Modern wonders exist
Modern wonders exist
115 comments
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The Large Hadron Collider and the International Space Stations are amazing wonders. It used to be that humanity's most expensive projects were religious temples. Now it's machines for scientific research. Some people apparently have a problem with this, and they're generally not the sort of people I like to be around.
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This is the Large Halibut Collider
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I'm already married but can arrange a quickie divorce if you'll just
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Those are exceptions. The majority of our (visible) expensive projects today are homages to power and money
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Yep. It’s 2024, and rich men are still funding projects to glorify themselves and assuage their ego.
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It used to be that humanity's most expensive projects were religious temples. Now it's machines for scientific research.
I wish that were true, but the world spends far more on machines of war than we spend on science.
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Warfare science is still science and often has the benefit of funding groups that develop civilian science as well. Civie science doesn’t pay as well as the brass do
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Same thing
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Highway systems are also massive.
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This is the headquarters of the fishery development board in Hyderabad.
It looks like a fish because they manage the fish there.
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First glance I thought someone there was crazy enough to build a home like this. Then I found out it really is a fishy workplace
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I love the Fish building!! We pass it every time on the way from the airport.
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Looks like a fish out of water.
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Nobody is doubting it looks like "a fish", it's just it looks like a fish drawn by a 3 years old
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🐟
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It's a case of being stupid enough to love it.
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Reminds me of Turkmenistan.
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It wasn't supposed to look like that, the construction contractor made some changes.
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I love the fact it’s in the middle of India, almost the furthest it could be from the ocean.
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Sounds fishy
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"This meme was brought to you through a single piece of glass several thousand miles long, at the bottom of the ocean"
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Undersea cables do have repeater stations, but your point still stands because those are also an engineering marvel.
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Undersea fiber optic Internet trunk lines, for anyone who missed the joke
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Single piece of glass that runs on electric pulses which travel trough a neatly arranged mineral structure.
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More like light pulses travelling through an amorphous silicon dioxide mineral structure, but apart from that you're entirely right.
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Edit: (not directed at OP)
Bro have you seen the size of the bridges, stadiums and skyscrapers we build? Fuck it, have you seen the LHC?
Should we start adding spires and arches to hospitals and train stations to get support from the RETVRN crowd?
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Yes we should. Our buildings and public places should be covered in art
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We could build more, better, more beautiful infrastructure, or we could buy more bombs and let the free market deal with that.
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Bigger but at what cost? So many buildings are boring, flat and lifeless e.g.
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Marvels like the Saturn V or JWST should be mentioned here, too.
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JWST is insane. Not quite as insane as Apollo or Voyager relative to current mainstream tech, but still, holy shit.
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Unironically yes, please build spires and arches and gargoyles on everything. I want Gothic architecture everywhere please.
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...I mean...I wouldn't mind it if we did.
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train stations
Have you seen the metro stations in Moscow?
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Every day in my dreams.
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The duomo took 600 years to be mostly complete and still has work being done though mostly restoration and maintenance. It has a marble quarry dedicated solely to it. Absolutely magnificent building, I did all the tours a few months ago, loved it.
That is why we don’t build buildings like it anymore, insanely expensive and time consuming. Plus our current rich people would rather rape kids on their massive yachts and private island than commission beauty to be admired by wider society like the wealthy of old.
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Yeah, but what about the Taj mahal?
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Was built 400 years ago, I wouldn’t consider it modern. Also not nearly as intricate as il duomo in decoration and masonry
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When did humans stop building mega-churches?
You’re not going to believe this, but…
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Every giant stadium is about the same.
A monument to the arrogance of some developer (et al), who then bilk the state/city for the cost.
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Interesting how the entire focus of the stadium is on the preacher himself instead of, for example, the works of Gawwwwwwwewwewd.
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Pff
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There's also the Longaberger Basket building.
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This is like something Clarissa's dad would make in Clarissa's explains it all
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RIch people used to comission great works, but today it seems like they have abandoned that one duty they have.
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Rich people resenting doing the things that justify their existence.
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since 1882. Very cool, i didn't know this!
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This video features more information about this building (but it is not the main topic). https://youtu.be/iRv_syz2DAc
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Something seems fishy here.
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That is National Fisheries Development Board in Hyderabad, India.
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I mean, Sagrada Família im Barcelona is still under construction
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It's going to be funny when China finishes it first and the whole thing goes poof
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If anything it's become so commonplace that nobody really cares that much anymore. "Oh look, a cool building. Anyway..."
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More proof. It's called the "Bullring", but i always thought it looked like a sperm whale.
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Idk if this is truly a wonder, but when I heard about it earlier this year I was stunned by how magnificent it looked. NJ opened the largest Hindu temple outside of Asia last fall. It looks crazy.
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Also pretty sure theres a church in Spain that is still being built that was started in the 1500s or some shit and is in the exact same style of gothic architecture as shown above.
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There's a shockingly large, beautiful one in my hometown of Pearland, Texas - the Sri Meenakshi Temple.
It was only the third Hindu temple built in America, and, at least when it was built, it was the only Meenakshi temple outside of India. It's still a venue for high-profile Hindu weddings.
When it was built, Pearland was a mostly-rural community with a population of about 10,000 (2020 census is around 120,000), and they built this phenomenal temple in the middle of nowhere on McLean road.
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In late game, Wonders are for culture and not science victories. We need to put more into one and get the other, as Canada just stole Einstein from me.
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There's also this.
If I was a rich person, I'd build a pyramid out of concrete in a more modern style, with the peak being made out of glass for maximum view, as a home.
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At least it wouldn't fall over.
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It's not a real rich man pet project if it doesn't end up in a catastrophe!
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A pyramid doesn't inherently have a wide base. See Transamerica pyramid as example.
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I'd put a saltwater lake in the center surrounding a 100' tall Cypress tree.
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I realize it's a joke but answering to the first tweet - one could simply post a picture of the Sagrada Familia which is super impressive if you've seen it live and it's still under construction today.
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The simple truth is that you have to justify the cost. Art is expensive and generates no quantifiable income. Capitalism is poison.
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we didnt
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butt actually
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You take your date to your apartment and they go "wait you live in a giant fish?"
It's either a massive win or catastrophic loss
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If they don't like it they can leave. Consider it a bullet dodged.
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It would be a plus for me unless it was one of the Jesus fish, in which case I'm fleeing on foot if necessary.
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I heard there's a mall in Iceland that from above looks like a man's wiggly jiggly bit. Forgot what it's called but it's still kinda funny.
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Forgot what it's called
Penis. It's called a penis
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I meant I forgot what the mall was called.
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You can say "penis" on the internet.
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I can say penis. Fine, the mall looks like a penis.
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That's the exact picture and name I'm looking for. Thank you.
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I’m seeing Eric cartman saying “I live in a hotdog.”
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CopenHill deserves a mention, although it would be nice if it were more of a blueprint for industrial architecture going forward, rather than a wonder unique to one progressive European country.
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😍❤️
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A shark would love this.
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Fish are friends!
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A true wonder!
Any time someone sees it they will wonder "why did someone build that thing?"
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I'm sure wondering why they built that.
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The whole of Benidorm is a modern Wonder
When you get home you wonder why you went, why you didn't catch any diseases and why you went to so many drag bars
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I can't think of a single thing built in the last century that will still be there in a thousand years. We may still build some cool stuff, but none of it is durable anymore it seems.
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Survivorship bias. The ancient stuff that survived to the modern day are not more durable than contemporary engineering, they're just the 0.1% of structures that managed to survive this long.
The problem isn't that we can't build something that will last a millennium, it's that we rarely, if ever, need things to last that long. Nuclear waste storage facilities are the only thing that comes to mind. Everything else would need to be torn down and renovated or brought up to code at some point.
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These Late English signs seem to say the tomb is... cursed? They were trying to contain something evil. All the scouts we send in fall ill and die within days.
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The ancient stuff that survived to the modern day are not more durable than contemporary engineering
Basically any stone structure made for any reason will vastly outlast any steel reinforced concrete structure. Although concrete might appear superficially stone-like and unchanging it is actually porous and chemically active. Within about 100 years the steel rebar inside a concrete structure will rust, expand, and crack the concrete apart. Freeze-thaw cycles and plant activity will reduce it to rubble shortly thereafter.
Meanwhile a piece of stone block was already about a billion years old before it was cut out of the ground. A stone structure might be destroyed by earthquakes or human activity, but it does not have a built-in self destruct sequence countdown timer like SRC does.
The problem isn’t that we can’t build something that will last a millennium, it’s that we rarely, if ever, need things to last that long.
We absolutely can and sometimes we do.
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Hitler's flak towers are not going anywhere. There's other 20th century buildings which can last a thousand years with occasional maintenance, but those flak towers, nothing will take them down.
Most very old buildings that survived to this age, survived because the locals had a use for them and maintained them, or because they had a pyramidical shape. The colloseum was a castle, the parthenon a church, ... Without that usage, we'd only have the foundations and a few basements left.
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I don't know. There's a bunch of giant statues that have been built. Buddhas, Guan Yu, Ghengis Khan, etc.
I have no idea if these were cheaply made, which I suppose is likely, but if they're concrete/stone, I could see them possibly lasting.
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I definitely like the fish way better than that stupid church.
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I wanna work in a fish shaped building lol
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Insert Mr. Crabs "Money" meme here.
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Groups mostly stopped building nice buildings when marketing in other ways became cheaper.
115 comments