Fucked up fact I learned in college, Nazis deliberately tried to project themselves into the future by building shit that emulated buildings from the past with the hope they would last a thousand years.
The Red Army solved this problem with dynamite
Future fascist civilizations building parking garages to evoke the ancient US empire.
Blowing up that swastika in Nuremberg was the sole, uncomplicatedly good thing the US has ever done
I learned about this playing Medal of Honor 2 Underground back in the day. Part of the plot was stopping the Nazis from putting their adulterations on ancient ruins. They were trying to make it seem like their ideology was older than what it really was.
Uhh they were pretty heavy in their propaganda about it being a new movement of the young, not that that’s what it actually was, but we’re talking about “trying to seem” here. It’s just standard fascist fetishization of the past
Yeah, it's less "our ideology is literally ancient" and more claiming "our ideology is the spiritual successor to the 'great' societies of the past"
The theory was Ruin Value. It wasn't so much about making the buildings last for centuries but having them look cool when they were in ruins.
The longest lasting structure of the American empire is probably going to be mount Rushmore, giant tacky faces of white supremacists and slave owners, created by letting a Klansman blow up a holy mountain on stolen land and then being too lazy to clean up afterwards.
Nothing could be more appropriate.
I have to disagree. The extreme weather from Climate Change will wear that monument away to nubs in a century or two.
The longest lasting structure Americans create is going to be the Puente Hills Landfill.
Most ancient structures that are still standing have very thick walls made of rock or earth. A lot of existing gravity dams will be around for thousands of years even if civilization collapses because the construction is similar.
Most modern skyscrapers and large buildings will be around for as long as we deem them useful, I could envision the empire state building lasting 1000+ years as long as society continues to maintain it.
Ancient buildings are usually large chunks of stone. Or in romes case, and probably some societies around that time, concrete that we have no idea how to duplicate nor want to. Becuase where the profit in that
Or in romes case, and probably some societies around that time, concrete that we have no idea how to duplicate nor want to.
AFAIK the ingredients for roman concrete are known, they're just comparatively expensive and IIRC lead to something that starts off weaker and more fragile and only gradually grows to be tougher over time because whenever it cracks and water gets in it just does the same reaction that formed the concrete in the first place, effectively gluing itself back together. Great for making something that's still a recognizable structure thousands of years later, less so for getting structural support for a building fast and in large quantities.
Roman concrete contains lime clasts which give it the ability to heal as it erodes and cracks. Including lime in modern concrete would quickly rust the rebar, making it infeasible for most of the buildings we use it for.
This was true until the inexpensive development of Basaltic Rebar
Which begs the question of why there isn't widespread replacement using basalt rebar alongside EMC derived concrete, I always chalked it up to some kind of institutional inertia among large concrete corporations, but that's just a guess on my part
It's more often a matter of design life in construction. Advances in engineering have made it much more possible to design building that just barely stand up, and 'advances' in neoliberalism have made it impossible to build anything else.
Planned obsolescence in construction isn't impossible or anything though.
Survivorship bias. There are lots of shitty structures that washed away from floods or eroded over time or were demolished to build on top. What exists today from ancient peoples is a fraction of what was built by them
Also, I feel like it should be worth noting that human civilization to date has only expanded.
Its not like Rome just went up in a poof of smoke. The civilization migrated to modern Turkey after the 400s and continued to influence art and architecture straight into the Renaissance Era a thousand years later. They established the formation of modern art and culture (for better or worse) and echo through cinema and music to this day. Roman iconography, literature, and science endures into the modern moment.
Rome didn't just go away. It was emulated and expanded upon for ages.
Neither did the old Chinese dynasties or the Aztec/Inca monoliths or the African kingdoms. They endure because they resonate, because they are the culmination of resonance formed over millennia, and because we continue to echo them even now.
What exists today from ancient peoples is a fraction of what was built by them
What exists today from ancient peoples is orders of magnitude grander than what was built.
We turned singular moments in time and space into a thousand fractalizing iterations of the same.
The Pyramids don't just live in Egypt anymore. They're everywhere.
Almost. There is a tendency because of capitlaism to make things cheaper and worse. So yeah, lots of old places were trash but we don't have thr capacity to marshall the forces to build a great thing like they could when material conditions were diffrent.
ngl I have never understood this meme. I’m not ashamed to admit I need someone to explain it to me.
Ah ok so in WWII the aircraft would limp back with some bullet holes in them. The first reaction of some military analysts was like damn, the statistics show that our planes keep getting shot in these particular areas. Better put more of the armor onto those spots!
But it's not like the Germans we're aiming AA guns and machine guns at these really particular places on the planes. They were really just aiming at the planes and doing their best to hit anywhere on the plane.
The reason planes came back with bullet holes in those spots in the diagram, is that when they got shot in the other areas they would just explode or fall out of the sky, and your ass on the airfield wouldn't record a bullet hit in that spot. That's what they call survivorship bias.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
In the context of OP’s post, the meaning is that it’s easy to look at the still-surviving structures from ancient civilizations (e.g. pyramids, castles) and get the incorrect idea that buildings used to be built better and more durable than buildings of today. But that’s not true, there were also plenty of buildings in ancient civilizations that didn’t last, they just get forgotten and ignored because they’re not around for us to see them anymore.
This reminds me of the time the human pet guy (if you don't know the story behind that, I don't recommend looking it up) claimed that Romans all lived in miniature colosseums
Speer
But then what happened...
