How will future civilizations look at our society? What wonders have and will we create that will survive and be treasured by future generations?
A Chinese publication has released a list of several modern wonders, a number of which come from China, like the new Bejing airport (and are truly impressive). Check it out at this link. But the list has some questionable items, like the shell of Chernobyl (really — how about having developed a rod cooling system that was foolproof instead?)
What modern wonders would you include? What might you exclude?
Don’t know how practical that giant Chernobyl system is…but if it works, it’s a legitimate wonder, no matter what someone else should have done 20 years ago. What happened then was terrible and still worries me that it could happen elsewhere…but how does that detract from the work of someone who’s figured out how to fix what remains?
The London Crossrail picture looked amazing, but I wasn’t sure just what the project is, so I looked it up on Wikipedia. It’s really amazing, it’s a railroad project that goes 89 miles from west of London through the city and out the other end to the south. In the center of London it’s got 13 miles of the tunnel in the picture! You can see more in Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossrail
PHeymont — understand the Brooklyn bridge is 19th century, but I’d still consider that as modern and, especially for its time, was an engineering marvel.
The 19th century would like a word with you about its Brooklyn Bridge…
The Soviets have never been completely transparent about Chernobyl, but this is the story as best as I was able to synthesize it: It seems that the alarm system was malfunctioning (going off all the time) so it was turned off by the tech monitoring the system. He had the fuel rods pulled out of their cooling chambers for maintenance work, was distracted (remember, the alarms are off), then by the time he focused back on the task at hand the rods had begun to melt and couldn’t be reinserted into their cooling chambers. The rest, as they say, is the stuff of infamy — it was an act of pure human error. So baring idiocy or acts of terror, I am quite comfortable that nuclear reactors are quite safe. And the energy they produce and which modern society demands is free of greenhouse emissions. As you know some countries, like France, produce the bulk of their electricity using nuclear reactor technology.
What I’ve found amazing about Chernobyl is how quickly nature recovered around the site. Wolves returned, wild animals have (mostly) flourished, and so on. It has essentially begun to transform itself into a national park. There is a fine layer of radioactivity buried into the dirt, so essentially this can never be farmed or built on in the future.
Back to the question at hand. I’d add many of the engineering wonders of the 20th century to the list. The Brooklyn and Golden Gate Bridges, the Empire State Building, and so on. These were revolutionary leaps forward in technology and engineering.