We Don't Build Pyramids Anymore

[MMI]

I heard a poet on the radio today saying, "We don't build pyramids anymore."

Is this true? Have we lost the ability or the desire to build new wonders of the world, or are we still creating them?

Do the CN Tower or Taipei 101, both beautiful in their way, count as wonders today. Or the Seagram Building, perhaps.

[Logic1]

I think it takes so much more to make and actual "wonder" nowadays so that is why we dont so to speak.
Something that was just amazing some 50 or 100 years ago gets built all the time nowadays.

[jeanne]

It isn't a matter of nothing great being built - it's us.

We've lost our sense of wonder. Cynicism is the norm. We continue to expect bigger, better, faster, higher...and right now.

The world has gotten too small in a way.

[jesperi]

I dunno. I think we build wonders all the time. I think they are just common place because they happen around us and not in some mythical past. I wonder people two thousand years from now (if there are still people and our structures still stand) will look at some of the things we did in awe and wonder and say, "Wow. How'd they do that?" Maybe not. Maybe our record keeping and communication has advanced to the point where our civilizations today wont be lost in the dust in a few millennium.

The point is that I think it's all a matter of perspective. Did the average person in Egypt four and a half thousand years ago look at the pyramid at Giza being built and say, "My! What a wonder we are building!" or was it just another big expensive thing that was being put up? Did the average person in Athens twenty five hundred years ago look up at the Parthenon on the hill and say, "What an awe inspiring site!" or was it just a big ol'temple that was put up? Until you know how the people at the time felt about the things we consider wonders today, you can't really know if anything we've done will one day be seen as wondrous.

-Geoff

[thrall]

lol......

I think the palm islands they are building in Dubai.....are very impressive in terms of..."wonders"

and i cant wait to see.........."the world" islands.......

[fetishdj]

Is it that the wonders we have today are so much easier to achieve than those in the past? A building bigger than the pyramids can be constructed now in less than a year whereas the pyramids themselves took years to build.

Or perhaps our wonders are no longer macroscopic but microscopic - advances in science and technology which may not dominate a skyline but do make big changes in the world.

Now, a true wonder I would like to see which may rival the pyramids is a space elavator... If you don't know what one of them is, its a satellite in geosync orbit with a cable descended down which can pull up elavator cabins (pressurised, of course). The cable has to be carbon nanofibre which we haven't (yet) got that is light and strong enough to do the job and the thing itself would be extortionately expensive to build (which is the other reason we don't have them at the moment) but once one is made it becomes a cheap (almost energy neutral - no wasted fuel) way to get into space.

Apparently it is possible to do this and this would indeed be a wonder. The reason we have not built one - the money. Big projects need someone with a massive ego and a bottomless purse and enough slaves (well, salaried employees) to get the job done and a single minded focus on that goal with a will to complete it regardless of the cost. Autonomic monarchs like the pharohs had all that, dictators like Napoleon and Hitler had it (to a lesser extent). Modern bureaucratic governments with committees querying every expense certainly do not have it. The closest we have are eccentric Billionaires like Richard Branson and he spends all his money on epic balloon trips.

[WyldWyl]

We could indeed build the space elevator right now- it would bankrupt every nation on earth, but we could do it.

On the other hand, building nanoscale cars seems pretty wondrous to me.

[lucy]

What about the ability to create black holes, as some people say will happen with CERN's Large Hadron Collider. Isn't that a wonder too?
Of course, Geneva being sucked into a black hole is certainly not wonderful imho, but i'm biased because i have relatives and friends there.

As for the initial question: No, those buildings don't count. Simply because they may be tall, but others being built right now are even taller, and those after them will yet be higher. On the other hand, the pyramids of Gizeh are still the tallest of their kind after a couple of millenia.

We could indeed build the space elevator right now- it would bankrupt every nation on earth, but we could do it.

It would certainly be better to go bankrupt because of a space elevator than because of some greedy bankers the way it happens right now.

[fetishdj]

The black holes in CERN don't count because a) if they happened they would have been accidental and I am not sure you can do wonders by accident... and b) They didn't happen cos Geneva is still here...

Of course, Douglas Adams could have been right and there was a black hole which led to the destruction of the universe and its subsequent recreation a nanosecond later in a much more complex and difficult to understand form...