'll outline more.

John Cage's musical piece is played hundreds of years.

> The longest music piece in the world is being performed in the city of Halberstadt in Germany: John Cage's composition for organ ORGAN2/ASLSP - As SLow aS Possible - is resounding here in an extreme interpretation of 639 years, that means until the year 2640! Halberstadt is a town (43,800 inhabitants in 2015) in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt, and the capital of the district of Harz.

https://universes.art/en/specials/john-cage-organ-project-ha...

Dams, skyscrapers, military bases, housing mortgages, bonds, business contracts, commercial leases, land/resource/farm leases.

Lots of things have 50 (or longer) year plans, contracts, payoffs, repayment schedules, and so on.

Here's Austria's recent 100 year bond (paying a comical 0.88%):

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-06-24/austri...

The deal on Hong Kong was supposed to be 50 years, with it operating as a SAR.

Modern US aircraft carriers are usually given a ~50 year service life. CVN-79, USS John F. Kennedy, would be planned to operate until roughly 2070. (the prior John F. Kennedy aircraft carrier, CV-67, made it about 40 years, 1967-2007)

DC-3 aircraft from the thirties still operate. And aircraft experience nontrivial loads and wear.

Good engineering and craftsmanship.

I saw 2069 yesterday when reading about the plan to do a fly-by of the nearest star system (Alpha Centauri), so technically yep, 2070 is the longest-ahead plan I've seen so far! And more concrete, too (literally, hah).

(In case anyone wants to read more, there isn't much info yet but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_Centauri#Future_explorat... )

Not as long, but Sound Transit 3 had a 25-year time horizon, from 2016 to 2041. Most of the voters who considered it would be retired before the 60th mile of light rail could affect their own commutes. It's similar in terms of building something that will primarily be used by a later generation.

That's similar to the timeframe of the ITER/DEMO/PROTO project, if you bake in the delays.

It’s definitely a modern phenomenon to have such short term planning.

In the past (building cathedrals for example) humanity had advanced project timelines of many hundreds of years. I wish we were able to replicate the long-term thinking strategies of the past.

Whilst this does today seem like a long way off and a lifetime project. There have thruout history been many projects of far longer duration and some early examples would be:

https://www.archi-ninja.com/the-10-longest-construction-proj...

Which for the longest has a duration of 2,000 years for the great wall of China.

That's the retirement date for someone leaving school in the UK this year. If they go straight into work then they will be signed up for a workplace pension with that date in mind.

Japan built an island for the Kansai airport. Construction started in 1987 and the airport opened in 1994.

Japan have a host of "long term big engineering projects" they're always working on.

That's only 7 years?

I flew in and out of there the first time I visited, it was so cool. Japan is an infrastructure nerds dream.

It didn't feel like being on an island at all, since it's entirely developed. But once you hop on a train you shoot out across the ocean and it's quite spectacular.

I recommend going up to the viewing tower if you have time before your flight, it's an inimitable view.

A couple of years after it was built I stayed high up in the hotel that is immediately on the mainland with a view directly along the bridge to the island.

10/10

That’s true. California has projects that have true timelines like that but there are usually lies about completion dates.

Cathedral projects often took decades.

Ground breaking on Sagrada Familia in Barcelona was in 1882 — it was consecrated in 2010, but still not finished!

According to Wikipedia they're expecting it to take more than 5 years more, with a completion date of "post 2026"

Construction of the Cologne Cathedral began in 1248 and was not completed until 1880, with a generous break between 1560 and 1840. During the break, a medieval crane remained in place as a landmark of the Cologne skyline for 400 years. [0]

[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Sch%C3%B6nscheidt,_J._H....

It will be good to see how many Y2038 issues they run into over such a duration and certainly be a good project that will touch upon that issue more than most due to planning dates.

Y2038 issue for those that don't know https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

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